Tag Archives: Politics & Government

Meta AI will launch in six more countries today, including the UK

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Meta AI is beginning a big international rollout. The AI assistant will arrive today in Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, Paraguay, Philippines and the UK. It is also slated to debut in Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam and Yemen over the coming weeks, although the company did not offer specific dates for those countries.

This expansion is also adding new language support to Meta AI. Starting today, it is getting support for Tagalog, while Arabic, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese will join the assistant "soon." Customers can use the Meta AI assistant on the web or within the company's social media apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. 

The final element of today's announcement is that Meta AI will be launched on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in the UK and in Australia. The UK launch will only include voice support for now; Meta did not provide a timeline for when UK customers might get the full multimodal capabilities on the glasses.

The EU is a notable absence in this expansion. Meta said this summer that it would not introduce multimodal AI services in the EU due to concerns over regulation in the bloc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been public with critiques of how European regulators are handling the proliferation of artificial intelligence.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/meta-ai-will-launch-in-six-more-countries-today-including-the-uk-150057934.html?src=rss

Viewers don’t trust candidates who use generative AI in political ads, study finds

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Artificial intelligence is expected to have an impact on the upcoming US election in November. States have been trying to protect against misinformation by passing laws that require political advertisements to disclose when they have used generative AI. Twenty states now have rules on the books, and according to new research, voters have a negative reaction to seeing those disclaimers. That seems like a pretty fair response: If a politician uses generative AI to mislead voters, then voters don't appreciate that. The study was conducted by New York University’s Center on Technology Policy and first reported by The Washington Post.

The investigation had a thousand participants watch political ads from fictional candidates. Some of the ads were accompanied by a disclaimer that AI was used in the creation of the spot, while others had no disclaimer. The presence of a disclaimer was linked to viewers rating the promoted candidate as less trustworthy and less appealing. Respondents also said they would be more likely to flag or report the ads on social media when they contained disclaimers. In attack ads, participants were more likely to express negative opinions about the candidate who sponsored the spot rather than the candidate being attacked. The researchers also found that the presence of an AI disclaimer led to worse or unchanged opinions regardless of the fictional candidate's political party.

The researchers tested two different disclaimers inspired by two different state requirements for AI disclosure in political ads. The text tied to Michigan's law reads: "This video has been manipulated by technical means and depicts speech or conduct that did not occur." The other disclaimer is based on Florida's law, and says: "This video was created in whole or in part with the use of generative artificial intelligence." Although the approach of Michigan's requirements is more common among state laws, study participants said they preferred seeing the broader disclaimer for any type of AI use.

While these disclaimers can play a part in transparency about the presence of AI in an ad, they aren't a perfect failsafe. As many as 37 percent of the respondents said they didn't recall seeing any language about AI after viewing the ads.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/viewers-dont-trust-candidates-who-use-generative-ai-in-political-ads-study-finds-194532117.html?src=rss

Judge blocks new California law barring distribution of election-related AI deepfakes

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One of California's new AI laws, which aims to prevent AI deepfakes related to elections from spreading online, has been blocked a month before the US presidential elections. As TechCrunch and Reason report, Judge John Mendez has issued a preliminary injunction, preventing the state's attorney general from enforcing AB 2839. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law, along with other bills focusing on AI, back in mid-September. After doing so, he tweeted a screenshot of a story about X owner Elon Musk sharing an AI deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris without labeling it as fake. "I just signed a bill to make this illegal in the state of California," he wrote. 

AB 2839 holds anybody who distributes AI deepfakes accountable, if they feature political candidates and if they're posted within 120 days of an election in the state. Anybody who sees those deepfakes can file a civil action against the person who distributed it, and a judge can order the poster to take the manipulated media down if they don't want to face monetary penalties. After Newsom signed it into law, the video's original poster, X user Christopher Kohls, filed a lawsuit to block it, arguing that the video was satire and hence protected by the First Amendment. 

Judge Mendez has agreed with Kohls, noting in his decision [PDF] that AB 2839 does not pass strict scrutiny and is not narrowly tailored. He also said that the law's disclosure requirements are unduly burdensome. "Almost any digitally altered content, when left up to an arbitrary individual on the internet, could be considered harmful," he wrote. The judge likened YouTube videos, Facebook posts and X tweets to newspaper advertisements and political cartoons and asserted that the First Amendment "protects an individual’s right to speak regardless of the new medium these critiques may take." Since this is merely a preliminary injunction, the law may be unblocked in the future, though that might not happen in time for this year's presidential elections. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/judge-blocks-new-california-law-barring-distribution-of-election-related-ai-deepfakes-133043341.html?src=rss

Women of color running for Congress are attacked disproportionately on X, report finds

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Women of color running for Congress in 2024 have faced a disproportionate number of attacks on X compared with other candidates, according to a new report from the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the University of Pittsburgh.

The report sought to “compare the levels of offensive speech and hate speech that different groups of Congressional candidates are targeted with based on race and gender, with a particular emphasis on women of color.” To do this, the report’s authors analyzed 800,000 tweets that covered a three-month period between May 20 and August 23 of this year. That dataset represented all posts mentioning a candidate running for Congress with an account on X.

The report’s authors found that more than 20 percent of posts directed at Black and Asian women candidates “contained offensive language about the candidate.” It also found that Black women in particular were targeted with hate speech more often compared with other candidates.

“On average, less than 1% of all tweets that mentioned a candidate contained hate speech,” the report says. “However, we found that African-American women candidates were more likely than any other candidate to be subject to this type of post (4%).” That roughly lines up with X’s recent transparency report — the company’s first since Elon Musk took over the company — which said that rule-breaking content accounts for less than 1 percent of all posts on its platform.

In a statement, an X spokesperson said the company had suspended more than 1 million accounts and removed more than 2 million posts in the first half of 2024 for breaking the company's rules. "While we encourage people to express themselves freely on X, abuse, harassment, and hateful conduct have no place on our platform and violate the X Rules," the spokesperson said. 

Notably, the CDT’s report analyzed both hate speech — which ostensibly violates X’s policies — and “offensive speech,” which the report defined as “words or phrases that demean, threaten, insult, or ridicule a candidate.” While the latter category may not be against X’s rules, the report notes that the volume of suck attacks could still deter women of color from running for office. It recommends that X and other platforms take “specific measures” to counteract such effects.

“This should include clear policies that prohibit attacks against someone based on race or gender, greater transparency into how their systems address these types of attacks, better reporting tools and means for accountability, regular risk assessments with an emphasis on race and gender, and privacy preserving mechanisms for independent researchers to conduct studies using their data. The consequences of the status-quo where women of color candidates are targeted with significant attacks online at much higher rates than other candidates creates an immense barrier to creating a truly inclusive democracy.”

Update: October 2, 2024, 12:13 PM ET: This post was updated to include a statement from an X spokesperson. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/women-of-color-running-for-congress-are-attacked-disproportionately-on-x-report-finds-043206066.html?src=rss

California Gov. Newsom vetoes bill SB 1047 that aims to prevent AI disasters

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed bill SB 1047, which aims to prevent bad actors from using AI to cause "critical harm" to humans. The California state assembly passed the legislation by a margin of 41-9 on August 28, but several organizations including the Chamber of Commerce had urged Newsom to veto the bill. In his veto message on Sept. 29, Newsom said the bill is "well-intentioned" but "does not take into account whether an AI system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data. Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions - so long as a large system deploys it." 

SB 1047 would have made the developers of AI models liable for adopting safety protocols that would stop catastrophic uses of their technology. That includes preventive measures such as testing and outside risk assessment, as well as an "emergency stop" that would completely shut down the AI model. A first violation would cost a minimum of $10 million and $30 million for subsequent infractions. However, the bill was revised to eliminate the state attorney general's ability to sue AI companies with negligent practices if a catastrophic event does not occur. Companies would only be subject to injunctive relief and could be sued if their model caused critical harm.

This law would apply to AI models that cost at least $100 million to use and 10^26 FLOPS for training. It also would have covered derivative projects in instances where a third party has invested $10 million or more in developing or modifying the original model. Any company doing business in California would be subject to the rules if it meets the other requirements. Addressing the bill's focus on large-scale systems, Newsom said, "I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology." The veto message adds:

By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB 1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology. Smaller, specialized models may emerge as equally or even more dangerous than the models targeted by SB 1047 - at the potential expense of curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good.

The earlier version of SB 1047 would have created a new department called the Frontier Model Division to oversee and enforce the rules. Instead, the bill was altered ahead of a committee vote to place governance at the hands of a Board of Frontier Models within the Government Operations Agency. The nine members would be appointed by the state's governor and legislature.

The bill faced a complicated path to the final vote. SB 1047 was authored by California State Sen. Scott Wiener, who told TechCrunch: "We have a history with technology of waiting for harms to happen, and then wringing our hands. Let’s not wait for something bad to happen. Let’s just get out ahead of it." Notable AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio backed the legislation, as did the Center for AI Safety, which has been raising the alarm about AI's risks over the past year.

"Let me be clear - I agree with the author - we cannot afford to wait for a major catastrophe to occur before taking action to protect the public," Newsom said in the veto message. The statement continues:

California will not abandon its responsibility. Safety protocols must be adopted. Proactive guardrails should be implemented, and severe consequences for bad actors must be clear and enforceable. I do not agree, however, that to keep the public safe, we must settle for a solution that is not informed by an empirical trajectory analysis of AI systems and capabilities. Ultimately, any framework for effectively regulating AI needs to keep pace with the technology itself.

SB 1047 drew heavy-hitting opposition from across the tech space. Researcher Fei-Fei Li critiqued the bill, as did Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, for limiting the potential to explore new uses of AI. The trade group repping tech giants such as Amazon, Apple and Google said SB 1047 would limit new developments in the state's tech sector. Venture capital firm Andreeson Horowitz and several startups also questioned whether the bill placed unnecessary financial burdens on AI innovators. Anthropic and other opponents of the original bill pushed for amendments that were adopted in the version of SB 1047 that passed California's Appropriations Committee on August 15. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/california-gov-newsom-vetoes-bill-sb-1047-that-aims-to-prevent-ai-disasters-220826827.html?src=rss

Three men charged in connection with the Trump campaign hack

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The US Department of Justice charged three Iranian nationals as part of an effort to hack into the emails and computers used by President Donald Trump’s campaign staff and other political connections.

The Washington Post reported that DOJ officials filed charges against Masoud Jalili, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri and Yasar Balaghi in an indictment filed Thursday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. The indictment alleges the three men “prepared for and engaged in a wide-ranging hacking campaign” against current and former US officials, political campaigns and the media.

According to the indictment Jalili, Aghamiri and Balaghi’s "activity is part of Iran’s continuing efforts to [...] erode confidence in the US electoral process." They also face possible charges such as providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

The suspects are accused of running a targeted hacking campaign committed in Iran over a four-year period. Their victims include current and former officials with the US State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Ambassador to Israel and an Iranian human rights organization.

Then last May, the three hackers successfully gained access to accounts belonging to Trump campaign officials. (Attempts to breach Biden campaign staff were, apparently, unsuccessful.) President Joe Biden’s campaign staffers as well as news outlets like The Washington Post and Politico received unsolicited emails from an AOL account owned by “Robert” that contained materials stolen from the Trump campaign. They included some internal poll results and the vetting dossier for Trump’s running mate Senator J.D. Vance.

Because of extradition laws, it's unlikely these hackers will be brought to justice on US soil.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/three-men-charged-in-connection-with-the-trump-campaign-hack-191154617.html?src=rss

X suspends journalist Ken Klippenstein after he published J.D. Vance dossier

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X suspended journalist Ken Klippenstein’s account earlier this afternoon. X’s Safety account says they issued the temporary suspension “for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. [J.D.] Vance’s physical address and the majority of his social security number.”

Several news outlets that received the vetting dossier of the Republican vice presidential candidate leaked by hackers chose not to publish the sensitive document since it contained personal information. Klippenstein felt the dossier was newsworthy and decided to publish it on Substack and his social media channels and one of them took down his account.

Engadget has viewed the dossier and can confirm the details mentioned by X’s Safety team are present and unredacted in Klippenstein’s copy of the document except for the last four numbers of Vance’s social security number.

Klippenstein explained his decision to buck the media’s trend and release Sen. Vance’s dossier on his Substack. President Trump’s campaign has accused Iran’s government on more than one occasion of hacking into its files and releasing the dossier back in June. Other news outlets chose not to release the document but Klippenstein says he felt they declined “in fear of finding itself at odds with the [US} government’s campaign against ‘foreign malign influence’” referring to the National Counterterrorism Center’s organization of the same name that seeks to prevent interference in elections.

“I disagree,” Klippenstein added. “The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season.”

The suspension extends beyond Klippenstein’s account. X has flagged the link to the dossier and automatically prevents anyone who attempts to post it. Those who do receive a warning from X saying “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

X (then Twitter) updated its policy on “hacked materials” after it blocked stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, saying it would allow stories about hacked materials but not links to the material if it was published by the hacker or someone working “in concert” with them.

Update, September 27 2024, 1:55PM ET: Meta will also block the sharing of the newsletter containing Vance's personal info, according to a Washington Post report. The company told the Post sharing the dossier was in contravention of its policies on hacked materials and foreign meddling.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-suspends-journalist-ken-klippenstein-after-he-published-jd-vance-dossier-214219066.html?src=rss

FCC fines political consultant $6 million for deepfake robocalls

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has officially issued its full recommended fine against political consultant Steve Kramer for a series of illegal robocalls using deepfake AI technology and caller ID spoofing during the New Hampshire primaries. Kramer must pay $6 million in fines in the next 30 days or the Department of Justice will handle collection, according to a FCC statement.

Kramer violated the Truth in Caller ID Act passed in 2009 that prohibits anyone from “knowingly transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information with the intent to defraud, cause harm or wrongfully obtain anything of value,” according to legislative records. The law preceded the widespread usage of AI, but the FCC voted unanimously to have it apply to such deepfakes this past February.

The phony robocalls delivered pre-recorded audio of President Biden’s voice using deepfake AI technology to New Hampshire residents leading up to the 2024 presidential primary election. The phony President Biden told voters not to vote in the upcoming primary saying “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” according to an earlier report from CBS New York. The robocalls were spoofed so as to appear to originate from the former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, according to the New York Times.

Kramer hired New Orleans magician (no, really, an actual magician) Paul Carpenter to make the phony recordings. Carpenter showed NBC News how he made the deepfake audio files of President Biden using an AI voice generator called ElevenLabs. The recordings, he claims, only took around 20 minutes to make. Carpenter says Kramer paid him through Venmo and he thought the work he was doing was authorized by President Biden’s campaign. Eleven Labs has since shut down Carpenter’s account.

Kramer claims he sent the robocalls to raise awareness about the dangers and misuse of the technology. His apparent experiment only cost him $500 but, according to the political consultant, resulted in a massive return. “For me to do that and get $5 million worth of exposure, not for me,” Kramer told CBS New York. “I kept myself anonymous so the regulations could just play themselves out or begin to play themselves out. I don’t need to be famous. That’s not my intention. My intention was to make a difference.”

Kramer doesn’t just face a hefty FCC fine, he’s also facing criminal charges. New Hampshire Attorney General John M. Formella announced last May that Kramer received 13 felony counts of voter suppression and 13 misdemeanor counts of impersonation of a candidate.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/fcc-fines-political-consultant-6-million-for-deepfake-robocalls-190050186.html?src=rss

TikTok removes Russian state-owned media accounts for ‘covert influence’

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TikTok has announced in its US Elections Integrity Hub that it has removed accounts associated with Rossiya Segodnya and TV-Novosti, which own and run Russia state media outlets Sputnik and RT. The company said that it kicked the accounts off the social media platform for "engaging in covert influence operations" that go against its guidelines for spam and deceitful behavior. TikTok clarified that the accounts' content weren't shown in the For You feed under its state-affiliated media policy and were also labeled as such. Their videos were already restricted in the EU and the UK, as well, but now the accounts had been permanently banned and are no longer visible to anyone in the world. 

As CNBC notes, Sputnik has issued a statement on X that says "TikTok users and [its] 86,000 subscribers are no longer allowed to know the truth about most urgent geopolitical issues and laugh at Western politicians' gaffes in Sputnik International videos."

TikTok didn't give specific examples of how the outlets are trying to spread misinformation and to manipulate this year's presidential elections in the US. But the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI have just told reporters that Russia has generated the most AI content related to the election, so far. It has reportedly created and spread AI-made text, images, audios and videos online, mostly to "denigrate the Vice President and the Democratic Party" and to sow division by focusing on topics like immigration. 

Earlier this month, the US government formally issued sanctions against Rossiya Segodnya and TV-Novosti, accusing RT of moving "beyond being simply a media outlet." It said the Russian government embedded a cyber operational team with ties to Russian intelligence within RT, and that team allegedly focuses on "influence and intelligence operations all over the world." That team even pays social media personalities to spread "unbranded content" meant to influence foreign government elections, the feds said. 

Meta banned Russian state media outlets on its products, including Facebook and Instagram, "for foreign interference activity" shortly after the US government announced the sanction. It said it found evidence in the past that the outlets tried to hide foreign interference activities and that it expects them to continue with their deceptive practices. 

If you're wondering what kind of fake videos Russia has been releasing, Microsoft detailed a few in a recent threat analysis report. One video showed "Kamala Harris" attacking Trump rally attendees, while another video used an actor to accuse the Vice President of being involved in a 2011 hit-and-run incident that paralyzed a 13-year-old girl. There's also another fake video showing a New York City billboard claiming that Harris wants to change children's gender. The company warned that more Russian-made staged and AI-generated videos are bound to circulate online as the US gets closer to the election. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/tiktok-removes-russian-state-owned-media-accounts-for-covert-influence-133006441.html?src=rss

Biden administration seeks ban on auto software from China

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The Biden administration just announced a comprehensive plan to ban Chinese software and some hardware from internet-connected cars in the US. This is being framed as a national security measure, with the administration stating that this software poses “new threats to our national security, including through our supply chains.”

This is the same reasoning behind a recent ban of telecommunications equipment from Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE. In that case, the claims had teeth, as documents reportedly showed how Huawei was involved in the country’s surveillance efforts. Today’s announcement goes on to say that China “could use critical technologies” from connected vehicles “within our supply chains for surveillance and sabotage to undermine national security.”

The rules announced today go beyond mere software. It would also cover any piece of hardware that connects a vehicle to the outside world, which includes Bluetooth, cellular, Wi-Fi and satellite components. It also includes cameras, sensors and onboard computers. The software ban would go into effect in model year 2027, with the related hardware prohibition starting in model year 2030.

The proposed ban also includes Russian auto software. The country has a fairly robust EV industry, but primarily for domestic use. There’s nothing in Russia that’s globally lusted after like the cheap EVs from Chinese companies like BYD.

This leads us to a major point. While this proposed ban is primarily for internet-connected software, it would effectively block all Chinese auto imports. The software is pretty much baked in, as are the items of hardware that allow for connectivity. It’s already tough to get one of these vehicles stateside, due to the recent tariffs placed on Chinese EVs, but this would make it nearly impossible.

Government officials, however, have held steadfast that this is a move to improve national security, and not to ban cheaper EVs from another market. “Connected vehicles and the technology they use bring new vulnerabilities and threats, especially in the case of vehicles or components developed in the P.R.C. [People's Republic of China] and other countries of concern,” said Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser. These remarks were given to reporters over the weekend and were transcribed by The New York Times. 

Sullivan went on to reference something called Volt Typhoon, which is an alleged Chinese effort to insert malicious code into American power systems, pipelines and other critical infrastructure. US officials fear that this program could be used to cripple American military bases in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or a similar military excursion.

Peter Harrell, who was previously the National Security Council’s senior director for international economics during the Biden administration, told The New York Times that “this is likely to be opening the door, over a number of years, to a much broader governmental set of actions” that would “likely see a continuation” no matter who wins the presidential election.

It’s worth noting that the BYD Seagull, as an example, sells for around $10,000. This makes it much cheaper than American EVs, even after getting slapped by that fat 100 percent tariff. A full-featured EV for $20,000 sounds pretty nice right about now. Oh well. It was fun to dream.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/biden-administration-seeks-ban-on-auto-software-from-china-154025671.html?src=rss