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A bill that could ban TikTok is now all but certain to become law. The Senate approved a measure that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban, in a vote of 79 - 18. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, will next head to President Joe Biden, who has said he would sign the bill into law. While its far from the first effort to force a ban or divestment of the social media app, the bill managed to draw far more support than previous attempts. The bill was introduced in March and sailed through the House of Representatives with overwhelming bipartisan agreement. A slightly revised version was approved as part of a package of foreign aid legislation on Saturday. Under the updated terms, TikTok would have up to 12 months to divest from parent company ByteDance or face a ban in US app stores and web hosting services. The company has called the bill unconstitutional and indicated it would mount a legal challenge to such a law, which could further delay an eventual sale or ban. The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. TikTok has long been viewed with suspicion by lawmakers and the intelligence community. Ahead of votes in the House and Senate, members of Congress were briefed by intelligence officials on the alleged national security threat posed by the app. The exact nature of those concerns is still unclear, though some members of Congress have asked for details from the briefings to be declassified. At the same time, some lawmakers have expressed skepticism, saying that the alleged threat posed by TikTok is largely hypothetical. Free speech and digital rights groups also oppose the bill, noting that comprehensive privacy legislation would be a more effective way of protecting Americans personal data. TikTok CEO Shou Chew has made a similar argument, telling Congress last year that a forced sale wouldnt resolve data concerns about the app. But TikToks recent efforts to muster opposition to the bill may have backfired. Lawmakers rebuked the company for sending in-app notifications to users about the bill after the alerts resulted in a flood of calls to Congressional offices. And the app may have drawn even more suspicion when Politico reported last week that Chinese diplomats were lobbying Congressional staffers to oppose the bill. Officials in China have condemned the measure. A Chinese law, passed in 2020, could prevent ByteDance from including TikToks recommendation algorithm in a sale of the app.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/senate-passes-bill-that-could-ban-tiktok-014124533.html?src=rss
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Spotted by: Liesbeth den Toom
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Leading artificial intelligence companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and others have jointly pledged to prevent their AI tools from being used to exploit children and generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The initiative was led by child-safety group Thorn and All Tech Is Human, a non-profit focused on responsible tech. The pledges from AI companies, Thorn said, set a groundbreaking precedent for the industry and represent a significant leap in efforts to defend children from sexual abuse as a feature with generative AI unfolds. The goal of the initiative is to prevent the creation of sexually explicit material involving children and take it off social media platforms and search engines. More than 104 million files of suspected child sexual abuse material were reported in the US in 2023 alone, Thorn says. In the absence of collective action, generative AI is poised to make this problem worse and overwhelm law enforcement agencies that are already struggling to identify genuine victims. On Tuesday, Thorn and All Tech Is Human released a new paper titled Safety by Design for Generative AI: Preventing Child Sexual Abuse that outlines strategies and lays out recommendations for companies that build AI tools, search engines, social media platforms, hosting companies and developers to take steps to prevent generative AI from being used to harm children. One of the recommendations, for instance, asks companies to choose data sets used to train AI models carefully and avoid ones only only containing instances of CSAM but also adult sexual content altogether because of generative AIs propensity to combine the two concepts. Thorn is also asking social media platforms and search engines to remove links to websites and apps that let people nudity images of children, thus creating new AI-generated child sexual abuse material online. A flood of AI-generated CSAM, according to the paper, will make identifying genuine victims of child sexual abuse more difficult by increasing the haystack problem an reference to the amount of content that law enforcement agencies must current sift through. This project was intended to make abundantly clear that you dont need to throw up your hands, Thorns vice president of data science Rebecca Portnoff told the Wall Street Journal. We want to be able to change the course of this technology to where the existing harms of this technology get cut off at the knees. Some companies, Portnoff said, had already agreed to separate images, video and audio that involved children from data sets containing adult content to prevent their models from combining the two. Others also add watermarks to identify AI-generated content, but the method isnt foolproof watermarks and metadata can be easily removed.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-worlds-leading-ai-companies-pledge-to-protect-the-safety-of-children-online-213558797.html?src=rss
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