May 5, 2023

Friday, May 5, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Kamala is always busy.

AI is on many people’s minds.

Biden, Harris meet with CEOs about AI risks.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris met on Thursday with the heads of Google, Microsoft and two other companies developing artificial intelligence as the Biden administration rolls out initiatives meant to ensure the rapidly evolving technology improves lives without putting people’s rights and safety at risk.

President Joe Biden briefly dropped by the meeting in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, saying he hoped the group could “educate us” on what is most needed to protect and advance society.

“What you’re doing has enormous potential and enormous danger,” Biden told the CEOs, according to a video posted to his Twitter account.

The popularity of AI chatbot ChatGPT — even Biden has given it a try, White House officials said Thursday — has sparked a surge of commercial investment in AI tools that can write convincingly human-like text and churn out new images, music and computer code.

But the ease with which it can mimic humans has propelled governments around the world to consider how it could take away jobs, trick people and spread disinformation.

The Democratic administration announced an investment of $140 million to establish seven new AI research institutes.

In addition, the White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to issue guidance in the next few months on how federal agencies can use AI tools. There is also an independent commitment by top AI developers to participate in a public evaluation of their systems in August at the Las Vegas hacker convention DEF CON.

But the White House also needs to take stronger action as AI systems built by these companies are getting integrated into thousands of consumer applications, said Adam Conner of the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.

“We’re at a moment that in the next couple of months will really determine whether or not we lead on this or cede leadership to other parts of the world, as we have in other tech regulatory spaces like privacy or regulating large online platforms,” Conner said.

The meeting was pitched as a way for Harris and administration officials to discuss the risks in current AI development with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the heads of two influential startups: Google-backed Anthropic and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Harris said in a statement after the closed-door meeting that she told the executives that “the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products.”

ChatGPT has led a flurry of new “generative AI” tools adding to ethical and societal concerns about automated systems trained on vast pools of data.

Some of the companies, including OpenAI, have been secretive about the data their AI systems have been trained upon. That’s made it harder to understand why a chatbot is producing biased or false answers to requests or to address concerns about whether it’s stealing from copyrighted works.

Companies worried about being liable for something in their training data might also not have incentives to rigorously track it in a way that would be useful “in terms of some of the concerns around consent and privacy and licensing,” said Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face.

“From what I know of tech culture, that just isn’t done,” she said.

Some have called for disclosure laws to force AI providers to open their systems to more third-party scrutiny. But with AI systems being built atop previous models, it won’t be easy to provide greater transparency after the fact.

“It’s really going to be up to the governments to decide whether this means that you have to trash all the work you’ve done or not,” Mitchell said. “Of course, I kind of imagine that at least in the U.S., the decisions will lean towards the corporations and be supportive of the fact that it’s already been done. It would have such massive ramifications if all these companies had to essentially trash all of this work and start over.”

While the White House on Thursday signaled a collaborative approach with the industry, companies that build or use AI are also facing heightened scrutiny from U.S. agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws.

The companies also face potentially tighter rules in the European Union, where negotiators are putting finishing touches on AI regulations that could vault the 27-nation bloc to the forefront of the global push to set standards for the technology.

When the EU first drew up its proposal for AI rules in 2021, the focus was on reining in high-risk applications that threaten people’s safety or rights such as live facial scanning or government social scoring systems, which judge people based on their behavior. Chatbots were barely mentioned.

But in a reflection of how fast AI technology has developed, negotiators in Brussels have been scrambling to update their proposals to take into account general purpose AI systems such as those built by OpenAI. Provisions added to the bill would require so-called foundation AI models to disclose copyright material used to train the systems, according to a recent partial draft of the legislation obtained by The Associated Press.

A European Parliament committee is due to vote next week on the bill, but it could be years before the AI Act takes effect.

Elsewhere in Europe, Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT over a breach of stringent European privacy rules, and Britain’s competition watchdog said Thursday it’s opening a review of the AI market.

In the U.S., putting AI systems up for public inspection at the DEF CON hacker conference could be a novel way to test risks, though not likely as thorough as a prolonged audit, said Heather Frase, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Along with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, companies that the White House says have agreed to participate include Hugging Face, chipmaker Nvidia and Stability AI, known for its image-generator Stable Diffusion.

“This would be a way for very skilled and creative people to do it in one kind of big burst,” Frase said. (Associated Press).

Touch 👇 to hear the President addressing AI leaders.

Suzanne Duke, who heads global public policy at LinkedIn, said during a World Economic Forum conference in Geneva on Wednesday -

“Currently, women hold less than 30% of all global AI roles, she said. “It is really, really important that we are creating opportunities for women to access what will be the jobs of tomorrow.”   (Source. Bloomberg).

One more thing. Last week, in an article on Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, we read these words -

“Gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.”

We can count on this administration always being on top of things.

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More on Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow.

A Summary.

The Expose.

Clarence Thomas Raised Him. Harlan Crow Paid His Tuition.

Crow paid for private school for a relative Thomas said he was raising “as a son.” “This is way outside the norm,” said a former White House ethics lawyer.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.

Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.(ProPublica).

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4 Proud Boys have been found guilty of sedition.

Four Proud Boys Convicted of Sedition in Key Jan. 6 Case.

Four members of the Proud Boys, including their former leader Enrique Tarrio, were convicted on Thursday of seditious conspiracy for plotting to keep President Donald J. Trump in power after his election defeat by leading a violent mob in attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The fifth defendant in the case, Dominic Pezzola, was found not guilty on the sedition charges, although he was convicted of other serious felonies.

The verdicts, coming after seven days of deliberations in Federal District Court in Washington, were a major blow against one of the country’s most notorious far-right groups and another milestone in the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack.

The trial was the last of three sedition cases that federal prosecutors had brought against key figures in the Capitol attack.

The sedition charge, which is rarely used and harks back to the Union’s efforts to protect the federal government against secessionist rebels during the Civil War, was also used in two separate trials against nine members of another far-right group, the Oath Keepers militia. Six of those defendants — including Stewart Rhodes, the organization’s founder and leader — were convicted of sedition; each of the others was found guilty of different serious felonies.

In a brief statement on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland noted that prosecutors had now secured sedition convictions against leaders of both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and promised to keep the Jan. 6 investigation moving forward.

“Today’s verdicts make clear that the Justice Department will do everything in its power to defend the American people and American democracy,” he said, adding: “Our work will continue.”

Mr. Trump loomed large over the proceeding. In closing arguments, the prosecution placed the former president — a figure the Proud Boys revered since his first days in the White House — at the heart of their story.

They told the jury that the defendants and others in the group refused to accept Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory and that, acting as “Donald Trump’s army,” they organized and ultimately fought “to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it.”

A prime example of the Proud Boys’ ties to Mr. Trump came in December 2020, when he posted a message on Twitter calling for a “wild” protest to be held in Washington on Jan. 6. Hearing the post as a call to action, Mr. Tarrio and his lieutenants organized a group of so-called “real men” — referred to as the Ministry of Self-Defense — to be on the ground in Washington that day. (New York Times).

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During the 1st Presidential Debate in 2020, as you may recall, Trump asked the Proud Boys to “Stand back and Stand by.” Watch it again. 👇

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The E. Jean Carroll case.

So much is happening in the federal trial in Manhattan, in which the writer and publicist, E. Jean Carroll is accusing Trump of rape.

Among other odd defenses Trump has made in the E. Jean Carroll case has been his declaration that E. Jean isn’t his “type.”

Rape, of course, isn’t about a man finding a woman to to be his “type.” Rape is about power and a rapist’s belief that he has the right to impose himself sexually wherever and whenever he chooses.

That said, in this article 👇 is an account of a video shown today in court of Trump confusing E. Jean Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples in a photo. Type or no type.

The video was made during during Trump’s October deposition in connection with this trial.

Video of Trump confusing E. Jean Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples shown during lawsuit trial.

E. Jean Carroll is on the left.

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Jurors in the trial stemming from writer E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against former President Donald Trump watched video Thursday of the moment Trump confused Carroll for his ex-wife, Marla Maples.

During the October deposition, Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan showed Trump a late-1980s photo of him, his then-wife Ivana, Carroll and her ex-husband John Johnson. Referring to Carroll, Trump said, "It's Marla," referring to his second wife,  Marla Maples.

"That's Marla, yeah. That's my wife," he said, before being corrected, and told it was Carroll. The writer sued Trump for defamation and battery after he said she "made up" allegations that he raped in her a New York City department store in the mid-1990s. Trump has adamantly denied the allegations and claimed Carroll "is not my type."

Jurors in the federal civil trial watched deposition video Thursday in which he reiterated that claim about Carroll's appearance. 

When Trump was told that Carroll was the person he believed was Maples — to whom he was married for six years, and who is the mother of one of Trump's daughters — he replied that the photo was "very blurry." (CBSnews).

One more thing. A social media and marketing expert hired by Carroll told jurors on Thursday that the cost to repair the reputational damage of Trump's statements about her could range from $368,000 to $2.8 million. Carroll is seeking unspecified damages.

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More on Republican Donors.

The GOP megadonors with buyer's remorse.

It turns out Megadonors like Peter Thiel and Ken Griffin are not “Masters of the Universe.” Instead, they don’t seem very bright, and they are clearly not moral.

Peter Thiel is (allegedly) having second thoughts.

The billionaire, right-wing megadonor reportedly has decided that he’s done bankrolling political candidates because Republicans are too focused on fighting cultural battles over abortion and transgender rights.

If true, he’s not alone. Billionaire GOP donor Thomas Peterffy similarly told the Financial Times in April that he had qualms about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ relentless crusade against abortion, drag queens and “woke” books. “I have put myself on hold,” he said. “Myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.” (A few days later, Peterffy wired $1 million to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s political action committee.)

The trickle of discontent threatens to become a deluge. Other well-heeled GOP donors, including Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin, are also reportedly rethinking their 2024 contribution plans. Andy Sabin, chairman of Sabin Metal Corp., expressed similar reservations, telling Reuters, which also reported Thiel's alleged decision to stop funding Republican campaigns, citing interviews with his associates, that “if it wasn’t for abortion and the book-banning, there would be no question I would support [DeSantis].”

It’s too soon to know whether this marks a widespread shift among billionaire funders, or whether it will even make any difference. Despite the qualms of the donors, Republican candidates continue to race to the right on culture issues, and the GOP donor class has a long history of getting back in line.

But all of this, if true, does raise a nagging question for Thiel and company: “What did you expect?”

For years, these donors funded candidates who rushed to embrace every meme and narrative of the culture war: from transgender bathroom etiquette and pronouns to variously nebulous and nonsensical attacks on “wokeness.” They backed candidates who publicly pledged to outlaw abortion, and supported Trumpists and Trump-like candidates who had played on racial distrust and gender anxieties.

For years, they nursed baby alligators and are now surprised to find out those baby reptiles have grown up — and are on the loose.

And Peter Thiel is apparently shocked, shocked, that those many-toothed monsters may be coming for him. [Did we mention Thiel is gay? It will come up again.]

This would be the same Peter Thiel who bankrolled Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, whose political posts in a CrossFit chat room “lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and pushed an isolationism that extended beyond even Mr. Trump’s,” New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman wrote.

During his failed Senate bid, Masters appeared to embrace the racist “replacement theory” and suggested that America’s gun violence problem boiled down to “Black people, frankly.” Masters suggested that all of the Army’s “woke” generals should be fired and replaced with “the most conservative colonels.”

When an interviewer asked the Thiel-funded Masters to pick a “subversive thinker” that people should know more about, he picked the “Unabomber.” “I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Masters responded. “How about, like, Theodore Kaczynski?”

The AP reports that Masters “was careful to point out he doesn’t condone the bombings that killed three people and injured dozens between 1978 and 1995 and terrorized the nation until Kaczynski’s arrest in 1996.” But while the Arizona Republican “said he doesn’t endorse all of Kaczynski’s views,” he thinks Kaczynski “had a lot to say about the political left, about how they all have inferiority complexes and fundamentally hate anything like goodness, truth, beauty, justice.”

Masters also pandered to the cultural right by opposing gay marriage — despite the fact that he attended Thiel’s same-sex wedding.

Thiel contributed around $20 million to Masters’ political action committee. In November, he lost to Democrat Mark Kelly.

Thiel also backed Ohio’s J.D. Vance, who was elected to the Senate last year after Thiel spent at least $10 million boosting Vance’s candidacy. As my Bulwark colleague Tim Miller wrote after the election, Vance transformed himself into the perfect MAGA troll.

Vance accepted the endorsement of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., even defending her appearance at a white nationalist conference. “She is my friend, and she did nothing wrong,” Vance said after she appeared at an event organized by Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

Thiel’s record is clearly mixed. In Ohio, the right-wing billionaire essentially bought Vance a Senate seat; in Arizona, his candidate crashed and burned. But after donating $35 million to candidates in 2022, Thiel may have decided to sit out next year because the GOP has become too extreme and too consumed by the culture war.

That would be the culture war that he helped launch, and the extremism he so richly funded. (Charlie Sykes MSNBC).

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Some news about the Texas - Mexican Border.

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Touch 👇 to watch the crowd assembling in Missoula, Montana to support Transgender Representative Zooey Zephyr who was expelled from the Montana legislature by the GOP.

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Yesterday I wrote - Poverty causes fear - for the poor, but also for the middle class, afraid of homeless people, afraid of poor people, afraid their own lives may change.

The Republican solution is scare tactics.

The Democratic solution must be - End Poverty, End Homelessness.

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A man died on Monday on a New York subway. He died because people were afraid.

Making People Uncomfortable Can Now Get You Killed by Roxane Gay.

Increasingly, it is not safe to be in public, to be human, to be fallible. I’m not quoting breathless journalism about rising crime or conservative talking points about America falling into ruin. The ruin I’m thinking of isn’t in San Francisco or Chicago or at the southern border. The ruin is woven into the fabric of America. It’s seeping into all of us. All across the country, supposedly good, upstanding citizens are often fatally enforcing ever-changing, arbitrary and personal norms for how we conduct ourselves.

On Monday, Jordan Neely, a Michael Jackson impersonator experiencing homelessness, was yelling and, according to some subway riders, acting aggressively on an F train in New York City. “I don’t have food, I don’t have a drink, I’m fed up,” Mr. Neely cried out. “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.”

Was he making people uncomfortable? I’m sure he was. But his were the words of a man in pain. He did not physically harm anyone. And the consequence for causing discomfort isn’t death unless, of course, it is.

A former Marine held Mr. Neely in a chokehold for several minutes, killing the man. News reports keep saying Mr. Neely died, which is a passive thing. We die of old age. We die in a car accident. We die from disease. When someone holds us in a chokehold for several minutes, something far worse has occurred.

A man actively brought about Mr. Neely’s death. No one appears to have intervened during those minutes to help Mr. Neely, though two men apparently tried to help the former Marine. Did anyone ask the former Marine to release Mr. Neely from his chokehold?

The people in that subway car prioritized their own discomfort and anxiety over Mr. Neely’s distress.

All of the people in that subway car on Monday will have to live with their apparent inaction and indifference. Now that it’s too late, there are haunting, heartbreaking images of Mr. Neely, helpless and pinned, still being choked. How does something like this happen? How does this senseless, avoidable violence happen? Truly, how? We all need to ask ourselves that question until we come up with an acceptable answer. (New York Times).

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Will RSV now become a disease of the past?

An RSV vaccine has been approved by the FDA. It’s a huge deal.

A rendering of a virus in the paramyxoviridae family, of which respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a member.
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The FDA approves a breakthrough vaccine 50 years in the making.

On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first vaccine that protects against respiratory syncytial virus, otherwise known as RSV.

This is a big moment in the fight against a major scourge. Researchers have been working to create an RSV vaccine for more than half a century. And it’s not an exaggeration to say RSV vaccines could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year on a global scale.

RSV generally causes cold symptoms, but can also lead to severe lung inflammation or infection in very young and very old people. Each year, it causes up to 160,000 hospitalizations and 10,000 deaths among older Americans, and as many as 55,000 adult deaths globally. People with heart and lung disease and weakened immune systems are at the highest risk for severe RSV disease.

RSV season usually starts in the autumn and is worst in the winter. The vaccine, known as Arexvy, was approved for adults 60 and over, will likely be recommended by the CDC in June and available in time for people to receive it this fall, according to reporting in the New York Times.

Young babies, especially newborns born prematurely, are also at high risk for bad disease due to RSV: Annually, the virus causes up to 80,000 hospitalizations and 300 deaths in American children under 5, and leads to 2 million outpatient visits. The virus also leads to an estimated 120,000 infant deaths worldwide each year.

Right now, this news does not impact pediatric populations. But there’s hope on the horizon: Several vaccines that would protect babies and children — and a number of other adult vaccines — are currently either under FDA review or at earlier stages of development.

RSV was a major contributor to the “tripledemic“ that flooded hospitals last winter. As these vaccines come to market, they could dramatically change the face of cold and flu season for the better. (Vox).

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