Technology

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills Tuesday to crack down on the use of artificial intelligence to create false images or videos in political ads ahead of the 2024 election. 

A new law, set to take effect immediately, makes it illegal to create and publish deepfakes related to elections 120 days before Election Day and 60 days thereafter. It also allows courts to stop distribution of the materials and impose civil penalties. 

“Safeguarding the integrity of elections is essential to democracy, and it’s critical that we ensure AI is not deployed to undermine the public’s trust through disinformation -– especially in today’s fraught political climate,” Newsom said in a statement. “These measures will help to combat the harmful use of deepfakes in political ads and other content, one of several areas in which the state is being proactive to foster transparent and trustworthy AI.”

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2958203

There is an interesting study (May 2024), also linked in the article: When Online Content Disappears

Historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days.

However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy – many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion.

"The risks are manifold. Not just that technology may fail, but that certainly happens. But more important, that institutions fail, or companies go out of business. News organisations are gobbled up by other news organisations, or more and more frequently, they're shut down," says Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a tool that collects and stores snapshots of websites for posterity. There are numerous incentives to put content online, he says, but there's little pushing companies to maintain it over the long term.

Despite the Internet Archive's achievements thus far, the organisation and others like it face financial threats, technical challenges, cyberattacks and legal battles from businesses who dislike the idea of freely available copies of their intellectual property. And as recent court losses show, the project of saving the internet could be just as fleeting as the content it's trying to protect.

"More and more of our intellectual endeavours, more of our entertainment, more of our news, and more of our conversations exist only in a digital environment," Graham says. "That environment is inherently fragile."

• VOA.

The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history.

Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above the list of links they usually see in results. As first spotted by a user on Twitter, when people searched for “Hieronymus Bosch” on Google, it included a couple of images from the real painting, but the first and largest image they saw was an AI-generated version of it.

Snapchat is reserving the right to put its users’ faces in ads, according to terms of service related to its “My Selfie” tool (formerly “AI Selfies”), which allows users and their friends to create AI-generated images trained on their selfies.

Users have the option to opt out of this by toggling off a “feature” in the app called “See My Selfie in Ads,” but according to 404 Media’s testing this feature is on by default.

Post: https://mstdn.social/@tilvids/112893651077838844

There was a golden age when computers were something you owned, not like before when they were big machines your employer or university would give out access to, nor like after when they went to the cloud, you bought what was essentially a thin client and every software became a service.

At least in the olden days the computers weren't forced into every single damn part of society!

Now in order to talk with most of your friends and family, you have to sell your soul to every one of the thousand ToS's. It's impossible to meaningfully use your personal device you bought with your own money without the internet, as every app and their mom needs to call home for some reason. For some reason, it is morally acceptable for a company to prevent you from being able to have someone you pay to replace parts of your device with third-party components you bought with your own money!

Now, of course, you can simply install some Libre operating system and use Lemmy, or Mastodon or whatever. But computers are so embedded into society that it is simply impossible to go without these services unless you want to get yourself isolated (and potentially in trouble with the authorities).

Besides, from prior experience, most people are unwilling to use technologies unless it is physically placed in front of them, whether through social influences, advertising or word of mouth, which generally corporate services do better than Libre alternatives.

It used to be that computers and programs were made for the end user. Now they are simply tools for ad and data-collection companies to extract every byte of personal data and force every second of advertising on others.

I've been seriously considering to remove computers from most aspects of my life, but as paper slowly disappears from our lives, this becomes harder and harder. Now you would likely be fired if you refused to use Teams or Slack or whatever your company uses. No one uses fax or writes mail or watches live TV anymore.

The only other alternative is to take back computers and make them personal again.

The US has imposed sanctions on yet another Israeli spyware firm, Intellexa, citing the “threats” that it poses to national security. The move comes in the wake of the ongoing global scandal surrounding Israeli spyware companies, most notably NSO Group, which has been accused of selling espionage technology to some of the world’s most repressive regimes to target journalists, critics and human rights activists. NSO was put on Washington’s blacklist in 2021, again over national security concerns.

Three years on from the global NSO scandal, the proliferation of Israeli spyware continues to pose a menace, as the US Treasury Department announced yesterday the expansion of personal sanctions against officials linked to the offensive cyber-arms firms Cytrox and Intellexa, developers of the Predator spyware software used for mobile phone surveillance.

Investigations by journalists have revealed that Intellexa’s Predator spyware was sold to a Sudanese militia and even to militants in Bangladesh, highlighting the ongoing concerns about the lack of oversight and regulation around Israel’s cyber-surveillance industry. The most high-profile case of espionage involving NSO technology was that of Jamal Khashoggi.

Meta's has been listening to some concerns after all especially now after some pressure.

These changes very well could help parents moderate their teens. Meta's head of product says these changes address particular 3 concerns in an Npr interview.

Will this be the end of the complaints and concerns geared towards Instagram, probably not.