Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately — including for hiring, training and picking suppliers, according to a new employee memo obtained by Axios.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to sanction the International Criminal Court to protest its issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister over Israel's campaign in Gaza.
This paper examines ‘open’ artificial intelligence (AI). Claims about ‘open’ AI often lack precision, frequently eliding scrutiny of substantial industry concentration in large-scale AI development and deployment, and often incorrectly applying understandings of ‘open’ imported from free and open-source software to AI systems. At present, powerful actors are seeking to shape policy using claims that ‘open’ AI is either beneficial to innovation and democracy, on the one hand, or detrimental to safety, on the other. When policy is being shaped, definitions matter. To add clarity to this debate, we examine the basis for claims of openness in AI, and offer a material analysis of what AI is and what ‘openness’ in AI can and cannot provide: examining models, data, labour, frameworks, and computational power. We highlight three main affordances of ‘open’ AI, namely transparency, reusability, and extensibility, and we observe that maximally ‘open’ AI allows some forms of oversight and experimentation on top of existing models. However, we find that openness alone does not perturb the concentration of power in AI. Just as many traditional open-source software projects were co-opted in various ways by large technology companies, we show how rhetoric around ‘open’ AI is frequently wielded in ways that exacerbate rather than reduce concentration of power in the AI sector.
The 175-page report, “‘I Learned How to Say No’: Labor Abuses & Sexual Exploitation in Colombian Webcam Studios,” exposes working conditions in webcam studios in Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, and Palmira, where models record content that is broadcasted by adult platforms and streamed around the world. Webcamming is a global industry in which studies estimate that platforms keep between 50 and 65 percent of what viewers pay. People interviewed said that studios retain as much as 70 percent of what is paid out by the platform, reducing the pay of workers. Adult webcam platforms based in the United States and Europe should immediately address labor abuses and sexual exploitation in Colombian webcam studios.
A young Tibetan woman living in Northern India takes a trip back to her village in Tibet to visit family. For the last two years she has been working for Drewla, a Tibetan NGO that provides ways for Tibetans inside Tibet to connect with the diaspora online. The trip does not go as planned.
When she reaches the Nepalese-Tibetan border she is immediately taken into detention and held for two months. Chinese authorities interrogate her about her employment in Dharamsala. The young woman denies being involved in any political activities and insists she went to Dharamsala for studies. The authorities presented a stack of chat transcripts from conversations she has had online. They explained to her that they have been monitoring Drewla and knew about its activities. They eventually released the woman and allowed her to travel to her village with a message for her colleagues back in Dharamsala: “You are not welcome to return to Tibet”