AI advances shock and awe regulators, Saudi Arabia jails Wikipedia editors, Myanmar’s spyware deal
The peril and promise of AI-driven technology have dominated the Western tech zeitgeist in 2023 so far, with too much excitement and not enough hand-wringing around ChatGPT, the naughty little bot released late last year by Open AI, a relative newcomer with big-name Silicon Valley backers like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Too few questions are being asked about what Musk meant by “dangerously” when he described ChatGPT as “dangerously strong AI.” As usual, U.S. policymakers are behind the curve, watching in awe (or counting their campaign donations) as the tech moves fast into the future, with the prospect of regulation slowly plodding along behind it but thus far failing to catch up.
Across the Atlantic, though, lawmakers seem to realize that while Europe may never become a major leader in the global tech industry, it can certainly distinguish itself as the world’s de facto tech regulator. Chris Stokel-Walker wrote for us a few weeks ago about the European Union’s AI Act, a draft regulation that is intended to rein in the sale and government use of riskier AI-driven technologies. But new amendments are apparently on the table that could make the whole process voluntary and thereby defang the regulation entirely. On Twitter, Access Now AI researcher Daniel Leufer predicted that if the amendments pass, “unscrupulous” developers will simply claim that their products are not high risk and avoid the process altogether. “These amendments incentivise bad behavior [and] punish responsible developers,” he wrote.
It recently came to light that two Wikipedia editors from Saudi Arabia have been in prison since 2020. They will be there for some time. Ziad Al-Sufyani is facing eight years behind bars. Osama Khalid, a well-known Wikipedia contributor and open source software developer, has been sentenced to 32 years in prison. Both young men were also practicing physicians. There’s not much more information about Saudi Arabia’s case against either of them or why it has taken so long for their fate to become public knowledge. But the facts we do have show just how concerned Saudi authorities are with their image and the measures they’re willing to take to protect it.
Public data experts shuddered when the Taliban retook Afghanistan and seized technical equipment that authorities used to digitize public services during the U.S. occupation. Vast stores of Afghans’ personal data were now in the hands of the Taliban. There’s a lot that we may never know about what has happened to this data or how it has been used. But what could happen might be indicated in the fact that one particular set, dating back from 2012, has found its way to Germany. Just before the new year, the New York Times reported that a digital security researcher there unknowingly purchased a database off eBay, which turned out to contain “the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people,” most of them from either Afghanistan or Iraq.