Greetings from Guildford, and hope you are having a lovely week. If you’re in London (maybe the UK) there have been rare sightings of blue skies this week, so life is pretty good.
There are quite a lot of stories below about ICE, and their use of surveillance tools. 404 has a great piece on the use of tools to monitor entire neighborhoods, and the Brennan Centre has a piece on ICE looking to expand the net from immigrants to dissenters. Tl;dr – not a great bunch of lads.
The Guardian also has a very interesting story about the use of automated tools to investigate child benefit fraud, and what acceptable risk might be. And I quote:
Documents released under freedom of information laws show HMRCrecognised a risk that Home Office data would wrongly flag families as having emigrated, but deemed that risk remote and tolerable.
This was despite evidence from a pilot scheme showing travel data was wrong in 46% of cases. Of those investigated for suspected fraud during the pilot, more than a third were ultimately found to be legitimate claimants.
I would say its pretty unbelievable, and its pretty shocking, and it really still should be both of these things. We need not only better impact assessments, but better assessment of those impact assessments.
Its not really human rights-related, but the Washington Post has a piece on how Apple is adopting Gemini to power Siri (etc). Which is interesting to me, as a pretty strong endorsement of Gemini, and a validation of my own decision-making (tap on back) as Gemini is my LLM of choice.
I’m very tired after a long day at a workshop, so that’s me for this week. Since next Monday is apparently – and totally officially (take it off) – the most depressing day of the year, i really have no choice but to leave you with one of my favourite songs, ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order.
Stay well, be lovely.
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HTN, Deep dive: AI in healthcare, what progress has been made in the past 12 months?
The Brennan, Centre, ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants
404 Media, Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods
Policing Insight, Trust and confidence: Applying AI for the policing of disinformation
Financial Times, Welcome to a post-human world: the vast anonymity of the data centre
The Guardian, HMRC accepted ‘tolerable’ risk of harm in child benefit fraud crackdown
Technology News, Gmail adds new AI features, turning it into a personal assistant
Technology News, Meta strikes deals with three nuclear energy companies (what could go wrong?)
Washington Post, Monkeys are on the loose in St. Louis and AI is complicating efforts to find them (you are absolutely clicking on this)
Financial Times, Nvidia and Microsoft back AI breakthrough for gene therapies
The Hill, How artificial intelligence is reshaping the future of war
The Hill, UK to criminalize nonconsensual deepfakes amid probe into Grok AI
The Hill, Pentagon is embracing Musk’s Grok AI chatbot as it draws global outcry (you cant make this shit up)
Rest of World News, How countries around the world have adopted generative AI
Open Rights Group, Automating the Hostile Environment: AI in the Asylum Decision-Making Process
Rest of World News, Iran crippled Starlink and why the rest of the world should worry
Algorithm Watch, What artificial butter tells us about Artificial Intelligence
EFF, How Hackers Are Fighting Back Against ICE
Rest of World News, OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Health. Should we trust it? (no)
The Guardian, ‘Dangerous and alarming’: Google removes some of its AI summaries after users’ health put at risk (told you)
New York Times, Can A.I. Help Medical Research? (you would hope so. I mean. We’re pretty invested)
The Guardian, UK watchdog fines facial recognition firm £7.5m over image collection
Washington Post, ‘Worst in Show’ CES products include AI refrigerators, AI companions and AI doorbells
WIRED, How AI Companies Got Caught Up in US Military Efforts\
Washington Post, Sales of a powerful Nvidia AI chip to China gets the greenlight, with conditions
Financial Times, Google taps emails and YouTube history in push for personalised AI
WIRED, Roblox’s AI-Powered Age Verification Is a Complete Mess
Washington Post, College paper fights to stop AI slop website from stealing its identity
New York Times, The Internet May Look Different After You Listen to This
The Guardian, After the Bondi attack, a deepfaked Guardian video went viral. It won’t be the last – video
Financial Times, Microsoft warns that China is winning AI race outside the west (you’re shocked, right?)
Washington Post, Apple calls on Google to help smarten up Siri and bring other AI features to the iPhoneArms Control Association, Geopolitics and the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons Systems