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☆ Why Slurs Are Back in Left-Leaning, Liberal Language
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-23 | by ( Julia Pugachevsky | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

A few weeks ago, I started asking left-leaning people their thoughts on slurs being peppered into everyday conversations. An inclusive eraKayla Cash, a 31-year-old PR manager, grew up using words she now considers offensive. Some of the language felt ubiquitous; she remembers the 2004 release of "Let's Get It Started," the Grammy-winning Black Eyed Peas hit that was originally released as "Let's Get Retarded." It was billed as discussions between two "bohemian layabouts" who called out performative aspects of progressive politics — while using language more often associated with the right, such as that offensive term for someone with intellectual disabilities. Looser language and new rulesEveryone I talked to for this story had rules for which words they would and wouldn't say.

Persons: It's, I've, Kayla Cash, Cash, Obama, Ari Lightman, Lightman, Seth MacFarlane, Kevin Hart, Robbie Goodwin, would've, Donald Trump, Goodwin, Reagan, who've, Zach Beauchamp, Ezra Klein, Beauchamp, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk Organizations: University of Idaho, Rosa's Law, Twitter, Carnegie Mellon University, New York Times, Yorker, Vox, Democratic Locations: Vietnam, Brooklyn

☆ A UPenn student started a YouTube channel. In weeks, her face was stolen on China's social media.
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-25 | by ( Matthew Loh | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

That message included a link to a video on Xiaohongshu, a social media platform rapidly gaining steam in China. The student started her self-empowerment channel in November and has so far published eight videos and seven YouTube Shorts. The Xiaohongshu deepfakes of other YouTubers do the same. In a matter of about 10 minutes, BI found deepfake videos of at least five caucasian women on Xiaohongshu. But at least one Chinese deepfake version of Blakely has a different agenda to share on Xiaohongshu.

Persons: —, Olga Loiek, Loiek, Vladimir Putin, Loeik, Weibo, someone's, Lyu Siwei, it's, Haibing Lu, they've, Xiaohongshu, Natasha, she's, Annie, Sophia Elena, Katyusha, China, Lana Blakely, Blakely, Elizabeth Filips, Serbia, Filips, Lyu, Vincent Conitzer, Conitzer, Lu, Lyu who's, he's, Roy, Ari Lightman, she'll Organizations: Service, Business, Kremlin, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Media, University at Buffalo, Santa Clara University, University of Pennsylvania, BI, Russia, Institute for, Oxford University, Social, Carnegie Mellon University Locations: Munich, China, Moscow, Ukraine, Santa, China's Heilongjiang, Germany, Xiaohongshu, Russian, Russia, Stockholm, Xiaohongshu London, Pakistan

☆ Can an AI chatbot be convicted of an illegal wiretap? A case against Gap's Old Navy may answer that
▼ + stars: | 2023-12-03 | by ( Ellen Sheng | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

The suit also alleges that Old Navy unlawfully shares consumer data with third parties without informing consumers or seeking consent. Old Navy, through its parent company Gap, declined to comment. Old Navy isn't the only one to face similar charges. For now, states have different privacy rules, but there is no unifying federal-level regulation about online privacy. With no comprehensive federal online privacy legislation, companies are free to charge ahead without having to put privacy protections in place.

Persons: Irina Raicu, Raicu, It's, Ari Lightman Organizations: Navy, Central District of, Old, Home Depot, General Motors, Ford, JCPenney, Markkula Center, Applied, Santa Clara University . Companies, Companies, JPMorgan, Verizon, Old Navy, Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College Locations: Central District, Central District of California, California, U.S, Europe, Canada, Europe . Colorado , Connecticut , Utah, Virginia, Delaware, Florida, Iowa

As Open AI employees celebrated the return of CEO Sam Altman with a five-alarm office party , OpenAI software engineer Steven Heidel was busy publicly rebuffing overtures from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Heidel was one of more than 700 OpenAI employees who's threatened exodus halted a would-be mutiny at one of Silicon Valley's most important AI companies. He was previously a scientist at Facebook AI Research and worked as a member of Google Brain under supervision of Prof. Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever. Alec Radford: Radford was hired in 2016 from a small AI company he founded in his dorm room. Tao Xu : technical staff, worked on GPT4 and WhisperChristine McLeavey : technical staff, with contributions to music-related productsChristina Kim : technical staffChristopher Hesse : technical staffHeewoo Jun : technical staff, researchAlex Nichol : technical staff, researchWilliam Fedus: technical staff, researchIlge Akkaya: technical staff, researchVineet Kosaraju : technical staff, researchHenrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto : technical staffAditya Ramesh : technical staff, developed DALL-E and DALL-E 2Prafulla Dhariwal : research scientistHunter Lightman : technical staffHarrison Edwards : research scientistYura Burda : machine language researcherTyna Eloundou : technical staff, researchPamela Mishkin : researcherCasey Chu : researcherDavid Dohan : technical staff, researchAidan Clark : researcherRaul Puri : research scientistLeo Gao : technical staff, researchYang Song : technical staff, researchGiambattista ParascandoloTodor Markov : Machine learning researcherNick Ryder : technical staff

Persons: Sam Altman, Steven Heidel, Marc Benioff, Heidel, Altman, Mira Murati, Murati, Brad Lightcap, Lightcap, Jason Kwon, Kwon, Wojciech Zaremba, Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Alec Radford, Radford, OpenAI, Peter Welinder, He's, Github Copilot, Anna Makanju, Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI's, Michael Petrov, Petrov, Greg [ Brockman, Miles Brundage, Brundage, John Schulman OpenAI, Srinivas Narayanan, Scott Grey, Grey, Bob McGrew, Research Che Chang, Lillian Weng, Safety Systems Mark Chen, Frontiers Research Barret Zoph, Peter Deng, Jan Leike Evan Morikawa Steven Heidel Jong Wook Kim, Tao Xu, Christine McLeavey, Christina Kim, Christopher Hesse, Heewoo, Alex Nichol, William Fedus, Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto, Aditya Ramesh, Hunter Lightman, Harrison Edwards, Yura, Tyna, Pamela Mishkin, Casey Chu, David Dohan, Aidan Clark, Raul Puri, Leo Gao, Yang, Giambattista Parascandolo Todor Markov, Nick Ryder Organizations: Business, BI, OpenAI, Khosla Ventures, Facebook, Research, Google, Tesla, U.S . Department of Energy, Oxford University, Safety Systems, Frontiers Research Locations: Albania, Canada, OpenAI

☆ ‘The Transcendent Brain’ Review: Beyond Ones and Zeroes
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-17 | by ( Danny Heitman | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

For much of the year, Alan Lightman lives less than a mile from Walden Pond, the Massachusetts spot where Henry David Thoreau popularized transcendentalism and its ideas about a direct connection to the divine through nature. Mr. Lightman, a theoretical physicist and professor of humanities at MIT, has had some vivid experiences with nature himself. In “Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine,” his 2018 essay collection, he recalled immersing himself in a starry sky as his small boat bobbed off the shore of his summer home in New England. “I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were a part of them,” he wrote. “And the vast expanse of time—extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die—seemed compressed to a dot.”

☆ How small-town Maine embraced a family that fled the Taliban
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Elyse Lightman Samuels | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +36 min

CAPE ELIZABETH, Maine — Last November, at about midnight, Omid was lying in bed in his new home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine — exhausted, but unable to sleep. On this night, and on many nights during Omid's first few months in Maine, Nasir was soon at his door. Omid's family arrived in Maine just before Halloween in 2021 and recently celebrated one year in Maine. Catholic Charities, the local refugee-resettlement organization in Maine, was working with Omid's family to help them resettle. After Omid's family escaped Kabul, members of his extended family came by to collect some of their more precious items, and gave other things away.

The Musk video by reAlpha included “robust disclaimers” establishing it as satire, said Christie Currie, chief marketing officer. The first Musk video went live days after reAlpha launched a public offering under regulation A+ in 2021. But the ease of creating deepfakes means some celebrities could soon be deluged by ads featuring their unauthorized, but very convincing likenesses, Mr. Moss said. At the same time, the language in contracts written years before the technology existed may be vague enough to allow marketers to use existing footage to create new deepfake videos. Companies most often request celebrity deepfake videos to use internally for training, communications, parties or other purposes—but not for ads, said Daynen Biggs, owner of Slack Shack Films, which produced the Elon Musk videos.

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