This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with the Babylon Bee’s tackle Google Gemini’s woke willpower to inject a phony range into pictures of historic characters: “After decades of nothing but white Nazis, I can finally see a strong, confident black female wearing a swastika. Thanks, Google!” Jim Dempsey and Mark MacCarthy be part of the dialogue as a result of Gemini’s preposterous picture range quotas deserve greater than snark. Actually, I argue, they weren’t errors; they have been fully deliberate efforts by Google to provide its customers not what they need however what Google in its knowledge thinks they need to need. That such weird outcomes have been achieved by Google’s sneakily modifying person prompts to ask for, say, “indigenous” founding fathers merely exhibits that Google has discovered a novel mixture of hubris and incompetence. Extra broadly, Mark and Jim recommend, the collapse of Google’s effort to manage its customers raises this query: Can we belief AI builders after they say they’ve put in guardrails to make their methods secure?
The identical may be requested of the most recent in what appears an infinite stream of specialists demanding that AI fashions defeat customers by stopping them from creating “harmful” deepfake pictures. Later, Mark factors out that almost all of Silicon Valley not too long ago signed on to guarantees to fight election-related deepfakes. Within the 2010s, all of us realized to hate the tech corporations; within the 2020s, it appears, they’ve realized to hate us.
Talking of hubris, Michael Ellis covers the State Division’s stonewalling of a Home committee looking for out how generously the Division funded a gaggle of ideologues making an attempt to chop off promoting revenues for right-of-center information and remark websites. We take this story a bit of personally, having contributed op-eds to a number of of the blacklisted websites.
Michael explains simply how a lot enjoyable Western governments had taking down the notorious Lockbit ransomware service. I credit score the Brits for the humor displayed as governments imitated Lockbit’s graphics, gimmicks, and angle. There have been arrests, cryptocurrency seizures, indictments, and extra. It was enjoyable whereas it lasted. However per week later, Lockbit was claiming that its infrastructure was slowly coming again on line.
Jim unpacks the FTC’s case towards Avast for accumulating the searching habits of its antivirus clients. He sees this as one other battle within the FTC’s struggle towards company claims that privateness could be preserved by “de-identifying” private information.
Mark notes the EU’s newest investigation into TikTok. And Michael explains how the Laptop Fraud and Abuse Act pertains to Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the Fox community.
Mark and I take a second to advertise subsequent week’s evaluation of the Supreme Court docket oral argument over Texas and Florida social media legal guidelines. The argument was taking place whereas we have been recording, however it was already clear that the end result shall be a blended bag. Tune in subsequent week for extra.
Jim explains why the administration has produced an government order about cybersecurity in America’s ports, and the authorized steps wanted to bolster port safety.
Lastly, in fast hits:
Obtain 493rd Episode (mp3)
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