Sunday, April 21, 2024

Image Credits: TechCrunch

An ongoing effort to force TikTok owner ByteDance to either sell the app or face a ban in the United States might be approaching the finish line.

On Saturday, the House of Representatives passed a TikTok bill as part of a larger foreign aid package that will now be sent to the Senate. This may sound familiar, as the House passed a similar bill just last month, but that one seemed unlikely to move forward in the Senate. The new version may have more Senate support, because it extends the window for ByteDance to sell to nine months (or a full year, if the president decides to grant an extension).

President Joe Biden has already said he supports and will sign the bill. After that, TikTok will presumably challenge it in court — and if the company loses, we'll see if it will actually sell or just walk away from the U.S. market.

The issue cuts across traditional political lines: Both Democrats and Republicans have suggested that ByteDance has ties to the Chinese Communist Party that make TikTok a national security threat. (Opponents have been outnumbered but seem to be similarly bipartisan.) TikTok has denied such ties and also asked its users to voice their support.

Whatever happens next, it seemed like a good week for The New York Times to publish a long list of the ways TikTok has already changed American culture, from generating countless trends to becoming Hollywood's favorite new marketing channel.

And the Chinese government showed that app banning goes both ways, forcing Apple to pull Threads and WhatsApp from China's App Store.

Putting the spotlight on Women in AI

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers continues his series of interviews with some of the most brilliant, important, and promising women working in AI, with three stories hitting this weekend.

First up, he talks to Mila's Allison Cohen about her work with researchers, social scientists, and other partners to deploy AI in ways that benefit society. Next, he interviews Ewa Luger — co-director at the Institute of Design Informatics and co-director of the Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) program — about how AI and culture shape each other. Finally, he discusses the intersection of linguistics and AI with Anna Korhonen, an NLP professor at Cambridge. Read More

A camera transforms photos into AI poetry

Image Credits: Poetry Camera

As Haje Jan Kamps explains, when you take pictures with the Poetry Camera, it identifies key elements of the photo and uses those elements to generate a poem (haiku, sonnet, whatever you like) via GPT-4. Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather first built the camera as an art project, but they're now thinking about commercializing it. Read More

India's election threatened by online misinformation

Image Credits: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP / Getty Images

Every country has problems with online misinformation, but fact-checkers tell Jagmeet Singh that India's issues are particularly acute because of its diversity of language and culture. Some suggest that the Big Tech platforms need to do more — Angie Drobnic Holan of the International Fact-Checking Network said, "The platforms invested heavily during COVID in trust and safety programs. And since then, there's clearly been a pullback." Read More

What else we're reading

Defector's David Roth takes aim at AI in a piece that opens with the embarrassing gap between New York City mayor Eric Adams' hype versus what early AI pilots are actually delivering (one chatbot has been giving business owners false and legally dubious advice). Roth argues that in reality, AI has been "far more successful as a brand or symbol than it is as any actual useful thing." Read More

And according to Daniel Bessner in a thought-provoking article in Harper's, streaming is just the latest Hollywood shift to put the squeeze on creative talent. Read More