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VR Headsets Give Enough Data for AI to Accurately Guess Ethnicity, Income and More
Blending virtual reality with artificial intelligence could turn into a privacy nightmare. By analyzing how people moved while wearing virtual reality headsets, researchers said, a machine learning model accurately predicted their height, weight, age, marital status and more the majority of the time. The work exposes how artificial intelligence could be used to guess personal data, without users having to directly reveal it.
In one study at the University of California, Berkeley, in February, researchers could pick out a single person from more than 50,000 other VR users with more than 94% accuracy. They achieved that result after analyzing just 200 seconds of motion data. In a second June study, researchers figured out a person’s height, weight, foot size and country with more than 80% accuracy using data from 1,000 people playing the popular VR game Beat Saber. Even personal information like marital status, employment status and ethnicity could be identified with more than 70% accuracy.
Nearly half of the participants in both studies used Meta Platforms Inc.’s Quest 2, 16% used the Valve Index and the remaining participants used other headsets such as the HTC Vive or Samsung Windows Mixed Reality.
Virtual reality headsets capture data that wouldn’t be available through a traditional website or app, such as a user’s gaze, body language, body proportions and facial expressions, said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It brings together a whole bunch of other privacy issues, but also intensifies them.”
Biden Administration Defends Communications With Social Media Companies in High-Stakes Court Fight
The Biden administration on Thursday defended its communications with social media giants in court, arguing those channels must stay open so that the federal government can help protect the public from threats to election security, COVID-19 misinformation and other dangers.
The closely watched court fight reflects how social media has become an informational battleground for major social issues. It has revealed the messy challenges for social media companies as they try to manage the massive amounts of information on their platforms.
In oral arguments before a New Orleans-based federal appeals court, the U.S. government challenged a July injunction that blocked several federal agencies from discussing certain social media posts and sharing other information with online platforms, amid allegations by state governments that those communications amounted to a form of unconstitutional censorship.
The appeals court last month temporarily blocked the injunction from taking effect. But the outcome of Thursday’s arguments will determine the ultimate fate of the order, which placed new limits on the Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and other federal agencies’ ability to coordinate with tech companies and civil society groups.
During more than an hour of oral arguments Thursday, the three judges handling the appeal gave little indication of how they would rule in the case, with one judge asking just a couple of questions during the hearing. The other two spent much of the time pressing attorneys for the Biden administration and the plaintiffs in the case on issues concerning the scope of the injunction and whether the states even had the legal right — or standing — to bring the lawsuit.
Robotaxi Fight Intensifies as California Approves San Francisco Expansion
The California Public Utilities Commission voted on Thursday to let self-driving cars transport paying customers around San Francisco, overriding vociferous local and labor opposition in a preview of larger battles over technology that could reshape cities and workforces.
Driverless vehicles are a common sight on the streets of technology-focused San Francisco, and operators Waymo and Cruise sought state approval to deploy those vehicles for paid rides at any time of the day or night. San Francisco city officials and firefighters pushed back, warning autonomous vehicles had blocked emergency vehicles and driven erratically as the parent companies withheld vital data — a point echoed by Los Angeles counterparts.
The vehicles are “a menace to public safety that benefits private corporations at the expense of the public good,” San Francisco resident Joshua Babcock testified.
AI Can Be a Force for Good or Ill in Society, so Everyone Must Shape It, Not Just the ‘Tech Guys’
Superpower. Catastrophic. Revolutionary. Irresponsible. Efficiency-creating. Dangerous. These terms have been used to describe artificial intelligence over the past several months. The release of ChatGPT to the general public thrusts AI into the limelight, and many are left wondering: how is it different from other technologies, and what will happen when the way we do business and live our lives changes entirely?
First, it is important to recognize that AI is just that: a technology. As Amy Sample Ward and I point out in our book, The Tech That Comes Next, technology is a tool created by humans, and therefore subject to human beliefs and constraints. AI has often been depicted as a completely self-sufficient, self-teaching technology; however, in reality, it is subject to the rules built into its design.
Whereas designers have a great deal of power in determining how AI tools work, industry leaders, government agencies and nonprofit organizations can exercise their power to choose when and how to apply AI systems.
Generative AI may impress us with its ability to produce headshots, plan vacation agendas, create work presentations, and even write new code, but that does not mean it can solve every problem. Despite the technological hype, those deciding how to use AI should first ask the affected community members: “What are your needs?” and “What are your dreams?” The answers to these questions should drive constraints for developers to implement and should drive the decision about whether and how to use AI.
Hospital Bosses Love AI. Doctors and Nurses Are Worried.
Mount Sinai is among a group of elite hospitals pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into AI software and education, turning their institutions into laboratories for this technology. They’re buoyed by a growing body of scientific literature, such as a recent study finding AI readings of mammograms detected 20% more cases of breast cancer than radiologists — along with the conviction that AI is the future of medicine.
But the advances are triggering tension among front-line workers, many of whom fear the technology comes at a strong cost to humans. They worry about the technology making wrong diagnoses, revealing sensitive patient data and becoming an excuse for insurance and hospital administrators to cut staff in the name of innovation and efficiency.
Most of all, they say software can’t do the work of a human doctor or nurse.
Though AI can analyze troves of data and predict how sick a patient might be, Michelle Mahon, the assistant director of nursing practice at the National Nurses United Union, has often found that these algorithms can get it wrong. Nurses see beyond a patient’s vital signs, she argues. They see how a patient looks, smell unnatural odors from their body and can use these biological data points as predictors that something might be wrong. “AI can’t do that,” she said.
The ‘Godfather of AI’ Has a Hopeful Plan for Keeping Future AI Friendly
Geoffrey Hinton, perhaps the world’s most celebrated artificial intelligence researcher, made a big splash a few months ago when he publicly revealed that he’d left Google so he could speak frankly about the dangers of the technology he helped develop. His announcement did not come out of the blue.
Late 2022 was all about the heady discovery of what AI could do for us. In 2023, even as we GPT’d and Bing chat-ed, the giddiness was washed down with a panic cocktail of existential angst. So it wasn’t a total shock that the man known as the “Godfather of AI” would share his own thoughtful reservations.
Hinton took pains to say that his critique was not a criticism of the search giant that had employed him for a decade; his departure simply avoided any potential tensions that come from critiquing a technology that your company is aggressively deploying.
Hinton’s basic message was that AI could potentially get out of control, to the detriment of humanity. In the first few weeks after he went public, he gave a number of interviews, including with WIRED’s own Will Knight, about those fears, which he had come to feel only relatively recently, after seeing the power of large language models like that behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
