Greetings friends. I hope ye are keeping well. The skies over London are just beautifully blue. Which is, I have to say, very nice indeed.
Mind you, not gonna lie, its been a pretty crazy/mad/intense few weeks this end, so apologies for the absence of a newsletter. How have your inboxes coped? To be honest it’s likely to be a bit sporadic over the next month, and then August is definitely off. But during that time I plan on heading off to the Basque country, and so shall return fresh, and rested, and most definitely very well fed, in September. Thats the plan at least.
Anyways, on to the propaganda. Very happy to report that Dr Matthew Abbey has published his first paper as part of my project team – The Void of Surveillance: Machine Learning, Psychoanalysis, and the Misreading of Desire – available at surveillance and society, and worth your time. I’ve also published a piece with Dr Ronit Matar – Rethinking International Human Rights Law’s Approach to Identity in Light of Surveillance and AI – which is hopefully the start of work exploring what identity is in today’s digital age and what human rights law can do to protect it. Available at the human rights law review.
For those interested, PUC Rio de Janeiro is running a field-based training course on Conflict & International law, there was a trial in February which apparently went really well, so this may be worth your time. Conor Foley is excellent. Info here.
I’m not going to try to recap the last few weeks here, but have tried to group the stories below a little bit. You know. For some kind of narrative flavour!
I’ll leave you this week with the new video for the Talking Heads ‘Psycho Killer’ featuring (an absolutely incredible) Saoirse Ronan. Cos like. Its been that kind of month. Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa. If you haven’t seen ‘Stop Making Sense’ the Talking Heads concert video from sometime in the mid-80’s, you absolutely must. It is totally worth your time. Actually, on that note, I’ll leave you with that version of my favourite song, This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody). MMMHHH!
Be well
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WIRED, How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance
New Lines Magazine, Turkey’s AI-Powered Protest Crackdown
The New York Times, Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
The Guardian, Top Meta exec joins US army’s ‘next generation’ tech team Detachment 201
The Financial Times, Big Tech’s push into military AI is troubling
WIRED, Taiwan Is Rushing to Make Its Own Drones Before It’s Too Late
WIRED, Google Wants to Get Better at Spotting Wildfires From Space
Financial Times, Skills to future-proof a legal career
The New York Times, A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy
The Guardian, Downing Street exploring options for ‘progressive’ UK digital IDs (like there’s a lot to say on this, but seriously, Brit card?)
The Washington Post, Inside the digital hunt for a child sex abuser
The Guardian, Shopper put on facial ID watchlist after dispute over 39p of paracetamol at Home Bargains (this is in the naughty facial recognition corner piece)
The Financial Times, Here come the glassholes, part II (shout out for the title)
The Washington Post, New Orleans pushes to legalize police use of ‘facial surveillance’
Business Insider, How Delivery App Roadie Deals With Gig Worker Fraud: Face ID, GPS
The Conversation, AI helps tell snow leopards apart, improving population counts for these majestic mountain predators
New York Times, A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse
ExtremeTech, ChatGPT Lost a Chess Game to an Atari 2600 (revenge of the nerd)
The Register, Anthropic: All the major AI models will blackmail us if pushed hard enough (or maybe this is revenge of the nerds!)
The Hill, Teens with ‘addictive’ phone use more likely to be suicidal: Study
Information Labs, Don’t Blindly Blame the Bots: How AI Is Helping Journalism
The Hill, WhatsApp banned on House staffer devices
The Hill, ChatGPT use linked to cognitive decline: MIT research
New York Times, A.I. Computing Power Is Splitting the World Into Haves and Have-Nots
WIRED, How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren’t Saying
Blogs
JustSecurity, The Just Security Podcast: A Conversation with Jen Easterly — Cybersecurity at a Crossroads
Data Counsel, Washington State Broadly Criminalizes All Malicious Deepfakes, Expanding on Existing Deepfake Regulation
BTLJ, Deepfaked Evidence: What Case Law Tells Us About How the Rules of Authenticity Needs to Change
Academic Literature
*Disclaimer: The following have not been evaluated for their methodology and do not necessarily reflect the views of the AI & Human Rights Blog
Ronit Matar & Daragh Murray, Re-thinking international human rights law’s approach to identity in light of surveillance and AI
Matthew Abbey, The Void of Surveillance: Machine Learning, Psychoanalysis, and the Misreading of Desire