19: TikTok

Should governments ban TikTok? Can they? A cybersecurity expert explains the risks the app poses and the challenges to blocking it On May 17, 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed legislation banning TikTok in the state. The law imposes fines of US$10,000 per day on any app store that offers the popular Chinese-owned video social media app, and on the app maker itself if it operates in the state. Individual users are not subject to penalties. The law, which is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2024, is the first total ban by a U.S. state government. The company claims 200,000 users in the state of 1.1 million people.......... What data privacy risk does TikTok pose? What could the Chinese government do with data collected by the app? Is its content recommendation algorithm dangerous? Is it legal for a government to impose a total ban on the app? And is it even possible to ban an app? ........... most apps collect data that the companies use in part to fund their operations. This revenue typically comes from targeting users with ads based on the data they collect. .......... what makes TikTok different from the likes of Pokemon-GO, Facebook or even your phone itself? ........ If most apps collect data, why are governments worried about TikTok? First, they worry about the Chinese government accessing data from TikTok’s 150 million users in the U.S. There is also a concern about the algorithms used by TikTok to show content. ......... If the data does end up in the hands of the Chinese government, the question is how could it use the data to its benefit. The government could share it with other companies in China to help them profit, which is no different than U.S. companies sharing marketing data. The Chinese government is known for playing the long game, and data is power, so if it is collecting data, it could take years to learn how it benefits China............ One potential threat is the Chinese government using the data to spy on people, particularly people who have access to valuable information. The Justice Department is investigating TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, for using the app to monitor U.S. journalists. The Chinese government has an extensive history of hacking U.S. government agencies and corporations, and much of that hacking has been facilitated by social engineering – the practice of using data about people to trick them into revealing more information. ............ TikTok and most social media apps have algorithms designed to learn a user’s interests and then try to adjust the content so the user will continue to use the app. ......... The Montana law aims to use fines to coerce companies into enforcing its ban. It’s not clear if companies will comply, and it’s unlikely that this would deter users from finding workarounds. .......... if the federal government comes to the conclusion that TikTok should be banned, is it even possible to ban it for all of its 150 million existing users? Any such ban would likely start with blocking the distribution of the app through Apple’s and Google’s app stores. This might keep many users off the platform, but there are other ways to download and install apps for people who are determined to use them. ......... A more drastic method would be to force Apple and Google to change their phones to prevent TikTok from running. While I’m not a lawyer, I think this effort would fail due to legal challenges, which include First Amendment concerns. The bottom line is that an absolute ban will be tough to enforce. ........ By some estimates, the Chinese government has already collected personal information on at least 80% of the U.S. population via various means. So a ban might limit the damage going forward to some degree, but the Chinese government has already collected a significant amount of data. The Chinese government also has access – along with anyone else with money – to the large market for personal data, which fuels calls for stronger data privacy rules. ............ Independent of a ban, families should have conversations about TikTok and other social media platforms and how they can be detrimental to mental health. These conversations should focus on how to determine if the app is leading you down an unhealthy path. .



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The US has lots to lose and little to gain by banning TikTok and WeChat The executive orders are based on national security grounds, though the threats cited are to citizens rather than the government. Foreign policy analysts see the move as part of the administration’s ongoing wrestling match with the Chinese government for leverage in the global economy. ......... The bans threaten Americans’ freedom of speech, and may harm foreign investment in the U.S. and American companies’ ability to sell software abroad, while delivering minimal privacy and cybersecurity benefits........ The Australian military accused WeChat, a messaging, social media and mobile payment app, of acting as spyware, saying the app was caught sending data to Chinese Intelligence servers. ....... banning the apps and requiring Chinese divestiture also has a national security downside. It damages the U.S.‘s moral authority to push for free speech and democracy abroad. Critics have frequently contended that America’s moral authority has been severely damaged during the Trump administration and this action could arguably add to the decline......... The administration’s principal argument against TikTok is that it collects Americans’ personal data and could provide it to the Chinese government. The executive order states that this could allow China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage. ....... Skeptics have argued that the government hasn’t presented clear evidence of privacy issues and that the service’s practices are standard in the industry. TikTok’s terms of service do say that it can share information with its China-based corporate parent, ByteDance. ........... The order against WeChat is similar. It also mentions that the app captures the personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States. However, some of these visiting Chinese nationals have expressed concern that banning WeChat may limit their ability to communicate with friends and family in China. ............ While TikTok and WeChat do raise cybersecurity concerns, they are not significantly different from those raised by other smart phone apps. In my view, these concerns could be better addressed by enacting national privacy legislation, similar to Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, to dictate how data is collected and used and where it is stored. Another remedy is to have Google, Apple and others review the apps for cybersecurity concerns before allowing new versions to be made available in their app stores. ......... Perhaps the greatest concern raised by the bans are their impact on people’s ability to communicate, and whether they violate the First Amendment. Both TikTok and WeChat are communications channels and TikTok publishes and hosts content. ........ In the case of TikTok, banning an app that is being used for political commentary and activism would raise pronounced constitutional claims and likely be overturned by the courts. ............. put the U.S. in uncomfortable territory: the list of countries that have banned social media platforms. These include Egypt, Hong Kong, Turkey, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Russia and China. ........ Social media gives freedom fighters, protesters and dissidents all over the world a voice. It enables citizens to voice concerns and organize protests about monarchies, sexual and other human rights abuses, discriminatory laws and civil rights violations. When authoritarian governments clamp down on dissent, they frequently target social media. ......... China and the U.S. have already gone through a cycle of reciprocal company banning, in addition to reciprocal consulate closures. ........ They also cut U.S. firms off from the high-growth Chinese market. ......... The issues could be solved through better oversight and the enactment of privacy laws that could otherwise benefit Americans.

ChatGPT has now a big problem.

Google just updated its free competitor, Bard.

Here are 8 things impossible on ChatGPT but that Bard can do (for free):

— Paul.ai (@itsPaulAi) May 11, 2023

15: AI

What Gandhi’s Rare Win Over Modi Means for India’s 2024 Vote Swing state Karnataka gives some clues for the national polls ...... Opposition Congress party, Gandhi scion retain some relevance ........ A big Indian state election win has given a boost to Rahul Gandhi’s Congress party in its quest to unseat Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a national vote next year. But it still faces a long road ahead. ..... The victory in Karnataka over the weekend was one of the most significant for Congress against Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in major state elections since he took power nearly a decade ago. Now the question is whether Gandhi can build on that momentum in the five remaining state assembly elections before the 2024 vote. .

How AI Knows Things No One Told It Researchers are still struggling to understand how AI models trained to parrot internet text can perform advanced tasks such as running code, playing games and trying to break up a marriage ........ “Everything we want to do with them in order to make them better or safer or anything like that seems to me like a ridiculous thing to ask ourselves to do if we don’t understand how they work,” says Ellie Pavlick of Brown University, one of the researchers working to fill that explanatory void. ........ GPT (short for generative pretrained transformer) .......... The models rely on a machine-learning system called a neural network. Such networks have a structure modeled loosely after the connected neurons of the human brain. The code for these programs is relatively simple and fills just a few screens. It sets up an autocorrection algorithm, which chooses the most likely word to complete a passage based on laborious statistical analysis of hundreds of gigabytes of Internet text. Additional training ensures the system will present its results in the form of dialogue. In this sense, all it does is regurgitate what it learned—it is a “stochastic parrot,” in the words of Emily Bender, a linguist at the University of Washington. But LLMs have also managed to ace the bar exam, explain the Higgs boson in iambic pentameter, and make an attempt to break up their users’ marriage. Few had expected a fairly straightforward autocorrection algorithm to acquire such broad abilities............ That GPT and other AI systems perform tasks they were not trained to do, giving them “emergent abilities,” has surprised even researchers who have been generally skeptical about the hype over LLMs. “I don’t know how they’re doing it or if they could do it more generally the way humans do—but they’ve challenged my views,” says Melanie Mitchell, an AI researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. ............. The philosopher typed in a program to calculate the 83rd number in the Fibonacci sequence. “It’s multistep reasoning of a very high degree,” he says. And the bot nailed it. When Millière asked directly for the 83rd Fibonacci number, however, GPT got it wrong: this suggests the system wasn’t just parroting the Internet. Rather it was performing its own calculations to reach the correct answer. ........... Researchers are finding that these systems seem to achieve genuine understanding of what they have learned. ......... The researchers concluded that it was playing Othello roughly like a human: by keeping a game board in its “mind’s eye” and using this model to evaluate moves. Li says he thinks the system learns this skill because it is the most parsimonious description of its training data. “If you are given a whole lot of game scripts, trying to figure out the rule behind it is the best way to compress,” he adds. ............ The system had no independent way of knowing what a box or key is, yet it picked up the concepts it needed for this task. ......... Researchers marvel at how much LLMs are able to learn from text. ......... the wider the range of the data, the more general the rules the system will discover. ....... “Maybe we’re seeing such a huge jump because we have reached a diversity of data, which is large enough that the only underlying principle to all of it is that intelligent beings produced them,” he says. “And so the only way to explain all of this data is [for the model] to become intelligent.” ...........

LLMs do, in fact, learn from their users’ prompts—an ability known as “in-context learning.”

“It’s a different sort of learning that wasn’t really understood to exist before,” says Ben Goertzel, founder of the AI company SingularityNET. ............ Its outputs are determined by the last several thousand words it has seen. ......... Entire websites are devoted to “jailbreak” prompts that overcome the system’s “guardrails”—restrictions that stop the system from telling users how to make a pipe bomb, for example—typically by directing the model to pretend to be a system without guardrails. Some people use jailbreaking for sketchy purposes, yet others deploy it to elicit more creative answers. “It will answer scientific questions, I would say, better” than if you just ask it directly, without the special jailbreak prompt ............ “It’s better at scholarship.” ........ Another type of in-context learning happens via “chain of thought” prompting, which means asking the network to spell out each step of its reasoning—a tactic that makes it do better at logic or arithmetic problems requiring multiple steps. (But one thing that made Millière’s example so surprising is that the network found the Fibonacci number without any such coaching.) ........... in-context learning follows the same basic computational procedure as standard learning, known as gradient descent. This procedure was not programmed; the system discovered it without help. .............

LLMs may have other latent abilities that no one has discovered yet. “Every time we test for a new ability that we can quantify, we find it”

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A hero's strength is yours with ChatGPT. paramendra.mykajabi.com

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ChatGPT Literacy (4) #ChatGPT #GPT4 #AI #OpenAI #artificialintelligence

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ChatGPT Explains Why AIs like ChatGPT Should Be Regulated We asked the text-generating AI ChatGPT to talk about its own flaws ....... When we asked ChatGPT to generate a Scientific American editorial, it produced a thoughtful-sounding essay. ........... Despite sounding more sophisticated and realistic than perhaps any language model before it, ChatGPT cannot actually think for itself—and it can produce falsehoods and illogical statements that merely look reasonable. .............. ChatGPT is capable of spouting incorrect information with apparent confidence. ......... the potential for ChatGPT to be used for nefarious purposes, such as impersonating individuals or spreading misinformation. .......... Overly strict regulations could stifle innovation and prevent the technology from reaching its full potential. On the other hand, insufficient regulation could lead to abuses of the technology. .......... the creation of ChatGPT and other large language models that are trained on vast amounts of text generated by human writers. These writers, who may include novelists, journalists, and bloggers, receive no compensation for the use of their work in training these language models. .......... ChatGPT and other language models could be used to generate fake news articles, impersonate individuals, or spread other forms of misinformation. ......... In the case of a question like “how to change a lightbulb,” it’s possible that ChatGPT may provide a response that is accurate and helpful. However, it’s also possible that the model may provide an inaccurate or incomplete response, in which case it would be up to the user to use their own judgment and verify the information provided by the model. ............ Large language models like ChatGPT are trained to generate text that is fluent and coherent, but they may not always be able to generate responses that are as nuanced or creative as those written by a human. ....... prompts written by large language models may include repetitions or unusual combinations of words and phrases. This is because language models are trained to generate text by identifying patterns and regularities in the data, and may sometimes produce responses that contain repetitive or unusual elements. ......... As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I do not have personal experiences or the ability to browse the internet.