T3THICS Week 18: AI Imitating Art
Text to image models run into IP law, Longtermism is rearing its ugly head again, and consent pop-ups may finally be defeated.
T3THICS is a weekly roundup of the latest news & spicy conversations from the responsible tech space. Curation & analysis is brought to you by Monika Viktorova & Marta Janczarski, & SEO wizardry by Monika Kardyś.
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One of the big stories this week: the release of the latest text to image AI has caused outcry amongst some artists who are discovering their work was used to train the model without their knowledge or permission. This raises questions around copyright and IP laws, and how artists all over the world can protect their art from being harvested to train AI.
A new climate change twist: when temperatures heat up, Tweets do too according to scientists.
In grim (and unethical uses of personal data) news, DNA taken from a woman’s rape kit was subsequently used by San Francisco Police Department to identify her as a burglary suspect.
For everyone who hates the ad consent pop-ups (which is all of us, basically), there’s some good news: a case against them that ‘s been winding its way through the EU courts has been sent to the European Court of Justice. The “Transparency and Consent Framework” designed by the ad industry that underlies them was found to be illegal by the Brussels Data Protection Authority (DPO) and the industry body IAB has begun an appeal. Stay tuned to see if we’ll be rid of pop-ups once and for all!
Everyone still wants to work from home. As we already talked about in Week 13, workers prefer WFH, to the tune of 70-80% in a recent poll!
Australian computer scientist Peter Eckersley, who created tools for easy encryption and advocated for privacy, has passed away at 44.
Facebook continues to flounder when trying to explain where it keeps all that data it gathers on you and everyone you know. It begs the question: is there a better way?
“It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level.” >> more evidence Fb is a GDPR breach by design & defaultThere is no documentation of what happens to your data once it’s uploaded, because that’s just never been something the company does, two Facebook engineers explained. https://t.co/yPjtrFgzJeThe Intercept @theinterceptBack in the news again is Longtermism, a vaguely cultish movement that wants to divert resources away from solving current pressing issues like the global pandemic and climate change to the vague protection of our species for billions more years. There’s also an explainer podcast episode on this movement here.
Signal in the Noise Tweet: It’s now possible to discover you have long covid from your Fitbit!
Marta’s Links
The Attorney General for California, Rob Bonta, sent letters to hospital CEOs across the state requesting information about how healthcare facilities and other providers are identifying and addressing racial and ethnic disparities in commercial decision-making tools. This inquiry is the first for the state in looking specifically at healthcare AI tools for any race or ethic bias. This is certainly the beginning for such inquiries across the States as well as globally, as we play catch up on AI systems already deployed prior to regulatory frameworks.
Another week, another EU fine. This past week, Meta was fined $400 million by Ireland’s data watchdog, Data Protection Commission, due to Instagram failing to protect children’s privacy on its platform. The fine was partly based on the fact Instagram had allowed children to operate business accounts on its platform. Instagram business accounts show the account holder's phone number and email address, meaning that data was exposed.They also found the accounts of 13 to 17 year-olds were set to "public" as their default setting. Meta has already declared that it intends to appeal due to these findings being based on old settings.
Not so much news, more as an fyi followup, why is Ireland issuing fines to tech companies? Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, serves as the EU’s regulator for several US tech companies because their headquarters are based in the country. Because of this, they are the main enforcers of GDPR and play an interesting role in its enforcement. Here is a great place to keep track of some of their activity.