Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

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Futuristic autonomous vehicle cockpit. Interior of unmanned car cockpit with digital screens. Created with Generative AI

Congress Boosts AI-Enabled Automobile “Kill Switch” Technology to Control Drivers

Federal agency power poised to extend to your every move.

Next thing you know, you’ll be sitting in the driver’s seat, when Siri or Alexa informs you: “Sorry, you may not drive. This vehicle is temporarily disabled. Please try again later.” There is no override, no “lost password” feature to bypass the lockdown. It won’t matter where you were going, nor how urgently you needed to go. The AI-powered system decides you are not fit to drive. Yet another dystopian fantasy? Hardly. Congress and the President enacted Public Law 117–58 (Nov. 15, 2021) requiring national rules to require passenger vehicles “to be equipped with advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.” Say it that way, and who could speak against the idea?  After all, AI systems would be saving lives. Continued funding Read More ›

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Closed up image of a Female using TikTok application on a smartphone in home. 5 September, 2022. ChiangMai, Thailand.

TikTok is Storing Data in China, Contrary to Former Claims

TikTok CEO said user data isn't stored in China. Turns out it is.

Many online creators and entrepreneurs give sensitive data to TikTok, the China-owned social media app, so they can do business on the platform. That includes social security numbers. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told Congress earlier this year that users’ data was stored outside of China in places such as Virginia and Singapore. Apparently, however, that is an inaccurate claim. According to a report from Forbes, TikTok has indeed been storing sensitive data on Chinese servers, where employees there can access it. Alexandra S. Levine reports, A trove of records obtained by Forbes from multiple sources across different parts of the company reveals that highly sensitive financial and personal information about those prized users and third parties has been stored in China. Read More ›

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Empty vintage congress hall with seats and microphones

“A Printing Press Moment” in History

AI should be regulated lest it do real harm in the world, said OpenAI CEO

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company at the forefront of artificial intelligence development in recent months, testified before lawmakers last week on the state of AI, its potential, and the dangers of its misuse. Despite Altman’s overall optimism regarding AI, calling it a “printing press moment,” he called for lawmakers to regulate it to keep it from causing legitimate harm in the world. Julia Zorthian, writer at Times and owner of the coolest last name in the world, reports, Joining Altman in testifying before the committee were two other AI experts, professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University Gary Marcus and IBM Chief Privacy & Trust Officer Christina Montgomery. The three witnesses supported governance of AI Read More ›

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video wall with multimedia images on different television screens, generative ai

AI Still Struggles to Take Out the Trash

How good is AI at content moderation?

How good is AI at content moderation? Also, why haven’t tech companies improved at filtering bad content? A new article at MIT Technology Review goes into some of the details of AI, content moderation, and the struggle tech companies have with “bad actors.” In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT still struggle with capturing the nuance and context of language; therefore it seems unlikely that AI will totally replace human content moderators. Tate Ryan-Mosley writes, Large language models still struggle with context, which means they probably won’t be able to interpret the nuance of posts and images as well as human moderators. Scalability and specificity across different cultures also raise questions.  -Tate Ryan-Mosley, Catching bad content in the age Read More ›