Concerned about Artificial Intelligence? Microsoft chat robot goes nuts
A chat bot released by Microsoft this Wednesday, was taken down on Thursday because her self-learning capabilities had turned her...
Things that caught our eye
Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing reports that Intel has pulled advertising from the gaming publication site Gamasutra, after the site posted criticism of the GamerGate movement.
Beschizza writes that after Intel was “flooded” with complaints about Gamasutra’s critique of the GamerGate campaign, Intel’s spokesperson Bill Calder confirmed the decision. Calder:
“We take feedback from our customers very seriously especially as it relates to contextually relevant content and placements.”
Beschizza goes on to explain that the GamerGate movement, now infamous for the harassment and threats against Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, also “targeted journalists” critical of the GamerGate cause, including Leigh Alexander of Boing Boing.
Things that caught our eye
Ars Technica reports that the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against Arizona’s current anti-revenge porn law on behalf of several bookstores, the American Association of Publishers and the National Press Photographers association, claiming that the law is unconstitutional. They provide a list of sample “actions” that could be criminalized under the new law, to highlight the broad way the law is written, including,
“A college professor in Arizona, giving a lecture on the history of the Vietnam War, projects on a screen the iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, “Napalm Girl,” which shows a girl, unclothed, running in horror from her village.”
or
“A librarian in Arizona includes, in the library’s collection, the book Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints (Guggenheim Museum Publications 2004), which contains nude images.”
They also cite Michael Bamberger, one of the lead attorneys on the case, to highlight potential First Amendment issues with Arizona’s law:
“This is a supposed revenge-porn statute that does not require revenge”
Our own Stefan Kulk, has also offered a discussion on the role of copyright in the case of the celebrity nude photo hack.
Blog
The first celebrity photo hack has already received a great deal of attention, and the second hack has gotten only slightly less. Much has already been thoughtfully written about the first hack, the celebrity women exposed by the hack (forbes), and the legal, security, and privacy implications (Apple states no iCloud breach). Stefan might be poised to speak with the most authority about the legal defense of copyright, and I urge anyone curious about current research into Revenge Porn and copyright in the United States to check out the work of Levendowski on this topic (see here).
More…
Things that caught our eye
Zeynep Tufekci’s recent post breaks down Twitter’s plan to “tweak” the chronological ordering of posts that the micro-blogging platform had always previously employed. Tufekci uses the recent examples of Ferguson in the United States and the ALS ice bucket challenge to highlight the issues that can arise from a curated system, like the one Facebook currently employs.
“I also recently wrote about how #Ferguson surfaced on Twitter while it remained buried, at least for me, in curated Facebook—as many others noted, Facebook was awash with the Ice Bucket Challenge instead, which invites likes and provides videos and tagging of others; just the things an algorithm would value. This isn’t a judgement of the value of the ALS challenge but a clear example of how algorithms work—and don’t work.”
Tufekci writes that while the reverse chronology may not always be perfect, that it still allows for the “human judgement of the flock” to decide what information is the most deserving of attention.
algorithm, Twitter