Gongol.com Archives: December 2024
December 6, 2024
Bits and bytes of Woodward and Bernstein
One of the many unusual aspects of content generated by artificial intelligence is that it is not eligible for copyright protection under current interpretations of US law. This happens to coincide with another exception in copyright law, which holds that facts cannot be copyrighted. Due to this loophole-within-a-loophole, virtually every piece of factual news reporting is rather suddenly up for grabs via a backdoor route to the public domain. ■ That's because artificial intelligence is being used to generate (one hesitates to use the word "write") "news" stories, and the essence of generative AI is that it draws from the available written content in the world to create new material based upon the old. All it takes is for an AI tool to recognize factual content, and it is more or less at liberty to generate an offshoot or derivative piece of content -- which it can do in virtually unlimited volume, without sleep, until the end of time. ■ Facts, though, can be costly to obtain, and real judgment remains an exclusive advantage of thinking human beings. That hasn't stopped the companies backing AI technology from dabbling with experiments in the news business anyway. And it's only set to grow in intensity: One thing that human beings (who possess the eyeballs whose attention pays the bills for online services) are always likely to crave is new information about the world around them. ■ Lacking judgment is no small handicap: Computers might get pretty good at predicting what will generate clicks, but that doesn't mean they'll ever know when they've uncovered the next Watergate. ■ But if big computing companies, in the rush to try to generate any kind of profit off of AI experiments that they can, bluster their way into the news business with such force that they choke out the painfully dwindling number of journalists still on the job by "re-packaging" what the true shoe-leather reporters uncovered and wrote, then we're not only heading towards a future where everywhere is a news desert, we're also en route to a day when few human beings will have any practice (or resulting intuitive judgment) left to know when something advertised as "news" really is news.
Nevermind what the government has been saying and how it has been acting for many years now: Americans are being told to switch to encrypted messaging services rather than old-fashioned texts between friends and family. It's a significant reversal, instigated by the revelation that China's government and its affiliates have seriously compromised the security of America's telecommunications infrastructure. ■ So, all that stuff we used to hear about the importance of having backdoors for law enforcement? Forget it! Now it's all encryption, all the time! ■ It's all a matter of finding the lesser among evils -- or, perhaps, of making weighted-risk assessments of the available options. It may be bad if domestic law enforcement can't crack criminal cases because people were encrypting messages and rendering wiretaps useless. It's probably a whole lot worse if a hostile adversary can plug into the essential lines of communications that we've always used with almost no hesitation because what's domestic feels secure (even when it's not). ■ End-to-end communications encryption is rising to the surface as a matter of vital national interest, but it's also time to start considering what to do with data when it's "at rest" -- not traveling from place to place, but residing on the user's devices. We're going to regret not taking storage encryption more seriously than we do now; depending on what else our adversaries have already compromised, it may already be too late for much of what is stored.
