"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #43
September 1, 2023
"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #43
Your weekly roundup of the relevant trends, regulatory developments and policy insights, about the metaverse, AI, crypto, neurotech, and gaming.
😩I’m exhausted, just give me “the weekly snapshot”:
Whew, what a roller-coaster week in tech!
In the cool-but-also-terrifying news, researchers have come up with a new BCI allowing paralyzed people to communicate via digital avatars. Beyond the admirable goal of helping people in need, the gaming world is already frothing at the mouth; because why invest in VR headsets when we humans are the hardware? Cue eerie futuristic music. Meanwhile, the EU's Digital Services Act is causing ripples, with EFF sounding alarms over potential 'Filternet' effects. Meanwhile, data protection authorities worldwide are telling companies to protect data from scrapers (looking at you, Clearview AI). In copyright news, AI art had its day in court and the results are...complex. While IBM is back in the facial recognition game after pinky promising it wouldnt, Microsoft's AI tried to be a travel guide and epically failed. And KFC is now in the VR world, rewarding virtual catchs with real chicken. But remember, it's not all fun and games: an alarming AI porn marketplace is brewing, raising serious ethical concerns, and researchers have managed to reconstruct "Another brick in the wall" just from brain data.
So, gear up, and let's dive deeper into the metaverse! 🚀🧠🕹️
👁️🗨️Now the full version, what's going on:
👀 => Researchers created a brain-computer interface (BCI) that allows a paralyzed woman to communicate through a digital avatar.
This advancement marks the first-ever synthesis of speech or facial expressions directly from brain signals.
The system can convert these signals to text at an impressive rate of nearly 80 words per minute, surpassing existing technologies.
How this is relevant for the metaverse?
Beyond the loable humanitarian achievement of helping paralyzed people to communicate, this technology has a very profitable commercial application in the entretaiment industry. Gaming companies are increasingly interested and already investing in neural interfaces. In his 2019 GDC talk, Valve's psychologist and researcher Mike Ambinder explored BCI’s gaming applications. Also in a 2021 interview Valve’s Gabe Newell hinted a more ambitious goal, not just reading brain signals but actually to transmit information on to it. “The real world will seem flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences you’ll be able to create in people’s brains”
Logically, as VR needs specialized hardware that’s already placed in our heads, and interface controls that are intuitive, BCI’s are the natural evolution step for connecting to the metaverse.
Cynically, it's also worth mentioning that they would be far cheaper than developing cutting edge, high-end, headsets, as human beings come equiped with the necessary hardware.
Pessimistically, this technology is ripe for abuse, not just from interfering with our mental privacy, but potentially causing irreparable physical damage (not just hacking or flawed software, let’s imagine a nightmare landscape of programmed obsolescence, proprietary software and copyright DRM’s).
More to come on my next book “Braindancing in the Metaverse: a capitalism of cognitive surveillance”
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) goes into effect
It forces companies to rethink their policies on advertising, transparency, and moderation. Even though this new law was passed in the EU, we’ll likely see far-reaching global effects as companies adjust their policies to comply.
Amongst other organizations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned about how this regulation incentivize the use of content moderation algorithms, which are not robust to deal with the nuances of speech, hence they deemed it the Filternet, Made In Europe
Large platforms will overblock, removing content according to the fast-paced, blunt determinations of an algorithm, while appeals for the wrongfully silenced will go through a review process that, like the algorithm, will be opaque and arbitrary. That review will also be slow: speech will be removed in an instant, but only reinstated after days, or weeks,or 2.5 years.
More on => theverge.com and EFF.org
Google's Achilles' heel: The tech giant's struggles in augmented reality highlight a much bigger weakness
Google has failed to turn any into a viable business yet, thanks largely to constant pivots and strategy tweaks, which eventually led to a talent exodus. The problems Google faces with AR are a symptom of a larger issue for the tech giant: its inability to be a hardware power player.
More on => businessinsider.com
Data protection authorities from 12 countries released a joint statement adressing data scraping on the open web
The statement recalls increased reports of mass data scraping from social media applications and other websites that host publicly accessible personal information. Like the surveillance tool Clearview AI, Inc. who was find in breach of Australians’ privacy law.
The aim of the joint statement is to set out how SMCs and other websites should protect individuals’ personal information from unlawful data scraping to meet regulatory expectations.
Signatory countries are: Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, China, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Colombia, Jersey, Morroco, Argentina, Mexico.
Virtual reality study reveals link between sense of presence and cognitive abilities
One of the key findings of the study is that a stronger sense of presence is positively correlated with enhanced cognitive abilities. Participants who reported a heightened feeling of presence in the virtual tasks demonstrated improved performance in various cognitive domains. These domains include memory, attention, problem-solving, and decision-making.
More on => medicalxpress.com
Siemens plans to invest billions in Europe and the U.S. to create an industrial metaverse hub in Germany.
More on => mixed-news.com
🤖I Am Not A Robot: AI news
US federal judge rules thatAI-generated art cannot be copyrighted
You might have seen a lot of media headlines like this one, but not so fast!
The case “Thaler vs Perlmutter” is not as relevant as those headlines make it seem, and I am going to explain you why: the key is this word “autonomous”
The plaintiff, Thaler tried to register a work with the US Copyright Office, claiming that it has been autonomously generated by a computer system he calls the “Creativity Machine”, that he owns.
He tried to register this computer-generated work claiming that the copyright was vested on him as owner of the machine, like a work-for-hire.
USCO denied the registration on the grounds that the work lacked human authorship, something that has already been clear on it’s 2021 version of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices.
313.2>>“the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.”
Thaler challenged that decision as arbitrary under the Administrative Procedure Act , that “requires agencies to engage in reasoned decisionmaking”
Plantiff and defendant agreed on the facts, so it was summary motion whose sole legal issue of whether a work autonomously (aka, no human intervention, 100%) generated by an AI system is copyrightable.
As it was claimed to be created autonomously, it never existed any copyright, and therefore nothing could be trasferred to him. (In latin is the nemo plus iuris principle, but the judge hilariously called it “putting the cart before the horse.”
But both the USCO Compendium as well as following policy statements made clear that… it’s not that simple, when humans and AI “collaborate” it should be asesses on individual basis, as you can see from this USCO June 28 webinar.
So, nothing new under the Sun.
But the Court did said something interesting:
“The increased attenuation of human creativity from the actual generation of the final work will prompt challenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as an “author” of a generated work, the scope of the protection obtained over the resultant image, how to assess the originality of AI-generated works where the systems may have been trained on unknown pre-existing works, how copyright might best be used to incentivize creative works involving AI, and more.”
As we anticipated before, the problem will be:
a) how cumbersome and arbitrary it will be to elucidate if the human input was enough on each basis to fulfil the originality requirement for the work to be protected.
b) how litigious and risky the landscape will be, with AI assisted work standing on moving sands.
c) on contrary, the outcome of a broader unprotectability will benefit a less risky legal landscape, and importantly, the public domain, that could be shrinked by the huge scale of AI works under protection over the long terms of current copyright law.
IBM promised to back off facial recognition — then it signed a $69.8 million contract to provide it
IBM has returned to the facial recognition market — just three years after announcing it was abandoning work on the technology due to concerns about racial profiling, mass surveillance, and other human rights violations.
They signed a contract with the British government to develop a national biometrics platform that will offer a facial recognition function to immigration and law enforcement officials, according to documents reviewed by The Verge and Liberty Investigates, an investigative journalism unit in the UK.
More on => theverge.com
Studios Reveal New Proposal to Striking Writers on Data Transparency, AI and Residuals
More on => hollywoodreporter.com
China keeps buying hobbled Nvidia cards to train its AI models
The US acted aggressively last year to limit China’s ability to develop artificial intelligence for military purposes, blocking the sale there of the most advanced US chips used to train AI systems.
More on => arstechnica.com
Snapchat Users Terrified After ‘My AI’ Feature Starts Posting Its Own Stories and Ignoring Messages
More on => complex.com
Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale
An extensive investigation by 404 Media reports that on “CivitAI, a site for sharing image generating AI models, users can browse thousands of models that can produce any kind of pornographic scenario”.
They recall that “while the practice is technically not allowed on CivitAI, the site hosts image generating AI models of specific real people, which can be combined with any of the pornographic AI models to generate non-consensual sexual images”
More on => 404media.co
🤦The WTF award of the week goes to…
Microsoft has pulled an AI-written travel guide, which told tourists to visit the Ottawa Food Bank if they are hungry
Microsoft has pulled an AI-generated guide titled that recommended the city's food bank as a top tourist attraction and included a caption that said, "Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach.
More on => bussinessinsider.com
And also, KFC made a VR game that rewards players with free chicken
The aim of the game is to catch as many virtual flying chickens as many as they can in a digital KFC world.
More on => standard.co.uk
🎮Gaming news
OpenAI has acquired its first company, Global Illumination, creators of an online role-playing game that has been compared to Minecraft.
More on => theregister.com
🧠Neurotech:
‘Another brick in the wall’ reconstructed from brain data
Researchers played the song to patients, recording the brain’s electrical activity.
They succeeded in reconstructing recognizable parts of the it, showcasing how the brain processes musical elements of speech, or prosody.
The phrase “All in all it was just a brick in the wall” came through recognizably in the reconstructed song, its rhythms intact, and the words muddy, but decipherable.
More on => neurosciencenews.com
😬Meme corner:
✍️Ending nugget:
“Our investigation shows the current state of the non-consensual AI porn supply chain: specific Reddit communities that are being scraped for images, the platforms that monetize these AI models and images, and the open source technology that makes it possible to easily generate non-consensual sexual images of celebrities, influencers, YouTubers, and athletes. We also spoke to sex workers whose images are powering these AI generated porn without their consent who said they are terrified of how this will impact their lives.”
"TInside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale," Emanuel Maiberg
That’s all for now!To continue the conversation, find me at https://linktr.ee/abogamer. And if you want to support my work, please consider sharing this newsletter!!