Why did OpenAI use Scarlett Johansson's voice? As Jessa Lingel & I discuss in our journal article on AI agents, there's a long history of using white women's voices to “personalize” a technology to make it feel safe and non-threatening while it is capturing maximum data. 🧵 Sam Altman has said as much. NYT: he told ScarJo her voice would help "consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI” as her voice "would be comforting to people.” nytimes.com/2024/05/20/tec…

The @EU_Commission's final proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act is here. Some examples:

AI systems are prohibited if they violate human rights, do general social scoring for authorities, use live remote biometrics in public for policing. 👀

digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/pro… There are compulsory transparency obligations for AI systems that
(i) interact with humans
(ii) 'detect' emotions or interpret social categories based on biometric data
(iii) generate or manipulate content, e.g deep fakes

This tweet was 5 years in the making: #AtlasofAI is out TODAY!
It’s a book on the politics and planetary costs of artificial intelligence as an extractive industry— consuming natural resources, labor, and vast quantities of data. 👉 bookshop.org/books/atlas-of… @yalepress (1/6) To get a sense of the book, here’s an extract from the EARTH chapter, and there’s another coming shortly from the AFFECT chapter in @TheAtlantic: bit.ly/3cR3UIi (2/6)

📣 The AI Now 2018 Report is now live! 📣

Our biggest ever report tackles the issues of AI and accountability, after a hell of a year for the tech sector. Read the report, see our 10 recommendations ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2018_Re… We're calling for regulation of AI, and in particular - facial and affect recognition

Whoa... looks like our Anatomy of AI research spawned some viral news. A bunch of stories focused on the ‘worker cage’ patent. So here’s some context: The Amazon cage thing is not new. The patent was filed in 2013, granted in ‘16. We dug it up in our research on all the patents that went into the Amazon Echo. You can search them too – USPTO has 'em on a public site. Here’s the cage patent:
pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=092…