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February 2018
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What Are The Ethical Issues Of Google -- Or Anyone Else -- Conducting AI Research In China?

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AI is hot, and nowhere more so than in China:

The present global verve about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies has resonated in China as much as anywhere on earth. With the State Council's issuance of the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan" on July 20 [2017], China's government set out an ambitious roadmap including targets through 2030. Meanwhile, in China's leading cities, flashy conferences on AI have become commonplace. It seems every mid-sized tech company wants to show off its self-driving car efforts, while numerous financial tech start-ups tout an AI-driven approach. Chatbot startups clog investors' date books, and Shanghai metro ads pitch AI-taught English language learning.
That's from a detailed analysis of China's new AI strategy document, produced by New America, which includes a full translation of the development plan. Part of AI's hotness is driven by all the usual Internet giants piling in with lots of money to attract the best researchers from around the world. One of the companies that is betting on AI in a big way is Google. Here's what Sundar Pichai wrote in his 2016 Founders' Letter:
Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the "device" to fade away. Over time, the computer itself -- whatever its form factor -- will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world.
Given that emphasis, and the rise of China as a hotbed of AI activity, the announcement in December last year that Google was opening an AI lab in China made a lot of sense:
This Center joins other AI research groups we have all over the world, including in New York, Toronto, London and Zurich, all contributing towards the same goal of finding ways to make AI work better for everyone.Focused on basic AI research, the Center will consist of a team of AI researchers in Beijing, supported by Google China's strong engineering teams.
So far, so obvious. But an interesting article on the Macro Polo site points out that there's a problem with AI research in China. It flows from the continuing roll-out of intrusive surveillance technologies there, as Techdirt has discussed in numerous posts. The issue is this:
Many, though not all, of these new surveillance technologies are powered by AI. Recent advances in AI have given computers superhuman pattern-recognition skills: the ability to spot correlations within oceans of digital data, and make predictions based on those correlations. It's a highly versatile skill that can be put to use diagnosing diseases, driving cars, predicting consumer behavior, or recognizing the face of a dissident captured by a city's omnipresent surveillance cameras. The Chinese government is going for all of the above, making AI core to its mission of upgrading the economy, broadening access to public goods, and maintaining political control.
As the Macro Polo article notes, Google is unlikely to allow any of its AI products or technologies to be sold directly to the authorities for surveillance purposes. But there are plenty of other ways in which advances in AI produced at Google's new lab could end up making life for Chinese dissidents, and for ordinary citizens in Xinjiang and Tibet, much, much worse. For example, the fierce competition for AI experts is likely to see Google's Beijing engineers headhunted by local Chinese companies, where knowledge can and will flow unimpeded to government departments. Although arguably Chinese researchers elsewhere -- in the US or Europe, for example -- might also return home, taking their expertise with them, there's no doubt that the barriers to doing so are higher in that case.So does that mean that Google is wrong to open up a lab in Beijing, when it could simply have expanded its existing AI teams elsewhere? Is this another step toward re-entering China after it shut down operations there in 2010 over the authorities' insistence that it should censor its search results -- which, to its credit, Google refused to do? "AI first" is all very well, but where does "Don't be evil" fit into that?Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Judge Dismisses Playboy's Dumb Copyright Lawsuit Against BoingBoing

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Well, that was incredibly quick. The district court judge hearing the case that Playboy filed against BoingBoing back in November has already dismissed it, though without prejudice, leaving it open for Playboy to try again. The judge noted that, given the facts before the court so far, it wasn't even necessary to hold a hearing, since BoingBoing was so clearly in the right and Playboy so clearly had no case. While the ruling does note that Playboy and its legal team can try again, it warns them that it's hard to see how there's a case here:

The court will grant defendant's Motion and dismiss plaintiff's First Amended Complaint... with leave to amend. In preparing the Second Amended Complaint, plaintiff shallcarefully evaluate the contentions set forth in defendant's Motion. For example, the court isskeptical that plaintiff has sufficiently alleged facts to support either its inducement or materialcontribution theories of copyright infringement.... seeTarantino v. Gawker Media, LLC, 2014 WL 2434647, *3 (C.D. Cal. 2014) (An allegation that adefendant merely provided the means to accomplish an infringing activity is insufficient to establisha claim for copyright infringement. Rather, liability exists if the defendant engages in personalconduct that encourages or assists the infringement.) (internal citations omitted); Perfect 10, Inc.v. Giganews, Inc., 847 F.3d 657, 672 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 138 S.Ct. 504 (2017) (We havedescribed the inducement theory as having four elements: (1) the distribution of a device orproduct, (2) acts of infringement, (3) an object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, and (4)causation.) (internal quotation marks omitted).
It will be interesting to see what happens next. As we noted in our original post, the lawyers representing Playboy, Donger and Burroughs have been making every effort over the last year or so to move beyond their reputation as fabric copyright trolls, and seeking out opportunities for high profile, if silly, cases including "sounds like" music cases. While one of the two partners, Scott Burroughs, has busied himself over at Above the Law (who really should think more carefully about the lawyers they bring in as posters) to post increasingly silly things about copyright law -- including trying to argue that linking is infringing and the EFF is wrong to argue that it's not.That article -- written about the same time that the BoingBoing lawsuit was filed -- looks particularly bad now that a court has rejected the same argument in a case in which Burroughs is listed as a lawyer for Playboy, and in which EFF helped write the Motion to Dismiss that said that Burroughs was wrong. Just days ago, another lawyer posting at Above the Law explained why Burroughs' own case had no chance (without mentioning Burroughs' own writings on the site).I'm guessing that Playboy will file an amended complaint, though as we noted earlier, in copyright law, it's much easier to have legal fees awarded for filing frivolous cases, and as the quote above notes, the judge is "skeptical" that Playboy has any case at all.

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