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"content": "\u003cp>It’s been eight months since Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the outfit that gave us ChatGPT, urged U.S. senators to \u003cem>please\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO0J2Yw7usM\"> pass new laws\u003c/a> to force accountability from the big players, like OpenAI investor Microsoft, as well as Amazon, Google and Meta. “The number of companies is going to be small, just because of the resources required, and so I think there needs to be incredible scrutiny on us and our competitors,” Altman said in May of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yeah, no. That’s not what has happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco)\"]‘I would love to have one unified, federal law that effectively addresses AI safety. Congress has not passed such a law. Congress has not even come close to passing such a law.’[/pullquote]“I would love to have one unified, federal law that effectively addresses AI safety. Congress has \u003ca href=\"https://techpost.bsa.org/2024/02/06/bsa-member-roundtable-what-do-we-expect-from-congress-on-tech-policy-in-2024/\">not passed such a law\u003c/a>. Congress has not even come close to passing such a law,” said Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, one of a growing number of California lawmakers rolling out legislation that could provide a model for other states to follow, if not the federal government. Wiener argues his \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB1047\">Senate Bill 1047\u003c/a> is the most ambitious proposal so far in the country, and given that he was just named Senate Budget chair, he is arguably the best positioned at the state capitol to pass aggressive legislation that is also well-funded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SB 1047 would require companies building the largest and most powerful AI models — not the wee startups — to test for safety before releasing those models to the public. What does that mean? Here’s some language from the legislation as currently written:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“If not properly subject to human controls, future development in artificial intelligence may also have the potential to be used to create novel threats to public safety and security, including by enabling the creation and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, such as biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, as well as weapons with cyber-offensive capabilities.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>AI companies would have to tell the state about testing protocols and guardrails, and if the tech causes “critical harm,” California’s attorney general can sue. Wiener says his legislation draws heavily on the Biden administration’s 2023 \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/\">executive order on AI\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Catch up fast: \u003c/strong>By software industry alliance BSA’s count, there are more than 400 AI-related bills pending across 44 states, but California’s size and sophistication make the roughly 30 bills pending in Sacramento most likely to be seen as legal landmarks, should they pass. Also, many of the largest companies working on generative AI models are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. OpenAI is based in San Francisco; so are Anthropic, Databricks and Scale AI. Meta is based in Menlo Park. Google is based in Mountain View. Seattle-based Microsoft and Amazon have offices in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to the think tank Brookings, more than 60% of generative AI jobs posted in the year ending in July 2023 were clustered in just 10 metro areas in the U.S.,\u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-data-shows-that-without-intervention-generative-ai-jobs-will-continue-to-cluster-in-the-same-big-tech-hubs/\"> led far and away by the Bay Area\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The context: \u003c/strong>The FTC and other regulators are exploring how to use \u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/02/ftc-proposes-new-protections-combat-ai-impersonation-individuals?utm_source=govdelivery\">existing laws\u003c/a> to rein in AI developers and nefarious individuals and organizations using AI to break the law, but many experts say that’s not going to be enough. Lina Khan, who heads the Federal Trade Commission, raised this question during an FTC\u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events/2024/01/ftc-tech-summit\"> summit on AI\u003c/a> last month: “Will a handful of dominant firms concentrate control over these key tools, locking us into a future of their choosing?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The big picture: \u003c/strong>By now, you’ve probably gotten the memo: Large AI models are everywhere and doing everything — developing \u003ca href=\"https://news.mit.edu/2020/artificial-intelligence-identifies-new-antibiotic-0220\">new antibiotics\u003c/a> and helping humans \u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/use-ai-talk-to-whales-save-life-on-earth/\">communicate with whales\u003c/a>, but also turbocharging \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/02/08/1229641751/ai-deepfakes-election-risks-lawmakers-tech-companies-artificial-intelligence\">election-season fraud\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/01/31/1152652093/ai-artificial-intelligence-bot-hiring-eeoc-discrimination\">automating hiring discrimination\u003c/a>. In 2023, many world-leading experts signed a \u003ca href=\"https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk\">statement on AI Risks\u003c/a> — “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” it reads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What we are watching: \u003c/strong>There are at least 29 bills pending in Sacramento alone in the 2023–2024 legislative year focused on some aspect of artificial intelligence, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.axios.com/2024/02/14/ai-bills-state-legislatures-deepfakes-bias-discrimination\">Axios\u003c/a>. More are expected to roll out in the near future, which is why the following list is a partial one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-11976121\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49%E2%80%AFPM-e1708041434811.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2398\" height=\"863\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811.png 2398w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-800x288.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-1020x367.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-160x58.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-1536x553.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-2048x737.png 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-1920x691.png 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2398px) 100vw, 2398px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The opposing view: \u003c/strong>“While I think that these types of regulatory guidelines are good, I’m not sure how effective they will be,” said Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley School of Information professor specializing in digital forensics, misinformation, and human perception.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The bottom line:\u003c/strong> Farid added, “I don’t think it makes sense for individual states to try to regulate in this space, but if any state is going to do it, it should be California. The upside of state regulation is that it puts more pressure on the federal government to act so that we don’t end up with a chaotic state-by-state regulation of tech.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can’t have a patchwork of state laws,” agrees Grace Gedye, an AI Policy Analyst at Consumer Reports. But, she added, “We definitely can’t hold our breath [for Congress to act] because we could be waiting 10 or 20 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“I would love to have one unified, federal law that effectively addresses AI safety. Congress has \u003ca href=\"https://techpost.bsa.org/2024/02/06/bsa-member-roundtable-what-do-we-expect-from-congress-on-tech-policy-in-2024/\">not passed such a law\u003c/a>. Congress has not even come close to passing such a law,” said Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, one of a growing number of California lawmakers rolling out legislation that could provide a model for other states to follow, if not the federal government. Wiener argues his \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB1047\">Senate Bill 1047\u003c/a> is the most ambitious proposal so far in the country, and given that he was just named Senate Budget chair, he is arguably the best positioned at the state capitol to pass aggressive legislation that is also well-funded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SB 1047 would require companies building the largest and most powerful AI models — not the wee startups — to test for safety before releasing those models to the public. What does that mean? Here’s some language from the legislation as currently written:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“If not properly subject to human controls, future development in artificial intelligence may also have the potential to be used to create novel threats to public safety and security, including by enabling the creation and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, such as biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, as well as weapons with cyber-offensive capabilities.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>AI companies would have to tell the state about testing protocols and guardrails, and if the tech causes “critical harm,” California’s attorney general can sue. Wiener says his legislation draws heavily on the Biden administration’s 2023 \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/\">executive order on AI\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Catch up fast: \u003c/strong>By software industry alliance BSA’s count, there are more than 400 AI-related bills pending across 44 states, but California’s size and sophistication make the roughly 30 bills pending in Sacramento most likely to be seen as legal landmarks, should they pass. Also, many of the largest companies working on generative AI models are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. OpenAI is based in San Francisco; so are Anthropic, Databricks and Scale AI. Meta is based in Menlo Park. Google is based in Mountain View. Seattle-based Microsoft and Amazon have offices in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to the think tank Brookings, more than 60% of generative AI jobs posted in the year ending in July 2023 were clustered in just 10 metro areas in the U.S.,\u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-data-shows-that-without-intervention-generative-ai-jobs-will-continue-to-cluster-in-the-same-big-tech-hubs/\"> led far and away by the Bay Area\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The context: \u003c/strong>The FTC and other regulators are exploring how to use \u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/02/ftc-proposes-new-protections-combat-ai-impersonation-individuals?utm_source=govdelivery\">existing laws\u003c/a> to rein in AI developers and nefarious individuals and organizations using AI to break the law, but many experts say that’s not going to be enough. Lina Khan, who heads the Federal Trade Commission, raised this question during an FTC\u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events/2024/01/ftc-tech-summit\"> summit on AI\u003c/a> last month: “Will a handful of dominant firms concentrate control over these key tools, locking us into a future of their choosing?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The big picture: \u003c/strong>By now, you’ve probably gotten the memo: Large AI models are everywhere and doing everything — developing \u003ca href=\"https://news.mit.edu/2020/artificial-intelligence-identifies-new-antibiotic-0220\">new antibiotics\u003c/a> and helping humans \u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/use-ai-talk-to-whales-save-life-on-earth/\">communicate with whales\u003c/a>, but also turbocharging \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/02/08/1229641751/ai-deepfakes-election-risks-lawmakers-tech-companies-artificial-intelligence\">election-season fraud\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/01/31/1152652093/ai-artificial-intelligence-bot-hiring-eeoc-discrimination\">automating hiring discrimination\u003c/a>. In 2023, many world-leading experts signed a \u003ca href=\"https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk\">statement on AI Risks\u003c/a> — “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” it reads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What we are watching: \u003c/strong>There are at least 29 bills pending in Sacramento alone in the 2023–2024 legislative year focused on some aspect of artificial intelligence, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.axios.com/2024/02/14/ai-bills-state-legislatures-deepfakes-bias-discrimination\">Axios\u003c/a>. More are expected to roll out in the near future, which is why the following list is a partial one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-11976121\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49%E2%80%AFPM-e1708041434811.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2398\" height=\"863\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811.png 2398w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-800x288.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-1020x367.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-160x58.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-1536x553.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-2048x737.png 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-15-at-3.40.49 PM-e1708041434811-1920x691.png 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2398px) 100vw, 2398px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The opposing view: \u003c/strong>“While I think that these types of regulatory guidelines are good, I’m not sure how effective they will be,” said Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley School of Information professor specializing in digital forensics, misinformation, and human perception.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The bottom line:\u003c/strong> Farid added, “I don’t think it makes sense for individual states to try to regulate in this space, but if any state is going to do it, it should be California. The upside of state regulation is that it puts more pressure on the federal government to act so that we don’t end up with a chaotic state-by-state regulation of tech.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can’t have a patchwork of state laws,” agrees Grace Gedye, an AI Policy Analyst at Consumer Reports. But, she added, “We definitely can’t hold our breath [for Congress to act] because we could be waiting 10 or 20 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A few weeks ago, white hat hackers — remember, those are the good kind — identified a vulnerability in the software code powering \u003ca href=\"https://chattr.ai\">Chattr\u003c/a>, a Florida-based “AI-powered” hiring platform.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The backdoor these \u003ca href=\"https://mrbruh.com/chattr/\">hackers found gave them easy access\u003c/a> to names, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords and more. Because Chattr is a \u003cem>hiring\u003c/em> platform, personal details belong to job seekers and hiring managers across the country, mostly in fast food and retail.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Paul, New Zealand University student and hacker hobbyist\"]‘It’s a very competitive market, so people have to get their products up and going before anyone else can. Because of that, shortcuts get made.’[/pullquote]“A slip-up, a misconfiguration when creating their website and everything that goes with it,” said 19-year-old Paul, who asked that we not use his full name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s a New Zealand university student and sort of a hacker hobbyist. He writes a cybersecurity blog using the pen name “MrBruh,” and his \u003ca href=\"https://mrbruh.com/chattr/\">post\u003c/a> about Chattr is titled, “How I pwned half of America’s fast food chains, simultaneously.” The term “pwned,” by the way, means compromised.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a very competitive market, so people have to get their products up and going before anyone else can. Because of that, shortcuts get made,” Paul said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Paul and a couple of \u003ca href=\"https://kibty.town/blog/chattr\">friends\u003c/a> who conducted the hack with him said they contacted Chattr. \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The company didn’t respond to them personally, but in a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7151289760647467008/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">LinkedIn post\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, wrote,\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> “Our engineering team acted swiftly, initiating a comprehensive investigation to determine the extent of the breach. We are pleased to report that the vulnerability has been fixed.”\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Paul confirmed Chattr fixed the problem within a day of being alerted. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there are plenty of other chatbot vulnerabilities yet to be discovered, and not always by \u003cem>white\u003c/em> hat hackers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We already live in an era of proliferating ransomware and malware. And we’re adding a new layer of vulnerabilities,” said Irina Raicu, who directs the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Raicu noted that, in the age of the internet, most companies have systems in place to protect against malicious hackers, but they’re widely understood to be inadequate.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Irina Raicu, director of internet ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University\"]‘It’s also a huge problem for the government, for national security, for education, for the entire healthcare system.’[/pullquote]“Yes, and not just companies. It’s also a huge problem for the government, for national security, for education, for the entire healthcare system,” Raicu said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Artificial intelligence can be helpful for those tasked with protecting software systems. But the same technology serves the other side of the conflict.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All types of cyber threat actors — state and non-state, skilled and less-skilled — are already using AI, to varying degrees,” as one \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/report/impact-of-ai-on-cyber-threat\">recent report\u003c/a> from the U.K.’s National Security Cyber Centre put it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same report goes on to warn the growing sophistication of AI “lowers the barrier” for amateur cybercriminals and hackers to access systems and gather information, extract sensitive data, paralyze computer systems, and demand ransoms.[aside postID=news_11966824 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/11/DeepFakeVid-1020x676.jpg']In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.idtheftcenter.org/post/2023-annual-data-breach-report-reveals-record-number-of-compromises-72-percent-increase-over-previous-high/\">report released \u003c/a>on Jan. 25, the Identity Theft Resource Center, which tracks publicly available information about data breaches, noted: “The availability of compromised consumer data and the use of large language models [LLMs] is already resulting in vastly improved phishing lures and highly effective social engineering attacks that are driving financial losses for businesses and individuals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/01/nist-identifies-types-cyberattacks-manipulate-behavior-ai-systems\">unsolved cybersecurity issues\u003c/a> with AI chatbots, Raicu said, are likely to make us all much more vulnerable on multiple fronts. Primarily because bad or confused actors inside and outside organizations now have tools that allow them to\u003ca href=\"https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/01/nist-identifies-types-cyberattacks-manipulate-behavior-ai-systems\"> corrupt the data\u003c/a> a chatbot is working with or \u003ca href=\"https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/14/worst-that-can-happen/\">have it execute commands\u003c/a> that should not be executed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re hearing all this talk about AI governance and about responsible development and deployment of AI systems. Those conversations, if they don’t include a component about cybersecurity, then they’re not really doing what they’re claiming to be doing,” Raicu said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In some states, like \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/databreach/reporting#:~:text=California%20law%20requires%20a%20business,acquired,%20by%20an%20unauthorized%20person.\">California\u003c/a>, businesses and state agencies are legally required to take reasonable measures to protect personal information and report big data breaches to affected consumers — for what it’s worth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“A slip-up, a misconfiguration when creating their website and everything that goes with it,” said 19-year-old Paul, who asked that we not use his full name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s a New Zealand university student and sort of a hacker hobbyist. He writes a cybersecurity blog using the pen name “MrBruh,” and his \u003ca href=\"https://mrbruh.com/chattr/\">post\u003c/a> about Chattr is titled, “How I pwned half of America’s fast food chains, simultaneously.” The term “pwned,” by the way, means compromised.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a very competitive market, so people have to get their products up and going before anyone else can. Because of that, shortcuts get made,” Paul said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Paul and a couple of \u003ca href=\"https://kibty.town/blog/chattr\">friends\u003c/a> who conducted the hack with him said they contacted Chattr. \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The company didn’t respond to them personally, but in a \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7151289760647467008/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">LinkedIn post\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, wrote,\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> “Our engineering team acted swiftly, initiating a comprehensive investigation to determine the extent of the breach. We are pleased to report that the vulnerability has been fixed.”\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Paul confirmed Chattr fixed the problem within a day of being alerted. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there are plenty of other chatbot vulnerabilities yet to be discovered, and not always by \u003cem>white\u003c/em> hat hackers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We already live in an era of proliferating ransomware and malware. And we’re adding a new layer of vulnerabilities,” said Irina Raicu, who directs the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Raicu noted that, in the age of the internet, most companies have systems in place to protect against malicious hackers, but they’re widely understood to be inadequate.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“Yes, and not just companies. It’s also a huge problem for the government, for national security, for education, for the entire healthcare system,” Raicu said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Artificial intelligence can be helpful for those tasked with protecting software systems. But the same technology serves the other side of the conflict.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All types of cyber threat actors — state and non-state, skilled and less-skilled — are already using AI, to varying degrees,” as one \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/report/impact-of-ai-on-cyber-threat\">recent report\u003c/a> from the U.K.’s National Security Cyber Centre put it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The same report goes on to warn the growing sophistication of AI “lowers the barrier” for amateur cybercriminals and hackers to access systems and gather information, extract sensitive data, paralyze computer systems, and demand ransoms.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.idtheftcenter.org/post/2023-annual-data-breach-report-reveals-record-number-of-compromises-72-percent-increase-over-previous-high/\">report released \u003c/a>on Jan. 25, the Identity Theft Resource Center, which tracks publicly available information about data breaches, noted: “The availability of compromised consumer data and the use of large language models [LLMs] is already resulting in vastly improved phishing lures and highly effective social engineering attacks that are driving financial losses for businesses and individuals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/01/nist-identifies-types-cyberattacks-manipulate-behavior-ai-systems\">unsolved cybersecurity issues\u003c/a> with AI chatbots, Raicu said, are likely to make us all much more vulnerable on multiple fronts. Primarily because bad or confused actors inside and outside organizations now have tools that allow them to\u003ca href=\"https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/01/nist-identifies-types-cyberattacks-manipulate-behavior-ai-systems\"> corrupt the data\u003c/a> a chatbot is working with or \u003ca href=\"https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/14/worst-that-can-happen/\">have it execute commands\u003c/a> that should not be executed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re hearing all this talk about AI governance and about responsible development and deployment of AI systems. Those conversations, if they don’t include a component about cybersecurity, then they’re not really doing what they’re claiming to be doing,” Raicu said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In some states, like \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/databreach/reporting#:~:text=California%20law%20requires%20a%20business,acquired,%20by%20an%20unauthorized%20person.\">California\u003c/a>, businesses and state agencies are legally required to take reasonable measures to protect personal information and report big data breaches to affected consumers — for what it’s worth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Lots of industries have embraced artificial intelligence as a tool this past year, including climate solutions companies. From detecting pollution to wildfires, companies are finding AI can help translate vast amounts of climate-related data faster and more efficiently, says Sasha Luccioni, climate lead for AI company Hugging Face.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Luccioni notes it’s important to be cautious about whether AI is always necessary. Generative AI, which makes new content, can use large amounts of energy and have a big carbon footprint. But she says there are many applications for AI in the green transition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are four ways companies, researchers and governments use AI for climate solutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Using AI to detect planet-heating methane\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Methane emissions, the second biggest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide, are climbing. The highly potent pollutant — the main ingredient in natural gas — gets released by the energy sector, as well as agriculture and decomposing material in landfills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now,\u003ca href=\"https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-11-23-ai-automatically-detects-methane-plumes-space-could-be-powerful-tool-combating\"> researchers\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.accenture.com/us-en/case-studies/utilities/duke-energy-powers-ai-platform\">companies\u003c/a> are using AI to interpret huge quantities of satellite images to track global methane emissions on a daily basis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Before we could mine satellite information with AI, we had no idea where methane was coming from,” says Antoine Halff, co-founder and chief analyst at Kayrros, a climate analytics firm. “We understood the climate risk that this represented. But there was no understanding of the sources.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Kayrros began in 2016, Halff says the world knew about only a handful of occurrences of large methane leaks and other releases. He says his team can now detect dozens of them every week and thousands yearly. “For methane,” Halff says, “AI really reveals things that could not be known.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The United Nations uses Kayrros’s AI-fueled data to verify that companies’ reports on methane emissions are accurate. Other governments are gearing up for more methane monitoring:\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/12/02/1216401828/epa-aims-to-slash-the-oil-industrys-climate-warming-methane-pollution\"> the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/eu-methane-emissions-law-pollution-0c7e15ee81a05aad88e56935ae24216f\"> the European Union\u003c/a> recently passed new methane regulations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because methane is so potent, targeting it through AI makes strategic sense, Halff says. “If you eliminate methane emissions today,” he says, “you can very quickly have an impact on the curve of global warming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11971401\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1600px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2024/01/02/4-ways-ai-could-help-fight-climate-change/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11971401\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11971401\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85.jpg\" alt=\"a field of gas and oil drills\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1054\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85.jpg 1600w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85-800x527.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85-1020x672.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85-160x105.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85-1536x1012.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Companies like KoBold Metals and Earth AI are using AI to speed up the search for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and copper. These minerals are key for climate solutions like solar panels and electric vehicles. \u003ccite>(Lucas Aguayo Araos/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Using AI for early detection of forest fires\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Climate change is driving more frequent and intense wildfires, and those burns are making up an\u003ca href=\"https://news.uci.edu/2023/03/02/wildfires-in-2021-emitted-a-record-breaking-amount-of-carbon-dioxide/\"> increasing share\u003c/a> of planet-heating pollution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, a Berlin-based startup uses AI with sensors in forests to find small burns before they spread into megafires. \u003ca href=\"https://www.dryad.net/team\">Carsten Brinkschulte\u003c/a>, CEO of Dryad, uses AI to train sensors to detect the specific gasses that get released when organic material burns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re basically like an electronic nose that we embed in the forest,” Brinkschulte says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The nose-like sensors can detect the fires early in the smoldering stage, “when it’s still easy or relatively easy to extinguish the fire,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company has 50 sensor installations from the Middle East to California. \u003ca href=\"https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/12/18/2797950/0/en/Dryad-s-Silvanet-Detects-Unauthorized-Wildfire-in-Lebanon-in-30-Minutes-Prompting-Timely-Response-and-Resolution.html\">Last month in Lebanon\u003c/a>, sensors reacted to a small fire within 30 minutes, Brinkschulte says.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Using AI to prevent new wildfires\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Another way to stop megafires is to set “controlled burns” outside of fire season to remove the excess brush and vegetation that become fuel for fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Typically, so-called burn managers — who are people from utilities, the federal forest service or other entities — deploy teams to designated areas to set controlled burns. (Native tribes have a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-california-looks-to-what-tribes-have-known-all-along\">long history of making these controlled burns\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But to do the work safely, burn managers need lots of information to know how the fire might behave so it doesn’t spin out of control. They need to know things like the wind conditions and amount of moisture in the vegetation, says Yolanda Gil, director for strategic AI and data science initiatives at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After interviewing fire scientists, Gil and their team used AI to create a so-called intelligent or smart assistant —like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa —that can access vast data sets and complex models. Burn managers can use these Siri-like assistants to decide where and when to make controlled burns. “It’s kind of like Siri, but for burn managers,” Gil says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gil says burn managers can ask the smart assistant about a particular area. The assistant can take information about the topography, the vegetation, weather patterns and recommend a potential burn model —a way to make a safe controlled burn, Gil says. The goal, they say, is to make these assistants widely available for utilities, the forest service, and others doing controlled burns to make them safer and plentiful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They plan to send out the first prototypes of the smart assistants in the coming months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11971385\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2542px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2024/01/02/4-ways-ai-could-help-fight-climate-change/companies-like-kobold-metals-and-earth-ai-are-using-ai-to-speed-up-the-search-for-critical-minerals-like-lithium-cobalt-and-copper-these-minerals-are-key-for-climate-solutions-like-solar-panels-and/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11971385\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11971385\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292.jpg\" alt=\"a dump truck mining a field of minerals\" width=\"2542\" height=\"1907\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292.jpg 2542w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2542px) 100vw, 2542px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Companies like KoBold Metals and Earth AI are using AI to speed up the search for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and copper. These minerals are key for climate solutions like solar panels and electric vehicles. \u003ccite>(Lucas Aguayo Araos/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Using AI in green tech mining\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Climate solutions from solar panels to electric vehicles require immense amounts of minerals like cobalt, lithium and copper. But current supplies are not enough to meet growing demand. By 2030, projected lithium demand will be five times the current global supply, according to the\u003ca href=\"https://www.iea.org/\"> International Energy Agency\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, governments, researchers, and companies are using AI to explore critical minerals. Colin Williams, mineral resources program coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey, writes in an email that his team\u003ca href=\"https://criticalminerals.darpa.mil/\"> uses AI\u003c/a> to analyze data to determine which areas in the U.S. have the best potential for mining critical metals. He adds that using AI means “dramatic time savings.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is a lot of data out there about what it looks like under the earth’s surface. Using AI to sift through all this data helps minimize uncertainty, Williams says. Because mining operations \u003ca href=\"https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/research/ces-2023-monetary-tightening-weighs-down-exploration-activity\">spend billions of dollars\u003c/a> trying to find profitable areas to exploit, companies say using AI can help save a lot of time and money in locating minerals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Companies \u003ca href=\"https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/mining-looks-to-ai-for-edge-in-finding-new-metal-76345909\">all over the world\u003c/a> —from Australian \u003ca href=\"https://sensore.com/about/\">SensOre\u003c/a> to California-based\u003ca href=\"https://www.koboldmetals.com/\"> KoBold Metals\u003c/a> —are now using AI to explore for minerals on several continents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca>www.npr.org.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Lots of industries have embraced artificial intelligence as a tool this past year, including climate solutions companies. From detecting pollution to wildfires, companies are finding AI can help translate vast amounts of climate-related data faster and more efficiently, says Sasha Luccioni, climate lead for AI company Hugging Face.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Luccioni notes it’s important to be cautious about whether AI is always necessary. Generative AI, which makes new content, can use large amounts of energy and have a big carbon footprint. But she says there are many applications for AI in the green transition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are four ways companies, researchers and governments use AI for climate solutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Using AI to detect planet-heating methane\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Methane emissions, the second biggest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide, are climbing. The highly potent pollutant — the main ingredient in natural gas — gets released by the energy sector, as well as agriculture and decomposing material in landfills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now,\u003ca href=\"https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-11-23-ai-automatically-detects-methane-plumes-space-could-be-powerful-tool-combating\"> researchers\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.accenture.com/us-en/case-studies/utilities/duke-energy-powers-ai-platform\">companies\u003c/a> are using AI to interpret huge quantities of satellite images to track global methane emissions on a daily basis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Before we could mine satellite information with AI, we had no idea where methane was coming from,” says Antoine Halff, co-founder and chief analyst at Kayrros, a climate analytics firm. “We understood the climate risk that this represented. But there was no understanding of the sources.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Kayrros began in 2016, Halff says the world knew about only a handful of occurrences of large methane leaks and other releases. He says his team can now detect dozens of them every week and thousands yearly. “For methane,” Halff says, “AI really reveals things that could not be known.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The United Nations uses Kayrros’s AI-fueled data to verify that companies’ reports on methane emissions are accurate. Other governments are gearing up for more methane monitoring:\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/12/02/1216401828/epa-aims-to-slash-the-oil-industrys-climate-warming-methane-pollution\"> the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/eu-methane-emissions-law-pollution-0c7e15ee81a05aad88e56935ae24216f\"> the European Union\u003c/a> recently passed new methane regulations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because methane is so potent, targeting it through AI makes strategic sense, Halff says. “If you eliminate methane emissions today,” he says, “you can very quickly have an impact on the curve of global warming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11971401\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1600px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2024/01/02/4-ways-ai-could-help-fight-climate-change/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11971401\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11971401\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85.jpg\" alt=\"a field of gas and oil drills\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1054\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85.jpg 1600w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85-800x527.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85-1020x672.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85-160x105.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1351224007_custom-0e5e0ed77722cb64595a41f527f6769e6304ddff-s1600-c85-1536x1012.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Companies like KoBold Metals and Earth AI are using AI to speed up the search for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and copper. These minerals are key for climate solutions like solar panels and electric vehicles. \u003ccite>(Lucas Aguayo Araos/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Using AI for early detection of forest fires\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Climate change is driving more frequent and intense wildfires, and those burns are making up an\u003ca href=\"https://news.uci.edu/2023/03/02/wildfires-in-2021-emitted-a-record-breaking-amount-of-carbon-dioxide/\"> increasing share\u003c/a> of planet-heating pollution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, a Berlin-based startup uses AI with sensors in forests to find small burns before they spread into megafires. \u003ca href=\"https://www.dryad.net/team\">Carsten Brinkschulte\u003c/a>, CEO of Dryad, uses AI to train sensors to detect the specific gasses that get released when organic material burns.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They’re basically like an electronic nose that we embed in the forest,” Brinkschulte says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The nose-like sensors can detect the fires early in the smoldering stage, “when it’s still easy or relatively easy to extinguish the fire,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company has 50 sensor installations from the Middle East to California. \u003ca href=\"https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/12/18/2797950/0/en/Dryad-s-Silvanet-Detects-Unauthorized-Wildfire-in-Lebanon-in-30-Minutes-Prompting-Timely-Response-and-Resolution.html\">Last month in Lebanon\u003c/a>, sensors reacted to a small fire within 30 minutes, Brinkschulte says.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Using AI to prevent new wildfires\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Another way to stop megafires is to set “controlled burns” outside of fire season to remove the excess brush and vegetation that become fuel for fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Typically, so-called burn managers — who are people from utilities, the federal forest service or other entities — deploy teams to designated areas to set controlled burns. (Native tribes have a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-california-looks-to-what-tribes-have-known-all-along\">long history of making these controlled burns\u003c/a>.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But to do the work safely, burn managers need lots of information to know how the fire might behave so it doesn’t spin out of control. They need to know things like the wind conditions and amount of moisture in the vegetation, says Yolanda Gil, director for strategic AI and data science initiatives at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After interviewing fire scientists, Gil and their team used AI to create a so-called intelligent or smart assistant —like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa —that can access vast data sets and complex models. Burn managers can use these Siri-like assistants to decide where and when to make controlled burns. “It’s kind of like Siri, but for burn managers,” Gil says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gil says burn managers can ask the smart assistant about a particular area. The assistant can take information about the topography, the vegetation, weather patterns and recommend a potential burn model —a way to make a safe controlled burn, Gil says. The goal, they say, is to make these assistants widely available for utilities, the forest service, and others doing controlled burns to make them safer and plentiful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They plan to send out the first prototypes of the smart assistants in the coming months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11971385\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2542px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2024/01/02/4-ways-ai-could-help-fight-climate-change/companies-like-kobold-metals-and-earth-ai-are-using-ai-to-speed-up-the-search-for-critical-minerals-like-lithium-cobalt-and-copper-these-minerals-are-key-for-climate-solutions-like-solar-panels-and/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11971385\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11971385\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292.jpg\" alt=\"a dump truck mining a field of minerals\" width=\"2542\" height=\"1907\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292.jpg 2542w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/01/gettyimages-1244574317-8e6dbce1f990a88457afe5db80dc8cb8d5cde292-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2542px) 100vw, 2542px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Companies like KoBold Metals and Earth AI are using AI to speed up the search for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and copper. These minerals are key for climate solutions like solar panels and electric vehicles. \u003ccite>(Lucas Aguayo Araos/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch3>Using AI in green tech mining\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Climate solutions from solar panels to electric vehicles require immense amounts of minerals like cobalt, lithium and copper. But current supplies are not enough to meet growing demand. By 2030, projected lithium demand will be five times the current global supply, according to the\u003ca href=\"https://www.iea.org/\"> International Energy Agency\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, governments, researchers, and companies are using AI to explore critical minerals. Colin Williams, mineral resources program coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey, writes in an email that his team\u003ca href=\"https://criticalminerals.darpa.mil/\"> uses AI\u003c/a> to analyze data to determine which areas in the U.S. have the best potential for mining critical metals. He adds that using AI means “dramatic time savings.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is a lot of data out there about what it looks like under the earth’s surface. Using AI to sift through all this data helps minimize uncertainty, Williams says. Because mining operations \u003ca href=\"https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/research/ces-2023-monetary-tightening-weighs-down-exploration-activity\">spend billions of dollars\u003c/a> trying to find profitable areas to exploit, companies say using AI can help save a lot of time and money in locating minerals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Companies \u003ca href=\"https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/mining-looks-to-ai-for-edge-in-finding-new-metal-76345909\">all over the world\u003c/a> —from Australian \u003ca href=\"https://sensore.com/about/\">SensOre\u003c/a> to California-based\u003ca href=\"https://www.koboldmetals.com/\"> KoBold Metals\u003c/a> —are now using AI to explore for minerals on several continents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A student project has revealed yet another power of artificial intelligence — it can be extremely good at geolocating where photos are taken.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The project, known as Predicting Image Geolocations (or PIGEON, for short), was designed by three Stanford graduate students to identify locations on Google Street View. [pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst, American Civil Liberties Union\"]‘From a privacy point of view, your location can be a very sensitive set of information.’[/pullquote]But when presented with a few personal photos it had never seen before, the program was, in the majority of cases, able to make accurate guesses about where the photos were taken.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like so many applications of AI, this new power is likely to be a double-edged sword: It may help people identify the locations of old snapshots from relatives or allow field biologists to conduct rapid surveys of entire regions for invasive plant species, to name but a few of many likely beneficial applications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it could also be used to expose information about individuals they never intended to share, says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union who studies technology. Stanley worries that similar technology, which he feels will almost certainly become widely available, could be used for government surveillance, corporate tracking, or even stalking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From a privacy point of view, your location can be a very sensitive set of information,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>AI has arrived at your destination\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>It all began with a class at Stanford: Computer Science 330, Deep Multi-task and Meta Learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three friends, Michal Skreta, Silas Alberti and Lukas Haas, needed a project, and they shared a common hobby:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“During that time, we were actually big players of a Swedish game called GeoGuessr,” Skreta says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.geoguessr.com/\">GeoGuessr\u003c/a> is an online game that challenges players to geolocate photos. It has a pretty straightforward setup, Skreta says: “You enter the game, you’re placed somewhere in the world on Google Street View, and you’re supposed to place a pin on the map that is your best guess of the location.” [aside postID=news_11960814 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-01-KQED-1020x673.jpg']The game has over 50 million players who compete in world championships, adds Silas Alberti, another member of the project. “It has YouTubers, Twitch streamers, pro players.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The students wanted to see if they could build an AI player that could do better than humans. They started with an existing system for analyzing images called \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/research/clip\">CLIP\u003c/a>. It’s a neural network program that can learn about visual images just by reading text about them, and it’s built by OpenAI, the same company that makes ChatGPT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Stanford students trained their version of the system with images from Google Street View.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We created our own dataset of around 500,000 street view images,” Alberti says. “That’s actually not that much data, [and] we were able to get quite spectacular performance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The team added additional pieces to the program, including one that helped the AI classify images by their position on the globe. When completed, the PIGEON system could identify the location of a Google Street View image anywhere on Earth. [pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Silas Alberti, PhD student, Stanford University\"]‘We created our own dataset of around 500,000 street view images. That’s actually not that much data, [and] we were able to get quite spectacular performance.’[/pullquote]It guesses the correct country 95% of the time and can usually pick a location within about 25 miles of the actual site.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next, they pitted their algorithm against a human. Specifically, a really good human named Trevor Rainbolt. Rainbolt is a legend in geoguessing circles —he recently geolocated \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0P96JBS-ei/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==\">a photo of a random tree\u003c/a> in Illinois, just for kicks — but he met his match with PIGEON. In \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV--cU?si=6yPIPfSyMmVHZh8r\">a head-to-head competition\u003c/a>, he lost multiple rounds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We weren’t the first AI that played against Rainbolt,” Alberti says. “We’re just the first AI that won against Rainbolt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Noticing the little things\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>PIGEON excels because it can pick up on all the little clues humans can, and many more subtle ones, like slight differences in foliage, soil, and weather. [pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Michal Skreta, student, Stanford University\"]‘You like this destination in Italy; where in the world could you go if you want to see something similar?’[/pullquote]The group says the technology has all kinds of potential applications. It could identify roads or power lines that need fixing, help monitor biodiversity, or be used as a teaching tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Skreta believes ordinary people will also find it useful: “You like this destination in Italy; where in the world could you go if you want to see something similar?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To test PIGEON’s performance, I gave it five personal photos from a trip I took across America years ago, none of which have been published online. Some photos were snapped in cities, but a few were taken in places nowhere near roads or other easily recognizable landmarks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That didn’t seem to matter much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It guessed a campsite in Yellowstone within around 35 miles of the actual location. The program placed another photo, taken on a street in San Francisco, within a few city blocks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not every photo was an easy match: The program mistakenly linked one image taken on the front range of Wyoming to a spot along the front range of Colorado, more than a hundred miles away. And it guessed that a picture of the Snake River Canyon in Idaho was of the Kawarau Gorge in New Zealand (in fairness, the two landscapes look remarkably similar). [aside label='More Stories on Artificial Intelligence' tag='artificial-intelligence']The ACLU’s Jay Stanley thinks despite these stumbles, the program clearly shows the potential power of AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The fact that this was done as a student project makes you wonder what could be done by, for example, Google,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Google already has a feature known as “location estimation,” which uses AI to guess a photo’s location. Currently, it only uses a catalog of roughly a million landmarks rather than the\u003ca href=\"https://blog.google/products/maps/street-view-15-new-features/#:~:text=Fast%20forward%20to%20today%3A%20There,from%20their%20phone%20or%20computer.\"> 220 billion street-view images\u003c/a> that Google has collected. The company told NPR that users \u003ca href=\"https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6153599?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid\">can disable the feature\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanley worries that companies might soon use AI to track where you’ve traveled or that governments might check your photos to see if you’ve visited a country on a watchlist. Stalking and abuse are also obvious threats, he says. In the past, Stanley says, people have been able to remove GPS location tagging from photos they post online. That may not work anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Stanford graduate students are well aware of the risks. They’ve written \u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05845\">a paper\u003c/a> on their technique, which they co-authored with their professor, Chelsea Finn — but they’ve held back from making their full model publicly available precisely because of these concerns, they say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, Stanley thinks using AI for geolocation will become even more powerful going forward. He doubts there’s much to be done — except to be aware of what’s in the background photos you post online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The group says the technology has all kinds of potential applications. It could identify roads or power lines that need fixing, help monitor biodiversity, or be used as a teaching tool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Skreta believes ordinary people will also find it useful: “You like this destination in Italy; where in the world could you go if you want to see something similar?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To test PIGEON’s performance, I gave it five personal photos from a trip I took across America years ago, none of which have been published online. Some photos were snapped in cities, but a few were taken in places nowhere near roads or other easily recognizable landmarks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That didn’t seem to matter much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It guessed a campsite in Yellowstone within around 35 miles of the actual location. The program placed another photo, taken on a street in San Francisco, within a few city blocks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not every photo was an easy match: The program mistakenly linked one image taken on the front range of Wyoming to a spot along the front range of Colorado, more than a hundred miles away. And it guessed that a picture of the Snake River Canyon in Idaho was of the Kawarau Gorge in New Zealand (in fairness, the two landscapes look remarkably similar). \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The ACLU’s Jay Stanley thinks despite these stumbles, the program clearly shows the potential power of AI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The fact that this was done as a student project makes you wonder what could be done by, for example, Google,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Google already has a feature known as “location estimation,” which uses AI to guess a photo’s location. Currently, it only uses a catalog of roughly a million landmarks rather than the\u003ca href=\"https://blog.google/products/maps/street-view-15-new-features/#:~:text=Fast%20forward%20to%20today%3A%20There,from%20their%20phone%20or%20computer.\"> 220 billion street-view images\u003c/a> that Google has collected. The company told NPR that users \u003ca href=\"https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6153599?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid\">can disable the feature\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanley worries that companies might soon use AI to track where you’ve traveled or that governments might check your photos to see if you’ve visited a country on a watchlist. Stalking and abuse are also obvious threats, he says. In the past, Stanley says, people have been able to remove GPS location tagging from photos they post online. That may not work anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Stanford graduate students are well aware of the risks. They’ve written \u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05845\">a paper\u003c/a> on their technique, which they co-authored with their professor, Chelsea Finn — but they’ve held back from making their full model publicly available precisely because of these concerns, they say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, Stanley thinks using AI for geolocation will become even more powerful going forward. He doubts there’s much to be done — except to be aware of what’s in the background photos you post online.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Protesters Outside Google in San Francisco Call for Immediate End to 'Project Nimbus'",
"headTitle": "Protesters Outside Google in San Francisco Call for Immediate End to ‘Project Nimbus’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Pro-Palestinian Google employees protested outside Google offices in San Francisco on Thursday to demand the tech giant cancel a $1.2 billion contract — called “Project Nimbus” — with the Israeli government and military.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An estimated 500 protesters chanted “Google, Google you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” reflecting growing outrage over the contract during Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza. The Israeli Finance Ministry described the Project Nimbus contract as “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969956\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969956\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL.jpg\" alt=\"Protesters holding signs.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demonstrators gather outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco on Dec. 14, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Valerie Kuan, a software engineer at Google who was at the protest, said she doesn’t work on Project Nimbus “but this is an issue that affects all Google workers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Google is looking to exploit all of their workers’ labor to profit off of war and profit off of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people,” said Kuan, who has worked at Google for a little more than a year. “There are many ways to run a profitable company without supporting genocide.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969954\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969954\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL.jpg\" alt=\"An young woman with Palestinian garb speaks to protesters through a loud speaker.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A demonstrator speaks outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco on Dec. 14, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A recent\u003ca href=\"https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/\"> investigation by +972 Magazine\u003c/a>, an Israeli-Palestinian journalism publication, revealed that the Israeli military is using artificial intelligence to target and assassinate Palestinians in Gaza. The reporting does not identify the source of the technology, but Google workers with the \u003ca href=\"https://www.notechforapartheid.com\">No Tech For Apartheid\u003c/a> campaign claim their company and its Project Nimbus partner, Amazon, are complicit in the Israeli siege.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote align=\"right\" size=\"medium\" citation=\"Khaled Allen, software engineer, Google\"]‘I have a lot of faith in Google as a company. In general, it is a force for good in the world. Because I believe that, that’s why I’m here.’[/pullquote]Protester Khaled Allen, a Google software engineer of part-Palestinian descent, said he hasn’t been very politically active but that he feels “called to do so now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I feel very connected to the issue because of my background,” said Allen, who has been at Google for two years. “I have a lot of faith in Google as a company. In general, it is a force for good in the world. Because I believe that, that’s why I’m here.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the protest grew Thursday night, a dozen protesters lay down on the sidewalk and covered themselves with white sheets bearing the Google logo. \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-hamas-press-on-despite-rising-deaths-tolls-on-both-sides-afe9787f\">More than 18,600 people in Gaza\u003c/a> have been killed in the war, most of them women and children, according to Gaza health officials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969953\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969953\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demonstrators gather outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In a 2021 anonymous open letter to Google and Amazon published in\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/12/google-amazon-workers-condemn-project-nimbus-israeli-military-contract\">\u003cem> The Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, employees described watching their companies “aggressively pursue contracts with institutions like the US Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and state and local police departments. These contracts are part of a disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the\u003ca href=\"https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=210303-prosecutor-statement-investigation-palestine\"> international criminal court\u003c/a>,” the letter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969959\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969959\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demonstrators gather outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Google did not respond to KQED’s request for comment for this story, but in an email to the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>, it wrote that Project Nimbus was not a military program, adding that the protest “is part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education,” the statement added. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969957\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969957\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demonstrators gather outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Last year, a group of Palestinian Google employees and their allied colleagues spoke out anonymously in a public video about the anti-Palestinian bias they said they witnessed at the company. One Palestinian Google employee said she felt like she was making her living “off the oppression of my family back home.” Another Palestinian Google employee said, “Google’s Project Nimbus will be a big ugly moment in Google’s history and a shameful and embarrassing engagement.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GI-ePG0rTA\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another group of workers recently published an\u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/googleopenletter-868f0c4477db\"> open letter\u003c/a> addressed to Google leadership accusing the company of a double standard that allows for “freedom of expression for Israeli Googlers versus Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Googlers.” The unsigned letter was attributed to “Muslim, Palestinian and Arab Google employees joined by anti-Zionist Jewish colleagues.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In another\u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vQt-eWcx-7rZxWTlx0dngRvhn_goqMdl8bPhqvucPiEenbd6KNpLGe-I_QLPLg1_K37Yrkp86ks4RXl/pub\"> unsigned open letter\u003c/a>, published in mid-October, a group of Google employees demanded the company cancel its Project Nimbus contract “and immediately cease doing business with the Israeli apartheid government and military.” The letter goes on to demand that Google leadership “issue a public condemnation of the ongoing genocide in the strongest possible terms.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Around 500 people marched and chanted outside Google offices in San Francisco in an effort to get the Silicon Valley giant to stop 'being complicit' in the mass civilian casualties in Gaza following Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Pro-Palestinian Google employees protested outside Google offices in San Francisco on Thursday to demand the tech giant cancel a $1.2 billion contract — called “Project Nimbus” — with the Israeli government and military.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An estimated 500 protesters chanted “Google, Google you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” reflecting growing outrage over the contract during Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza. The Israeli Finance Ministry described the Project Nimbus contract as “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969956\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969956\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL.jpg\" alt=\"Protesters holding signs.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-13-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demonstrators gather outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco on Dec. 14, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Valerie Kuan, a software engineer at Google who was at the protest, said she doesn’t work on Project Nimbus “but this is an issue that affects all Google workers.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Google is looking to exploit all of their workers’ labor to profit off of war and profit off of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people,” said Kuan, who has worked at Google for a little more than a year. “There are many ways to run a profitable company without supporting genocide.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969954\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969954\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL.jpg\" alt=\"An young woman with Palestinian garb speaks to protesters through a loud speaker.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-03-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A demonstrator speaks outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco on Dec. 14, 2023. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A recent\u003ca href=\"https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/\"> investigation by +972 Magazine\u003c/a>, an Israeli-Palestinian journalism publication, revealed that the Israeli military is using artificial intelligence to target and assassinate Palestinians in Gaza. The reporting does not identify the source of the technology, but Google workers with the \u003ca href=\"https://www.notechforapartheid.com\">No Tech For Apartheid\u003c/a> campaign claim their company and its Project Nimbus partner, Amazon, are complicit in the Israeli siege.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Protester Khaled Allen, a Google software engineer of part-Palestinian descent, said he hasn’t been very politically active but that he feels “called to do so now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I feel very connected to the issue because of my background,” said Allen, who has been at Google for two years. “I have a lot of faith in Google as a company. In general, it is a force for good in the world. Because I believe that, that’s why I’m here.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the protest grew Thursday night, a dozen protesters lay down on the sidewalk and covered themselves with white sheets bearing the Google logo. \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-hamas-press-on-despite-rising-deaths-tolls-on-both-sides-afe9787f\">More than 18,600 people in Gaza\u003c/a> have been killed in the war, most of them women and children, according to Gaza health officials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969953\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969953\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-02-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demonstrators gather outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In a 2021 anonymous open letter to Google and Amazon published in\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/12/google-amazon-workers-condemn-project-nimbus-israeli-military-contract\">\u003cem> The Guardian\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, employees described watching their companies “aggressively pursue contracts with institutions like the US Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and state and local police departments. These contracts are part of a disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the\u003ca href=\"https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=210303-prosecutor-statement-investigation-palestine\"> international criminal court\u003c/a>,” the letter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969959\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969959\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-12-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demonstrators gather outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Google did not respond to KQED’s request for comment for this story, but in an email to the \u003cem>San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>, it wrote that Project Nimbus was not a military program, adding that the protest “is part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education,” the statement added. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11969957\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11969957\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/12/231214-GazaGoogleProtest-16-BL-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Demonstrators gather outside Google offices in downtown San Francisco. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Last year, a group of Palestinian Google employees and their allied colleagues spoke out anonymously in a public video about the anti-Palestinian bias they said they witnessed at the company. One Palestinian Google employee said she felt like she was making her living “off the oppression of my family back home.” Another Palestinian Google employee said, “Google’s Project Nimbus will be a big ugly moment in Google’s history and a shameful and embarrassing engagement.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/2GI-ePG0rTA'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/2GI-ePG0rTA'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Another group of workers recently published an\u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/googleopenletter-868f0c4477db\"> open letter\u003c/a> addressed to Google leadership accusing the company of a double standard that allows for “freedom of expression for Israeli Googlers versus Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Googlers.” The unsigned letter was attributed to “Muslim, Palestinian and Arab Google employees joined by anti-Zionist Jewish colleagues.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In another\u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vQt-eWcx-7rZxWTlx0dngRvhn_goqMdl8bPhqvucPiEenbd6KNpLGe-I_QLPLg1_K37Yrkp86ks4RXl/pub\"> unsigned open letter\u003c/a>, published in mid-October, a group of Google employees demanded the company cancel its Project Nimbus contract “and immediately cease doing business with the Israeli apartheid government and military.” The letter goes on to demand that Google leadership “issue a public condemnation of the ongoing genocide in the strongest possible terms.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>One year ahead of the 2024 presidential election, \u003ca href=\"https://www.commoncause.org/california/our-work/\">California Common Cause\u003c/a>, a nonprofit, nonpartisan good government advocacy group, has launched the California Institute for Technology and Democracy (\u003ca href=\"https://cited.tech/\">CITED\u003c/a>), to counter the impacts of AI, deepfakes and disinformation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It makes sense that the first such effort is in California, a state that is home to the largest technology companies in the world, but also a state that has a track record of leading the nation in technology policy regulation,” said Ishan Mehta, media and democracy program director at the national branch of Common Cause in Washington D.C., during a Tuesday news conference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CITED, which claims to be the first organization of its kind at the state level, wants to serve as an information hub, recommending policies to state and congressional lawmakers and highlighting what online tools could be used to spread disinformation, especially during election seasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Much of the recent policy focus has been on the concerns of the use of AI tools for national security and law enforcement purposes, and I think rightly so. But I think now it’s also time for us to focus on how these same tools can be misused to improperly influence and manipulate our democratic processes. Whether real or not, they can pose a threat to the integrity of elections,” said Angélica Salceda, director of the ACLU of Northern California’s Democracy and Civic Engagement Program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the run-up to the 2020 election,\u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elections-voting-misinformation-race-immigration-712a5c5a9b72c1668b8c9b1eb6e0038a\"> disinformation ran riot on social media platforms\u003c/a>. Facebook ads targeting Latino and Asian American voters described Joe Biden as a communist. \u003ca href=\"https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dog-peeing-trump-sign/\">Doctored images\u003c/a> showed dogs urinating on Donald Trump campaign posters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But over the last year, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11932611/with-mass-social-media-layoffs-researchers-warn-of-rise-in-hate-speech\">major platforms have gutted their content moderation teams\u003c/a>, a shift many civil society advocates decry, especially ahead of what’s expected to be a contentious presidential election.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can all imagine a scenario where AI is used to target limited English-speaking voters and spread false information about polling locations or voting opportunities. Even without the use of AI, we’ve seen some campaigns use these tactics,” Salceda said. “Now imagine these same tactics super-charged.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disinformation landscape includes altered videos and generative AI, which has streamlined the creation of deep fakes – like \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxXpB9pSETo\">this one featuring the actor Morgan Freeman\u003c/a>. Or \u003ca href=\"https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ron-desantis-trump-gop-candidate/\">this one featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we will see in the next year ranges from the silly stuff that’s not that silly — maybe Joe Biden falling down the stairs of AirForce One — to deeply pernicious, perhaps audio of an elections official ‘caught on tape’ saying that vote by mail ballots aren’t secure,” said Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause and a CITED board member.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside label='More Silicon Valley Coverage' tag='silicon-valley']Last month, Meta’s oversight board announced it would review whether the Menlo Park-based social media giant chose poorly when it left up an altered video that suggested Biden is a “sick pedophile.” The video appeared to show the president repeatedly touching the chest of his adult granddaughter and kissing her on the cheek.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response, \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.fb.com/oversight/oversight-board-cases/president-biden-altered-video\">the company wrote in a blog post\u003c/a>: “Meta determined that the content did not violate our policies on \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/hate-speech/\">Hate Speech\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/bullying-harassment/\">Bullying and Harassment\u003c/a>, or \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/misinformation/\">Manipulated Media\u003c/a>, as laid out in our Facebook Community Standards, and left the content up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Personally, when I find myself listening to a campaign video or a TV ad, I wonder whether any aspect of those videos, including voiceovers, are AI-generated,” Salceda said. “I don’t have a trained eye or ear to know the difference right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my experience was reflective of the average voter.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CITED Director Drew Liebert, who served as chief of staff for former Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg, noted the new institute doesn’t intend to exclude Silicon Valley from the policy discussion around AI. “We also very much intend to work, as best we can, with the tech platforms, to see what we can potentially do collaboratively,” Liebert said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>One year ahead of the 2024 presidential election, \u003ca href=\"https://www.commoncause.org/california/our-work/\">California Common Cause\u003c/a>, a nonprofit, nonpartisan good government advocacy group, has launched the California Institute for Technology and Democracy (\u003ca href=\"https://cited.tech/\">CITED\u003c/a>), to counter the impacts of AI, deepfakes and disinformation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It makes sense that the first such effort is in California, a state that is home to the largest technology companies in the world, but also a state that has a track record of leading the nation in technology policy regulation,” said Ishan Mehta, media and democracy program director at the national branch of Common Cause in Washington D.C., during a Tuesday news conference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CITED, which claims to be the first organization of its kind at the state level, wants to serve as an information hub, recommending policies to state and congressional lawmakers and highlighting what online tools could be used to spread disinformation, especially during election seasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Much of the recent policy focus has been on the concerns of the use of AI tools for national security and law enforcement purposes, and I think rightly so. But I think now it’s also time for us to focus on how these same tools can be misused to improperly influence and manipulate our democratic processes. Whether real or not, they can pose a threat to the integrity of elections,” said Angélica Salceda, director of the ACLU of Northern California’s Democracy and Civic Engagement Program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the run-up to the 2020 election,\u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/elections-voting-misinformation-race-immigration-712a5c5a9b72c1668b8c9b1eb6e0038a\"> disinformation ran riot on social media platforms\u003c/a>. Facebook ads targeting Latino and Asian American voters described Joe Biden as a communist. \u003ca href=\"https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dog-peeing-trump-sign/\">Doctored images\u003c/a> showed dogs urinating on Donald Trump campaign posters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But over the last year, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11932611/with-mass-social-media-layoffs-researchers-warn-of-rise-in-hate-speech\">major platforms have gutted their content moderation teams\u003c/a>, a shift many civil society advocates decry, especially ahead of what’s expected to be a contentious presidential election.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can all imagine a scenario where AI is used to target limited English-speaking voters and spread false information about polling locations or voting opportunities. Even without the use of AI, we’ve seen some campaigns use these tactics,” Salceda said. “Now imagine these same tactics super-charged.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disinformation landscape includes altered videos and generative AI, which has streamlined the creation of deep fakes – like \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxXpB9pSETo\">this one featuring the actor Morgan Freeman\u003c/a>. Or \u003ca href=\"https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ron-desantis-trump-gop-candidate/\">this one featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we will see in the next year ranges from the silly stuff that’s not that silly — maybe Joe Biden falling down the stairs of AirForce One — to deeply pernicious, perhaps audio of an elections official ‘caught on tape’ saying that vote by mail ballots aren’t secure,” said Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause and a CITED board member.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Last month, Meta’s oversight board announced it would review whether the Menlo Park-based social media giant chose poorly when it left up an altered video that suggested Biden is a “sick pedophile.” The video appeared to show the president repeatedly touching the chest of his adult granddaughter and kissing her on the cheek.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response, \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.fb.com/oversight/oversight-board-cases/president-biden-altered-video\">the company wrote in a blog post\u003c/a>: “Meta determined that the content did not violate our policies on \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/hate-speech/\">Hate Speech\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/bullying-harassment/\">Bullying and Harassment\u003c/a>, or \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/misinformation/\">Manipulated Media\u003c/a>, as laid out in our Facebook Community Standards, and left the content up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Personally, when I find myself listening to a campaign video or a TV ad, I wonder whether any aspect of those videos, including voiceovers, are AI-generated,” Salceda said. “I don’t have a trained eye or ear to know the difference right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my experience was reflective of the average voter.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CITED Director Drew Liebert, who served as chief of staff for former Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg, noted the new institute doesn’t intend to exclude Silicon Valley from the policy discussion around AI. “We also very much intend to work, as best we can, with the tech platforms, to see what we can potentially do collaboratively,” Liebert said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>For months, photographer Merrick Morton seemed like he was playing whack-a-mole as he tried to get a hold of someone at Meta’s Instagram.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The social media platform repeatedly took down his photo archive depicting the lives of cholo and African American street culture in Los Angeles during the 1980s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This experience, once again, left him trying to navigate the best way to get his photography restored on the site, mainly with help from his contacts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morton said his account, @MerrickMortonPhoto, has been taken down three times by Instagram moderators. That is, until last week when it was permanently disabled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That time, he was notified via email that his account would no longer be active, and with that, he lost more than 60,000 followers that he had cultivated for over five years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of a sudden, one day, I lost everything,” Morton said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His archive had more than 500 historic photographs, mostly in black and white, that captured images of cholo and African American street culture in Los Angeles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11960659\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11960659 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-02-KQED-800x911.jpg\" alt=\"A person wearing sunglasses stands with his hands in his pockets\" width=\"800\" height=\"911\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-02-KQED-800x911.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-02-KQED-160x182.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-02-KQED.jpg 878w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Wolfe’ from El Hoyo Maravilla, a Mexican American street gang, in East Los Angeles, 1980. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Merrick Morton)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Among the notices Morton received from Instagram, one stated that his photos violated its community guidelines on violence or dangerous organizations. Those guidelines state that Instagram is “… not a place to support or praise, terrorism, organized crime, or hate groups.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED reached out to Meta’s press office multiple times through email to request comment. Meta did not respond in time for publication.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morton bristles at the idea that his photography belongs in the same category as terrorist organizations and hate groups like white supremacists. He defines his work as “fine art” and says his images have been displayed in many art galleries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He said it’s also journalism. His work on street gangs has been published internationally. Morton’s goal is that he wants his photographs available to archivists, students, activists and historians. It captures a unique time and place in Southern California that the mainstream media has mostly ignored.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think I’m the only photographer in the ’80s who had the cholo culture, who also captured the Black culture and also captured the interactions with the police and these communities,” Morton said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s seen how his photographs provoke discussions about ending the deadly warfare between rival street gangs in Los Angeles. His photos also raise questions about the fraught relationship between the police and the communities they patrol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But someone — or some machine — has decided these historic snapshots needed to come down, and Morton can’t get an explanation from Meta, Instagram’s parent company. These experiences have left Morton to wonder if the problem stems from the skin tone of the people he features.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Making community and connections\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Before Instagram took down his photos, Morton was building relationships with the friends and families of his subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had people communicating with me through Instagram. Family members, I was getting back to them,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few years ago, he reconnected with Charles “Bear” Spratley whom he met on the set of the 1988 movie \u003cem>Colors.\u003c/em> Directed by Dennis Hopper, the film starred Robert Duvall as a Los Angeles Police Department veteran at odds with his rookie partner, Sean Penn, over how to manage their relationships with the Black and cholo street gangs whose territory they patrolled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11960664\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11960664\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-07-KQED-800x1384.jpg\" alt=\"A screen shot of a photo of a man wearing sunglasses surrounded by other people making signs with their hands.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1384\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-07-KQED-800x1384.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-07-KQED-160x277.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-07-KQED.jpg 816w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Director Dennis Hopper surrounded by East Coast Crips\u003cbr>on the set of his film ‘Colors.’ This photograph was taken down by Instagram. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Merrick Morton)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Spratley was an active member of the 89 East Coast Crips during filming. Through Morton, he was hired as an extra and received on-screen credit for working in the art department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few years ago, Spratley found Morton on Instagram.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had been looking for a way to get in touch with whoever was involved in those pictures for years. They were memories for us, you know,” Spratley said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once reunited, Morton learned that many of Spratley’s friends, whom Morton had met and photographed for \u003cem>Colors,\u003c/em> had died on the streets. According to Spratley, the ones who are still alive have left gang life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of these guys, if they made it through living, they are changed. They have changed their lives,” Spratley said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After attending hundreds of funerals for young men from his community, Spratley founded an organization called \u003ca href=\"https://www.babyla.org/\">B.A.B.Y.\u003c/a>, or Brothers Against Banging Youth, that works to prevent young people from joining gangs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morton, who currently earns a living as a set photographer for film and television, has helped Spratley find union entertainment jobs for young men who have gone through B.A.B.Y.’s programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Algorithmic bias in content moderation\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For Morton, Instagram at its best connects people, challenges systems and creates opportunities. But at its worst, it perpetuates social biases against people of color. He suspects his photographs were swept up by artificial intelligence applications because of the skin color of his subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To prove his point, Morton cites this side-by-side comparison: On the left, is a photograph he took that was removed by Instagram. On the right, is a photograph of the Hells Angels, a group that federal law enforcement calls “a criminal threat on six different continents.” The Anti-Defamation League has linked them to white supremacists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11960666\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11960666\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"Screen shots from two different Instagram accounts: outlawarchive of the left and marrickmortonphoto on the right.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1055\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-800x422.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-1020x538.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-160x84.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-1536x810.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-1920x1013.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">OutlawArchive (right) is currently up on Instagram. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Merrick Morton)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When a machine moderates content, it evaluates text and images as data using an algorithm that has been trained on existing data sets. The process for selecting training data has come under fire as it’s been shown to have racial, gender and other biases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joy Buolamwini, a digital activist at the MIT Media Lab, has written that facial analysis software was unable to recognize her until she put on a white mask. She further demonstrated how artificial intelligence had trouble identifying three famous Black women: Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams and Michelle Obama. Obama, for instance, was identified by artificial intelligence as a young man with a toupee in this \u003ca href=\"https://time.com/5520558/artificial-intelligence-racial-gender-bias/\">video\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Buolamwini argued that “when technology denigrates even these iconic women, it is time to re-examine how these systems are built and who they truly serve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The pitfalls of content moderation\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Despite his account being permanently banned, Morton believes that if he could get in touch with an actual human being at Instagram, he could explain why his archive should remain accessible to the public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He did, however, manage to locate someone through his network who knew someone who worked at Instagram, and his original account was restored then. Once his images were back, Morton received a brief apology email from the Facebook Team on behalf of Instagram. (Meta owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more.) [aside label='More on Artificial Intelligence' tag='artificial-intelligence'] But, since the latest ban on his account in March, Morton has been unable to get through to someone at Instagram to plead his case once again. Since then, he filed an appeal but hasn’t received a response.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Attorney Jessica González of the nonprofit Freepress.net, is a watchdog for Meta’s content moderation practices. She said she has observed differential treatment across the social media platform, depending on the race of the subject in the image in question or who posted it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve seen this time and again, Meta taking down content by and about people of color,” she said. “While similar content by and about white people remains up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During recent national elections, González noted that neither Instagram nor Facebook managed to keep hate speech and violent organizing off of their platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve raised this with Meta many times leading up to the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms,” González said. “We had militia groups not just posting pictures with guns, or that seemed to be promoting violence, but actually organizing violent rallies, calling for people to bring guns.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With an estimated 2.3 billion worldwide users, Instagram cannot sift through its sheer volume of content using human moderators. Artificial intelligence can be used to make the “first cut” before actual human beings take a second look. Human reviewers, however, have their own biases, and some may struggle with prolonged exposure to harsh images. [pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Jessica González, attorney, nonprofit Freepress.net\"]‘We’ve seen this time and again, Meta taking down content by and about people of color. While similar content by and about white people remains up.’[/pullquote] Brian Fishman led the team at Facebook that removed hate organizations and terrorist groups from its platform. He now runs Cinder, a trust and safety company that builds custom content moderation tools. He said he believes that making the internet safe requires nuanced thinking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are circumstances where AI is actually more accurate in some circumstances than human reviewers, but there’s also plenty of examples where that’s not the case,” he said. “We know that AI misses things, and calculating that risk and understanding what that risk may be is really difficult.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He went on to acknowledge that many AI scientists are just beginning to understand how to manage this powerful new technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They don’t necessarily just want to suck up everything, they want to be able to understand whether they are inadvertently introducing bias into their models based on the training data that they have selected originally,” Fishman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morton, in the meantime, created an alternate Instagram account, but has only gained about half of his original followers back. He said he hopes to keep the new archive up and fly under the content-moderation radar for as long as possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I feel it’s important because the public has the right to know. People in these communities have the right to see these images,” Morton said. “Educators have the right to see these images. Curators and fine artists have the right to see these images.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "An LA-based photographer says his Instagram account that documents 1980s cholo and African American street culture has been banned repeatedly due to racial bias.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>For months, photographer Merrick Morton seemed like he was playing whack-a-mole as he tried to get a hold of someone at Meta’s Instagram.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The social media platform repeatedly took down his photo archive depicting the lives of cholo and African American street culture in Los Angeles during the 1980s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This experience, once again, left him trying to navigate the best way to get his photography restored on the site, mainly with help from his contacts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morton said his account, @MerrickMortonPhoto, has been taken down three times by Instagram moderators. That is, until last week when it was permanently disabled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That time, he was notified via email that his account would no longer be active, and with that, he lost more than 60,000 followers that he had cultivated for over five years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of a sudden, one day, I lost everything,” Morton said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His archive had more than 500 historic photographs, mostly in black and white, that captured images of cholo and African American street culture in Los Angeles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11960659\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11960659 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-02-KQED-800x911.jpg\" alt=\"A person wearing sunglasses stands with his hands in his pockets\" width=\"800\" height=\"911\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-02-KQED-800x911.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-02-KQED-160x182.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-02-KQED.jpg 878w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Wolfe’ from El Hoyo Maravilla, a Mexican American street gang, in East Los Angeles, 1980. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Merrick Morton)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Among the notices Morton received from Instagram, one stated that his photos violated its community guidelines on violence or dangerous organizations. Those guidelines state that Instagram is “… not a place to support or praise, terrorism, organized crime, or hate groups.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED reached out to Meta’s press office multiple times through email to request comment. Meta did not respond in time for publication.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morton bristles at the idea that his photography belongs in the same category as terrorist organizations and hate groups like white supremacists. He defines his work as “fine art” and says his images have been displayed in many art galleries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He said it’s also journalism. His work on street gangs has been published internationally. Morton’s goal is that he wants his photographs available to archivists, students, activists and historians. It captures a unique time and place in Southern California that the mainstream media has mostly ignored.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think I’m the only photographer in the ’80s who had the cholo culture, who also captured the Black culture and also captured the interactions with the police and these communities,” Morton said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s seen how his photographs provoke discussions about ending the deadly warfare between rival street gangs in Los Angeles. His photos also raise questions about the fraught relationship between the police and the communities they patrol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But someone — or some machine — has decided these historic snapshots needed to come down, and Morton can’t get an explanation from Meta, Instagram’s parent company. These experiences have left Morton to wonder if the problem stems from the skin tone of the people he features.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Making community and connections\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Before Instagram took down his photos, Morton was building relationships with the friends and families of his subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had people communicating with me through Instagram. Family members, I was getting back to them,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few years ago, he reconnected with Charles “Bear” Spratley whom he met on the set of the 1988 movie \u003cem>Colors.\u003c/em> Directed by Dennis Hopper, the film starred Robert Duvall as a Los Angeles Police Department veteran at odds with his rookie partner, Sean Penn, over how to manage their relationships with the Black and cholo street gangs whose territory they patrolled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11960664\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11960664\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-07-KQED-800x1384.jpg\" alt=\"A screen shot of a photo of a man wearing sunglasses surrounded by other people making signs with their hands.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1384\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-07-KQED-800x1384.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-07-KQED-160x277.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-07-KQED.jpg 816w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Director Dennis Hopper surrounded by East Coast Crips\u003cbr>on the set of his film ‘Colors.’ This photograph was taken down by Instagram. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Merrick Morton)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Spratley was an active member of the 89 East Coast Crips during filming. Through Morton, he was hired as an extra and received on-screen credit for working in the art department.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few years ago, Spratley found Morton on Instagram.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had been looking for a way to get in touch with whoever was involved in those pictures for years. They were memories for us, you know,” Spratley said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once reunited, Morton learned that many of Spratley’s friends, whom Morton had met and photographed for \u003cem>Colors,\u003c/em> had died on the streets. According to Spratley, the ones who are still alive have left gang life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of these guys, if they made it through living, they are changed. They have changed their lives,” Spratley said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After attending hundreds of funerals for young men from his community, Spratley founded an organization called \u003ca href=\"https://www.babyla.org/\">B.A.B.Y.\u003c/a>, or Brothers Against Banging Youth, that works to prevent young people from joining gangs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morton, who currently earns a living as a set photographer for film and television, has helped Spratley find union entertainment jobs for young men who have gone through B.A.B.Y.’s programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Algorithmic bias in content moderation\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>For Morton, Instagram at its best connects people, challenges systems and creates opportunities. But at its worst, it perpetuates social biases against people of color. He suspects his photographs were swept up by artificial intelligence applications because of the skin color of his subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To prove his point, Morton cites this side-by-side comparison: On the left, is a photograph he took that was removed by Instagram. On the right, is a photograph of the Hells Angels, a group that federal law enforcement calls “a criminal threat on six different continents.” The Anti-Defamation League has linked them to white supremacists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11960666\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11960666\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"Screen shots from two different Instagram accounts: outlawarchive of the left and marrickmortonphoto on the right.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1055\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-800x422.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-1020x538.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-160x84.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-1536x810.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/091123-PHOTO-AI-RM-09-KQED-1920x1013.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">OutlawArchive (right) is currently up on Instagram. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Merrick Morton)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When a machine moderates content, it evaluates text and images as data using an algorithm that has been trained on existing data sets. The process for selecting training data has come under fire as it’s been shown to have racial, gender and other biases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joy Buolamwini, a digital activist at the MIT Media Lab, has written that facial analysis software was unable to recognize her until she put on a white mask. She further demonstrated how artificial intelligence had trouble identifying three famous Black women: Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams and Michelle Obama. Obama, for instance, was identified by artificial intelligence as a young man with a toupee in this \u003ca href=\"https://time.com/5520558/artificial-intelligence-racial-gender-bias/\">video\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Buolamwini argued that “when technology denigrates even these iconic women, it is time to re-examine how these systems are built and who they truly serve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The pitfalls of content moderation\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Despite his account being permanently banned, Morton believes that if he could get in touch with an actual human being at Instagram, he could explain why his archive should remain accessible to the public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He did, however, manage to locate someone through his network who knew someone who worked at Instagram, and his original account was restored then. Once his images were back, Morton received a brief apology email from the Facebook Team on behalf of Instagram. (Meta owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more.) \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> But, since the latest ban on his account in March, Morton has been unable to get through to someone at Instagram to plead his case once again. Since then, he filed an appeal but hasn’t received a response.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Attorney Jessica González of the nonprofit Freepress.net, is a watchdog for Meta’s content moderation practices. She said she has observed differential treatment across the social media platform, depending on the race of the subject in the image in question or who posted it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve seen this time and again, Meta taking down content by and about people of color,” she said. “While similar content by and about white people remains up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During recent national elections, González noted that neither Instagram nor Facebook managed to keep hate speech and violent organizing off of their platforms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve raised this with Meta many times leading up to the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms,” González said. “We had militia groups not just posting pictures with guns, or that seemed to be promoting violence, but actually organizing violent rallies, calling for people to bring guns.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With an estimated 2.3 billion worldwide users, Instagram cannot sift through its sheer volume of content using human moderators. Artificial intelligence can be used to make the “first cut” before actual human beings take a second look. Human reviewers, however, have their own biases, and some may struggle with prolonged exposure to harsh images. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> Brian Fishman led the team at Facebook that removed hate organizations and terrorist groups from its platform. He now runs Cinder, a trust and safety company that builds custom content moderation tools. He said he believes that making the internet safe requires nuanced thinking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are circumstances where AI is actually more accurate in some circumstances than human reviewers, but there’s also plenty of examples where that’s not the case,” he said. “We know that AI misses things, and calculating that risk and understanding what that risk may be is really difficult.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He went on to acknowledge that many AI scientists are just beginning to understand how to manage this powerful new technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They don’t necessarily just want to suck up everything, they want to be able to understand whether they are inadvertently introducing bias into their models based on the training data that they have selected originally,” Fishman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morton, in the meantime, created an alternate Instagram account, but has only gained about half of his original followers back. He said he hopes to keep the new archive up and fly under the content-moderation radar for as long as possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I feel it’s important because the public has the right to know. People in these communities have the right to see these images,” Morton said. “Educators have the right to see these images. Curators and fine artists have the right to see these images.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Get Ready For More Robotaxis in S.F.",
"headTitle": "Get Ready For More Robotaxis in S.F. | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">View the full episode transcript.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This episode contains explicit language.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Franciscans can expect to see more driverless cars on the road after California regulators approved a permit to allow Waymo and Cruise to charge fares.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once again, the city is the testing ground for new technology. And people on both sides have strong feelings about it. Ida Mojadad from the San Francisco Standard breaks it all down for us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC7090345903\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, And welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. Over the weekend, some self-driving cars, a.k.a. autonomous vehicles, a.k.a. robo taxis, got themselves into another little pickle in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Unidentified: \u003c/strong>What the f•ck They’re–\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Several of these self-driving cars were just chillin in the middle of the road. Blinkers on blocking all kinds of traffic, apparently because of connectivity issues caused by the Outside Lands Music Festival. And the thing is, people have feelings about whether these self-driving cars are safer than human drivers. And whatever happens, there’s no doubt that we’re going to continue hearing about these things because California regulators just gave the go ahead for companies to put an unlimited number of these robo taxis on the roads in San Francisco. Today, the debate over self-driving cars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong> So, I pass by a cruise fleet every single day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Ida Mojadad: is a reporter for the San Francisco Standard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>I see it on my way home. On the way to work. Everywhere in between. They’re everywhere, really. But it’s still just a very weird sight, even though they’ve been pretty dominant on the streets this whole year. It’s still new and weird.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I think I probably fall in that weirded out bucket. But I mean, how long have people been talking about these robo taxis? How long have they been like, I guess, driving around San Francisco at this point?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So the two that are in San Francisco, Cruise and Waymo have been able to operate and test driverless in the city since about last summer, but they have been really noticeable this whole year, especially in the spring. As you know, certain conflicts have emerged and more people have been able to take them. They have a waitlist for them, but they have tested trusted passengers. So as more people have been able to take them and and there’s just been more run ins with them, they’ve been really noticeable this whole year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>And you mentioned Cruise and Waymo, these two big companies behind these driverless vehicles. Can you tell me about those companies? I know I know this idea has been a techie dream for a while.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Sure. So Cruise is owned by General Motors and Waymo is run by Google’s parent company known as Alphabet. A lot of companies have invested in this technology. Billions have been poured into it, but these are the two that are currently in San Francisco and now able to carry people without a driver.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I mean, what is with these companies obsession with driverless cars? Like why are they putting so much effort into expanding these fleets?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>I think essentially they see it’s the way of the future. They are very enthusiastic about how transformative it can be for people. Their frequent, you know, arguments for it is that it can provide safer streets because they they say that they drive safer than humans and that they have an electric fleet. So it will help reduce emissions. But essentially, they see it as being the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>We see San Francisco as a litmus test for the commercialization of Robotaxis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>News anchor: is the CEO of Cruise and he’s been pretty vocal and active about his company and shared excitement to to expand not just in San Francisco but cities across the country and to do a quick and aggressively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>You know, the rate of expansion has been pretty impressive. And this is not because we’re going just just going wild here. It’s actually because the system itself is improving so quickly. And so even just a couple of weeks ago on the GM earnings call, I said we were at about 10,000 rides per week. This last week it was 15,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>A lot of people have been talking about these driverless cars. They’ve been on the roads in San Francisco. What have they been allowed to do up until now?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So Waymo has been able to drive around with these cars for all hours of the day. And Cruise has been able to do during certain hours, mostly at night. But both of them essentially have not been able to charge people without a safety driver present. And that was the biggest hurdle to, you know, expanding their their business operations, essentially. Prior to the vote, Waymo had 250 vehicles in the city with about 100 in operation. Crews has about 400 with 300 operating at night as of last week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Well, I know a really important commission just made a huge decision about expanding these fleets in San Francisco. Can you remind us what the you see is and what was that meeting about exactly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>The California Public Utilities Commission is, in this case tasked with weighing passenger safety in these autonomous vehicles known as robo taxis. And they already approved these, you know, initial permits that allow them to operate on the streets. And now they have just made a big decision to let them operate and charge people, saying that they met the requirements that were asked of them in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I know that there were people who are both for and against these robotaxis at this California Public Utilities Commission meeting. I know these companies, of course, are huge proponents of these, but who else was coming out in favor of robo taxis?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So some big supporters are some street safety advocates, but also a lot of groups that advocate for blind people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Activist: \u003c/strong>As a blind woman, I am here fully to support autonomous technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>They seem to be very enthusiastic about it. They have already been, you know, in talks with these companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Activist: \u003c/strong>Not only has being a Waymo tested rider provided me with a level of independence that I have never been able to experience before. It has provided me with a feeling of safety that I’ve never had before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Not all disability advocates agree, but they seem to be the most enthusiastic about this. And then there’s also a union, SEIU, that was also in favor of this, because they have been assured by one of the companies that they will be union jobs and their members need jobs right now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>SEIU Spokesperson \u003c/strong>We already represent workers within cruise spaces. Cruise is one of the few tech companies in San Francisco that is celebrating the fact that they want to stay in San Francisco and operate in San Francisco. And right now, we need to be able to celebrate those opportunities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>There’s also this group Safer Roads for All, which is actually affiliated with the companies. What? What’s their deal? Who are they?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>They are more of a campaign that brings together tech industry groups. But Waymo is a the only actual company behind that. So these tech industry groups are advocating to let this technology move on. And, you know, the groups behind these have, you know, been advocating for anything from just general tech industry things to specifically autonomous vehicles. But essentially, they are tech groups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>How would you maybe summarize what it is that people like about these robo taxis?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>In essence, I think it’s the convenience of being able to get from point A to point B.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>Autonomous vehicles represent a route to safer roads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Without driving themselves, without dealing with parking and without having a person in the vehicle. Maybe there’s more privacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Advocate: \u003c/strong>As a woman who frequently needs to take rideshare or public transportation on a regular basis, and especially during evening hours, I feel much safer knowing that I’m writing, in a judgment free discrimination, free beer free vehicle rather than one that you nervously navigate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>There’s a novelty. And until last week, they had to be free when there was no driver.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>I encourage the panel to please embrace this technology that our city and region have long been renowned for. Thank you for your time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>So, I mean, there’s been a lot of excitement I know, around these, but there have also been some really strong feelings about them, too. Who is coming out against these robo taxis?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>The most vocal opponents of a large expansion of these vehicles are essentially human drivers, those who drive Uber and Lyft and taxi cabs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Driver: \u003c/strong>[SPANISH]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Translator: \u003c/strong>I’m raising five children, if the driverless cars expand, they’re going to take away the work from us. And I have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>As well as some disability advocates who feel like this really just isn’t ready for them. People with more like physical disabilities, they’re in a wheelchair.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Activist: \u003c/strong>It’s an issue that we we don’t yet have an agreement on what accessibility looks like. How do folks like myself who are full time wheelchair users enter and use and exit these vehicles safely?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>City officials from departments of for first responders, transportation agencies and you know Mayor London breed the Board of supervisors President Aaron Peskin are really not for an immediate big expansion. They’re urging more of an incremental approach, but there’s also not a lot that they can do to to stop that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>And I know there’s also a lot of safety concerns from firefighters and also police and also first responders. Can you describe some of those incidents for us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>Now to an autonomous car that got stuck for hours today on San Francisco Street. This is the latest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So the fire department has tallied over 50 incidents this year where they have been blocked from doing their job because one of these vehicles, you know, stopped, maybe has overreacted and just didn’t want to run into anything. It’s hard to say exactly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: : \u003c/strong>Firefighters describe driverless cars rolling into fire scenes, running over hoses, even having to break windshields to stop a vehicle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>It’s meant that sometimes these firefighters, while they’re, you know, trying to respond to a fire, are stuck babysitting a robotaxi for a roughly half an hour, which is not what the robotaxi companies themselves say happens. But it’s it’s been noticeable enough to interfere with their jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Jeanine Nicholson: \u003c/strong>I’m not it’s high technology. What I am is part of safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>The San Francisco Fire Department chief is Jeanine Nicholson, and she has been pretty vocal that it’s not their job to babysit these cars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Jeanine Nicholson: \u003c/strong>Every second can make the difference if you are blocked by an autonomous vehicle. A fire will double in size. And even if that could lead to more and to the people in that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>It is the job of these companies to stay out of their way and train their cars to stay out of their way, and that the training that first responders have received so far from the companies they say doesn’t match what’s actually happening on the ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Jeanine Nicholson: \u003c/strong>But what would have really helped would have been a two way conversation seven years ago. It’s been a one way conversation up until very recently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>And ultimately, she feels that the transparency has been lacking, the collaboration has been lacking, and that it just overall needs to stop interfering with doing the business of saving lives and people’s homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Jeanine Nicholson: \u003c/strong>It’s the unpredictability, the obstructions and the lack of working with us is really that it is really a problem. They are still not ready for prime time because of how they have impacted our operations. And and, you know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>And I feel like I also have to ask you about the cones that are being put on these robo taxis sort of as a form of protest. What are those about?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So over the summer, it was another noticeable aspect of these cars is that it has been that there’s been some activists who were placing cones on them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: : \u003c/strong>Marking autonomous vehicles as traffic hazards. The group Safe Street Rebels is placing cones on cruise and Waymo cars as a way to temporarily stop that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>You know, would basically make them not go anywhere and have to be retrieved by the companies. You know, there’s even been some like reports that a firefighter has done that to to to prevent them from interfering further. But the city does not condone it. And it’s it’s just the most visible sign of resistance to this technology and some of the havoc that people say it’s been bringing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>In terms of what’s next. I do want to ask you about the commission vote. I know they ultimately approved this new permit for robo taxis. Can you explain how they came to that vote?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So Commissioner Genevieve Sharma was one of the four commissioners who was urging caution, saying they’re not ready for prime time as well, and that they just need more time to really understand the data to from these companies and from the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Unidentified: \u003c/strong>Because of this insufficient record. I believe it is premature to vote to approve these resolutions today. Instead, the resolution should be held or withdrawn so that crews and Waymo have the additional time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>The other three commissioners voted in favor for saying that they met the requirements that were asked of them, that they can always add more restrictions later. And one of the commissioners, Commissioner John Reynolds, was a little bit more enthusiastic about them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>John Reynolds \u003c/strong>Today is the first of many steps in bringing transportation services to Californians and setting a successful and transparent model for other states to follow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>He actually used to be general counsel for Cruise, but didn’t have to recuse himself because enough time had passed. Commissioner Reynolds said that, you know, he’s able to advocate for both, you know, the people of California and can see what this technology does, essentially.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Unidentified: \u003c/strong>Commissioner John Reynolds. Yes. Mr. Houck? Yes. Commissioner Sherman. No as. Alice Reynolds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Advocate: \u003c/strong>Yes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Unknown: \u003c/strong>The vote is three one, tthe item passes. All right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I will now. Well, you mentioned this means there’s going to be a huge expansion of these fleets in San Francisco. But I mean, I definitely have not seen one of these robot taxis where I live in Vallejo. But, I mean, with this vote, does that mean that we could see them possibly expand to other cities?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>This vote is specific to San Francisco, but there are many other companies that are doing testing in the Bay Area, both on the peninsula and other places. So people in Nevada Bay Area will probably see these around as more companies continue to test and seek more approvals. Waymo and Cruise are going to be more dominant in the city itself, but everyone’s going to be seeing them more in the future, that’s for sure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Well, I mean, I that this for some reason feels like such a San Francisco story. What do you think this debate says about where San Francisco is at right now?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Well, San Francisco is kind of once again the testing ground for a lot of this emerging technology. We saw with Uber and Lyft. That was our biggest example. And this time, city officials are really not wanting to be the guinea pigs. But for other people, it’s really exciting to be the first ones to do this and to see this, you know, get the first access to a glimpse into the future, a little bit of the Jetsons people compared to. So there’s kind of this split and excitement and trepidation about where this leaves the city. But once again, the city is seeing it before many others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Well, Ida, thank you so much for joining us on the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>That was Ida Mojadad, a reporter for the San Francisco Standard. This 28 minute conversation with Ida was cut down and edited by producer Maria Esquinca. It was pitched by senior editor Alan Motecillo, who added all the tape. This episode was scored by me. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevara. The Bay is a production of member supported KQED in San Francisco. Thank you so much for listening to next time.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">View the full episode transcript.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This episode contains explicit language.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Franciscans can expect to see more driverless cars on the road after California regulators approved a permit to allow Waymo and Cruise to charge fares.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once again, the city is the testing ground for new technology. And people on both sides have strong feelings about it. Ida Mojadad from the San Francisco Standard breaks it all down for us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC7090345903\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, And welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. Over the weekend, some self-driving cars, a.k.a. autonomous vehicles, a.k.a. robo taxis, got themselves into another little pickle in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Unidentified: \u003c/strong>What the f•ck They’re–\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Several of these self-driving cars were just chillin in the middle of the road. Blinkers on blocking all kinds of traffic, apparently because of connectivity issues caused by the Outside Lands Music Festival. And the thing is, people have feelings about whether these self-driving cars are safer than human drivers. And whatever happens, there’s no doubt that we’re going to continue hearing about these things because California regulators just gave the go ahead for companies to put an unlimited number of these robo taxis on the roads in San Francisco. Today, the debate over self-driving cars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong> So, I pass by a cruise fleet every single day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Ida Mojadad: is a reporter for the San Francisco Standard.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>I see it on my way home. On the way to work. Everywhere in between. They’re everywhere, really. But it’s still just a very weird sight, even though they’ve been pretty dominant on the streets this whole year. It’s still new and weird.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I think I probably fall in that weirded out bucket. But I mean, how long have people been talking about these robo taxis? How long have they been like, I guess, driving around San Francisco at this point?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So the two that are in San Francisco, Cruise and Waymo have been able to operate and test driverless in the city since about last summer, but they have been really noticeable this whole year, especially in the spring. As you know, certain conflicts have emerged and more people have been able to take them. They have a waitlist for them, but they have tested trusted passengers. So as more people have been able to take them and and there’s just been more run ins with them, they’ve been really noticeable this whole year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>And you mentioned Cruise and Waymo, these two big companies behind these driverless vehicles. Can you tell me about those companies? I know I know this idea has been a techie dream for a while.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Sure. So Cruise is owned by General Motors and Waymo is run by Google’s parent company known as Alphabet. A lot of companies have invested in this technology. Billions have been poured into it, but these are the two that are currently in San Francisco and now able to carry people without a driver.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I mean, what is with these companies obsession with driverless cars? Like why are they putting so much effort into expanding these fleets?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>I think essentially they see it’s the way of the future. They are very enthusiastic about how transformative it can be for people. Their frequent, you know, arguments for it is that it can provide safer streets because they they say that they drive safer than humans and that they have an electric fleet. So it will help reduce emissions. But essentially, they see it as being the future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>We see San Francisco as a litmus test for the commercialization of Robotaxis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>News anchor: is the CEO of Cruise and he’s been pretty vocal and active about his company and shared excitement to to expand not just in San Francisco but cities across the country and to do a quick and aggressively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>You know, the rate of expansion has been pretty impressive. And this is not because we’re going just just going wild here. It’s actually because the system itself is improving so quickly. And so even just a couple of weeks ago on the GM earnings call, I said we were at about 10,000 rides per week. This last week it was 15,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>A lot of people have been talking about these driverless cars. They’ve been on the roads in San Francisco. What have they been allowed to do up until now?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So Waymo has been able to drive around with these cars for all hours of the day. And Cruise has been able to do during certain hours, mostly at night. But both of them essentially have not been able to charge people without a safety driver present. And that was the biggest hurdle to, you know, expanding their their business operations, essentially. Prior to the vote, Waymo had 250 vehicles in the city with about 100 in operation. Crews has about 400 with 300 operating at night as of last week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Well, I know a really important commission just made a huge decision about expanding these fleets in San Francisco. Can you remind us what the you see is and what was that meeting about exactly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>The California Public Utilities Commission is, in this case tasked with weighing passenger safety in these autonomous vehicles known as robo taxis. And they already approved these, you know, initial permits that allow them to operate on the streets. And now they have just made a big decision to let them operate and charge people, saying that they met the requirements that were asked of them in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I know that there were people who are both for and against these robotaxis at this California Public Utilities Commission meeting. I know these companies, of course, are huge proponents of these, but who else was coming out in favor of robo taxis?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So some big supporters are some street safety advocates, but also a lot of groups that advocate for blind people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Activist: \u003c/strong>As a blind woman, I am here fully to support autonomous technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>They seem to be very enthusiastic about it. They have already been, you know, in talks with these companies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Activist: \u003c/strong>Not only has being a Waymo tested rider provided me with a level of independence that I have never been able to experience before. It has provided me with a feeling of safety that I’ve never had before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Not all disability advocates agree, but they seem to be the most enthusiastic about this. And then there’s also a union, SEIU, that was also in favor of this, because they have been assured by one of the companies that they will be union jobs and their members need jobs right now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>SEIU Spokesperson \u003c/strong>We already represent workers within cruise spaces. Cruise is one of the few tech companies in San Francisco that is celebrating the fact that they want to stay in San Francisco and operate in San Francisco. And right now, we need to be able to celebrate those opportunities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>There’s also this group Safer Roads for All, which is actually affiliated with the companies. What? What’s their deal? Who are they?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>They are more of a campaign that brings together tech industry groups. But Waymo is a the only actual company behind that. So these tech industry groups are advocating to let this technology move on. And, you know, the groups behind these have, you know, been advocating for anything from just general tech industry things to specifically autonomous vehicles. But essentially, they are tech groups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>How would you maybe summarize what it is that people like about these robo taxis?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>In essence, I think it’s the convenience of being able to get from point A to point B.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>Autonomous vehicles represent a route to safer roads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Without driving themselves, without dealing with parking and without having a person in the vehicle. Maybe there’s more privacy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Advocate: \u003c/strong>As a woman who frequently needs to take rideshare or public transportation on a regular basis, and especially during evening hours, I feel much safer knowing that I’m writing, in a judgment free discrimination, free beer free vehicle rather than one that you nervously navigate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>There’s a novelty. And until last week, they had to be free when there was no driver.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>I encourage the panel to please embrace this technology that our city and region have long been renowned for. Thank you for your time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>So, I mean, there’s been a lot of excitement I know, around these, but there have also been some really strong feelings about them, too. Who is coming out against these robo taxis?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>The most vocal opponents of a large expansion of these vehicles are essentially human drivers, those who drive Uber and Lyft and taxi cabs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Driver: \u003c/strong>[SPANISH]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Translator: \u003c/strong>I’m raising five children, if the driverless cars expand, they’re going to take away the work from us. And I have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>As well as some disability advocates who feel like this really just isn’t ready for them. People with more like physical disabilities, they’re in a wheelchair.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Activist: \u003c/strong>It’s an issue that we we don’t yet have an agreement on what accessibility looks like. How do folks like myself who are full time wheelchair users enter and use and exit these vehicles safely?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>City officials from departments of for first responders, transportation agencies and you know Mayor London breed the Board of supervisors President Aaron Peskin are really not for an immediate big expansion. They’re urging more of an incremental approach, but there’s also not a lot that they can do to to stop that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>And I know there’s also a lot of safety concerns from firefighters and also police and also first responders. Can you describe some of those incidents for us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: \u003c/strong>Now to an autonomous car that got stuck for hours today on San Francisco Street. This is the latest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So the fire department has tallied over 50 incidents this year where they have been blocked from doing their job because one of these vehicles, you know, stopped, maybe has overreacted and just didn’t want to run into anything. It’s hard to say exactly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: : \u003c/strong>Firefighters describe driverless cars rolling into fire scenes, running over hoses, even having to break windshields to stop a vehicle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>It’s meant that sometimes these firefighters, while they’re, you know, trying to respond to a fire, are stuck babysitting a robotaxi for a roughly half an hour, which is not what the robotaxi companies themselves say happens. But it’s it’s been noticeable enough to interfere with their jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Jeanine Nicholson: \u003c/strong>I’m not it’s high technology. What I am is part of safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>The San Francisco Fire Department chief is Jeanine Nicholson, and she has been pretty vocal that it’s not their job to babysit these cars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Jeanine Nicholson: \u003c/strong>Every second can make the difference if you are blocked by an autonomous vehicle. A fire will double in size. And even if that could lead to more and to the people in that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>It is the job of these companies to stay out of their way and train their cars to stay out of their way, and that the training that first responders have received so far from the companies they say doesn’t match what’s actually happening on the ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Jeanine Nicholson: \u003c/strong>But what would have really helped would have been a two way conversation seven years ago. It’s been a one way conversation up until very recently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>And ultimately, she feels that the transparency has been lacking, the collaboration has been lacking, and that it just overall needs to stop interfering with doing the business of saving lives and people’s homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Jeanine Nicholson: \u003c/strong>It’s the unpredictability, the obstructions and the lack of working with us is really that it is really a problem. They are still not ready for prime time because of how they have impacted our operations. And and, you know.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>And I feel like I also have to ask you about the cones that are being put on these robo taxis sort of as a form of protest. What are those about?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So over the summer, it was another noticeable aspect of these cars is that it has been that there’s been some activists who were placing cones on them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>News anchor: : \u003c/strong>Marking autonomous vehicles as traffic hazards. The group Safe Street Rebels is placing cones on cruise and Waymo cars as a way to temporarily stop that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>You know, would basically make them not go anywhere and have to be retrieved by the companies. You know, there’s even been some like reports that a firefighter has done that to to to prevent them from interfering further. But the city does not condone it. And it’s it’s just the most visible sign of resistance to this technology and some of the havoc that people say it’s been bringing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>In terms of what’s next. I do want to ask you about the commission vote. I know they ultimately approved this new permit for robo taxis. Can you explain how they came to that vote?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>So Commissioner Genevieve Sharma was one of the four commissioners who was urging caution, saying they’re not ready for prime time as well, and that they just need more time to really understand the data to from these companies and from the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Unidentified: \u003c/strong>Because of this insufficient record. I believe it is premature to vote to approve these resolutions today. Instead, the resolution should be held or withdrawn so that crews and Waymo have the additional time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>The other three commissioners voted in favor for saying that they met the requirements that were asked of them, that they can always add more restrictions later. And one of the commissioners, Commissioner John Reynolds, was a little bit more enthusiastic about them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>John Reynolds \u003c/strong>Today is the first of many steps in bringing transportation services to Californians and setting a successful and transparent model for other states to follow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>He actually used to be general counsel for Cruise, but didn’t have to recuse himself because enough time had passed. Commissioner Reynolds said that, you know, he’s able to advocate for both, you know, the people of California and can see what this technology does, essentially.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Unidentified: \u003c/strong>Commissioner John Reynolds. Yes. Mr. Houck? Yes. Commissioner Sherman. No as. Alice Reynolds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Advocate: \u003c/strong>Yes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Unknown: \u003c/strong>The vote is three one, tthe item passes. All right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>I will now. Well, you mentioned this means there’s going to be a huge expansion of these fleets in San Francisco. But I mean, I definitely have not seen one of these robot taxis where I live in Vallejo. But, I mean, with this vote, does that mean that we could see them possibly expand to other cities?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>This vote is specific to San Francisco, but there are many other companies that are doing testing in the Bay Area, both on the peninsula and other places. So people in Nevada Bay Area will probably see these around as more companies continue to test and seek more approvals. Waymo and Cruise are going to be more dominant in the city itself, but everyone’s going to be seeing them more in the future, that’s for sure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Well, I mean, I that this for some reason feels like such a San Francisco story. What do you think this debate says about where San Francisco is at right now?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Well, San Francisco is kind of once again the testing ground for a lot of this emerging technology. We saw with Uber and Lyft. That was our biggest example. And this time, city officials are really not wanting to be the guinea pigs. But for other people, it’s really exciting to be the first ones to do this and to see this, you know, get the first access to a glimpse into the future, a little bit of the Jetsons people compared to. So there’s kind of this split and excitement and trepidation about where this leaves the city. But once again, the city is seeing it before many others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>Well, Ida, thank you so much for joining us on the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ida Mojadad: \u003c/strong>Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cstrong>Ericka Cruz Guevarra: \u003c/strong>That was Ida Mojadad, a reporter for the San Francisco Standard. This 28 minute conversation with Ida was cut down and edited by producer Maria Esquinca. It was pitched by senior editor Alan Motecillo, who added all the tape. This episode was scored by me. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevara. The Bay is a production of member supported KQED in San Francisco. Thank you so much for listening to next time.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "californias-fight-against-wildfires-turns-to-ai-drones-and-satellites",
"title": "California's Fight Against Wildfires Turns to AI, Drones and Satellites",
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"headTitle": "California’s Fight Against Wildfires Turns to AI, Drones and Satellites | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11954879/how-californias-firefighter-union-could-get-guaranteed-raises-forever\">Cal Fire\u003c/a> Battalion Chief Jon Heggie wasn’t expecting much to worry about when a late summer fire erupted north of Santa Cruz, home to California’s moist and cool “asbestos forests.” This place doesn’t burn, he thought, with just three notable fires there in 70 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Heggie’s job was to predict for the crews where the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/wildfires\">wildfire\u003c/a> might go and when, working through calculations based on topography, weather and fuels — the “immutable” basics. For fire behavior analysts like Heggie, predictable and familiar are manageable, while weird and unexpected are synonyms for danger.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that 2020 fire was anything but predictable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, ominous thunder cells formed over the region. Tens of thousands of lightning strikes rained down, creating a convulsion of fire that became the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2020/8/16/czu-lightning-complex-including-warnella-fire/\">CZU Lightning Complex\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By noon there were nearly two dozen fires burning, and not nearly enough people to handle them. Flames were roaring throughout the Coast Range in deep-shaded forests and waist-high ferns in sight of the Pacific Ocean.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No one had ever seen anything like it.\u003cem> \u003c/em>The blaze defied predictions and ran unchecked for a month. The fire spread to San Mateo County, burned through 86,000 acres, destroyed almost 1,500 structures and \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/czu-lighting-complex-fire-victim-died-trying-to-flee-flames-6-rescued-while-trying-to-return-to-evacuated-homes/\">killed a fleeing resident\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was astonishing to see that behavior and consumption of heavy fuels,” Heggie said. “Seeing the devastation was mind-boggling. Things were burning outside the norm. I hadn’t seen anything burn that intensely in my 30 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Almost as troubling was what this fire \u003cem>didn’t\u003c/em> do — it didn’t back off at night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We would have burning periods increase in the afternoon, and we saw continuous high-intensity burns in the night,” Heggie said. “That’s when we are supposed to make up ground. That didn’t happen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Jon Heggie, battalion chief, Cal Fire\"]‘Seeing the devastation was mind-boggling. Things were burning outside the norm. I hadn’t seen anything burn that intensely in my 30 years.’[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That 2020 summer of fires, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/2021/07/california-fires-2020/\">the worst in California history\u003c/a>, recalibrated what veteran firefighters understand about fire behavior: Nothing \u003cem>is\u003c/em> as it \u003cem>was.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Intensified by climate change, especially warmer nights and longer droughts, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/explainers/california-wildfires-explained/\">California’s fires often morph into megafires\u003c/a>, and even gigafires covering more than a million acres. U.S. wildfires have been \u003ca href=\"https://cires.colorado.edu/news/us-fires-four-times-larger-three-times-more-frequent-2000\">four times larger and three times more frequent\u003c/a> since 2000, according to University of Colorado researchers. And other scientists recently predicted that \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213815120\">up to 52% more California forest acreage\u003c/a> will burn in summertime over the next two decades because of the changing climate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As California now heads into its peak time for wildfires, even with last year’s \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/california-wildfires/2022/12/california-wildfires-2022/\">quiet season\u003c/a> and the end of its three-year drought, the specter of megafires hasn’t receded. Last winter’s record winter rains, rather than tamping down fire threats, have promoted lush growth, which provides more fuel for summer fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire officials warn that this year’s conditions are similar to the summer and fall of 2017 — when a rainy winter was followed by \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2017\">one of the state’s most destructive fire seasons\u003c/a>, killing 47 people and destroying almost 11,000 structures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955548\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955548 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01.jpg\" alt=\"Pictured in a dark room with two, large LCD screens illuminated with maps displayed on them. Two people are observing the screens with one man pointing up toward the screen on the left.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">US Forest Service teams deploy drones to capture photographs and infrared images, which are used to map fires to find areas where flames are still active and where they might spread. \u003ccite>(Andrew Avitt/US Forest Service)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It’s not just the size and power of modern wildfires, but their capricious behavior that has confounded fire veterans — the feints and shifts that bedevil efforts to predict what a fire might do and then devise strategies to stop it. It’s a dangerous calculation: In the literal heat of a fire, choices are consequential. People’s lives and livelihoods are at stake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire crews now often find themselves outflanked. Responding to larger and more erratic and intense fires requires more personnel and equipment. And staging crews and engines where flames are expected to go have been thrown off-kilter.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Gov. Gavin Newsom\"]‘We live in this new reality. … We’re enlisting cutting-edge technology in our efforts to fight wildfires, exploring how innovations like artificial intelligence can help us identify threats quicker and deploy resources smarter.’[/pullquote]“We live in this new reality,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a recent Cal Fire event, “where we can’t necessarily attach ourselves to some of the more predictive models of the past because of a world that is getting a lot hotter, a lot drier and a lot more uncertain because of climate change.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CalFire has responded by tapping into all the new technology — such as drones, military satellites, infrared images and AI-assisted maps — that can be brought to bear during a fire. Commanders now must consider a broader range of possibilities so they can pivot when the firefront shifts in an unexpected way. The agency also has beefed up its ability to fight nighttime fires with a \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-program\">new fleet of Fire Hawk helicopters\u003c/a> equipped to fly in darkness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state has thrown every possible data point at the problem with its year-old \u003ca href=\"https://fireforecast.caloes.ca.gov/\">Wildfire Threat and Intelligence Integration Center\u003c/a>, which pulls information from dozens of federal, state and private sources to create a minute-by-minute picture of conditions conducive to sparking or spreading fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re enlisting cutting-edge technology in our efforts to fight wildfires,” Newsom said, “exploring how innovations like artificial intelligence can help us identify threats quicker and deploy resources smarter.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>An unforeseen assault on a coastal town\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2017/12/4/thomas-fire/\">2017 Thomas Fire\u003c/a> stands as an example of what happens when a massive fire, ignited after a rainy winter, veers and shifts in unexpected ways.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The blaze in coastal Ventura and Santa Barbara counties struck in December when fire season normally quieted down. Fire veterans knew fall and winter fires were tamed by a blanket of moist air and fog.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that didn’t happen.[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Tim Chavez, assistant chief, Cal Fire\"]‘I looked at the maps and we both came to the conclusion that Carpinteria would be fine, don’t worry. Sure enough, that night it burned into Carpinteria and they had to evacuate the town.’[/pullquote]“We were on day five or six, and the incident commander comes to me and asks, ‘Are we going to have to evacuate Carpinteria tonight?’,” said Cal Fire Assistant Chief Tim Chavez, who was the fire behavior analyst for the Thomas Fire.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>“I looked at the maps and we both came to the conclusion that Carpinteria would be fine, don’t worry. Sure enough, that night it burned into Carpinteria and they had to evacuate the town.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Based on fire and weather data and informed hunches, no one expected the fire to continue advancing overnight. And, as the winds calmed, no one predicted the blaze would move toward the small seaside community of 13,000 south of Santa Barbara. But high temperatures, low humidity and a steep, dry landscape that hadn’t felt flames in more than 30 years drew the Thomas Fire to the coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sudden shift put the town in peril. Some 300 residents were evacuated in the middle of the night as the blaze moved into the eastern edge of Carpinteria.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In all, the fire, which was sparked by power lines downed by high winds, \u003ca href=\"https://vcfd.org/news/vcfd-determines-cause-of-the-thomas-fire/\">burned for nearly 40 days\u003c/a>, spread across 281,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and other buildings and killed two people, including a firefighter. At the time, it was the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/23/us/thomas-fire-california/index.html\">largest wildfire\u003c/a> in California’s modern history; now, just six years later, it ranks at number eight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955543\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955543 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM.jpg\" alt=\"A wildfire rushes toward a mansion in Southern California with two palm trees seen in the home's backyard. The sky is black and the fire glows an ominous, bright orange and red.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Thomas Fire threatened homes near the 101 freeway in Ventura on Dec. 5, 2017. \u003ccite>(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The unforeseen assault on Carpenteria was an I-told-you-so from nature, the sort of humbling slap-down that fire behavior analysts in California are experiencing more and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve learned more from being wrong than from being right,” Chavez said. “You cannot do this job and not be surprised by something you see. Even the small fires will surprise you sometimes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Warmer nights, drought and lack of fog alter fire behavior\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Scientists say the past 20 years have brought a profound — and perhaps irreversible — \u003ca href=\"https://santamariatimes.com/photos-welcome-to-the-age-of-fire-california-wildfires-explained/collection_539ecbd3-827e-5387-aa14-518705d05980.html#1\">shift in the norms of wildfire behavior\u003c/a> and intensity. Fires burn along the coast even when there are no desert winds to drive them, fires refuse to lay down at night and fires pierced the so-called Redwood Curtain, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/2021/04/big-basin-park-heals-wildfires/\">burning 97% of California’s oldest state park\u003c/a>, Big Basin Redwoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The changes in wildfires are driven by an array of factors: a megadrought from the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z\">driest period recorded\u003c/a> in the Western U.S.\u003cem> \u003c/em>in the past 1,200 years, the loss of fog along the California coast, and stubborn nighttime temperatures that propel flames well into the night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"California's nighttime fire conditions have worsened\" aria-label=\"Map\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-jyRUo\" src=\"https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/jyRUo/5/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"662\" data-external=\"1\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Higher temperatures and longer dry periods are linked to worsening fires in Western forests, with an eightfold increase from 1985 to 2017 in severely burned acreage, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020GL089858\">2020 study\u003c/a>. “Warmer and drier fire seasons corresponded with higher severity fire,” the researchers wrote, suggesting that “climate change will contribute to increased fire severity in future decades.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we are seeing is a dramatic increase in extreme fire behavior,” Heggie said. “When you have a drought lasting 10 years, devastating the landscape, you have dead fuel loading and available fuel for when these fires start. That’s the catalyst for megafire. That’s been the driving force for change in fire behavior.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-11955555\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/Fire-Tornado_6.9.22-SIZED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"1000\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/Fire-Tornado_6.9.22-SIZED.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/Fire-Tornado_6.9.22-SIZED-160x320.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/Fire-Tornado_6.9.22-SIZED-768x1536.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About 33% of coastal summer fog has vanished since the turn of the century, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0915062107\">researchers at UC Berkeley\u003c/a>. That blanket of cool, moist air that kept major fires out of coastal areas can no longer be relied upon to safeguard California’s redwood forests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Firefighters are losing another ally, too, with the significant increase in overnight temperatures. \u003ca href=\"https://cires.colorado.edu/news/hotter-drier-nights-mean-more-runaway-fires\">Nighttime fires\u003c/a> were about 28% more intense in 2020 than in 2003. And there are more of them — 11 more “flammable nights” every year than 40 years ago, an increase of more than 40%.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The upshot is that fires are increasingly less likely to “lie down” at night when fire crews could work to get ahead of the flames. The loss of those hours to perform critical suppression work — and the additional nighttime spread — gives California crews less time to catch up with fast-moving blazes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, fire whirls and so-called \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2022/aug/11/firenado-sparked-by-hot-winds-and-wildfires-burns-in-california-video\">firenados\u003c/a> are more common as a feature of erratic fire behavior. The twisting vortex of flames, heat and wind can rise in columns hundreds of feet high and are spun by high winds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Firenados are more than frightening to behold: They spread embers and strew debris for miles and make already dangerous fires all the more risky. One was spotted \u003ca href=\"https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2022/08/11/brush-fire-sparks-firenado-southern-california/10303678002/\">north of Los Angeles\u003c/a> last summer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fires are “really changing, and it’s a combination of all kinds of different changes,” said Jennifer Balch, director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and a longtime fire researcher who tracks trends that drive wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re losing fog. We’re seeing drier conditions longer and later into the season. And so what that means for California right now is, under these record heat waves, we’re also now butting up against the Santa Ana wind conditions,” she said. “I think we’re loading the dice in a certain direction.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A fire behaviorist’s routine\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Among the many specialists at work are fire behavior analysts, who are responsible for predicting a fire’s daily movements for the incident commander. As a fire rages, Cal Fire analysts get their information in an avalanche of highly technical data, including wind force and direction, temperature and humidity, the shape and height of slopes, the area’s burn history, which fuels are on the ground and, in some cases, how likely they are to burn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gleaned from satellites, drones, planes, remote sensors and computer mapping, the information is spat out in real-time and triaged by the fire behavior analyst, who often uses a computer program to prepare models to predict what the fire is likely to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That information is synthesized and relayed — quickly — to fire bosses. Laptops and hand-held computers are ubiquitous on modern firelines, replacing the time-honored practice of spreading a dog-eared map on the hood of a truck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“On a typical day I would get up at 4:30 or 5,” said Chavez, who has served as a fire behavior analyst for much of his career. “We get an infrared fire map from overnight aircraft, and that tells us where the fire is active. Other planes fly in a grid pattern and we look at those still images.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>I might look at computer models, fire spread models, and the weather forecast. There’s other data that tells you what fuels are in the area. You plug all that in to see where the fire will be 24 hours from now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the fire camp’s 8 a.m. briefing, “You get two minutes to tell people what to watch out for,” he said. Throughout the day, Chavez says he monitors available data and hitches a helicopter ride to view the fire from the air. At another meeting at 5 p.m., he and other officers prepare the next day’s incident action plan. Then he’s back to collating more weather and fire data. The aim is to get to bed before midnight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955545\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955545 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM.jpg\" alt=\"A woman with blond hair and glasses stands in front of a white board that's covered in handwritten graphs and figures. It appears she's inside a classroom or lab.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-1920x1281.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘We’re losing fog. We’re seeing drier conditions longer and later into the season … I think we’re loading the dice in a certain direction,’ said Jennifer Balch, director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. \u003ccite>(Aaron Ontivaeroz/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The importance of the fire behavior analyst’s job is reflected by the sophistication of the tools available: real-time NOAA satellite data, weather information from military flights, radar, computer-generated maps showing a 100-year history of previous burns in the area as well as the current fuel load and its combustibility, airplane and drone surveillance and AI-enabled models of future fire movements. Aircraft flying over fires provide more detail, faster, about what’s inside fire plumes, critical information to fire bosses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, the National Guard is entering the fourth year of an agreement to share non-classified information pulled from military satellites that scan for heat signatures from the boost phase of ballistic missiles. When those heat images are associated with wildfires, the agency’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article/3223104/fireguard-program-enhances-national-guard-wildfire-fighting/\">FireGuard system\u003c/a> can transmit detailed information to Cal Fire every 15 minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meteorologist Craig Clements, director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory at San Jose State University, has chased fires for a decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can pull up on a fire, and the radar starts spinning and you’re peering into a plume within four minutes,” Clements said. “It gives us information about the particles inside, the structure of it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955546\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955546 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM.jpg\" alt=\"A screenshot of a map of California and then a pop-up screen on top of the map shows coding in various colors.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This map was produced by supercomputers at a lab at University of Colorado Boulder that is using metadata to better understand large wildfires and their increasingly erratic behavior. \u003ccite>(Aaron Ontivaeroz/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Fire behavior decisions are not totally reliant on outside data inputs. Seasoned fire commanders remain firmly committed to a reliable indicator: the hair on the back of their necks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fireline experience and hard-earned knowledge still count when formulating tactics. But it’s a measure of how norms have shifted that even institutional knowledge can fail.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Future of firefighting: AI crunches billions of data points\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Perhaps the biggest leap is applying artificial intelligence to understand fire behavior. Neil Sahota, an AI adviser to the United Nations and a lecturer at UC Irvine, is developing systems to train a computer to review reams of data and come to a predictive conclusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The idea is not to replace fire behavior analysts and jettison their decades of fireline experience, Sahota said, but to augment their work — and, mostly, to move much faster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can crunch billions of different data points in near real-time, in seconds,” he said. “The challenge is, what’s the right data? We may think there are seven variables that go into a wildfire, for example. AI may come back saying there are thousands.”[aside label='More Stories on California Wildfires' tag='wildfires']In order for their information to be useful, computers have to be taught: What’s the difference between a Boy Scout campfire and a wildfire? How to distinguish between an arsonist starting a fire and a firefighter setting a backfire with a drip torch?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the dizzying speed at which devices have been employed on the modern fireline, most fire behavior computer models are still based on algorithms devised by Mark Finney, a revered figure in the field of fire science.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Working from the \u003ca href=\"https://www.firelab.org/\">Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory\u003c/a> in Montana, Finney has studied fire behavior through observation and, especially, by starting all manner of fires in combustion chambers and in the field. In another lab in Missoula, scientists bake all types of wood in special ovens to determine how fuels burn at different moisture levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Finney is unimpressed by much of the sophisticated technology brought to bear on wildfires as they burn. He said it provides only an illusion of control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once you are in a position to have to fight these extreme fires, you’ve already lost,” he said. “Don’t let anybody kid you, we do not suppress these fires, we don’t control them. We wait for the weather.”[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Mark Finney, research forester, US Forest Service\"]‘Once you are in a position to have to fight these extreme fires, you’ve already lost. Don’t let anybody kid you, we do not suppress these fires, we don’t control them. We wait for the weather.’[/pullquote]The Missoula research group developed the \u003ca href=\"https://www.firelab.org/project/national-fire-danger-rating-system\">National Fire Danger Rating System\u003c/a> in 1972, which is still in place today. Among the fire behavior tools Finney designed is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/tools/farsite\">FARSITE system\u003c/a>, a simulation of fire growth invaluable to frontline fire bosses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finney and colleagues are working on a next-generation version of the behavior prediction system, which is now undergoing real-world tests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This equation has an awful lot of assumptions in it,” he said. “We’re getting there. Nature is a lot more complicated. There are still a number of mysteries on fire behavior. We don’t have a road map to follow that tells us that this is good enough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By far the best use of the predictive tools that he and others have developed is to learn how to \u003cem>avoid \u003c/em>firestarts, he said, by thinning and clearing forests to reduce the threat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would love to tell you that the key to solving these problems is more research. But if we just stopped doing research and just use what we know, we’d be a lot better off.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, research about fire behavior races on, driven by the belief that you can’t fight an enemy you don’t understand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955547\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955547 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79.jpg\" alt=\"A man with a black and white checkered, button-up shirt, stands amid mountain and trees in Colorado.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mike Koontz is a postdoc researcher at University of Colorado Boulder who leads a project focusing on better understanding of California’s megafires to provide fire bosses the best information to fight fires. \u003ccite>(Aaron Ontivaeroz/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://earthlab.colorado.edu/our-team/michael-koontz\">Mike Koontz\u003c/a> is on the front lines of that battle, tucked into a semicircle of supercomputers. Koontz leads a team of researchers in Boulder, Colo., studying a new, volatile and compelling topic: California megafires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We began to see a clear uptick in extreme fire behavior in California since the 2000s,” said Koontz, a postdoctoral researcher with the Earth Lab at University of Colorado Boulder. “We keyed in on fires that moved quickly and blew up over a short period of time.” California is a trove of extreme fires, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Koontz is using supercomputers to scrape databases, maps and satellite images and apply the data to an analytical framework of his devising. The team tracks significant fires that grow unexpectedly, and layers in weather conditions, topography, fire spread rates and other factors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What comes out is a rough sketch of the elements driving California’s fires to grow so large. The next hurdle is to get the information quickly into the hands of fire commanders, Koontz said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The goal: if not a new bible for fighting fires, at least an updated playbook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"title": "California's Fight Against Wildfires Turns to AI, Drones and Satellites | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11954879/how-californias-firefighter-union-could-get-guaranteed-raises-forever\">Cal Fire\u003c/a> Battalion Chief Jon Heggie wasn’t expecting much to worry about when a late summer fire erupted north of Santa Cruz, home to California’s moist and cool “asbestos forests.” This place doesn’t burn, he thought, with just three notable fires there in 70 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Heggie’s job was to predict for the crews where the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/wildfires\">wildfire\u003c/a> might go and when, working through calculations based on topography, weather and fuels — the “immutable” basics. For fire behavior analysts like Heggie, predictable and familiar are manageable, while weird and unexpected are synonyms for danger.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that 2020 fire was anything but predictable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, ominous thunder cells formed over the region. Tens of thousands of lightning strikes rained down, creating a convulsion of fire that became the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2020/8/16/czu-lightning-complex-including-warnella-fire/\">CZU Lightning Complex\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By noon there were nearly two dozen fires burning, and not nearly enough people to handle them. Flames were roaring throughout the Coast Range in deep-shaded forests and waist-high ferns in sight of the Pacific Ocean.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No one had ever seen anything like it.\u003cem> \u003c/em>The blaze defied predictions and ran unchecked for a month. The fire spread to San Mateo County, burned through 86,000 acres, destroyed almost 1,500 structures and \u003ca href=\"https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/czu-lighting-complex-fire-victim-died-trying-to-flee-flames-6-rescued-while-trying-to-return-to-evacuated-homes/\">killed a fleeing resident\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was astonishing to see that behavior and consumption of heavy fuels,” Heggie said. “Seeing the devastation was mind-boggling. Things were burning outside the norm. I hadn’t seen anything burn that intensely in my 30 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Almost as troubling was what this fire \u003cem>didn’t\u003c/em> do — it didn’t back off at night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We would have burning periods increase in the afternoon, and we saw continuous high-intensity burns in the night,” Heggie said. “That’s when we are supposed to make up ground. That didn’t happen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘Seeing the devastation was mind-boggling. Things were burning outside the norm. I hadn’t seen anything burn that intensely in my 30 years.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That 2020 summer of fires, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/2021/07/california-fires-2020/\">the worst in California history\u003c/a>, recalibrated what veteran firefighters understand about fire behavior: Nothing \u003cem>is\u003c/em> as it \u003cem>was.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Intensified by climate change, especially warmer nights and longer droughts, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/explainers/california-wildfires-explained/\">California’s fires often morph into megafires\u003c/a>, and even gigafires covering more than a million acres. U.S. wildfires have been \u003ca href=\"https://cires.colorado.edu/news/us-fires-four-times-larger-three-times-more-frequent-2000\">four times larger and three times more frequent\u003c/a> since 2000, according to University of Colorado researchers. And other scientists recently predicted that \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213815120\">up to 52% more California forest acreage\u003c/a> will burn in summertime over the next two decades because of the changing climate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As California now heads into its peak time for wildfires, even with last year’s \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/california-wildfires/2022/12/california-wildfires-2022/\">quiet season\u003c/a> and the end of its three-year drought, the specter of megafires hasn’t receded. Last winter’s record winter rains, rather than tamping down fire threats, have promoted lush growth, which provides more fuel for summer fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire officials warn that this year’s conditions are similar to the summer and fall of 2017 — when a rainy winter was followed by \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2017\">one of the state’s most destructive fire seasons\u003c/a>, killing 47 people and destroying almost 11,000 structures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955548\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955548 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01.jpg\" alt=\"Pictured in a dark room with two, large LCD screens illuminated with maps displayed on them. Two people are observing the screens with one man pointing up toward the screen on the left.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/111822-USFS-Drone-Program-CM-01-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">US Forest Service teams deploy drones to capture photographs and infrared images, which are used to map fires to find areas where flames are still active and where they might spread. \u003ccite>(Andrew Avitt/US Forest Service)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It’s not just the size and power of modern wildfires, but their capricious behavior that has confounded fire veterans — the feints and shifts that bedevil efforts to predict what a fire might do and then devise strategies to stop it. It’s a dangerous calculation: In the literal heat of a fire, choices are consequential. People’s lives and livelihoods are at stake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire crews now often find themselves outflanked. Responding to larger and more erratic and intense fires requires more personnel and equipment. And staging crews and engines where flames are expected to go have been thrown off-kilter.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘We live in this new reality. … We’re enlisting cutting-edge technology in our efforts to fight wildfires, exploring how innovations like artificial intelligence can help us identify threats quicker and deploy resources smarter.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“We live in this new reality,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a recent Cal Fire event, “where we can’t necessarily attach ourselves to some of the more predictive models of the past because of a world that is getting a lot hotter, a lot drier and a lot more uncertain because of climate change.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>CalFire has responded by tapping into all the new technology — such as drones, military satellites, infrared images and AI-assisted maps — that can be brought to bear during a fire. Commanders now must consider a broader range of possibilities so they can pivot when the firefront shifts in an unexpected way. The agency also has beefed up its ability to fight nighttime fires with a \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-program\">new fleet of Fire Hawk helicopters\u003c/a> equipped to fly in darkness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state has thrown every possible data point at the problem with its year-old \u003ca href=\"https://fireforecast.caloes.ca.gov/\">Wildfire Threat and Intelligence Integration Center\u003c/a>, which pulls information from dozens of federal, state and private sources to create a minute-by-minute picture of conditions conducive to sparking or spreading fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re enlisting cutting-edge technology in our efforts to fight wildfires,” Newsom said, “exploring how innovations like artificial intelligence can help us identify threats quicker and deploy resources smarter.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>An unforeseen assault on a coastal town\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2017/12/4/thomas-fire/\">2017 Thomas Fire\u003c/a> stands as an example of what happens when a massive fire, ignited after a rainy winter, veers and shifts in unexpected ways.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The blaze in coastal Ventura and Santa Barbara counties struck in December when fire season normally quieted down. Fire veterans knew fall and winter fires were tamed by a blanket of moist air and fog.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that didn’t happen.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘I looked at the maps and we both came to the conclusion that Carpinteria would be fine, don’t worry. Sure enough, that night it burned into Carpinteria and they had to evacuate the town.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“We were on day five or six, and the incident commander comes to me and asks, ‘Are we going to have to evacuate Carpinteria tonight?’,” said Cal Fire Assistant Chief Tim Chavez, who was the fire behavior analyst for the Thomas Fire.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>“I looked at the maps and we both came to the conclusion that Carpinteria would be fine, don’t worry. Sure enough, that night it burned into Carpinteria and they had to evacuate the town.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Based on fire and weather data and informed hunches, no one expected the fire to continue advancing overnight. And, as the winds calmed, no one predicted the blaze would move toward the small seaside community of 13,000 south of Santa Barbara. But high temperatures, low humidity and a steep, dry landscape that hadn’t felt flames in more than 30 years drew the Thomas Fire to the coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sudden shift put the town in peril. Some 300 residents were evacuated in the middle of the night as the blaze moved into the eastern edge of Carpinteria.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In all, the fire, which was sparked by power lines downed by high winds, \u003ca href=\"https://vcfd.org/news/vcfd-determines-cause-of-the-thomas-fire/\">burned for nearly 40 days\u003c/a>, spread across 281,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and other buildings and killed two people, including a firefighter. At the time, it was the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/23/us/thomas-fire-california/index.html\">largest wildfire\u003c/a> in California’s modern history; now, just six years later, it ranks at number eight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955543\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955543 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM.jpg\" alt=\"A wildfire rushes toward a mansion in Southern California with two palm trees seen in the home's backyard. The sky is black and the fire glows an ominous, bright orange and red.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/040723-THOMAS-FIRE-AP-JCH-CM-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Thomas Fire threatened homes near the 101 freeway in Ventura on Dec. 5, 2017. \u003ccite>(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The unforeseen assault on Carpenteria was an I-told-you-so from nature, the sort of humbling slap-down that fire behavior analysts in California are experiencing more and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve learned more from being wrong than from being right,” Chavez said. “You cannot do this job and not be surprised by something you see. Even the small fires will surprise you sometimes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Warmer nights, drought and lack of fog alter fire behavior\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Scientists say the past 20 years have brought a profound — and perhaps irreversible — \u003ca href=\"https://santamariatimes.com/photos-welcome-to-the-age-of-fire-california-wildfires-explained/collection_539ecbd3-827e-5387-aa14-518705d05980.html#1\">shift in the norms of wildfire behavior\u003c/a> and intensity. Fires burn along the coast even when there are no desert winds to drive them, fires refuse to lay down at night and fires pierced the so-called Redwood Curtain, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/2021/04/big-basin-park-heals-wildfires/\">burning 97% of California’s oldest state park\u003c/a>, Big Basin Redwoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The changes in wildfires are driven by an array of factors: a megadrought from the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01290-z\">driest period recorded\u003c/a> in the Western U.S.\u003cem> \u003c/em>in the past 1,200 years, the loss of fog along the California coast, and stubborn nighttime temperatures that propel flames well into the night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"California's nighttime fire conditions have worsened\" aria-label=\"Map\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-jyRUo\" src=\"https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/jyRUo/5/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"662\" data-external=\"1\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Higher temperatures and longer dry periods are linked to worsening fires in Western forests, with an eightfold increase from 1985 to 2017 in severely burned acreage, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020GL089858\">2020 study\u003c/a>. “Warmer and drier fire seasons corresponded with higher severity fire,” the researchers wrote, suggesting that “climate change will contribute to increased fire severity in future decades.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we are seeing is a dramatic increase in extreme fire behavior,” Heggie said. “When you have a drought lasting 10 years, devastating the landscape, you have dead fuel loading and available fuel for when these fires start. That’s the catalyst for megafire. That’s been the driving force for change in fire behavior.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-11955555\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/Fire-Tornado_6.9.22-SIZED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"1000\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/Fire-Tornado_6.9.22-SIZED.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/Fire-Tornado_6.9.22-SIZED-160x320.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/Fire-Tornado_6.9.22-SIZED-768x1536.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About 33% of coastal summer fog has vanished since the turn of the century, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0915062107\">researchers at UC Berkeley\u003c/a>. That blanket of cool, moist air that kept major fires out of coastal areas can no longer be relied upon to safeguard California’s redwood forests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Firefighters are losing another ally, too, with the significant increase in overnight temperatures. \u003ca href=\"https://cires.colorado.edu/news/hotter-drier-nights-mean-more-runaway-fires\">Nighttime fires\u003c/a> were about 28% more intense in 2020 than in 2003. And there are more of them — 11 more “flammable nights” every year than 40 years ago, an increase of more than 40%.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The upshot is that fires are increasingly less likely to “lie down” at night when fire crews could work to get ahead of the flames. The loss of those hours to perform critical suppression work — and the additional nighttime spread — gives California crews less time to catch up with fast-moving blazes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, fire whirls and so-called \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2022/aug/11/firenado-sparked-by-hot-winds-and-wildfires-burns-in-california-video\">firenados\u003c/a> are more common as a feature of erratic fire behavior. The twisting vortex of flames, heat and wind can rise in columns hundreds of feet high and are spun by high winds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Firenados are more than frightening to behold: They spread embers and strew debris for miles and make already dangerous fires all the more risky. One was spotted \u003ca href=\"https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2022/08/11/brush-fire-sparks-firenado-southern-california/10303678002/\">north of Los Angeles\u003c/a> last summer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fires are “really changing, and it’s a combination of all kinds of different changes,” said Jennifer Balch, director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and a longtime fire researcher who tracks trends that drive wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re losing fog. We’re seeing drier conditions longer and later into the season. And so what that means for California right now is, under these record heat waves, we’re also now butting up against the Santa Ana wind conditions,” she said. “I think we’re loading the dice in a certain direction.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A fire behaviorist’s routine\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Among the many specialists at work are fire behavior analysts, who are responsible for predicting a fire’s daily movements for the incident commander. As a fire rages, Cal Fire analysts get their information in an avalanche of highly technical data, including wind force and direction, temperature and humidity, the shape and height of slopes, the area’s burn history, which fuels are on the ground and, in some cases, how likely they are to burn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gleaned from satellites, drones, planes, remote sensors and computer mapping, the information is spat out in real-time and triaged by the fire behavior analyst, who often uses a computer program to prepare models to predict what the fire is likely to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That information is synthesized and relayed — quickly — to fire bosses. Laptops and hand-held computers are ubiquitous on modern firelines, replacing the time-honored practice of spreading a dog-eared map on the hood of a truck.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“On a typical day I would get up at 4:30 or 5,” said Chavez, who has served as a fire behavior analyst for much of his career. “We get an infrared fire map from overnight aircraft, and that tells us where the fire is active. Other planes fly in a grid pattern and we look at those still images.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>I might look at computer models, fire spread models, and the weather forecast. There’s other data that tells you what fuels are in the area. You plug all that in to see where the fire will be 24 hours from now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the fire camp’s 8 a.m. briefing, “You get two minutes to tell people what to watch out for,” he said. Throughout the day, Chavez says he monitors available data and hitches a helicopter ride to view the fire from the air. At another meeting at 5 p.m., he and other officers prepare the next day’s incident action plan. Then he’s back to collating more weather and fire data. The aim is to get to bed before midnight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955545\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955545 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM.jpg\" alt=\"A woman with blond hair and glasses stands in front of a white board that's covered in handwritten graphs and figures. It appears she's inside a classroom or lab.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-03-CM-1920x1281.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘We’re losing fog. We’re seeing drier conditions longer and later into the season … I think we’re loading the dice in a certain direction,’ said Jennifer Balch, director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. \u003ccite>(Aaron Ontivaeroz/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The importance of the fire behavior analyst’s job is reflected by the sophistication of the tools available: real-time NOAA satellite data, weather information from military flights, radar, computer-generated maps showing a 100-year history of previous burns in the area as well as the current fuel load and its combustibility, airplane and drone surveillance and AI-enabled models of future fire movements. Aircraft flying over fires provide more detail, faster, about what’s inside fire plumes, critical information to fire bosses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, the National Guard is entering the fourth year of an agreement to share non-classified information pulled from military satellites that scan for heat signatures from the boost phase of ballistic missiles. When those heat images are associated with wildfires, the agency’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article/3223104/fireguard-program-enhances-national-guard-wildfire-fighting/\">FireGuard system\u003c/a> can transmit detailed information to Cal Fire every 15 minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meteorologist Craig Clements, director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory at San Jose State University, has chased fires for a decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can pull up on a fire, and the radar starts spinning and you’re peering into a plume within four minutes,” Clements said. “It gives us information about the particles inside, the structure of it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955546\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955546 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM.jpg\" alt=\"A screenshot of a map of California and then a pop-up screen on top of the map shows coding in various colors.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-04-CM-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">This map was produced by supercomputers at a lab at University of Colorado Boulder that is using metadata to better understand large wildfires and their increasingly erratic behavior. \u003ccite>(Aaron Ontivaeroz/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Fire behavior decisions are not totally reliant on outside data inputs. Seasoned fire commanders remain firmly committed to a reliable indicator: the hair on the back of their necks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fireline experience and hard-earned knowledge still count when formulating tactics. But it’s a measure of how norms have shifted that even institutional knowledge can fail.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Future of firefighting: AI crunches billions of data points\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Perhaps the biggest leap is applying artificial intelligence to understand fire behavior. Neil Sahota, an AI adviser to the United Nations and a lecturer at UC Irvine, is developing systems to train a computer to review reams of data and come to a predictive conclusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The idea is not to replace fire behavior analysts and jettison their decades of fireline experience, Sahota said, but to augment their work — and, mostly, to move much faster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can crunch billions of different data points in near real-time, in seconds,” he said. “The challenge is, what’s the right data? We may think there are seven variables that go into a wildfire, for example. AI may come back saying there are thousands.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In order for their information to be useful, computers have to be taught: What’s the difference between a Boy Scout campfire and a wildfire? How to distinguish between an arsonist starting a fire and a firefighter setting a backfire with a drip torch?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the dizzying speed at which devices have been employed on the modern fireline, most fire behavior computer models are still based on algorithms devised by Mark Finney, a revered figure in the field of fire science.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Working from the \u003ca href=\"https://www.firelab.org/\">Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory\u003c/a> in Montana, Finney has studied fire behavior through observation and, especially, by starting all manner of fires in combustion chambers and in the field. In another lab in Missoula, scientists bake all types of wood in special ovens to determine how fuels burn at different moisture levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Finney is unimpressed by much of the sophisticated technology brought to bear on wildfires as they burn. He said it provides only an illusion of control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once you are in a position to have to fight these extreme fires, you’ve already lost,” he said. “Don’t let anybody kid you, we do not suppress these fires, we don’t control them. We wait for the weather.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘Once you are in a position to have to fight these extreme fires, you’ve already lost. Don’t let anybody kid you, we do not suppress these fires, we don’t control them. We wait for the weather.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The Missoula research group developed the \u003ca href=\"https://www.firelab.org/project/national-fire-danger-rating-system\">National Fire Danger Rating System\u003c/a> in 1972, which is still in place today. Among the fire behavior tools Finney designed is the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/tools/farsite\">FARSITE system\u003c/a>, a simulation of fire growth invaluable to frontline fire bosses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finney and colleagues are working on a next-generation version of the behavior prediction system, which is now undergoing real-world tests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This equation has an awful lot of assumptions in it,” he said. “We’re getting there. Nature is a lot more complicated. There are still a number of mysteries on fire behavior. We don’t have a road map to follow that tells us that this is good enough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By far the best use of the predictive tools that he and others have developed is to learn how to \u003cem>avoid \u003c/em>firestarts, he said, by thinning and clearing forests to reduce the threat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would love to tell you that the key to solving these problems is more research. But if we just stopped doing research and just use what we know, we’d be a lot better off.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, research about fire behavior races on, driven by the belief that you can’t fight an enemy you don’t understand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11955547\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11955547 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79.jpg\" alt=\"A man with a black and white checkered, button-up shirt, stands amid mountain and trees in Colorado.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/07/090822-COLORADO-WILDFIRE-BEHAVIOR-AO-CM-79-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mike Koontz is a postdoc researcher at University of Colorado Boulder who leads a project focusing on better understanding of California’s megafires to provide fire bosses the best information to fight fires. \u003ccite>(Aaron Ontivaeroz/CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://earthlab.colorado.edu/our-team/michael-koontz\">Mike Koontz\u003c/a> is on the front lines of that battle, tucked into a semicircle of supercomputers. Koontz leads a team of researchers in Boulder, Colo., studying a new, volatile and compelling topic: California megafires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We began to see a clear uptick in extreme fire behavior in California since the 2000s,” said Koontz, a postdoctoral researcher with the Earth Lab at University of Colorado Boulder. “We keyed in on fires that moved quickly and blew up over a short period of time.” California is a trove of extreme fires, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Koontz is using supercomputers to scrape databases, maps and satellite images and apply the data to an analytical framework of his devising. The team tracks significant fires that grow unexpectedly, and layers in weather conditions, topography, fire spread rates and other factors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What comes out is a rough sketch of the elements driving California’s fires to grow so large. The next hurdle is to get the information quickly into the hands of fire commanders, Koontz said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The goal: if not a new bible for fighting fires, at least an updated playbook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cb>CA State Superintendent Tony Thurmond\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">California’s public schools are dealing with unprecedented issues exacerbated by the pandemic: staffing shortages, low literacy, absenteeism and a mental health crisis among students. Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of instruction, joins us to discuss the future of education in California. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Future of Autonomous Vehicles\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Driverless cars are already moving along densely packed San Francisco streets. What does it mean for human drivers and street safety? We look at what’s happening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ellie Casson, Waymo head of city policy and government affairs\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Prof. William Riggs, director of USF’s Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Generative AI\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Generative artificial intelligence is being called a paradigm shift for humanity — a change that will affect our work, our relationships and our knowledge. So what to make of it? Emily Chang, host and executive producer at Bloomberg Originals and author of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Brotopia\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, tries to help us make sense of it all. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Something Beautiful\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Since 1985, Point Isabel Dog Park has been a haven for Bay Area dog owners who want to let their dogs enjoy nature off-leash. The park, which sits on Richmond’s shoreline, encompasses roughly 50 acres and is this week’s look at Something Beautiful. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Update, 11:50 a.m. Wednesday:\u003c/strong> DALL-E was previously only accessible to the public via invite, but the AI generator has now been made available to all without a waitlist. \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-now-available-without-waitlist/\">Read more about signing up to use DALL-E here.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Original post, 2:10 p.m. Monday: \u003c/b>Think of something, type it in, and wait for it …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Imagine an image generated from your thoughts and words in just minutes, all ready for the world to see. That’s what \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/dall-e-2/\">OpenAI’s DALL-E \u003c/a>— a neural network designed to convert text descriptions into images — and its newest version, DALL-E 2, is for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This artificial intelligence-powered image generator seems futuristic and fun, but is it necessary? More importantly, is it \u003cem>safe\u003c/em>? And how can technologies like these handle things like online disinformation, bias, violent content and other harms?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101890327/dall-e-deepfakes-and-the-new-frontier-of-online-misinformation\">a recent episode of KQED Forum\u003c/a>, host Mina Kim hosted a conversation on the possibilities and pitfalls of this technology with:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Lama Ahmad, policy researcher from DALL-E creator OpenAI;\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Hany Farid, deepfake expert at UC Berkeley.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MINA KIN: What is DALL-E, and how does it work?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>LAMA AHMAD:\u003c/strong> DALL-E is an AI that basically does text-to-image. So someone can type in a prompt and the output would be anything you can imagine. It learned from pairs of lots and lots of images, and lots and lots of captions, and basically is able to construct those concepts entirely from scratch. Even though it learned from existing images, words and language, it will be able to construct what that image \u003cem>would\u003c/em> look like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can also use \u003ca href=\"https://theinpaint.com/\">Inpaint\u003c/a> to select a region of an image and modify it also using words. And you can also create variations on existing images, or images generated by the software itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The images can look hyperrealistic, fantastical or abstract, if that’s what you would like. Sort of all in the words that you use and how you craft your prompts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1511714516345651204\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can also upload images to DALL-E. That goes to that Inpainting functionality where you can edit regions of an image. That being said, you cannot upload images of people, and that was a concerted effort on the part of OpenAI to really combat misinformation and disinformation related to people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was really important to OpenAI that we are putting out the AI that is most helpful, and most beneficial to people. And at the end of the day, uploading images of people was not something we wanted to allow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>DALL-E doesn’t allow uploading images of people. But, how can DALL-E be used in a malicious way?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>LAMA AHMAD:\u003c/strong> Before we even deployed DALL-E, we worked with researchers at lots of universities, academic institutions, civil society organizations that have been thinking deeply about these problems. Not just disinformation, but things like bias, things like representations of harmful imagery around children, violent content — a whole host of things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so we really thought about this, all the way from training the model and what sorts of images we include, all the way up into the development of the system, and how it would be presented to the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Including external researchers was a really important part of that because it’s not just people at OpenAI who are thinking about it, it’s the minds of lots of great people that helped us to develop our mitigations and make sure that they were working.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What benefit does DALL-E provide?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>LAMA AHMAD:\u003c/strong> I think some of the exciting things that we’ve seen happen with DALL-E are changes in how artists are doing their work, a new genre of art, and the emerging accessibility of creating images. Not everyone has the skills to do Photoshop. I certainly don’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Being able to make those kinds of things accessible to a broad range of people is something that we hope will be unlocked as a benefit of models like DALL-E. But it’s certainly something that we think about, like, how do you deploy? Or should you even deploy at all?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1565009366951989248\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Are the safeguards really good that DALL-E puts in?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> They’re not perfect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shortly after DALL-E was released, another version of this image synthesis was released called Stable Diffusion, with zero guardrails. You can put in anybody’s name, create violent or sexually explicit material — no rules. And it’s completely open-source. It took us all of an hour to get one running up on one of our computers, and all of the safeguards — that OpenAI very thoughtfully put in — in some ways don’t matter anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ve seen three very different approaches to this technology. We’ve been talking about OpenAI’s thoughtful methods with safeguards; I’ve mentioned Stable Diffusion with zero safeguards; Google has a version of this and they refuse to release it. I couldn’t even get access as a forensic scientist saying I wanted to just do forensic analysis. Google’s rationale was they are concerned about misuse and they are not releasing it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so now you’ve seen three very different approaches to this. But of course, it’s the lowest common denominator that matters. And the lowest common denominator is, no rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Can you talk a little bit about regulating tools like this?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> What we spend most of our time doing here in my lab is, somebody sends me an image or a video, and we try to determine if it’s real or fake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another way to think about this problem is that when you record an image or a video at the point of recording, you can authenticate. And there’s a really nice initiative called the \u003ca href=\"https://c2pa.org/\">C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity\u003c/a>, building a system that would allow your device so that when I take an image or a video or audio, it will authenticate the date and time, the location, who took it, and all the pixels are authentic so that when that piece of content makes its way onto the internet, then I can trust that it has been authentic. And I like that technology a lot because it’s here, it works, and it will scale. But it doesn’t mean we can simply ignore all the other problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I think it’s part of a larger solution that includes education, government regulation and technology. And also, more corporate responsibility. OpenAI has done a good job, but I don’t think you can say that all companies have the same thoughtfulness that we have seen coming out of OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1511714540785860611\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What are the dangers of tools like DALL-E in cases like predictive policing, facial recognition and surveillance regimes?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> I think that a legitimate point to make is, how are these systems being trained? And also is there bias in the data?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So for example, in policing, if we use historical data, that historical data is biased against people of color. And if you simply train an AI algorithm, you are simply going to repeat history. So I think that it’s a legitimate and reasonable concern to have, both from a bias perspective, but also from a fairness perspective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>California does have two laws about deepfakes. One allows anyone whose images are nonconsensually used in pornography to sue, and the other prohibits the malicious use of deepfakes for a candidate for office. What do you think of those?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> There are some problems with the laws. You have to prove intent to harm. It’s not just that it’s illegal to create it. You have to prove that it was in your intent to harm somebody. And proving intent is very, very difficult.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And also, this works within the borders of California. What happens when this is coming from wherever — Romania? Russia? China? We have no ability to litigate this here. Once those images are on the internet, they don’t come down and the harm is done and maybe you’ll have some retribution a year, 10 years from now. But it doesn’t really deal with the problem.\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[pullquote size='medium' align='right' citation=\"Hany Farid, deepfake expert, UC Berkeley\"]‘If we enter this world where any image, any audio, any video, any tweet, any article can be fake, well, then — nothing has to be real.’[/pullquote]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think also the deepfake bill on politics is problematic, because it’s very narrowly tailored. There are all kinds of things you have to show. And again, within the California borders, I think they were well-intentioned. But I think they are largely impotent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You’ve talked about “the liar’s dividend.” Can you explain what that is?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> The thing I really worry about is that if we enter this world where any image, any audio, any video, any tweet, any article can be fake, well, then — nothing has to be real. We can simply dismiss things that we don’t like or agree with. And now we are living in a completely alternate universe relative to those around us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You see this playing out on a regular basis. For example, in 2015 Trump gets himself in trouble for the act of saying awful things about women on the “Access Hollywood” tape. A year and a half later, deepfakes are now on the horizon — they come into our vocabulary. He’s asked about the audio and he says it’s fake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now we are living in alternate realities, the so-called “liar’s dividend.” And now we have a double-fisted weapon. I can create fake content and I can deny reality by using exactly the same specter of that technology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.instagram.com/p/CgZmhlmrcWx\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What about democratizing access to knowledge?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> I think the paradox of the internet was that the idea was to democratize access to knowledge and information and to wrestle away from the handful of publishers the ability to publish. And therefore, that was a big leap. Now the world would be better off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But of course, what we’ve done is we’ve just traded off who controls information. It went from CBS, ABC, NBC Nightly News to Facebook. And if you asked me which one I would prefer, I would rather go back to the nightly news. Why? Because they have editorial standards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are now five tech companies that control the internet, and I think that has been to the detriment, because they have not brought in the editorial standards and the journalistic standards that, although they are not perfect, the mainstream media has.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In which ways do you see this technology being used for good?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> I’m not 100% convinced that we should have done this stuff. And I’m not referring specifically to DALL-E. I’m referring to the general world of synthetic media.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you go back for decades now, the computer-graphics community has developed technology that allows for really cool special effects and Hollywood studios. And now we’ve just democratized access to that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think it’s fun and creative. But are those outweighed by the downsides, and if so, by how much? And if so, then what do we do about it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I admit that I have a biased worldview because I come at it from the other side. I see more on the downside than the upside. That’s not to say that we can’t mitigate the harm. But the reality today is the cat is out of the bag. We’re not putting this technology back in, and we’re going to have to start to get more serious about dealing with and mitigating the harm that is coming from these types of technologies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What about the impact on manual and creative labor?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID: \u003c/strong>We tend to think of the disruption of technology impacting manual labor. But now we’re talking about AI disrupting creative tasks — the one thing that we thought we had over the machines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the way, it’s not just creative, it’s doctors, radiologists. AI systems are getting so good now that they can read X-rays and CT scans and MRIs on par with or better than physicians. So you are talking about disrupting not just what would be considered manual labor, but also things that we thought were safe for a while.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also \u003cem>my\u003c/em> job: Computer scientists are now starting to develop technology to write computer code that will then build the next generation of AI. And so it’s a really interesting landscape because you’re seeing how AI is starting to disrupt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t think you can stop this. So it’s a question of how we come to grips with this massive disruption on the scale of the industrial revolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You are constantly deep in it and you see some of the worst things that people can generate using these kinds of technologies. So how do you not freak out?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID: \u003c/strong>It’s been a rough few years, in combination with COVID and world events. And while I am quick to blame the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Facebooks of the world for that, the chaos that they have induced on society, at the end of the day, we as individuals can’t escape responsibility. We’re the idiots on Facebook clicking on this stuff. We’re the jerks on Twitter yelling and screaming at each other. We are contributing to this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I think we all have to look inward and also outward. And I think we have to look to our government regulators, to do a better job than they have done over the last 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Update, 11:50 a.m. Wednesday:\u003c/strong> DALL-E was previously only accessible to the public via invite, but the AI generator has now been made available to all without a waitlist. \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/blog/dall-e-now-available-without-waitlist/\">Read more about signing up to use DALL-E here.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Original post, 2:10 p.m. Monday: \u003c/b>Think of something, type it in, and wait for it …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Imagine an image generated from your thoughts and words in just minutes, all ready for the world to see. That’s what \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/dall-e-2/\">OpenAI’s DALL-E \u003c/a>— a neural network designed to convert text descriptions into images — and its newest version, DALL-E 2, is for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This artificial intelligence-powered image generator seems futuristic and fun, but is it necessary? More importantly, is it \u003cem>safe\u003c/em>? And how can technologies like these handle things like online disinformation, bias, violent content and other harms?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101890327/dall-e-deepfakes-and-the-new-frontier-of-online-misinformation\">a recent episode of KQED Forum\u003c/a>, host Mina Kim hosted a conversation on the possibilities and pitfalls of this technology with:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Lama Ahmad, policy researcher from DALL-E creator OpenAI;\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Hany Farid, deepfake expert at UC Berkeley.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>MINA KIN: What is DALL-E, and how does it work?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>LAMA AHMAD:\u003c/strong> DALL-E is an AI that basically does text-to-image. So someone can type in a prompt and the output would be anything you can imagine. It learned from pairs of lots and lots of images, and lots and lots of captions, and basically is able to construct those concepts entirely from scratch. Even though it learned from existing images, words and language, it will be able to construct what that image \u003cem>would\u003c/em> look like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can also use \u003ca href=\"https://theinpaint.com/\">Inpaint\u003c/a> to select a region of an image and modify it also using words. And you can also create variations on existing images, or images generated by the software itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The images can look hyperrealistic, fantastical or abstract, if that’s what you would like. Sort of all in the words that you use and how you craft your prompts.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>You can also upload images to DALL-E. That goes to that Inpainting functionality where you can edit regions of an image. That being said, you cannot upload images of people, and that was a concerted effort on the part of OpenAI to really combat misinformation and disinformation related to people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was really important to OpenAI that we are putting out the AI that is most helpful, and most beneficial to people. And at the end of the day, uploading images of people was not something we wanted to allow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>DALL-E doesn’t allow uploading images of people. But, how can DALL-E be used in a malicious way?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>LAMA AHMAD:\u003c/strong> Before we even deployed DALL-E, we worked with researchers at lots of universities, academic institutions, civil society organizations that have been thinking deeply about these problems. Not just disinformation, but things like bias, things like representations of harmful imagery around children, violent content — a whole host of things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so we really thought about this, all the way from training the model and what sorts of images we include, all the way up into the development of the system, and how it would be presented to the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Including external researchers was a really important part of that because it’s not just people at OpenAI who are thinking about it, it’s the minds of lots of great people that helped us to develop our mitigations and make sure that they were working.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What benefit does DALL-E provide?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>LAMA AHMAD:\u003c/strong> I think some of the exciting things that we’ve seen happen with DALL-E are changes in how artists are doing their work, a new genre of art, and the emerging accessibility of creating images. Not everyone has the skills to do Photoshop. I certainly don’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Being able to make those kinds of things accessible to a broad range of people is something that we hope will be unlocked as a benefit of models like DALL-E. But it’s certainly something that we think about, like, how do you deploy? Or should you even deploy at all?\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Are the safeguards really good that DALL-E puts in?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> They’re not perfect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shortly after DALL-E was released, another version of this image synthesis was released called Stable Diffusion, with zero guardrails. You can put in anybody’s name, create violent or sexually explicit material — no rules. And it’s completely open-source. It took us all of an hour to get one running up on one of our computers, and all of the safeguards — that OpenAI very thoughtfully put in — in some ways don’t matter anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ve seen three very different approaches to this technology. We’ve been talking about OpenAI’s thoughtful methods with safeguards; I’ve mentioned Stable Diffusion with zero safeguards; Google has a version of this and they refuse to release it. I couldn’t even get access as a forensic scientist saying I wanted to just do forensic analysis. Google’s rationale was they are concerned about misuse and they are not releasing it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so now you’ve seen three very different approaches to this. But of course, it’s the lowest common denominator that matters. And the lowest common denominator is, no rules.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Can you talk a little bit about regulating tools like this?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> What we spend most of our time doing here in my lab is, somebody sends me an image or a video, and we try to determine if it’s real or fake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another way to think about this problem is that when you record an image or a video at the point of recording, you can authenticate. And there’s a really nice initiative called the \u003ca href=\"https://c2pa.org/\">C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity\u003c/a>, building a system that would allow your device so that when I take an image or a video or audio, it will authenticate the date and time, the location, who took it, and all the pixels are authentic so that when that piece of content makes its way onto the internet, then I can trust that it has been authentic. And I like that technology a lot because it’s here, it works, and it will scale. But it doesn’t mean we can simply ignore all the other problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I think it’s part of a larger solution that includes education, government regulation and technology. And also, more corporate responsibility. OpenAI has done a good job, but I don’t think you can say that all companies have the same thoughtfulness that we have seen coming out of OpenAI.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What are the dangers of tools like DALL-E in cases like predictive policing, facial recognition and surveillance regimes?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> I think that a legitimate point to make is, how are these systems being trained? And also is there bias in the data?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So for example, in policing, if we use historical data, that historical data is biased against people of color. And if you simply train an AI algorithm, you are simply going to repeat history. So I think that it’s a legitimate and reasonable concern to have, both from a bias perspective, but also from a fairness perspective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>California does have two laws about deepfakes. One allows anyone whose images are nonconsensually used in pornography to sue, and the other prohibits the malicious use of deepfakes for a candidate for office. What do you think of those?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> There are some problems with the laws. You have to prove intent to harm. It’s not just that it’s illegal to create it. You have to prove that it was in your intent to harm somebody. And proving intent is very, very difficult.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And also, this works within the borders of California. What happens when this is coming from wherever — Romania? Russia? China? We have no ability to litigate this here. Once those images are on the internet, they don’t come down and the harm is done and maybe you’ll have some retribution a year, 10 years from now. But it doesn’t really deal with the problem.\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think also the deepfake bill on politics is problematic, because it’s very narrowly tailored. There are all kinds of things you have to show. And again, within the California borders, I think they were well-intentioned. But I think they are largely impotent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You’ve talked about “the liar’s dividend.” Can you explain what that is?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> The thing I really worry about is that if we enter this world where any image, any audio, any video, any tweet, any article can be fake, well, then — nothing has to be real. We can simply dismiss things that we don’t like or agree with. And now we are living in a completely alternate universe relative to those around us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You see this playing out on a regular basis. For example, in 2015 Trump gets himself in trouble for the act of saying awful things about women on the “Access Hollywood” tape. A year and a half later, deepfakes are now on the horizon — they come into our vocabulary. He’s asked about the audio and he says it’s fake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now we are living in alternate realities, the so-called “liar’s dividend.” And now we have a double-fisted weapon. I can create fake content and I can deny reality by using exactly the same specter of that technology.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What about democratizing access to knowledge?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> I think the paradox of the internet was that the idea was to democratize access to knowledge and information and to wrestle away from the handful of publishers the ability to publish. And therefore, that was a big leap. Now the world would be better off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But of course, what we’ve done is we’ve just traded off who controls information. It went from CBS, ABC, NBC Nightly News to Facebook. And if you asked me which one I would prefer, I would rather go back to the nightly news. Why? Because they have editorial standards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are now five tech companies that control the internet, and I think that has been to the detriment, because they have not brought in the editorial standards and the journalistic standards that, although they are not perfect, the mainstream media has.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In which ways do you see this technology being used for good?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID:\u003c/strong> I’m not 100% convinced that we should have done this stuff. And I’m not referring specifically to DALL-E. I’m referring to the general world of synthetic media.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you go back for decades now, the computer-graphics community has developed technology that allows for really cool special effects and Hollywood studios. And now we’ve just democratized access to that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think it’s fun and creative. But are those outweighed by the downsides, and if so, by how much? And if so, then what do we do about it?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I admit that I have a biased worldview because I come at it from the other side. I see more on the downside than the upside. That’s not to say that we can’t mitigate the harm. But the reality today is the cat is out of the bag. We’re not putting this technology back in, and we’re going to have to start to get more serious about dealing with and mitigating the harm that is coming from these types of technologies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What about the impact on manual and creative labor?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID: \u003c/strong>We tend to think of the disruption of technology impacting manual labor. But now we’re talking about AI disrupting creative tasks — the one thing that we thought we had over the machines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the way, it’s not just creative, it’s doctors, radiologists. AI systems are getting so good now that they can read X-rays and CT scans and MRIs on par with or better than physicians. So you are talking about disrupting not just what would be considered manual labor, but also things that we thought were safe for a while.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also \u003cem>my\u003c/em> job: Computer scientists are now starting to develop technology to write computer code that will then build the next generation of AI. And so it’s a really interesting landscape because you’re seeing how AI is starting to disrupt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t think you can stop this. So it’s a question of how we come to grips with this massive disruption on the scale of the industrial revolution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You are constantly deep in it and you see some of the worst things that people can generate using these kinds of technologies. So how do you not freak out?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>HANY FARID: \u003c/strong>It’s been a rough few years, in combination with COVID and world events. And while I am quick to blame the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Facebooks of the world for that, the chaos that they have induced on society, at the end of the day, we as individuals can’t escape responsibility. We’re the idiots on Facebook clicking on this stuff. We’re the jerks on Twitter yelling and screaming at each other. We are contributing to this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I think we all have to look inward and also outward. And I think we have to look to our government regulators, to do a better job than they have done over the last 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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"info": "Created by The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, Reveal is public radios first one-hour weekly radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Credible, fact based and without a partisan agenda, Reveal combines the power and artistry of driveway moment storytelling with data-rich reporting on critically important issues. The result is stories that inform and inspire, arming our listeners with information to right injustices, hold the powerful accountable and improve lives.Reveal is hosted by Al Letson and showcases the award-winning work of CIR and newsrooms large and small across the nation. In a radio and podcast market crowded with choices, Reveal focuses on important and often surprising stories that illuminate the world for our listeners.",
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"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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"soldout": {
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