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Fwd: MAPPATURA DELLE AREE SENZA SEGNALE | Compila subito la richiesta di segnalazioni delle aree e dei Comuni dove non si riesce a telefonare
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 23, 2023

July 23, 2023

-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: MAPPATURA DELLE AREE SENZA SEGNALE | Compila subito la richiesta di segnalazioni delle aree e dei Comuni dove non si riesce a telefonare Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2023 15:00:03 +0200 From: Uncem <uncem.nazionale(a)uncem.net> Reply-To: uncem.nazionale(a)uncem.net To: juancarlos.demartin(a)polito.it UNCEM - Unione Nazionale Comuni Comunità Enti Montani Se non riesci a visualizzare questo messaggio clicca qui <https://aml28.mailnewsletter.it//newsletter//tk/get.html?FCT=76650304368RX-…> MAPPATURA UNCEM DELLE AREE SENZA SEGNALE PER LA TELEFONIA MOBILE Compila subito la richiesta di segnalazioni delle aree, delle frazioni e dei Comuni dove non si riesce a telefonare, mandare un messaggio, navigare su internet con il proprio telefono. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSffSF7AfoeehyhuRU0CswBgofADsJHp4W-… <https://aml28.mailnewsletter.it///newsletter/tk/get.html?&ui=4973&cid=407&c…> <https://aml28.mailnewsletter.it///newsletter/tk/get.html?&ui=4973&cid=407&c…> /Cllcca sulla foto/ GRAZIE da Uncem! *Vai al link <https://aml28.mailnewsletter.it///newsletter/tk/get.html?newsid=3296&exid=3…> * *UNCEM - Unione Nazionale Comuni Comunità Enti Montani* Via Palestro, 30 - 00185 Roma - tel. +39 06 87390022 e-mail: *uncem.nazionale(a)uncem.net* <mailto:uncem.nazionale@uncem.net>

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RFC "Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations"
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 23, 2023

July 23, 2023

RFC 9446 *Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations** * Stream: Independent Submission RFC: 9446 Category: Informational Published: July 2023 ISSN: 2070-1721 Authors: S. Farrell Trinity College, Dublin F. Badii Digital Medusa B. Schneier Harvard University S. M. Bellovin Columbia University *Abstract** * This memo contains the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the United States National Security Agency (NSA) by Edward Snowden in 2013. There are four perspectives: that of someone who was involved with sifting through the information to responsibly inform the public, that of a security area director of the IETF, that of a human rights expert, and that of a computer science and affiliate law professor. The purpose of this memo is to provide some historical perspective, while at the same time offering a view as to what security and privacy challenges the technical community should consider. These essays do not represent a consensus view, but that of the individual authors. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9446.html

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Artificial Intelligence: A New Frontier for Surveillance Capitalism?
by Federico Guerrini July 23, 2023

July 23, 2023

"If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn’t know. It doesn’t take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but it’s silent about its own corporate parent’s misdeeds. When Alexa responds in this way, it’s obvious that it is putting its developer’s interests ahead of yours. Usually, though, it’s not so obvious whom an AI system is serving. To avoid being exploited by these systems, people will need to learn to approach AI skeptically. (...) As a security expert and data scientist, we believe that people who come to rely on these AIs will have to trust them implicitly to navigate daily life. That means they will need to be sure the AIs aren’t secretly working for someone else. Across the internet, devices and services that seem to work for you already secretly work against you. Smart TVs spy on you. Phone apps collect and sell your data. Many apps and websites manipulate you through dark patterns, design elements that deliberately mislead, coerce or deceive website visitors. This is surveillance capitalism, and AI is shaping up to be part of it." "Imagine asking your chatbot to plan your next vacation. Did it choose a particular airline or hotel chain or restaurant because it was the best for you or because its maker got a kickback from the businesses? As with paid results in Google search, newsfeed ads on Facebook and paid placements on Amazon queries, these paid influences are likely to get more surreptitious over time. If you’re asking your chatbot for political information, are the results skewed by the politics of the corporation that owns the chatbot? Or the candidate who paid it the most money? Or even the views of the demographic of the people whose data was used in training the model? Is your AI agent secretly a double agent? Right now, there is no way to know." https://theconversation.com/can-you-trust-ai-heres-why-you-shouldnt-209283 Ciao, Federico

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Prima discussione del Consiglio di Sicurezza ONU sull'AI
by Diego.Latella July 21, 2023

July 21, 2023

Buona sera, Non mi pare sia passata sulla lista la notizia in ogetto. In caso contrario mi scuso per il doppione. In ogni caso, il video della riunione e' disponibile al seguente link: Artificial intelligence: opportunities and risks for international peace and security - Security Council, 9381st meeting | UN Web TV [1] Buona serata Diego -- Dott. Diego Latella - Senior Researcher CNR/ISTI, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy (http:www.isti.cnr.it [2]) FM&&T Lab. (http://fmt.isti.cnr.it) CNR/GI-STS (http://gists.pi.cnr.it) https://www.isti.cnr.it/People/D.Latella - ph: +390506212982, fax: +390506212040 =================== The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than compulsion; if in the process we learn how to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember your humanity. -- Sir Joseph Rotblat I don't quite know whether it is especially computer science or its subdiscipline Artificial Intelligence that has such an enormous affection for euphemism. We speak so spectacularly and so readily of computer systems that understand, that see, decide, make judgments, and so on, without ourselves recognizing our own superficiality and immeasurable naivete with respect to these concepts. And, in the process of so speaking, we anesthetise our ability to evaluate the quality of our work and, what is more important, to identify and become conscious of its end use. […] One can't escape this state without asking, again and again: "What do I actually do? What is the final application and use of the products of my work?" and ultimately, "am I content or ashamed to have contributed to this use?" -- Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum ["Not without us", ACM SIGCAS 16(2-3) 2--7 - Aug. 1986] Links: ------ [1] https://media.un.org/en/asset/k1j/k1ji81po8p [2] http://www.isti.cnr.it

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Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads
by Alberto Cammozzo July 21, 2023

July 21, 2023

<https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/26/1075504/junk-websites-filled-wi…> More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites—and the problem is growing fast. People are using AI chatbots to fill junk websites with AI-generated text that attracts paying advertisers, according to a new report from the media research organization NewsGuard that was shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review. Over 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge. Ninety percent of the ads from major brands found on these AI-generated news sites were served by Google, though the company’s own policies prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages that include “spammy automatically generated content.” The practice threatens to hasten the arrival of a glitchy, spammy internet that is overrun by AI-generated content, as well as wasting massive amounts of ad money. Most companies that advertise online automatically bid on spots to run those ads through a practice called “programmatic advertising.” Algorithms place ads on various websites according to complex calculations that optimize the number of eyeballs an ad might attract from the company’s target audience. As a result, big brands end up paying for ad placements on websites that they may have never heard of before, with little to no human oversight. To take advantage, content farms have sprung up where low-paid humans churn out low-quality content to attract ad revenue. These types of websites already have a name: “made for advertising” sites. They use tactics such as clickbait, autoplay videos, and pop-up ads to squeeze as much money as possible out of advertisers. In a recent survey, the Association of National Advertisers found that 21% of ad impressions in their sample went to made-for-advertising sites. The group estimated that around $13 billion is wasted globally on these sites each year. Now, generative AI offers a new way to automate the content farm process and spin up more junk sites with less effort, resulting in what NewsGuard calls “unreliable artificial intelligence–generated news websites.” One site flagged by NewsGuard produced more than 1,200 articles a day. Some of these new sites are more sophisticated and convincing than others, with AI-generated photos and bios of fake authors. And the problem is growing rapidly. NewsGuard, which evaluates the quality of websites across the internet, says it’s discovering around 25 new AI-generated sites each week. It’s found 217 of them in 13 languages since it started tracking the phenomenon in April. NewsGuard has a clever way to identify these junk AI-written websites. Because many of them are also created without human oversight, they are often riddled with error messages typical of generative AI systems. For example, one site called CountyLocalNews.com had messages like “Sorry, I cannot fulfill this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles … As an AI language model, it is my responsibility to provide factual and trustworthy information.” NewsGuard’s AI looks for these snippets of text on the websites, and then a human analyst reviews them. Making money from junk “It appears that programmatic advertising is the main revenue source for these AI-generated websites,” says Lorenzo Arvanitis, an analyst at NewGuard who has been tracking AI-generated web content. “We have identified hundreds of Fortune 500 companies and well-known, prominent brands that are advertising on these sites and that are unwittingly supporting it.” “This is not normal. This is not healthy.” MIT Technology Review looked at the list of almost 400 individual ads from over 140 major brands that NewsGuard identified on the AI-generated sites that served programmatic ads, which included companies from many different industries including finance, retail, auto, health care, and e-commerce. The average cost of a programmatic ad was $1.21 per thousand impressions as of January 2023, and brands often don’t review all the automatic placements of their advertisements, even though they cost money. Google’s programmatic ad product, called Google Ads, is the largest exchange and made $168 billion in advertising revenue last year. The company has come under criticism for serving ads on content farms in the past, even though its own policies prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages with “spammy automatically generated content.” Around a quarter of the sites flagged by NewsGuard featured programmatic ads from major brands. Of the 393 ads from big brands found on AI-generated sites, 356 were served by Google. “We have strict policies that govern the type of content that can monetize on our platform,” Michael Aciman, a policy communications manager for Google, told MIT Technology Review in an email. “For example, we don’t allow ads to run alongside harmful content, spammy or low-value content, or content that’s been solely copied from other sites. When enforcing these policies, we focus on the quality of the content rather than how it was created, and we block or remove ads from serving if we detect violations.” Most ad exchanges and platforms already have policies against serving ads on content farms, yet they “do not appear to uniformly enforce these policies,” and “many of these ad exchanges continue to serve ads on [made-for-advertising] sites even if they appear to be in violation of … quality policies,” says Krzysztof Franaszek, founder of Adalytics, a digital forensics and ad verification company. Google said that the presence of AI-generated content on a page is not an inherent violation. “We also recognize that bad actors are always shifting their approach and may leverage technology, such as generative AI, to circumvent our policies and enforcement systems,” said Aciman. A new generation of misinformation sites NewsGuard says that most of the AI-generated sites are considered “low quality” but “do not spread misinformation.” But the economic dynamic of content farms already incentivizes the creation of clickbaity websites that are often riddled with junk and misinformation, and now that AIs can do the same thing on a bigger scale, it threatens to exacerbate the misinformation problem. For example, one AI-written site, MedicalOutline.com, had articles that spread harmful health misinformation with headlines like “Can lemon cure skin allergy?” “What are 5 natural remedies for ADHD?” and “How can you prevent cancer naturally?” According to NewsGuard, advertisements from nine major brands, including the bank Citigroup, the automaker Subaru, and the wellness company GNC, were placed on the site. Those ads were served via Google. Adalytics confirmed to MIT Technology Review that ads on Medical Outline appeared to be placed via Google as of June 24. We reached out to Medical Outline, Citigroup, Subaru, and GNC for comment over the weekend, but the brands have not yet replied. After MIT Technology Review flagged the ads on Medical Outline and other sites to Google, Aciman said Google had removed ads that were being served on many of the sites “due to pervasive policy violations.” The ads were still visible on Medical Outline as of June 25. “NewsGuard's findings shed light on the concerning relationship between Google, ad tech companies, and the emergence of a new generation of misinformation sites masquerading as news sites and content farms made possible by AI,” says Jack Brewster, the enterprise editor of NewsGuard. “The opaque nature of programmatic advertising has inadvertently turned major brands into unwitting supporters, unaware that their ad dollars indirectly fund these unreliable AI-generated sites." Related Story A high wire act looking down into their safety net. The nearest person has a inappropriate content flag in one hand. Catching bad content in the age of AI Why haven’t tech companies improved at content moderation? Franaszek says it’s still too early to tell how the AI-generated content will affect the programmatic advertising landscape. After all, in order for those sites to make money, they still need to attract humans to their content, and it’s currently not clear whether generative AI will make that easier. Some sites might draw in only a couple of thousand views each month, making just a few dollars. “The cost of content generation is likely less than 5% of the total cost of running a [made-for-advertising] site, and replacing low-cost foreign labor with an AI is unlikely to significantly change this situation,” says Franaszek. So far, there aren’t any easy solutions, especially given that advertising props up the entire economic model of the internet. “What is key to remember is that programmatic ads—and targeted ads more generally—are a fundamental enabler of the internet economy,” says Hodan Omaar, senior AI policy advisor at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC. “If policymakers banned the use of these types of ad services, consumers would face a radically different internet: more ads that are less relevant, lower-quality online content and services, and more paywalls,” Omaar says. “Policy shouldn’t be focused on getting rid of programmatic ads altogether, but rather on how to ensure there are more robust mechanisms in place to catch the spread of misinformation, whether it be direct or indirect.”

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Re: [nexa] nexa Digest, Vol 171, Issue 53
by Giuseppe Attardi July 21, 2023

July 21, 2023

> On 19 Jul 2023, at 06:51, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2023 12:05:12 +0200 > From: Fabio Alemagna <falemagn(a)gmail.com> > To: Guido Vetere <vetere.guido(a)gmail.com> > Cc: Daniela Tafani <daniela.tafani(a)unipi.it>, > "nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it" <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: Re: [nexa] AI and antitrust in 10 minutes > Message-ID: > <CACGmXuPNy4Y9uFBdL7O=QsCYtNYE3hP5gLbg-QzUZW=fPr8qKA(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > >> Il giorno mer 19 lug 2023 alle ore 10:44 Guido Vetere >> <vetere.guido(a)gmail.com> ha scritto: >> >> un piccolo commento a caldo dopo aver dato una scorsa a questo illuminante intervento >> noi diamo per scontato che i LLM non possano che essere ciò che oggi ci viene proposto dal dupolio Microsoft \ Google > > Non mi pare esista al momento un duopolio riguardo gli LLM: ne > esistono decine di completamente open source, prodotti un po' in tutto > il mondo. Dipende da cosa consideri Large. I veri LLM, quelli la cui dimensione consente l’apparire di emergent abilities, solo pochi si possono permettersi di costruirli. E le dimensiini dei LLM sono finora cresciute esponenzialmente. D’altra parte, non avrebbe senso che migliaia di ricercatori chiedessero di fermare lo sviluppo di LLM più potenti di GPT-4, se questa non fosse il percorso di sviluppo più promettente. I LM cosiddetti Open Source (ma non è di source che si parla, ma dei parametri del modello), sono circa un ordine di grandezza più piccoli di quelli più grandi. Questo si ripercuote sulle loro capacità. Non bisogna farsi illudere dalle dichiarazioni degli sviluppatori nel confronto con altri LLM. I confronti vengono fatti su task specifici, su cui quei modelli sono ottimizzati. Ma i LLM contengono una mole superiore di conoscenze, tali che possono essere utilizzati per altri task, solo col prompting, senza fare fine-tuning. E il fine-tuning di un modello da 60-80 miliardi di parametri richiede comunque un server con almeno 4 GPU (altrimenti non sta in memoria) e diversi giorni di calcolo. Il risultato è spesso inferiore a quello di un LLM. Lo so per esperienza diretta personale e di altri. Infine, non vorrei lasciare a quei pochi che se possono permettere, le scelte su come fare un LLM e dovermi limitare a quello che loro graziosamente, o pelosamente per conquistare quote di mercato, mettono a disposizione. Vorrei poter avere la libertà di esplorare anche nuove strade. Anche solo per fare, come dice Vetere, modelli per la mia lingua, o per un settore specifico (salute, energia), o per determinati punti di vista (politici, economici, sociali, personali). > Anche il Technology Innovation Institute dell'Arabia Saudita > ha rilasciato un LLM come Open Source: https://falconllm.tii.ae/ The model uses only 75 percent of GPT-3’s training compute, 40 percent of Chinchilla’s, and 80 percent of PaLM-62B’s Ossia, forse gli arabi hanno i soldi per pagarsi le risorse computazionali per costruirsi un loro LLM, ma difficile che ce li abbiano i ricercatori europei, quando i progetti europei su AI dispongono di un centinaio di milioni in tutto per dozzine di progetti triennali con dozzine di partner. Le risorse di calcolo per costruire GPT-3.5 sono stimate in 10^23 FLOPS per un costo di centinaia di milioni di $. Meta, per rilasciare i suoi modelli, ha costruito un Research Supercluster con 10.000 GPU Nvidia, che secondo Yann LeCun è già in overbooking. Musk, mentre chiede di fermare lo sviluppo di LLM, ha ordinato anche lui 10.000 GPU per X.AI. Le startup come Converse.AI e Anthropic AI, hanno raccolto finanziamenti da 1-3 miliardi$, principalmente per comprarsi le risorse di calcolo. Il massimo che abbiamo in Europa è Mistral, con 100 milioni di VC. — Beppe

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Authors call for AI companies to stop using their work without consent | Books | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo July 20, 2023

July 20, 2023

<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/20/authors-call-for-ai-companies…> Authors including Margaret Atwood, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Pullman have signed a petition calling for artificial intelligence companies to stop using writers’ work without consent or credit. The open letter, which has been set up by the Authors Guild, America’s largest professional organisation for writers, is addressed to the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, and IBM. It presents these generative AI leaders with three demands, asking that these companies: “Obtain permission for use of our copyrighted material”; “Compensate writers fairly for the past and ongoing use of our works”, and “Compensate writers fairly for the use of our works in AI output, whether or not the outputs are infringing under current law”. Maya Shanbhag Lang, president of the Authors Guild, said: “The output of AI will always be derivative in nature. AI regurgitates what it takes in, which is the work of human writers. It’s only fair that authors be compensated for having ‘fed’ AI and continuing to inform its evolution.” National book award-winning novelist Jonathan Franzen, My Sister’s Keeper author Jodi Picoult and nonfiction author and journalist Michael Pollan are among the letter’s nearly 8,000 signatories. “The Authors Guild is taking an important step to advance the rights of all Americans whose data and words and images are being exploited, for immense profit, without their consent”, said Franzen. “In other words, pretty much all Americans over the age of six.” The median writing-related income in 2022 for full-time writers in the US was just $23,330, according to the Authors Guild’s most recent income survey. “The advent of AI technology further exacerbates these challenges and will make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for writers – particularly those from underrepresented communities – to earn a living from the craft most spent years if not decades perfecting”, a statement from the Authors Guild read. “When writers have to give up their profession, it is a grave problem for all of us, not just the writers, because far fewer great books get written and published; and a free, democratic culture depends on a healthy, diverse ecosystem in which all views and voices are heard and ideas exchanged.” This petition is the latest in a series of steps taken by literary figures to combat the rising use of AI in the books sector. Earlier this month two North American authors, Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the organisation breached copyright law. OpenAI is the company behind the tool ChatGPT, a chatbot that is “trained” by copying large swathes of text and extracting information from it. The suit filed on behalf of Awad and Tremblay argued that “ChatGPT generates summaries of plaintiffs’ copyrighted works – something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on plaintiffs’ copyrighted works”. This line of argument could be difficult to prove, as ChatGPT may work “exactly the same” if it had not ingested the books themselves, Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex, told the Guardian at the time. This is because it may have been trained on non-copyrighted information such as internet users discussing the books. The UK’s leading industry body for writers, the Society of Authors (SoA) has backed both the legal action taken by Awad and Tremblay and this new petition by the Authors Guild. Nicola Solomon, chief executive of the SoA, said she and her colleagues “fully support” the open letter. “The principles of consent, credit and compensation are bedrocks of our intellectual property regime, and a critical part of every author’s ability to protect and make a living from their work.” But influencing AI developers is “only one part of the challenge here”, she added. “The race to build the next generation of systems is driven primarily by the profit motives of large corporations. It is opaque, unfettered and unregulated, while the ethical ramifications of AI systems are complex and crying out for scrutiny.” Solomon said the SoA is “working flat out on this - advising members and working closely with other creators’ unions (through the Creators’ Rights Alliance) and the British Copyright Council, as well as making sure we are part of conversations with industry, policy makers and technology companies to try to identify common ground and establish safeguards, regulation and compensation.” While the SoA does not currently have firm plans to publish its own open letter, it is something the team has discussed. At the moment, however, its focus is on continuing “to lobby in line with the recent report by the House of Lords, which urged government, in no uncertain terms, to protect IP and better fund and support the creative industries”, Solomon said. In June, the SoA published guidance for authors on how they can protect themselves and their work from being exploited by AI. In the same month the UK’s Publishers Association also announced it was setting up a taskforce to support the industry amid AI developments. This petition is not the first time the Authors Guild has taken tech companies to task. In 2005 the writers’ organisation filed a copyright infringement case against Google, claiming that the search engine’s scanning of millions of books “was a plain and brazen violation of copyright law”. In 2016, the long-running dispute came to an end when the US supreme court denied the Guild the right to appeal the ruling that Google’s scanning of books constituted “fair use”, and that “Google Books provide significant public benefits”.

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Artificial Intelligence, Persuasive Technology and Manipulation
by Stefano Faraoni July 20, 2023

July 20, 2023

Buongiorno a tutti, Leggo questa mailing list con estremo piacere da tempo, e oggi per la prima volta provo a contribuire. Il mio articolo "Persuasive Technology and computational manipulation: hypernudging out of mental self-determination" e' appena stato pubblicato da Frontiers on Artificial Intelligence, e spero possa farvi piacere leggerlo. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frai.2023.1216340/full Parla di manipolazione computazionale, dark patterns e hypernudge, e della necessita' di riconoscere un nuovo diritto fondamentale, il diritto alla sovranita' cognitiva o autodeterminazione mentale. Un saluto a tutti. Stefano *Stefano Faraoni* *Founder and DirectorAvvocato Patrocinante in CassazioneAdjunct Professor in Legal English, University of TurinPGR in AI Law, University of York* *Lumen Legis - Law Firm* INTERNAZIONALE | CONTRACT LAW | IT LAW | DIRITTO CIVILE | DIRITTO PENALE *w*: lumenlegis.com *@*: stefano.faraoni(a)lumenlegis.com **** Riservatezza/Confidentiality **** In ottemperanza al Regolamento Europeo 679/2016 (GDPR) in materia di protezione dei dati personali, le informazioni contenute in questo messaggio sono strettamente riservate ed esclusivamente indirizzate al destinatario indicato (oppure alla persona responsabile di rimetterlo al destinatario). Vogliate tener presente che qualsiasi uso, riproduzione o divulgazione della informativa in esso contenuta è vietata. Nel caso in cui lo aveste ricevuto per errore, vi preghiamo di accettare le nostre scuse e di distruggerlo, informandoci immediatamente tramite l’indirizzo e-mail stefano.faraoni(a)lumenlegis.com / According to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) concerning privacy, if you are not the addressee (or responsible for delivery of the message to such person) you are hereby notified that any disclosure, reproduction, distribution or other dissemination or use of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please accept our apology and destroy any copies and delete it from your computer system, then inform us immediately sending a message to stefano.faraoni(a)lumenlegis.com

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AI and antitrust in 10 minutes
by Daniela Tafani July 20, 2023

July 20, 2023

Daron Acemoglu Thank you, Cristina, for that wonderful introduction and to you and Tommaso for inviting me. […] As Cristina said, I'm going to talk about something that's partly inspired by my book. AI and antitrust in 10 minutes. So that's a tall order especially if I try to blend in ideas from the book, so let me jump into it. I'm going to do 10 question and answers in 10 minutes, but since that's a very short time I'll just give you the answers. I'll let your imagination do the job of the what the questions might have been to which. These are the answers. - Yes, generative AI has great potential, so I am completely convinced that this is a very interesting technology that can bring lots of goods and has capabilities so we can build on that. But I think let's move forward. - And yes, I believe that monopoly is everywhere in the tech sector. So here, perhaps I differ from many IO economists, and I subscribe to the duck test. If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. So if you have companies that have reached sizes that have never been in human history, and that dominate a particular line of business, they are monopolies. So we have to grapple with that. And that means all sorts of regulatory tools have to be considered, including antitrust. So this is absolutely on target. - And yes, in my view this is getting worse with foundation models. Because there is a likelihood that we may go towards a duopoly. With Microsoft Open AI and Google as the two key players, even though open source and many other competitors are going to try to get into foundation models, but the current business model of foundation models is very resource intensive. So that raises the possibility, does not in any way creates a certainty, but it raises the possibility. These two companies and their models are going to be the dominant ones on which many others will have to build, raising all of the issues of vertical product creation and all sorts of other questions that are going to be central for policymakers and economists to grapple with. - But no, I actually don't think monopoly power leading to high prices is the main problem that we're dealing with. You know, of course, that is a problem. But if the only issue was that because the foundation models are controlled by, you know, Google and Microsoft, they’re going to charge higher prices, and as a result, the apps that are developed on them are going to be more expensive, that would be, of course a pity and it's something we can do something about, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. So we get many new apps. They cost a little bit more. We don't get quite the consumer surplus. Woe is us, but not the end of the world. The problem is the direction of innovation. The problem is that the current market structure is selecting a particular direction of innovation. And that has much more sweeping consequences. Taking the set of products and technologies as given and pricing them above marginal cost and thus losing some of the welfare triangle is not the main issue. There’s the potential for doing much greater damage. No, this is not because of existential risk. In fact, like Cristina was implying, when all of these tech leaders are talking about existential risk I see it as either a blind spot or a ploy for making us not worry about the bigger risks. The bigger risks in my mind are in the labour market. Most of us earn our living in the labour market, so what happens to jobs is the most important issue. And the current direction of AI looks like it is going to follow some of the trends we have seen with digital technologies before. Failing to create the complementarities which human workers and skills, and instead going much toward much more towards automation, hence generating inequality, potential job losses, especially for workers without very specialised skills such as those with postgraduate degree. - And no, it's not just economics. There is a real danger here that the current direction of generative AI could again continue existing trends that we saw in social media degrade political conversations. Increase the amount of misinformation and disinformation, with a much more powerful tool. Create a particular type of ecosystem in online forums where people are drawn on the basis of emotion rather than engagement. And hence generally act towards the exploitation of people in their capacities and duties as democratic citizen. It is this twin: Inequality and Elimination of good jobs in the labour market, as well as erosion of democratic capacity that I think are most problematic. - No, I am not a Luddite. So I am not saying that this is in the nature of technology, nor that we should oppose technological change. The issue here is that we are not along the right path. What's great about technology in general and generative AI in particular, that it's a very highly malleable type of technological platform or what some economic historians used to call general purpose technology, meaning that you can use it for creating many apps, many different types of sub technologies and many different directions are possible. It is not complete idle talk. When people used to talk about social media and other online tools creating new democratic spaces today, it looks like very naive. When people in the 2000s said oh, online communication and social media are going to democratise communication. But that potential was there, and that potential is much greater with AI. When some people in the tech industry talk about generative AI being useful to humans in terms of getting better information, performing better tasks so generative AI… actually, I think the great potential that I mentioned at the beginning is precisely in being a human complementary technology. The tragedy of our current age is that we have almost all information that is at least codified available in some form. But we do not have the processing power to decide which one we should retrieve, how we should interpret how we should process, and which types of information we should engage with in different forms. Generative AI has the capability to improve human interaction with information and hence generate a lot of tasks, not just for knowledge workers, but for electricians, for carpenters, for educators, for healthcare workers. So that possibility is there. - But no, we are not going in the right direction. So we do need a redirection of technological change. - And no. I don't think it is naive or unrealistic to think about the redirection of technological change. One view which is common among some economists and some tech leaders goes back to either to the view that technology somehow has a preordained path and we just have to follow it. No, I am denying that and I think history is quite a good guide on showing how malleable technology is. Goes back to a saying by Ferdinand de Lesseps of fame, from the Suez and the Panama Canal, which we discussed in this book where he said, don't worry, men of genius would arise and solve all problems. Who are today's men of genius. Maybe some Altman or Elon Musk. But no, I don't think we should trust them. So I think the direction of technology is malleable, but it's also a societal choice. - And yes, as Cristina was hinting, antitrust has a very important role in this. For two reasons. One, because if we want alternatives. They are not very likely to come from a duopolistic or highly oligopolistic structure, especially one further empowered by killer acquisitions and these companies being a block other types of technologies that do not fit well with their business model. So if we want more alternatives that go more in a human complementary direction or more pro democratic direction, or create a more open competitive environment, I think we have to use antitrust tools including potential breakup of the largest companies which are too big and one other reason is because this type of power comes with enormous social power. And by that social power, I mean economic power, and also general social power. Tech companies have an enormous sway on public opinion, which I think is associated with their mega profits. And again, I don't think that creates a healthy environment. - And no, finally, I don't think antitrust is the main tool as Cristina was also hinting in her introductory comment. I think antitrust is a very blunt tool and I think for the redirection of technology we need a suite of tools which should include exactly how data is used and accessed. We need a new interoperability type of approach as well as how do we compensate and how do we actually encourage more creation of creative data. We also need to provide explicit incentives, such as, for example, those that have been successful in the field of renewable technology, where we encourage more of the socially valuable types of technologies. And I think there are a number of tools for that and we may also need more tax policies to discourage the worst types of business models and create room for alternative business models. So I am actually quite favourable, although I think much more study is needed, to a digital ad tax that creates more openness for alternative business models based on things like Wikipedia or subscription models in the online space. - Finally, I think we also need to rethink other tools that we have, like fiscal tools that currently create a very asymmetric playing field between capital and labour and going back to the job market and labour market inequality issues. I think equating marginal tax rate between capital and labour are things that we should definitely revisit. Thank you. https://mailchi.mp/cepr/central-bank-communication-rpn-seminar-series-516707

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Re: [nexa] AI and antitrust in 10 minutes
by Giuseppe Attardi July 19, 2023

July 19, 2023

Magistrale. In particolare sono convinto della necessità di scoraggiare il business model dei servizi gratuiti finanziati con la pubblicità, introducendo una tassazione altamente progressiva dei ricavi pubblicitari, come propone il nobel Paul Romer. So I am actually quite favourable, […] to a digital ad tax that creates more openness for alternative business models based on things like Wikipedia or subscription models in the online space. — Beppe > On 19 Jul 2023, at 04:44, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > From: Daniela Tafani <daniela.tafani(a)unipi.it> > To: "nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it" <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: [nexa] AI and antitrust in 10 minutes > Message-ID: <08789adc08254f80af9be9f171ad7521(a)unipi.it> > > Daron Acemoglu > Thank you, Cristina, for that wonderful introduction and to you and Tommaso for inviting me. […] > As Cristina said, I'm going to talk about something that's partly inspired by my book. AI and > antitrust in 10 minutes. So that's a tall order especially if I try to blend in ideas from the book, so > let me jump into it. I'm going to do 10 question and answers in 10 minutes, but since that's a very > short time I'll just give you the answers. I'll let your imagination do the job of the what the questions > might have been to which. These are the answers. > …

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