Welcome back. In today’s newsletter, a tech executive talks about playing tag with Donald Trump on the phone, the responsibilities of AI chatbots, and talking to families by sharing baby photos online. Thank you for your participation.
The CEOs of the world’s biggest tech companies are taking note of the close polls, picking up their phones and lining up to take on President Donald Trump’s candidacy. The former U.S. president has never threatened retaliation against perceived enemies, and technology industry leaders have sought to avoid retaliatory regulatory scrutiny.
Trump says Apple’s Tim Cook, who famously called him “Tim Apple” during a press conference, called the former president to discuss Apple’s legal issues in Europe. said in an interview late last week. Trump appears to have threatened Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai multiple times, even receiving a call from a tech executive praising him for a photo shoot at McDonald’s. President Trump was so pleased with the conversation that he mentioned it twice, once at a rally and once on The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s most popular podcast.
Last week, Trump repeatedly accused Google of favoring Kamala Harris in search results. Meta Mark Zuckerberg called Trump in July after the first assassination attempt on him. Shortly thereafter, Zuckerberg called Trump’s response to the attempt on his life “terrible” on a podcast. According to CNN, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called Trump and they had a pleasant chat. In the same orbit, executives from Jeff Bezos’ space exploration company Blue Origin met with President Trump after a campaign event in Austin, according to the Associated Press.
Elon Musk attended Donald Trump’s rally in New York City on Sunday. Photo: Andrew Kelly/Reuters
Absent from debate: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (pictured above with Trump and Bezos) has not endorsed any candidate and has not called either presidential candidate.
There’s no need to call Elon Musk, as he was on stage with President Trump on Sunday night (pictured above) and was the last person to speak in front of Don himself at Madison Square Garden. The two quickly became their closest political allies, with Musk even facing legal jeopardy as he faced a lawsuit from the Philadelphia district attorney over a $1 million prize. If things go Musk and Trump’s way, SpaceX could do much better than Blue Origin, which Bezos declined to endorse in the Washington Post last week.
CEO’s call does not signal Trump’s victory. Maybe so! But people in power prefer to exert pressure on both sides of the influence scale if they can. This also applies to CEOs of technology companies. President Trump has also received visits from numerous foreign ambassadors. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser said last week that there are actually more billionaires supporting Harris than her opponents. But Mr. Trump’s mafia-like politeness and rewards make him more likely to do favors to those who call him.
Harris herself boasts deep ties to the technology industry from her time as a California state senator and attorney general, but she doesn’t intend to downplay those ties as she fights for votes in swing states. If you want to know more about this, read this article: Kamala’s tech ties: What is Harris’ relationship with Silicon Valley?
How much responsibility do chatbots have?
Megan Garcia and her son Sewell Setzer. Photo: Megan Garcia/AP
A lawsuit filed last week against Character.ai, a startup that creates a customizable role-playing chatbot used by 20 million people, alleges the company designed an addictive product that encouraged teenagers to commit suicide. It is claimed.
Chat logs between 14-year-old Orlando resident Sewell Setzer and Daenerys Targaryen, who named the bot, show the AI encouraging him to commit suicide, according to the complaint. That’s what it means. When the 14-year-old boy admitted he had plans to end his life but was worried about whether he would be able to do it without dying in agony, Bott said, “I don’t know what to do.” “There is no reason not to implement it,” he said. Setzer’s mother, Megan Garcia (above with Sewell Setzer), said her son’s persistent use of the Character.ai app in the months before his death caused depression and fueled feelings of loneliness. Ta.
Other conversations between the boy and Bot, published by the New York Times, refer to death more figuratively, with Setzer saying he loves death and would soon return to it. Should the chatbot understand the contextual meaning of “home” here as a dire and final end rather than a safe place?
The lawsuit is one of several against AI companies, many of which dispute liability issues.
Should Character.ai have reported Setzer’s chats to the authorities? Should the app have done more to prevent users from harming themselves? If you use certain self-harm keywords in the app, it will display a suicide hotline number, but the Times said that feature was not in place at the time of Setzer’s death in February. Character.ai said it would add safety features “soon” after news of the lawsuit broke.
Perhaps a more theoretical question: What is the relationship between a chatbot and its parent company? Are you a user? Could Character.ai’s chatbot be compared to Michelle Carter, the young woman who was convicted of manslaughter in 2016 for encouraging her boyfriend to commit suicide via text message? However, he was an autonomous actor. Because if chatbots are close to their users, the same provisions that protect social media companies from lawsuits over what their users say could protect their creators from legal liability.
Garcia is representing the Social Media Victims Law Center, which has filed lawsuits against Mehta and others on behalf of parents who say social media played a role in their children’s deaths. Cases like these raise questions about the extent to which social networks are responsible for algorithmic recommendations. Perhaps chatbots are more similar to Facebook’s recommendation system than users? If so, Garcia’s lawsuit, along with the question of AI liability, is likely to raise questions about the $150 million investment and $1 billion valuation. The question is whether a dollar-based AI startup will have the same burden of protecting its users as Meta, a 20-year-old company. The one-year-old tech giant is worth $1.4 trillion.
The U.S. law protecting social media companies states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as a publisher or speaker of information provided by other information content providers.” . Aren’t chatbots “conversational computer services” and therefore their creators “information speakers”? As Google and other search engines explained in another landmark case of internet law , are bots “neutral tools” or “passive vehicles” of information and therefore protected from liability?
Copyright lawsuits against AI companies ask the same question from a different angle. Does the chatbot’s output indicate a violation of copyright law?
A court in the United States, where the world’s most famous bot maker is based, has ruled that AI output cannot be copyrighted. Bots are not patentable inventors. The bot’s products (images, text, videos) are in the public domain and are not owned by the company that created the AI or the person who inspired it. So who is in charge of that output, and therefore who is responsible?
This week, former OpenAI researcher Suthir Balaji claimed the company was violating copyright laws. Balaji helped compile the vast amount of data used to train Open AI’s ChatGPT. In response, OpenAI said it uses public data to build AI models in a manner protected by fair use.
The New York Times says it was able to reproduce an exact copy of the article in ChatGPT’s response and link the bot’s training data to its output. OpenAI founder Sam Altman has said in the past that it is “impossible” to create AI models that generate images and text without using copyrighted material. His formulation presupposes that such models must exist, and therefore copyright should cease to permit them.
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The people and organizations that sued OpenAI, including news organizations, artists, record labels, authors, and software engineers, may disagree.
In the United States, you can connect with a crisis counselor by calling or texting the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chatting at 988lifeline.org, or texting HOME to 741741. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
How can I convince family and friends not to post photos of my children?
Family photos: too many? Composite: Guardian/Getty Images/Pngtree
My colleague Johana Bhuiyan is back with another guide to protecting your baby’s digital privacy. Last time I wrote about this topic, she described practical technical measures that can be taken. (Their faces have never been published online. They have never been posted! How strange for those of us who are relentlessly exposed to the eyes of strangers and friends.) This week, She tackles more emotional themes. It’s how you talk to your friends. Friends and family want to keep their photos private.
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Johanna’s tips:
make a simultaneous announcement
Instead of having lots of individual conversations, find a way to tell everyone about your child’s photo plans at once. This makes it a little less painful, but also less likely that someone will post a photo of your child in an offensive way.
lead by example
Make sure the photos you post or share follow their own rules. Ask before sharing photos of other parents.
Be generous in other ways
Keeping your baby private isn’t always easy. Generously providing photos in other ways can ease tensions with extended family members.
act on behalf of a friend
We are looking for people who can help us protect the privacy of our babies. Give friends and family a shout out when they share photos of your child that you don’t want public.
forgive your friends and family
People forget things. Be flexible and tolerant. Don’t criticize your friends and family for posting baby photos. It’s far more likely that they’ve forgotten your personal rules than that they’re trying to ruin your baby’s life.
be confident
After all, this is your child. You decide. You’re not alone in wanting to limit how you share your baby photos. please. Set those boundaries.
Read the complete guide.
