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Wednesday, May 03, 2023

New Twitter, Now With More Hate

Alan Rickman’s secret showbiz diaries: the late actor on Harry Potter, politics and what he really thought of his co-stars

 

Biden’s team picks Julie Chavez Rodriguez as 2024 campaign manager Reuters

 


Antony Blinken and the ‘Made Men’ of the Biden

 

Administration Jonathan Turley

 

Clarence Thomas Friend Harlan Crow Had Supreme Court ‘Conflict of Interest’ Bloomberg (furzy)


New Twitter, Now With More Hate

USC Information Sciences Institute: “In an analysis of Twitter using natural language processing and AI techniques, researchers found that in the period of time since October 2022:

  • Hateful users have become more hateful.
  • Hate has increased overall.
  • There has been no meaningful change in the quantity of bots.

Computer scientist Keith Burghardt at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), a research institute of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, has been studying social media for five years, and specifically studying online hate for the last year.  Among other things, he has quantified how hateful online communities in Reddit increase the hate speech of new members; developed techniques to detect hateful subreddits and determine how subreddit members’ early interactions affect their activity within the group; and found ways to understand how online extremism occurs and predict anti-vaccine users on Twitter. His latest paper, Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots, quantifies hate and bots on Twitter. It has been peer-reviewed and accepted as a poster paper in the 2023 International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). When Elon Musk purchased Twitter on October 27th, 2022, two of his stated goals were to have less restrictive content moderation and to remove spam bots. In this paper, Burghardt and his fellow researchers set out to look at the impact of the former, and the success of the latter…”


FT.com ($) – “As issues about artificial intelligence make their way through the US patent system, greater disclosure about its use may lead to questions about how ideas are formed that are not considered under existing patent rules, warns Dr. Michael Sartori

When members of the US supreme court refused this week to hear a groundbreaking case that sought to have an artificial intelligence system named as the inventor on a patent, it appeared to lay to rest a controversial idea that could have transformed the intellectual property field. The justices’ decision, in the case of Thaler vs Vidal, leaves in place two lower court rulings that only “natural persons” can be awarded patents. 

The decision dealt a blow to claims that intelligent machines are already matching human creativity in important areas of the economy and deserve similar protections for their ideas. But while the court’s decision blocked a potentially radical extension of patent rights, it has done nothing to calm growing worries that AI is threatening to upend other aspects of intellectual property law. 

The US Patent and Trademark Office opened hearings on the issue this week, drawing warnings that AI-fuelled inventions might stretch existing understandings of how the patent system works and lead to a barrage of litigation. The flurry of concern has been prompted by the rapid rise of generative AI. Though known mainly from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the same technology is already being used to design semiconductors and suggest ideas for new molecules that might form the basis of useful drugs. 

For now, such uses of AI do not appear to pose a serious challenge to the patent system since the technology is being used as a tool to help humans shape ideas rather than operating independently, said Chris Morgan, an IP partner at law firm Reed Smith.

 However, referring to the possibility that AI systems might one day come up with inventions on their own, she added: “Our laws are not equipped, the way they’re written right now, to handle that scenario.”


Recommended Search Engines: “Use a search engine that doesn’t build an advertising profile based on your searches. The recommendations here are based on the merits of each service’s privacy policy. There is no guarantee that these privacy policies are honored. 

Consider using a VPN or Tor if your threat model requires hiding your IPaddress from the search provider.” [Note – Privacy Guides is a non-profit, socially motivated website that provides information for protecting your data security and privacy.”


Is This Humiliating? Or A Hoot? Italian Tourism Campaign Features Botticelli’s Venus As An Influencer

""In one image, she takes a selfie at Piazza San Marco in Venice, while elsewhere on her travels she eats a pizza on Lake Como and rides a bike past Rome's Colosseum. … The concept has been met mostly with derision by social media commentators, art critics, and even government officials." - Artnet