This week, we highlight a few ways in which the culture wars are manifesting through technology, to include Musk's 'anti-woke' LLM, cybersecurity concerns about Speaker Mike Johnson's porn-monitoring software and BigTech's relationship with state surveillance.
What Does It Mean That Elon Musk’s New AI Chatbot Is ‘Anti-Woke’? | New York Magazine
The rollout of xAI's new 'anti-woke' LLM illustrates how the culture wars are playing out in technology. As New York magazine writes, "For Musk, the people at OpenAI who are deciding what subjects ChatGPT should steer users away from are akin to Twitter’s old Trust and Safety teams, which Musk has mostly gutted: people who hide content, be they LLM outputs or tweets, in service of an ideological position that, whatever else it may be, is not Elon Musk’s."
Various apps and design elements, from dieting apps to features that limit screen time, offer technology-enabled accountability. House Speaker Mike Johnson's use of a porn-monitoring software, however, has attracted cybersecurity and privacy concerns. In other use cases, such software also calls into question whether coerced use might constitute stalkerware.
Silicon Valley is piling into the business of snooping | The Economist
Although "supporting state surveillance sits awkwardly with the libertarian values espoused by many American tech luminaries," the fact remains that technology enabled surveillance (drones, facial recognition, crime forecasting AI) is an increasingly lucrative field. Relatedly, we recommend MIT Tech Review's piece from last year that highlights a campaign by activists in Marseille to resist digital government surveillance.
Artificial Intelligence and Your Voice | Tech Policy Press
Much attention has been paid to the built in bias of facial recognition tools, but this podcast from Tech Policy Press dives into bias and ethics concerns present in voice biometrics. Looking towards a future where all internet connected devices have an embedded microphone, this field of study also raises significant privacy concerns.
AI Search Is Turning Into the Problem Everyone Worried About | The Atlantic
Worrying trend for how AI hallucinations are feeding into – and being elevated in – search engine results. In a world where we have come to treat Google as an online encyclopedia, we find ourselves considering a possible future in which "false information confidently [is] presented as fact, without any indication that it could be totally wrong."
Exclusive: Elon Musk's X Restructuring Curtails Disinformation Research, Spurs Legal Fears | Reuters
X's newly restrictive policies are measurably impairing research into disinformation, online child safety and hate speech. A study by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research documented "30 canceled projects, 47 stalled projects and 27 where researchers changed platforms" amidst changes in the site's policies, most notably the decision to shut down free academic API access.