News That Caught Our Eye #25: August 21, 2024

“The Knight First Amendment Institute invites submissions for its spring 2025 symposium, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms.’ The symposium will take place in two parts: a private work-in-progress workshop on November 18-19, 2024, and a public event aimed at stakeholders across government, industry, and civil society in mid-April 2025, held at Columbia University.” Click here to learn more about the themes of the symposium and how to submit an abstract.

“The National Association of State Technology Directors on Tuesday published a report showing that generative artificial intelligence and other types of AI are exciting the imaginations of many state technology officials, though many others remain skeptical. The report, which collects survey responses from technology officials in 42 states, reveals that most are developing many new AI policies and organizing their information technology departments in preparation of using new AI software in their agencies’ operations. The survey, distributed last May, provides a snapshot of the attitudes and governance strategies found in state governments nearly two years after ChatGPT’s public release.”

“According to a recent survey which stated that more than three-quarters (77%) of survey respondents said they believe AI will have a high or transformational impact on their work over the next five years. Thomson Reuters 2nd annual Future of Professionals Report shows that among the thousands of professionals surveyed, the rise of AI is clearly the dominant issue that they see propelling change in their respective professions…Those government professionals surveyed — among legal, law enforcement, and risk management roles within government agencies or government functions within corporations — shared that while, like their peers in other professions, they do have a perception of AI having a greater impact on their work over the next five years, their perspectives on AI and how it’s used within their profession are changing as well.”

“Just a few days after OpenAI’s multimodal AI model won a FedRAMP High Authorization as a service within Microsoft’s Azure Government cloud, the generative AI company says that it’s partnered to offer ChatGPT Enterprise to its first federal agency customer: the U.S. Agency for International Development. Anna Makanju, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, told FedScoop that USAID plans to use the technology to help reduce administrative burden and ‘make it easier for new and local organizations” to partner with the agency.’”

“The Pentagon is one step closer to building autonomous mechanics that can find and fix vulnerabilities in the world’s digital underbelly — and all it took was a few million dollars and a contest with some of the best and brightest at hacker summer camp. At this weekend’s DEF CON conference, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency convened 90 teams and asked them to build autonomous agents to probe open-source code bases, find vulnerabilities and automatically fix them. Building technology capable of doing so represents a white whale of AI development: a highly difficult-to-achieve technological breakthrough that could deliver massive gains in cybersecurity. Whether the participants of the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge will be able to build that tool remains unclear, but this weekend’s competition delivered positive signs that recent innovations in AI might enable such a breakthrough.”

State Lawmakers Contemplate AI Ahead of November Elections – Government Technology, by Kevin Hardy, August 19, 2024

“While some experts and lawmakers celebrated the promise of AI to advance services in health care and education, others lamented its potential to disrupt the democratic process with just months to go before November’s elections. And lawmakers compared the many types of legislation they’re proposing to tackle the issue. This presidential election cycle is the first since generative AI — a form of artificial intelligence that can create new images, audio and video — became widely available. That’s raised alarms over deepfakes, remarkably convincing but fake videos or images that can portray anyone, including candidates, in situations that didn’t occur or saying things they didn’t.”

“Former President Donald Trump posted what appeared to be a series of AI-generated images over the weekend to drum up support for his presidential candidacy, including a false endorsement from pop star Taylor Swift. The posts show how Trump might wield generative AI in a way that confounds attempts to police AI-created election disinformation, thanks in part to long-standing legal precedent allowing candidates to lie in political ads. They arrive on the heels of Trump falsely accusing his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, of using AI to generate a rally crowd. The images Trump posted included one that appears to resemble Harris from the back as she addresses a crowd in Chicago, the site of the Democratic National Convention this week, with a communist hammer and sickle dominating the background.”

“OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts linked to an Iranian influence operation that was generating content about the U.S. presidential election, according to a blog post on Friday. The company says the operation created AI-generated articles and social media posts, though it doesn’t seem that it reached much of an audience. This is not the first time OpenAI has banned accounts linked to state-affiliated actors using ChatGPT maliciously. In May the company disrupted five campaigns using ChatGPT to manipulate public opinion. These episodes are reminiscent of state actors using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to attempt to influence previous election cycles. Now similar groups (or perhaps the same ones) are using generative AI to flood social channels with misinformation. Similar to social media companies, OpenAI seems to be adopting a whack-a-mole approach, banning accounts associated with these efforts as they come up.”

“With a Labour government in power in the U.K. for the first time in 14 years, Blair’s influence is growing. A tight knot of Blairite ministers is carrying forward his vision for the power of AI to transform government and public services. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) event featured high-profile appearances from Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Cabinet Office fixer Pat McFadden, invigorated from the recent election that saw Labour win a landslide victory…The plans have tech firms — some of whom have partnerships with Blair’s institute — swarming, lured by the tantalizing prospect of millions of pounds of public contracts. But while most agree that AI holds promise for the public sector, some warn against “snake oil” salesmen and caution about embedding the sometimes unreliable and opaque tech into the heart of government.”