Category «AI»

Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading

Pluralistic: “Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon’s cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing. It’s easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery …

Subjects: AI, E-Commerce, Economy, Legal Research, Privacy

Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’

Wired [unpaywalled] “Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI…In the days and weeks that followed, DOGE hit one part of the federal government after another. The Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, …

Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, Climate Change, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Defense, E-Government, E-Records, Environmental Law, Food and Nutrition, Government Documents, Legal Research

AI search engines fail accuracy test, study finds 60% error rate

TechSpot: “In context: It is a foregone conclusion that AI models can lack accuracy. Hallucinations and doubling down on wrong information have been an ongoing struggle for developers. Usage varies so much in individual use cases that it’s hard to nail down quantifiable percentages related to AI accuracy. A research team claims it now has …

Subjects: AI, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

Spreading AI-generated content could lead to expensive fines

PopSci: “AI-generated “deepfake” materials are flooding the internet, sometimes with dangerous results. In just the last year, AI has been used to make deceiving voice clones of a former US president and spread fake, politically-charged images depicting children in natural disasters. Nonconsensual, AI-generated sexual images and videos, meanwhile, are leaving a trail of trauma impacting …

Subjects: AI, Government Documents, Internet, Legal Research, Legislation, Privacy

How Government Data Would Give an AI Company Extraordinary Power

Gizmodo: “The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has secured unprecedented access to at least seven sensitive federal databases, including those of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration. This access has sparked fears about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and privacy violations. Another concern has received far less attention: the potential use of the data to …

Subjects: AI, E-Government, E-Records, Economy, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

DOGE Has Deployed Its GSAi Custom Chatbot for 1,500 Federal Workers

Wired – no paywall – “Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, WIRED has confirmed. The move to automate tasks previously done by humans comes as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce. GSAi is meant to support …

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Government, E-Records, Knowledge Management, Privacy

Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues

TechCrunch: “Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing — where …

Subjects: AI, Economy, Financial System, Legal Research, Privacy, Search Engines

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 8, 2025

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 8, 2025. Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and …

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Legal Research, Privacy

We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News.

Columbia Journalism Review: “AI search tools are rapidly gaining in popularity, with nearly one in four Americans now saying they have used AI in place of traditional search engines. These tools derive their value from crawling the internet for up-to-date, relevant information—content that is often produced by news publishers.  Yet a troubling imbalance has emerged: …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines