Under the fluorescent lights of a fifth grade classroom in Lexington, Kentucky, Donnie Piercey instructed his 23 students to try and outwit the “robot” that was churning out writing assignments.

The robot was the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, which can generate everything from essays and haikus to term papers within seconds. The technology has panicked teachers and prompted school districts to block access to the site. But Piercey has taken another approach by embracing it as a teaching tool, saying his job is to prepare students for a world where knowledge of AI will be required.

“This is the future,” said Piercey, who describes ChatGPT as just the latest technology in his 17 years of teaching that prompted concerns about the potential for cheating. The calculator, spellcheck, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube. Now all his students have Chromebooks on their desks. “As educators, we haven’t figured out the best way to use artificial intelligence yet. But it’s coming, whether we want it to or not.”

One exercise in his class pitted students against the machine in a lively, interactive writing game. Piercey asked students to “Find the Bot:” Each student summarized a text about boxing champion and Kentucky icon Muhammad Ali, then tried to figure out which was written by the chatbot.

At the elementary school level, Piercey is less worried about cheating and plagiarism than high school teachers. His district has blocked students from ChatGPT while allowing teacher access. Many educators around the country say districts need time to evaluate and figure out the chatbot but also acknowledge the futility of a ban that today’s tech-savvy students can work around.

“To be perfectly honest, do I wish it could be uninvented? Yes. But it happened,” said Steve Darlow, the technology trainer at Florida’s Santa Rosa County District Schools, which has blocked the application on school-issued devices and networks.

He sees the advent of AI platforms as both “revolutionary and disruptive” to education. He envisions teachers asking ChatGPT to make “amazing lesson plans for a substitute” or even for help grading papers. “I know it’s lofty talk, but this is a real game changer. You are going to have an advantage in life and business and education from using it.”

ChatGPT quickly became a global phenomenon after its November launch, and rival companies including Google are racing to release their own versions of AI-powered chatbots.

The topic of AI platforms and how schools should respond drew hundreds of educators to conference rooms at the Future of Education Technology Conference in New Orleans last month, where Texas math teacher Heather Brantley gave an enthusiastic talk on the “Magic of Writing with AI for all Subjects.”

Brantley said she was amazed at ChatGPT’s ability to make her sixth grade math lessons more creative and applicable to everyday life.

“I’m using ChatGPT to enhance all my lessons,” she said in an interview. The platform is blocked for students but open to teachers at her school, White Oak Intermediate. “Take any lesson you’re doing and say, ‘Give me a real-world example,’ and you’ll get examples from today — not 20 years ago when the textbooks we’re using were written.”

For a lesson about slope, the chatbot suggested students build ramps out of cardboard and other items found in a classroom, then measure the slope. For teaching about surface area, the chatbot noted that sixth graders would see how the concept applies to real life when wrapping gifts or building a cardboard box, said Brantley.

She is urging districts to train staff to use the AI platform to stimulate student creativity and problem solving skills. “We have an opportunity to guide our students with the next big thing that will be part of their entire lives. Let’s not block it and shut them out.”

Students in Piercey’s class said the novelty of working with a chatbot makes learning fun.

After a few rounds of “Find the Bot,” Piercey asked his class what skills it helped them hone. Hands shot up. “How to properly summarize and correctly capitalize words and use commas,” said one student. A lively discussion ensued on the importance of developing a writing voice and how some of the chatbot’s sentences lacked flair or sounded stilted.

Trevor James Medley, 11, felt that sentences written by students “have a little more feeling. More backbone. More flavor.”

Next, the class turned to playwriting, or as the worksheet handed out by Piercey called it: “Pl-ai Writing.” The students broke into groups and wrote down (using pencils and paper) the characters of a short play with three scenes to unfold in a plot that included a problem that needs to get solved.

Piercey fed details from worksheets into the ChatGPT site, along with instructions to set the scenes inside a fifth grade classroom and to add a surprise ending. Line by line, it generated fully formed scripts, which the students edited, briefly rehearsed and then performed.

One was about a class computer that escapes, with students going on a hunt to find it. The play’s creators giggled over unexpected plot twists that the chatbot introduced, including sending the students on a time travel adventure.

“First of all, I was impressed,” said Olivia Laksi, 10, one of the protagonists. She liked how the chatbot came up with creative ideas. But she also liked how Piercey urged them to revise any phrases or stage directions they didn’t like. “It’s helpful in the sense that it gives you a starting point. It’s a good idea generator.”

She and classmate Katherine McCormick, 10, said they can see the pros and cons of working with chatbots. They can help students navigate writer’s block and help those who have trouble articulating their thoughts on paper. And there is no limit to the creativity it can add to classwork.

The fifth graders seemed unaware of the hype or controversy surrounding ChatGPT. For these children, who will grow up as the world’s first native AI users, their approach is simple: Use it for suggestions, but do your own work.

“You shouldn’t take advantage of it,” McCormick says. “You’re not learning anything if you type in what you want, and then it gives you the answer.
…

When Microsoft’s nascent Bing chatbot turns testy or even threatening, it’s likely because it essentially mimics what it learned from online conversations, analysts and academics said.

Tales of disturbing exchanges with the artificial intelligence chatbot, including it issuing threats and speaking of desires to steal nuclear code, create a deadly virus, or to be alive, have gone viral this week.

“I think this is basically mimicking conversations that it’s seen online,” Graham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s language technologies institute, said Friday.

A chatbot, by design, serves up words it predicts are the most likely responses, without understanding meaning or context.

However, humans taking part in banter with programs naturally tend to read emotion and intent into what a chatbot says. 

“Large language models have no concept of ‘truth,’ they just know how to best complete a sentence in a way that’s statistically probable based on their inputs and training set,” programmer Simon Willison said in a blog post. “So they make things up, and then state them with extreme confidence.”

Laurent Daudet, co-founder of French AI company LightOn, said that the chatbot seemingly gone rogue was trained on exchanges that themselves turned aggressive or inconsistent.

“Addressing this requires a lot of effort and a lot of human feedback, which is also the reason why we chose to restrict ourselves for now to business uses and not more conversational ones,” Daudet told AFP.

The Bing chatbot was designed by Microsoft and the startup OpenAI, which has been causing a sensation since the November launch of ChatGPT, the headline-grabbing app capable of generating all sorts of written content in seconds on a simple request.

Since ChatGPT debuted, the technology behind it, known as generative AI, has been stirring fascination and concern.

“The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses (and) that can lead to a style we didn’t intend,” Microsoft said in a blog post, noting the bot is a work in progress.

The Bing chatbot said in some shared exchanges that it had been codenamed Sydney during development, and that it was given rules of behavior.

Those rules include “Sydney’s responses should also be positive, interesting, entertaining and engaging,” according to online posts.

Disturbing dialogues that combine steely threats and professions of love could be the result of dueling directives to stay positive while mimicking what the AI mined from human exchanges, Willison said.

Chatbots seem to be more prone to disturbing or bizarre responses during lengthy conversations, losing a sense of where exchanges are going, eMarketer principal analyst Yoram Wurmser told AFP.

“They can really go off the rails,” Wurmser said.

Microsoft announced on Friday it had capped the amount of back-and-forth people can have with its chatbot over a given question, because “very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing.”
…

U.S. safety regulators have pressured Tesla into recalling nearly 363,000 vehicles with its “Full Self-Driving” system because it misbehaves around intersections and doesn’t always follow speed limits.

The recall, part of a larger investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Tesla’s automated driving systems, is the most serious action taken yet against the electric vehicle maker.

It raises questions about CEO Elon Musk’s claims that he can prove to regulators that cars equipped with “Full Self-Driving” are safer than humans, and that humans almost never have to touch the controls.

Musk at one point had promised that a fleet of autonomous robotaxis would be in use in 2020. The latest action appears to push that development further into the future.

The safety agency says in documents posted on its website Thursday that Tesla will fix the concerns with an online software update in the coming weeks. The documents say Tesla is recalling the cars but does not agree with an agency analysis of the problem.

The system, which is being tested on public roads by as many as 400,000 Tesla owners, makes such unsafe actions as traveling straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane, failing to come to a complete stop at stop signs, or going through an intersection during a yellow traffic light without proper caution, NHTSA said.

In addition, the system may not adequately respond to changes in posted speed limits, or it may not account for the driver’s adjustments in speed, the documents said.

“FSD beta software that allows a vehicle to exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash,” the agency said in documents.

Musk complained Thursday on Twitter, which he now owns, that calling an over-the-air software update a recall is “anachronistic and just flat wrong!” A message was left Thursday seeking further comment from Tesla, which has disbanded its media relations department.

Tesla has received 18 warranty claims that could be caused by the software from May 2019 through Sept. 12, 2022, the documents said. But the Austin, Texas, electric vehicle maker told the agency it is not aware of any deaths or injuries.

In a statement, NHTSA said it found the problems during tests performed as part of an investigation into Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” and “Autopilot” software that take on some driving tasks. The investigation remains open, and the recall doesn’t address the full scope of what NHTSA is scrutinizing, the agency said.

Despite the names “Full Self-Driving” and “Autopilot,” Tesla says on its website that the cars cannot drive themselves and owners must be ready to intervene at all times.

The recall announced Thursday covers certain 2016-23 Model S and Model X vehicles, as well as 2017 through 2013 Model 3s, and 2020 through 2023 Model Y vehicles equipped with the software, or with installation pending.
…

A top U.S. law enforcement official on Thursday unveiled a new “disruptive technology strike force” tasked with safeguarding American technology from foreign adversaries and other national security threats.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 U.S. Justice Department official, made the announcement at a speech in London at Chatham House. The initiative, Monaco said, will be a joint effort between her department and the U.S. Commerce Department, with a goal of blocking adversaries from “trying to siphon our best technology.”

Monaco also addressed concerns about Chinese-owned video sharing app TikTok.

The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a powerful national security body, in 2020 ordered Chinese company ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears that user data could be passed on to China’s government. The divestment has not taken place.

The committee and TikTok have been in talks for more than two years aiming to reach a national security agreement.

“I will note I don’t use TikTok, and I would not advise anybody to do so because of these concerns. The bottom line is China has been quite clear that they are trying to mold and put forward the use and norms around technologies that advance their privileges, their interests,” Monaco said.

The Justice Department in recent years has increasingly focused its efforts on bringing criminal cases to protect corporate intellectual property, U.S. supply chains and private data about Americans from foreign adversaries, either through cyberattacks, theft or sanctions evasion.

U.S. law enforcement officials have said that China by far remains the biggest threat to America’s technological innovation and economic security, a view that Monaco reiterated on Thursday.

“China’s doctrine of ‘civil-military fusion’ means that any advance by a Chinese company with military application must be shared with the state,” Monaco said. “So if a company operating in China collects your data, it is a good bet that the Chinese government is accessing it.”

Under former President Donald Trump’s administration, the Justice Department created a China initiative tasked with combating Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft.

President Joe Biden’s Justice Department later scrapped the name and re-focused the initiative amid criticism it was fueling racism by targeting professors at U.S. universities over whether they disclosed financial ties to China.

The department did not back away from continuing to pursue national security cases involving China and its alleged efforts to steal intellectual property or other American data.

The Commerce Department last year imposed new export controls on advanced computing and semiconductor components in a maneuver designed to prevent China from acquiring certain chips.

Monaco said on Thursday that the United States “must also pay attention to how our adversaries can use private investments in their companies to develop the most sensitive technologies, to fuel their drive for a military and national security edge.”

She noted that the Biden administration is “exploring how to monitor the flow of private capital in critical sectors” to ensure it “doesn’t provide our adversaries with a national security advantage.”

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers last year called on Biden to issue an executive order to boost oversight of investments by U.S. companies and individuals in China and other countries.
…

The United States Justice Department has in recent months escalated its antitrust probe on Apple Inc., The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter.  

Reuters had previously reported the Justice Department opened an antitrust probe into Apple in 2019. 

The Wall Street Journal report said more litigators have now been assigned, while new requests for documents and consultations have been made with all the companies involved. 

The probe will also look at whether Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, is anti-competitive, favoring its own products over those of outside developers, the report added. 

The Justice Department declined to comment, while Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 
…

Billionaire Elon Musk said Wednesday that he anticipates finding a CEO for Twitter “probably toward the end of this year.”

Speaking via a video call to the World Government Summit in Dubai, Musk said making sure the platform can function remained the most important thing for him.

“I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financial healthy place,” Musk said when asked about when he’d name a CEO. “I’m guessing probably toward the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company.”

Musk, 51, made his wealth initially on the finance website PayPal, then created the spacecraft company SpaceX and invested in the electric car company Tesla. In recent months, however, more attention has been focused on the chaos surrounding his $44 billion purchase of the microblogging site Twitter.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military’s use of Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink as it defends itself against Russia’s ongoing invasion has put Musk off and on at the center of the war.

Musk offered a wide-ranging 35-minute discussion that touched on the billionaire’s fears about artificial intelligence, the collapse of civilization and the possibility of space aliens. But questions about Twitter kept coming back up as Musk described both Tesla and SpaceX as able to function without his direct, day-to-day involvement.

“Twitter is still somewhat a startup in reverse,” he said. “There’s work required here to get Twitter to sort of a stable position and to really build the engine of software engineering.” 

Musk also sought to portray his takeover of San Francisco-based Twitter as a cultural correction. 

“I think that the general idea is just to reflect the values of the people as opposed to imposing the values of essentially San Francisco and Berkeley, which are so somewhat of a niche ideology as compared to the rest of the world,” he said. “And, you know, Twitter was, I think, doing a little too much to impose a niche.”

Musk’s takeover at Twitter has seen mass firings and other cost-cutting measures. Musk, who is on the hook for about $1 billion in yearly interest payments for his purchase, has been trying to find way to maximize profits at the company.

However, some of Musk’s decisions have conflicted with the reasons that journalists, governments and others rely on Twitter as an information-sharing platform.

Musk on Wednesday described the need for users to rely on Twitter for trusted information from verified accounts. However, a confused rollout to a paid verified account system saw some impersonate famous companies, leading to a further withdrawal of needed advertising cash to the site.

“Twitter is certainly quite the rollercoaster,” he acknowledged.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at just under $200 billion. The Forbes analysis ranks Musk as the second-wealthiest person on Earth, just behind French luxury brand magnate Bernard Arnault. 

But Musk also has become a thought leader for some as well, albeit an oracle that is trying to get six hours of sleep a night despite the challenges at Twitter.

Musk described his children as being “programmed by Reddit and YouTube.” However, he criticized the Chinese-made social media app TikTok.

“TikTok has a lot of very high usage (but) I often hear people say, ‘Well, I spent two hours on TikTok, but I regret those two hours,’” Musk said. “We don’t want that to be the case with Twitter.”

TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Musk warned that artificial intelligence should be regulated “very carefully,” describing it as akin to the promise of nuclear power but the danger of atomic bombs. He also cautioned against having a single civilization or “too much cooperation” on Earth, saying it could “collapse” a society that’s like a “tiny candle in a vast darkness.”

And when asked about the existence of aliens, Musk had a firm response.

“The crazy thing is, I’ve seen no evidence of alien technology or alien life whatsoever. And I think I’d know because of SpaceX,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows more about space, you know, than me.” 
…

On Colorado’s northeastern plains, where the pencil-straight horizon divides golden fields and blue sky, a farmer named Danny Wood scrambles to plant and harvest proso millet, dryland corn and winter wheat in short, seasonal windows. That is until his high-tech Steiger 370 tractor conks out. 

The tractor’s manufacturer doesn’t allow Wood to make certain fixes himself, and last spring his fertilizing operations were stalled for three days before the servicer arrived to add a few lines of missing computer code for $950. 

“That’s where they have us over the barrel, it’s more like we are renting it than buying it,” said Wood, who spent $300,000 on the used tractor. 

Wood’s plight, echoed by farmers across the country, has pushed lawmakers in Colorado and 10 other states to introduce bills that would force manufacturers to provide the tools, software, parts and manuals needed for farmers to do their own repairs — thereby avoiding steep labor costs and delays that imperil profits. 

“The manufacturers and the dealers have a monopoly on that repair market because it’s lucrative,” said Rep. Brianna Titone, a Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors. “[Farmers] just want to get their machine going again.” 

In Colorado, the legislation is largely being pushed by Democrats, while their Republican colleagues find themselves stuck in a tough spot: torn between right-leaning farming constituents asking to be able to repair their own machines and the manufacturing businesses that oppose the idea. 

The manufacturers argue that changing the current practice with this type of legislation would force companies to expose trade secrets. They also say it would make it easier for farmers to tinker with the software and illegally crank up the horsepower and bypass the emissions controller — risking operators’ safety and the environment. 

Similar arguments around intellectual property have been leveled against the broader campaign called ‘right to repair,’ which has picked up steam across the country — crusading for the right to fix everything from iPhones to hospital ventilators during the pandemic. 

In 2011, Congress tried passing a right to repair law for car owners and independent servicers. That bill did not pass, but a few years later, automotive industry groups agreed to a memorandum of understanding to give owners and independent mechanics — not just authorized dealerships — access to tools and information to fix problems. 

In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission pledged to beef up its right to repair enforcement at the direction of President Joe Biden. And just last year, Titone sponsored and passed Colorado’s first right to repair law, empowering people who use wheelchairs with the tools and information to fix them. 

For the right to repair farm equipment — from thin tractors used between grape vines to behemoth combines for harvesting grain that can cost over half a million dollars — Colorado is joined by 10 states including Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, Texas and Vermont. 

Many of the bills are finding bipartisan support, said Nathan Proctor, who leads Public Interest Research Group’s national right to repair campaign. But in Colorado’s House committee on agriculture, Democrats pushed the bill forward in a 9-4 vote along party lines, with Republicans in opposition even though the bill’s second sponsor is Republican Representative Ron Weinberg. 

“That’s really surprising, and that upset me,” said the Republican farmer Wood. 

Wood’s tractor, which flies an American flag reading “Farmers First,” isn’t his only machine to break down. His grain harvesting combine was dropping into idle, but the servicer took five days to arrive on Wood’s farm — a setback that could mean a hail storm decimates a wheat field or the soil temperature moves beyond the Goldilocks zone for planting. 

“Our crop is ready to harvest and we can’t wait five days, but there was nothing else to do,” said Wood. “When it’s broke down you just sit there and wait and that’s not acceptable. You can be losing $85,000 a day.” 

Representative Richard Holtorf, the Republican who represents Wood’s district and is a farmer himself, said he’s being pulled between his constituents and the dealerships in his district covering the largely rural northeast corner of the state. He voted against the measure because he believes it will financially hurt local dealerships in rural areas and could jeopardize trade secrets. 

“I do sympathize with my farmers,” Holtorf said, but he added, “I don’t think it’s the role of government to be forcing the sale of their intellectual property.”  

At the packed hearing last week that spilled into a second room in Colorado’s Capitol, the core concerns raised in testimony were farmers illegally slipping around the emissions control and cranking up the horsepower. 

“I know growers, if they can change horsepower and they can change emissions they are going to do it,” said Russ Ball, sales manager at 21st Century Equipment, a John Deere dealership in Western states. 

The bill’s proponents acknowledged that the legislation could make it easier for operators to modify horsepower and emissions controls but argued that farmers are already able to tinker with their machines and doing so would remain illegal. 

This January, the Farm Bureau and the farm equipment manufacturer John Deere did sign a memorandum of understanding — a right to repair agreement made in the free market and without government intervention. The agreement stipulates that John Deere will share some parts, diagnostic and repair codes and manuals to allow farmers to make their own fixes. 

The Colorado bill’s detractors laud that agreement as a strong middle ground while Titone said it wasn’t enough, evidenced by six of Colorado’s biggest farmworker associations that support the bill. 

Proctor, who is tracking 20 right to repair proposals in a number of industries across the country, said the memorandum of understanding has fallen far short. 

“Farmers are saying no,” Proctor said. “We want the real thing.” 
…

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of social media platform TikTok, has dramatically upped its U.S. lobbying effort since 2020 as U.S.-China relations continue to sour and is now the fourth-largest Internet company in spending on federal lobbying as of last year, according to newly released data.

Publicly available information collected by OpenSecrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, shows that ByteDance and its subsidiaries, including TikTok, the wildly popular short video app, have spent more than $13 million on U.S. lobbying since 2020. In 2022 alone, Fox News reported, the companies spent $5.4 million on lobbying.

Only Amazon.com ($19.7 million) and the parent companies of Google ($11 million) and Facebook ($19 million) spent more, according to OpenSecrets.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, ByteDance spent $1.2 million on lobbying, according to Fox News.

The lobbyists hired by ByteDance include former U.S. senators Trent Lott and John Breaux; David Urban, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign who was also a former chief of staff for the late Senator Arlen Specter; Layth Elhassani, special assistant to President Barack Obama in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs; and Samantha Clark, former deputy staff director of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

In November, TikTok hired Jamal Brown, a deputy press secretary at the Pentagon who was national press secretary for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, to manage policy communications for the Americas, with a focus on the U.S., according to Politico.

“This is kind of the template for how modern tech lobbying goes,” Dan Auble, a senior researcher at Open Secrets, told Vox. “These companies come on the scene and suddenly start spending substantial amounts of money. And ByteDance has certainly done that.”

U.S. officials have criticized TikTok as a security risk due to ties between ByteDance and the Chinese government. The worry is that user data collected by TikTok could be passed to Beijing, so lawmakers have been trying to regulate or even ban the app in the U.S.

In 2019, TikTok paid a $5.7 million fine as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over violating children’s privacy rights. The Trump administration attempted unsuccessfully to ban downloads of TikTok from app stores and outlaw transactions between Americans and ByteDance.

As of late December, TikTok has been banned on federally managed devices, and 19 states had at least partially blocked the app from state-managed devices.

The number of federal bills that ByteDance has been lobbying on increased to 14 in 2022 from eight in 2020.

With TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew scheduled to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee on March 23, and a House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee vote in March on a bill that would ban the use of TikTok in the U.S., the company is expected to further expand its U.S. influence campaign.

Erich Andersen, general counsel and head of corporate affairs at ByteDance and TikTok, told the New York Times in January that “it was necessary for us to accelerate our own explanation of what we were prepared to do and the level of commitments on the national security process.”

TikTok has been met with a mixed response to its efforts to prove that its operations in the U.S. are outside of Beijing’s sphere of influence.

Michael Beckerman, who oversees public policy for the Americas at TikTok, met with Mike Gallagher, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on China Affairs, on February 1 to explain the company’s U.S. data security plans.

According to Reuters, Gallagher’s spokesperson, Jordan Dunn, said after the meeting that the lawmaker “found their argument unpersuasive.”

Congressman Ken Buck and Senator Josh Hawley on January 25 introduced a bill, No TikTok on United States Devices Act, which will instruct President Joe Biden to use the International Emergency Economic Powers to prohibit downloads of TikTok and ban commercial activity with ByteDance.

Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute and a telecom regulation lawyer, told VOA Mandarin that he doubted the Buck-Hawley bill would become law. He said that calls to ban TikTok began during the Trump administration, yet TikTok has remained a visible and influential presence in the U.S.

James Lewis, director of the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program, told VOA Mandarin, “An outright ban will be difficult because TikTok is speech, which is protected speech. But it [the U.S. government] can ban financial transactions, that’s possible.”

Senators Marco Rubio and Angus King reintroduced bipartisan legislation on February 10 to ban TikTok and other similar apps from operating in the U.S. by “blocking and prohibiting all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern unless they fully divest of dangerous foreign ownership.”

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency group that reviews transactions involving foreign parties for possible national security threats, ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020. The two parties have yet to reach an agreement after two years of talks.

Chuck Flint, vice president of strategic relationships at Breitbart News who is also the former chief of staff for Senator Marsha Blackburn, told VOA Mandarin, “I expect that CFIUS will be hesitant to ban TikTok. Anything short of an outright ban will leave China’s TikTok data pipeline in place.”

China experts believe that TikTok wants to reach an agreement with CFIUS rather than being banned from the U.S. or being forced to sell TikTok’s U.S. business to an American company.

Lewis of CSIS said, “Every month that we don’t do CFIUS is a step closer towards some kind of ban.”

Julian Ku, professor of law and faculty director of international programs at Hofstra University, told VOA Mandarin, “The problem is that no matter what they offer, there’s no way to completely shield the data from the Chinese government … as long as there continues to be a shared entity.”

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
…

After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation.

The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works.

It’s an approach called prebunking, which involves teaching people how to spot false claims before they encounter them. The strategy is gaining support among researchers and tech companies. 

“There’s a real appetite for solutions,” said Beth Goldberg, head of research and development at Jigsaw, an incubator division of Google that studies emerging social challenges. “Using ads as a vehicle to counter a disinformation technique is pretty novel. And we’re excited about the results.”

While belief in falsehoods and conspiracy theories isn’t new, the speed and reach of the internet has given them a heightened power. When catalyzed by algorithms, misleading claims can discourage people from getting vaccines, spread authoritarian propaganda, foment distrust in democratic institutions and spur violence.

It’s a challenge with few easy solutions. Journalistic fact checks are effective, but they’re labor intensive, aren’t read by everyone, and won’t convince those already distrustful of traditional journalism. Content moderation by tech companies is another response, but it only drives misinformation elsewhere, while prompting cries of censorship and bias.

Prebunking videos, by contrast, are relatively cheap and easy to produce and can be seen by millions when placed on popular platforms. They also avoid the political challenge altogether by focusing not on the topics of false claims, which are often cultural lightning rods, but on the techniques that make viral misinformation so infectious.

Those techniques include fear-mongering, scapegoating, false comparisons, exaggeration and missing context. Whether the subject is COVID-19, mass shootings, immigration, climate change or elections, misleading claims often rely on one or more of these tricks to exploit emotions and short-circuit critical thinking.

Last fall, Google launched the largest test of the theory so far with a prebunking video campaign in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The videos dissected different techniques seen in false claims about Ukrainian refugees. Many of those claims relied on alarming and unfounded stories about refugees committing crimes or taking jobs away from residents.

The videos were seen 38 million times on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter — a number that equates to a majority of the population in the three nations. Researchers found that compared to people who hadn’t seen the videos, those who did watch were more likely to be able to identify misinformation techniques, and less likely to spread false claims to others.

The pilot project was the largest test of prebunking so far and adds to a growing consensus in support of the theory.

“This is a good news story in what has essentially been a bad news business when it comes to misinformation,” said Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise, a media literacy initiative of the Poynter Institute that has incorporated prebunking into its own programs in countries including Brazil, Spain, France and the U.S.

Mahadevan called the strategy a “pretty efficient way to address misinformation at scale, because you can reach a lot of people while at the same time address a wide range of misinformation.”

Google’s new campaign in Germany will include a focus on photos and videos, and the ease with which they can be presented of evidence of something false. One example: Last week, following the earthquake in Turkey, some social media users shared video of the massive explosion in Beirut in 2020, claiming it was actually footage of a nuclear explosion triggered by the earthquake. It was not the first time the 2020 explosion had been the subject of misinformation.

Google will announce its new German campaign Monday ahead of next week’s Munich Security Conference. The timing of the announcement, coming before that annual gathering of international security officials, reflects heightened concerns about the impact of misinformation among both tech companies and government officials.

Tech companies like prebunking because it avoids touchy topics that are easily politicized, said Sander van der Linden, a University of Cambridge professor considered a leading expert on the theory. Van der Linden worked with Google on its campaign and is now advising Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, as well.

Meta has incorporated prebunking into many different media literacy and anti-misinformation campaigns in recent years, the company told The Associated Press in an emailed statement.

They include a 2021 program in the U.S. that offered media literacy training about COVID-19 to Black, Latino and Asian American communities. Participants who took the training were later tested and found to be far more resistant to misleading COVID-19 claims.

Prebunking comes with its own challenges. The effects of the videos eventually wears off, requiring the use of periodic “booster” videos. Also, the videos must be crafted well enough to hold the viewer’s attention, and tailored for different languages, cultures and demographics. And like a vaccine, it’s not 100% effective for everyone.

Google found that its campaign in Eastern Europe varied from country to country. While the effect of the videos was highest in Poland, in Slovakia they had “little to no discernible effect,” researchers found. One possible explanation: The videos were dubbed into the Slovak language, and not created specifically for the local audience.

But together with traditional journalism, content moderation and other methods of combating misinformation, prebunking could help communities reach a kind of herd immunity when it comes to misinformation, limiting its spread and impact.

“You can think of misinformation as a virus. It spreads. It lingers. It can make people act in certain ways,” Van der Linden told the AP. “Some people develop symptoms, some do not. So: if it spreads and acts like a virus, then maybe we can figure out how to inoculate people.”
…

An uncrewed Russian supply ship docked at the International Space Station has lost cabin pressure, the Russian space corporation reported Saturday, saying the incident doesn’t pose any danger to the station’s crew.

Roscosmos said the hatch between the station and the Progress MS-21 had been locked so the loss of pressure didn’t affect the orbiting outpost.

“The temperature and pressure on board the station are within norms and there is no danger to health and safety of the crew,” it said in a statement.

The space corporation didn’t say what may have caused the cargo ship to lose pressure.

Roscosmos noted that the cargo ship had already been loaded with waste before its scheduled disposal. The craft is set to be undocked from the station and deorbit to burn in the atmosphere Feb. 18.

The announcement came shortly after a new Russian cargo ship docked smoothly at the station Saturday. The Progress MS-22 delivered almost 3 tons of food, water and fuel along with scientific equipment for the crew.

Roscosmos said that the loss of pressure in the Progress MS-21 didn’t affect the docking of the new cargo ship and “will have no impact on the future station program.”

The depressurization of the cargo craft follows an incident in December with the Soyuz crew capsule, which was hit by a tiny meteoroid that left a small hole in the exterior radiator and sent coolant spewing into space.

Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio were supposed to use the capsule to return to Earth in March, but Russian space officials decided that higher temperatures resulting from the coolant leak could make it dangerous to use.

They decided to launch a new Soyuz capsule February 20 so the crew would have a lifeboat in the event of an emergency. But since it will travel in automatic mode to expedite the launch, a replacement crew will now have to wait until late summer or fall when another capsule is ready. It means that Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio will have to stay several extra months at the station, possibly pushing their mission to close to a year.

NASA took part in all the discussions and agreed with the plan.

Besides Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio, the space station is home to NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Russian Anna Kikina, and Japan’s Koichi Wakata. The four rode up on a SpaceX capsule last October.
…

Since its release in late 2022, an artificial intelligence-powered writing tool called ChatGPT has won instant acclaim but has also raised concerns, especially on school campuses.

High school senior Galvin Fickes recently demonstrated how entering a short command can generate a summary of Jane Eyre, a book she was assigned to read.

“I think it did a pretty good job, honestly,” said Fickes, who has used the software to help with studying.

Across the U.S., school districts are choosing to restrict access to ChatGPT on their computers and networks.

Developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, ChatGPT is trained on a vast amount of language data from the internet. When prompted, the AI generates a response using the most likely sequence of words, creating original text that mimics human thought.

Some teachers like LuPaulette Taylor are concerned that the freely available tool could be used by students to do their homework and undermine learning. She listed the skills she worries will be affected by students having access to AI programs like ChatGPT.

“The critical thinking that we all need as human beings, and the creativity, and also the benefit of having done something yourself and saying, ‘I did that,’” said Taylor, who teaches high school English at an Oakland, California, public school.

Annie Chechitelli, who is chief product officer for Turnitin, an academic integrity service used by educators in 140 countries, said AI plagiarism presents a new challenge.

“There’s no, what we call, ‘source document,’ right?” she said. “Or a smoking gun to look to, to say, ‘Yes, this looks like it was lifted from that.’”

Turnitin’s anti-plagiarism software checks the authenticity of a student paper by scanning the internet for possible matches. But when AI writes text, each line is novel and unique, making it hard to detect cheating.

There is, however, one distinguishing feature of AI writing, said Eric Wang, vice president for AI at Turnitin.

“They tend to write in a very, very average way,” he said. “Humans all have idiosyncrasies. We all deviate from average one way or another. So, we’re able to build detectors that look for cases where an entire document or entire passage is uncannily average.”

Turnitin’s ChatGPT detector is due out later this year. Wang said keeping up with AI tools will be an ongoing challenge that will transform education.

“A lot of things that we hold as norms and as status quo are going to have to shift as a result of this technology,” he said.

AI may become acceptable for some uses in the classroom, just as calculators eventually did.

Computer science teacher Steve Wright said he was impressed when his student used ChatGPT to create a study guide for her calculus class.

“You know, if ChatGPT can make us throw up our hands and say, ‘No longer can I ask a student to regurgitate a process, but now I’m going to have to actually dig in and watch them think, to know if they’re learning’ — that’s fantastic,” said Wright.

In schools and elsewhere, it seems clear that AI will have a role in writing the future.
…

If your image of nuclear power is giant, cylindrical concrete cooling towers pouring out steam on a site that takes up hundreds of acres of land, soon there will be an alternative: tiny nuclear reactors that produce only one-hundredth the electricity and can even be delivered on a truck.

Small but meaningful amounts of electricity — nearly enough to run a small campus, a hospital or a military complex, for example — will pulse from a new generation of micronuclear reactors. Now, some universities are taking interest.

“What we see is these advanced reactor technologies having a real future in decarbonizing the energy landscape in the U.S. and around the world,” said Caleb Brooks, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The tiny reactors carry some of the same challenges as large-scale nuclear, such as how to dispose of radioactive waste and how to make sure they are secure. Supporters say those issues can be managed and the benefits outweigh any risks.

Universities are interested in the technology not just to power their buildings but to see how far it can go in replacing the coal and gas-fired energy that causes climate change. The University of Illinois hopes to advance the technology as part of a clean energy future, Brooks said. The school plans to apply for a construction permit for a high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor developed by the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, and aims to start operating it by early 2028. Brooks is the project lead.

Microreactors will be “transformative” because they can be built in factories and hooked up on site in a plug-and-play way, said Jacopo Buongiorno, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Buongiorno studies the role of nuclear energy in a clean energy world.

“That’s what we want to see, nuclear energy on demand as a product, not as a big mega project,” he said.

Both Buongiorno and Marc Nichol, senior director for new reactors at the Nuclear Energy Institute, view the interest by schools as the start of a trend.

Last year, Penn State University signed a memorandum of understanding with Westinghouse to collaborate on microreactor technology. Mike Shaqqo, the company’s senior vice president for advanced reactor programs, said universities are going to be “one of our key early adopters for this technology.”

Penn State wants to prove the technology so that Appalachian industries, such as steel and cement manufacturers, may be able to use it, said Professor Jean Paul Allain, head of the nuclear engineering department. Those two industries tend to burn dirty fuels and have very high emissions. Using a microreactor also could be one of several options to help the university use less natural gas and achieve its long-term carbon emissions goals, he said.

“I do feel that microreactors can be a game-changer and revolutionize the way we think about energy,” Allain said.

For Allain, microreactors can complement renewable energy by providing a large amount of power without taking up much land. A 10-megawatt microreactor could go on less than an acre, whereas windmills or a solar farm would need far more space to produce 10 megawatts, he added. The goal is to have one at Penn State by the end of the decade.

Purdue University in Indiana is working with Duke Energy on the feasibility of using advanced nuclear energy to meet its long-term energy needs.

Nuclear reactors that are used for research are nothing new on campus. About two dozen U.S. universities have them. But using them as an energy source is new.

Back at the University of Illinois, Brooks explains the microreactor would generate heat to make steam. While the excess heat from burning coal and gas to make electricity is often wasted, Brooks sees the steam production from the nuclear microreactor as a plus, because it’s a carbon-free way to deliver steam through the campus district heating system to radiators in buildings, a common heating method for large facilities in the Midwest and Northeast. The campus has hundreds of buildings.

The 10-megawatt microreactor wouldn’t meet all of the demand, but it would serve to demonstrate the technology, as other communities and campuses look to transition away from fossil fuels, Brooks said.

One company that is building microreactors that the public can get a look at today is Last Energy, based in Washington, D.C. It built a model reactor in Brookshire, Texas that’s housed in an edgy cube covered in reflective metal.

Now it’s taking that apart to test how to transport the unit. A caravan of trucks is taking it to Austin, where company founder Bret Kugelmass is scheduled to speak at the South by Southwest conference and festival.

Kugelmass, a technology entrepreneur and mechanical engineer, is talking with some universities, but his primary focus is on industrial customers. He’s working with licensing authorities in the United Kingdom, Poland and Romania to try to get his first reactor running in Europe in 2025.

The urgency of the climate crisis means zero-carbon nuclear energy must be scaled up soon, he said.

“It has to be a small, manufactured product as opposed to a large, bespoke construction project,” he said.

Traditional nuclear power costs billions of dollars. An example is two additional reactors at a plant in Georgia that will end up costing more than $30 billion.

The total cost of Last Energy’s microreactor, including module fabrication, assembly and site prep work, is under $100 million, the company says.

Westinghouse, which has been a mainstay of the nuclear industry for over 70 years, is developing its “eVinci” microreactor, Shaqqo said, and is aiming to get the technology licensed by 2027.

The Department of Defense is working on a microreactor too. Project Pele is a DOD prototype mobile nuclear reactor under design at the Idaho National Laboratory.

Abilene Christian University in Texas is leading a group of three other universities with the company Natura Resources to design and build a research microreactor cooled by molten salt to allow for high temperature operations at low pressure, in part to help train the next generation nuclear workforce.

But not everyone shares the enthusiasm. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called it “completely unjustified.”

Microreactors in general will require much more uranium to be mined and enriched per unit of electricity generated than conventional reactors do, he said. He said he also expects fuel costs to be substantially higher and that more depleted uranium waste could be generated compared to conventional reactors.

“I think those who are hoping that microreactors are going to be the silver bullet for solving the climate change crisis are simply betting on the wrong horse,” he said.

Lyman also said he fears microreactors could be targeted for a terrorist attack, and some designs would use fuels that could be attractive to terrorists seeking to build crude nuclear weapons. The UCS does not oppose using nuclear power, but wants to make sure it’s safe.

The United States does not have a national storage facility for storing spent nuclear fuel and it’s piling up. Microreactors would only compound the problem and spread the radioactive waste around, Lyman said.

A 2022 Stanford-led study found that smaller modular reactors — the next size up from micro — will generate more waste than conventional reactors. Lead author Lindsay Krall said this week that the design of microreactors would make them subject to the same issue.

Kugelmass sees only promise. Nuclear, he said, has been “totally misunderstood and under leveraged.” It will be “the key pillar of our energy transformation moving forward.”
…

Chatbots spouting falsehoods, face-swapping apps crafting porn videos, and cloned voices defrauding companies of millions — the scramble is on to rein in AI deepfakes that have become a misinformation super spreader.

Artificial Intelligence is redefining the proverb “seeing is believing,” with a deluge of images created out of thin air and people shown mouthing things they never said in real-looking deepfakes that have eroded online trust.

“Yikes. (Definitely) not me,” tweeted billionaire Elon Musk last year in one vivid example of a deepfake video that showed him promoting a cryptocurrency scam.

China recently adopted expansive rules to regulate deepfakes but most countries appear to be struggling to keep up with the fast-evolving technology amid concerns that regulation could stymie innovation or be misused to curtail free speech.

Experts warn that deepfake detectors are vastly outpaced by creators, who are hard to catch as they operate anonymously using AI-based software that was once touted as a specialized skill but is now widely available at low cost.

Facebook owner Meta last year said it took down a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urging citizens to lay down their weapons and surrender to Russia.

And British campaigner Kate Isaacs, 30, said her “heart sank” when her face appeared in a deepfake porn video that unleashed a barrage of online abuse after an unknown user posted it on Twitter.

“I remember just feeling like this video was going to go everywhere — it was horrendous,” Isaacs, who campaigns against non-consensual porn, was quoted as saying by the BBC in October.

The following month, the British government voiced concern about deepfakes and warned of a popular website that “virtually strips women naked.”

‘Information apocalypse’

With no barriers to creating AI-synthesized text, audio and video, the potential for misuse in identity theft, financial fraud and tarnishing reputations has sparked global alarm.

The Eurasia group called the AI tools “weapons of mass disruption.”

“Technological advances in artificial intelligence will erode social trust, empower demagogues and authoritarians, and disrupt businesses and markets,” the group warned in a report.

“Advances in deepfakes, facial recognition, and voice synthesis software will render control over one’s likeness a relic of the past.”

This week AI startup ElevenLabs admitted that its voice cloning tool could be misused for “malicious purposes” after users posted a deepfake audio purporting to be actor Emma Watson reading Adolf Hitler’s biography “Mein Kampf.”

The growing volume of deepfakes may lead to what the European law enforcement agency Europol described as an “information apocalypse,” a scenario where many people are unable to distinguish fact from fiction.

“Experts fear this may lead to a situation where citizens no longer have a shared reality or could create societal confusion about which information sources are reliable,” Europol said in a report.

That was demonstrated last weekend when NFL player Damar Hamlin spoke to his fans in a video for the first time since he suffered a cardiac arrest during a match.

Hamlin thanked medical professionals responsible for his recovery, but many who believed conspiracy theories that the COVID-19 vaccine was behind his on-field collapse baselessly labeled his video a deepfake.

‘Super spreader’

China enforced new rules last month that will require businesses offering deepfake services to obtain the real identities of their users. They also require deepfake content to be appropriately tagged to avoid “any confusion.”

The rules came after the Chinese government warned that deepfakes present a “danger to national security and social stability.”

In the United States, where lawmakers have pushed for a task force to police deepfakes, digital rights activists caution against legislative overreach that could kill innovation or target legitimate content.

The European Union, meanwhile, is locked in heated discussions over its proposed “AI Act.”

The law, which the EU is racing to pass this year, will require users to disclose deepfakes but many fear the legislation could prove toothless if it does not cover creative or satirical content.

“How do you reinstate digital trust with transparency? That is the real question right now,” Jason Davis, a research professor at Syracuse University, told AFP.

“The [detection] tools are coming and they’re coming relatively quickly. But the technology is moving perhaps even quicker. So like cyber security, we will never solve this, we will only hope to keep up.”

Many are already struggling to comprehend advances such as ChatGPT, a chatbot created by the U.S.-based OpenAI that is capable of generating strikingly cogent texts on almost any topic.

In a study, media watchdog NewsGuard, which called it the “next great misinformation super spreader,” said most of the chatbot’s responses to prompts related to topics such as COVID-19 and school shootings were “eloquent, false and misleading.”

“The results confirm fears … about how the tool can be weaponized in the wrong hands,” NewsGuard said.
…

Jurors on Friday cleared Elon Musk of liability for investors’ losses in a fraud trial over his 2018 tweets falsely claiming that he had funding in place to take Tesla private.

The tweets sent the Tesla share price on a rollercoaster ride, and Musk was sued by shareholders who said the tycoon acted recklessly in an effort to squeeze investors who had bet against the company.

Jurors deliberated for barely two hours before returning to the San Francisco courtroom to say they unanimously agreed that neither Musk nor the Tesla board perpetrated fraud with the tweets and in their aftermath.

“Thank goodness, the wisdom of the people has prevailed!” tweeted Musk, who had tried but failed to get the trial moved to Texas on the grounds jurors in California would be biased against him.

“I am deeply appreciative of the jury’s unanimous finding of innocence in the Tesla 420 take-private case.”

Attorney Nicholas Porritt, who represents Glen Littleton and other investors in Tesla, had argued in court that the case was about making sure the rich and powerful have to abide by the same stock market rules as everyone else.

“Elon Musk published tweets that were false with reckless disregard as to their truth,” Porritt told the panel of nine jurors during closing arguments.

Porritt pointed to expert testimony estimating that Musk’s claim about funding, which turned out not to be true, cost investors billions of dollars overall and that Musk and the Tesla board should be made to pay damages.

But Musk attorney Alex Spiro successfully countered that the billionaire may have erred on wording in a hasty tweet, but that he did not set out to deceive anyone.

Spiro also portrayed the mercurial entrepreneur, who now owns Twitter, as having had a troubled childhood and having come to the United States as a poor youth chasing dreams.

No joke

Musk testified during three days on the witness stand that his 2018 tweet about taking Tesla private at $420 a share was no joke and that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund was serious about helping him do it.

“To Elon Musk, if he believes it or even just thinks about it then it’s true no matter how objectively false or exaggerated it may be,” Porritt told jurors.

Tesla and its board were also to blame, because they let Musk use his Twitter account to post news about the company, Porritt argued.

The case revolved around a pair of tweets in which Musk said “funding secured” for a project to buy out the publicly traded electric automaker, then in a second tweet added that “investor support is confirmed.”

“He wrote two words ‘funding secured’ that were technically inaccurate,” Spiro said of Musk while addressing jurors.

“Whatever you think of him, this isn’t a bad tweeter trial, it’s a ‘did they prove this man committed fraud?’ trial.”

Musk did not intend to deceive anyone with the tweets and had the connections and wealth to take Tesla private, Spiro contended.

During the trial playing out in federal court in San Francisco, Spiro said that even though the tweets may have been a “reckless choice of words,” they were not fraud.

“I’m being accused of fraud; it’s outrageous,” Musk said while testifying in person.

Musk said he fired off the tweets at issue after learning of a Financial Times story about a Saudi Arabian investment fund wanting to acquire a stake in Tesla.

The trial came at a sensitive time for Musk, who has dominated the headlines for his chaotic takeover of Twitter where he has laid off more than half of the 7,500 employees and scaled down content moderation. 
…

Excitement around ChatGPT — an easy to use AI chatbot that can deliver an essay or computer code upon request and within seconds — has sent schools into panic and turned Big Tech green with envy.

The potential impact of ChatGPT on society remains complicated and unclear even as its creator Wednesday announced a paid subscription version in the United States.

Here is a closer look at what ChatGPT is (and is not):

Is this a turning point?  

It is entirely possible that November’s release of ChatGPT by California company OpenAI will be remembered as a turning point in introducing a new wave of artificial intelligence to the wider public.  

What is less clear is whether ChatGPT is actually a breakthrough with some critics calling it a brilliant PR move that helped OpenAI score billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft.

Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and professor at New York University, believes “ChatGPT is not a particularly interesting scientific advance,” calling the app a “flashy demo” built by talented engineers.

LeCun, speaking to the Big Technology Podcast, said ChatGPT is void of “any internal model of the world” and is merely churning “one word after another” based on inputs and patterns found on the internet.

“When working with these AI models, you have to remember that they’re slot machines, not calculators,” warned Haomiao Huang of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

“Every time you ask a question and pull the arm, you get an answer that could be marvelous… or not… The failures can be extremely unpredictable,” Huang wrote in Ars Technica, the tech news website.

Just like Google

ChatGPT is powered by an AI language model that is nearly three years old — OpenAI’s GPT-3 — and the chatbot only uses a part of its capability.  

The true revolution is the humanlike chat, said Jason Davis, research professor at Syracuse University.

“It’s familiar, it’s conversational and guess what? It’s kind of like putting in a Google search request,” he said.

ChatGPT’s rockstar-like success even shocked its creators at OpenAI, which received billions in new financing from Microsoft in January.

“Given the magnitude of the economic impact we expect here, more gradual is better,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview to StrictlyVC, a newsletter.

“We put GPT-3 out almost three years ago… so the incremental update from that to ChatGPT, I felt like should have been predictable and I want to do more introspection on why I was sort of miscalibrated on that,” he said.

The risk, Altman added, was startling the public and policymakers and on Tuesday his company unveiled a tool for detecting text generated by AI amid concerns from teachers that students may rely on artificial intelligence to do their homework.

What now?

From lawyers to speechwriters, from coders to journalists, everyone is waiting breathlessly to feel disruption caused by ChatGPT. OpenAI just launched a paid version of the chatbot – $20 per month for an improved and faster service.

For now, officially, the first significant application of OpenAI’s tech will be for Microsoft software products.  

Though details are scarce, most assume that ChatGPT-like capabilities will turn up on the Bing search engine and in the Office suite.

“Think about Microsoft Word. I don’t have to write an essay or an article, I just have to tell Microsoft Word what I wanted to write with a prompt,” said Davis.

He believes influencers on TikTok and Twitter will be the earliest adopters of this so-called generative AI since going viral requires huge amounts of content and ChatGPT can take care of that in no time.

This of course raises the specter of disinformation and spamming carried out at an industrial scale.  

For now, Davis said the reach of ChatGPT is very limited by computing power, but once this is ramped up, the opportunities and potential dangers will grow exponentially.

And much like the ever imminent arrival of self-driving cars that never quite happens, experts disagree on whether that is a question of months or years.

Ridicule

LeCun said Meta and Google have refrained from releasing AI as potent as ChatGPT out of fear of ridicule and backlash.

Quieter releases of language-based bots – like Meta’s Blenderbot or Microsoft’s Tay for example – were quickly shown capable of generating racist or inappropriate content.

Tech giants have to think hard before releasing something “that is going to spew nonsense” and disappoint, he said.
…

Zimbabwe plans to build “Zim Cyber City,” a modern capital expected to cost up to $60 billion in raised funds and include new government buildings and a presidential palace. Critics are blasting the plan as wasteful when more than half the population lives in poverty and the government has let the current capital, Harare, fall apart. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Mount Hampden, Zimbabwe. Camera: Blessing Chigwenhembe
…

Zimbabwe plans to build “Zim Cyber City,” a modern capital expected to cost up to $60 billion in raised funds and include new government buildings and a presidential palace. Critics are blasting the plan as wasteful when more than half the population lives in poverty and the government has let the current capital, Harare, fall apart. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Mount Hampden, Zimbabwe. Camera: Blessing Chigwenhembe
…

Boeing bid farewell to an icon on Tuesday, delivering its final 747 jumbo jet as thousands of workers who helped build the planes over the past 55 years looked on. 

Since its first flight in 1969, the giant yet graceful 747 has served as a cargo plane, a commercial aircraft capable of carrying nearly 500 passengers, a transport for NASA’s space shuttles, and the Air Force One presidential aircraft. It revolutionized travel, connecting international cities that had never before had direct routes and helping democratize passenger flight. 

But over about the past 15 years, Boeing and its European rival Airbus have introduced more profitable and fuel efficient wide-body planes, with only two engines to maintain instead of the 747’s four. The final plane is the 1,574th built by Boeing in the Puget Sound region of Washington state. 

Thousands of workers joined Boeing and other industry executives from around the world — as well as actor and pilot John Travolta, who has flown 747s — Tuesday for a ceremony in the company’s massive factory north of Seattle, marking the delivery of the last one to cargo carrier Atlas Air. 

“If you love this business, you’ve been dreading this moment,” said longtime aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia. “Nobody wants a four-engine airliner anymore, but that doesn’t erase the tremendous contribution the aircraft made to the development of the industry or its remarkable legacy.” 

Boeing set out to build the 747 after losing a contract for a huge military transport, the C-5A. The idea was to take advantage of the new engines developed for the transport — high-bypass turbofan engines, which burned less fuel by passing air around the engine core, enabling a farther flight range — and to use them for a newly imagined civilian aircraft. 

It took more than 50,000 Boeing workers less than 16 months to churn out the first 747 — a Herculean effort that earned them the nickname “The Incredibles.” The jumbo jet’s production required the construction of a massive factory in Everett, north of Seattle — the world’s largest building by volume. The factory wasn’t even completed when the first planes were finished. 

Among those in attendance was Desi Evans, 92, who joined Boeing at its factory in Renton, south of Seattle, in 1957 and went on to spend 38 years at the company before retiring. One day in 1967, his boss told him he’d be joining the 747 program in Everett — the next morning. 

“They told me, ‘Wear rubber boots, a hard hat and dress warm, because it’s a sea of mud,'” Evans recalled. “And it was — they were getting ready for the erection of the factory.” 

He was assigned as a supervisor to help figure out how the interior of the passenger cabin would be installed and later oversaw crews that worked on sealing and painting the planes. 

“When that very first 747 rolled out, it was an incredible time,” he said as he stood before the last plane, parked outside the factory. “You felt elated — like you’re making history. You’re part of something big, and it’s still big, even if this is the last one.” 

The plane’s fuselage was 225 feet (68.5 meters) long and the tail stood as tall as a six-story building. The plane’s design included a second deck extending from the cockpit back over the first third of the plane, giving it a distinctive hump and inspiring a nickname, the Whale. More romantically, the 747 became known as the Queen of the Skies. 

Some airlines turned the second deck into a first-class cocktail lounge, while even the lower deck sometimes featured lounges or even a piano bar. One decommissioned 747, originally built for Singapore Airlines in 1976, has been converted into a 33-room hotel near the airport in Stockholm. 

“It was the first big carrier, the first widebody, so it set a new standard for airlines to figure out what to do with it, and how to fill it,” said Guillaume de Syon, a history professor at Pennsylvania’s Albright College who specializes in aviation and mobility. “It became the essence of mass air travel: You couldn’t fill it with people paying full price, so you need to lower prices to get people onboard. It contributed to what happened in the late 1970s with the deregulation of air travel.” 

The first 747 entered service in 1970 on Pan Am’s New York-London route, and its timing was terrible, Aboulafia said. It debuted shortly before the oil crisis of 1973, amid a recession that saw Boeing’s employment fall from 100,800 employees in 1967 to a low of 38,690 in April 1971. The “Boeing bust” was infamously marked by a billboard near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that read, “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE — Turn out the lights.” 

An updated model — the 747-400 series — arrived in the late 1980s and had much better timing, coinciding with the Asian economic boom of the early 1990s, Aboulafia said. He took a Cathay Pacific 747 from Los Angeles to Hong Kong as a twentysomething backpacker in 1991. 

“Even people like me could go see Asia,” Aboulafia said. “Before, you had to stop for fuel in Alaska or Hawaii and it cost a lot more. This was a straight shot — and reasonably priced.” 

Delta was the last U.S. airline to use the 747 for passenger flights, which ended in 2017, although some other international carriers continue to fly it, including the German airline Lufthansa. 

Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr recalled traveling in a 747 as a young exchange student and said that when he realized he’d be traveling to the West Coast of the U.S. for Tuesday’s event, there was only one way to go: riding first-class in the nose of a Lufthansa 747 from Frankfurt to San Francisco. He promised the crowd Lufthansa would keep flying the 747 for many years to come. 

“We just love the airplane,” he said. 

Atlas Air ordered four 747-8 freighters early last year, with the final one — emblazoned with an image of Joe Sutter, the engineer who oversaw the 747’s original design team — delivered Tuesday. Atlas CEO John Dietrich called the 747 the greatest air freighter, thanks in part to its unique capacity to load through the nose cone. 
…

The maker of ChatGPT is trying to curb its reputation as a freewheeling cheating machine with a new tool that can help teachers detect if a student or artificial intelligence wrote that homework.

The new AI Text Classifier launched Tuesday by OpenAI follows a weeks-long discussion at schools and colleges over fears that ChatGPT’s ability to write just about anything on command could fuel academic dishonesty and hinder learning.

OpenAI cautions that its new tool – like others already available – is not foolproof. The method for detecting AI-written text “is imperfect and it will be wrong sometimes,” said Jan Leike, head of OpenAI’s alignment team tasked to make its systems safer.

“Because of that, it shouldn’t be solely relied upon when making decisions,” Leike said.

Teenagers and college students were among the millions of people who began experimenting with ChatGPT after it launched November 30 as a free application on OpenAI’s website. And while many found ways to use it creatively and harmlessly, the ease with which it could answer take-home test questions and assist with other assignments sparked a panic among some educators.

By the time schools opened for the new year, New York City, Los Angeles and other big public school districts began to block its use in classrooms and on school devices.

The Seattle Public Schools district initially blocked ChatGPT on all school devices in December but then opened access to educators who want to use it as a teaching tool, said Tim Robinson, the district spokesman.

“We can’t afford to ignore it,” Robinson said.

The district is also discussing possibly expanding the use of ChatGPT into classrooms to let teachers use it to train students to be better critical thinkers and to let students use the application as a “personal tutor” or to help generate new ideas when working on an assignment, Robinson said.

School districts around the country say they are seeing the conversation around ChatGPT evolve quickly.

“The initial reaction was ‘OMG, how are we going to stem the tide of all the cheating that will happen with ChatGPT,'” said Devin Page, a technology specialist with the Calvert County Public School District in Maryland. Now there is a growing realization that “this is the future” and blocking it is not the solution, he said.

“I think we would be naïve if we were not aware of the dangers this tool poses, but we also would fail to serve our students if we ban them and us from using it for all its potential power,” said Page, who thinks districts like his own will eventually unblock ChatGPT, especially once the company’s detection service is in place.

OpenAI emphasized the limitations of its detection tool in a blog post Tuesday, but said that in addition to deterring plagiarism, it could help to detect automated disinformation campaigns and other misuse of AI to mimic humans.

The longer a passage of text, the better the tool is at detecting if an AI or human wrote something. Type in any text — a college admissions essay, or a literary analysis of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” — and the tool will label it as either “very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely” AI-generated.

But much like ChatGPT itself, which was trained on a huge trove of digitized books, newspapers and online writings but often confidently spits out falsehoods or nonsense, it’s not easy to interpret how it came up with a result.

“We don’t fundamentally know what kind of pattern it pays attention to, or how it works internally,” Leike said. “There’s really not much we could say at this point about how the classifier actually works.”

“Like many other technologies, it may be that one district decides that it’s inappropriate for use in their classrooms,” said OpenAI policy researcher Lama Ahmad. “We don’t really push them one way or another.”
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China says it is “deeply concerned” over reports that the United States is moving to further restrict sales of American technology to Huawei, a tech company that U.S. officials have long singled out as a threat to national security for its alleged support of Beijing’s espionage efforts.

As first reported by the Financial Times, the U.S. Department of Commerce has informed American firms that it will no longer issue licenses for technology exports to Huawei, thereby isolating the Shenzen-based company from supplies it needs to make its products.

The White House and Commerce Department have not responded to VOA’s request for confirmation of the reports. But observers say the move may be the latest tactic in the Biden administration’s geoeconomics strategy as it comes under increasing Republican pressure to outcompete China. 

The crackdown on Chinese companies began under the Trump administration, which in 2019 added Huawei to an export blacklist but made exceptions for some American firms, including Qualcomm and Intel, to provide non-5G technology licenses.

Since taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden has taken an even more aggressive stance than his predecessor, Donald Trump. Now the Biden administration appears to be heading toward a total ban on all tech exports to Huawei, said Sam Howell, who researches quantum information science at the Center for a New American Security’s Technology and National Security program.

“These new restrictions from what we understand so far would include items below the 5G level,” she told VOA. “So 4G items, Wi-Fi 6 and [Wi-Fi] 7, artificial intelligence, high performance computing and cloud capabilities as well.”

Should the Commerce Department follow through with the ban, there will likely be pushback from U.S. companies whose revenues will be directly affected, Howell said. Currently Intel and Qualcomm still sell chips used in laptops and phones manufactured by Huawei.

Huawei and Beijing have denied that they are a threat to other countries’ national security. Foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning accused Washington of “overstretching the concept of national security and abusing state power” to suppress Chinese competitors.

“Such practices are contrary to the principles of market economy” and are “blatant technological hegemony,” Mao said. 

Outcompeting Chinese tech

The latest U.S. move on Huawei is part of a U.S. effort to outcompete China in the cutting-edge technology sector.

In October, Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on providing advanced semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to Chinese companies, seeking to maintain dominance particularly on the most advanced chips. His administration is rallying allies behind the effort, including the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – home to leading companies that play key roles in the industry’s supply chain.

U.S. officials say export restrictions on chips are necessary because China can use semiconductors to advance their military systems, including weapons of mass destruction, and commit human rights abuses. 

The October restrictions follow the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which Biden signed into law in August and that restricts companies receiving U.S. subsidies from investing in and expanding cutting-edge chipmaking facilities in China. It also provides $52 billion to strengthen the domestic semiconductor industry.

Beijing has invested heavily in its own semiconductor sector, with plans to invest $1.4 trillion in advanced technologies in a bid to achieve 70% self-sufficiency in semiconductors by 2025. 

TikTok a target

TikTok, a social media application owned by the Chinese company ByteDance that has built a massive following especially among American youth, is also under U.S. lawmakers’ scrutiny due to suspicion that it could be used as a tool of Chinese foreign espionage or influence.

CEO Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 23 to testify about TikTok’s “consumer privacy and data security practices, the platforms’ impact on kids, and their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.”

Lawmakers are divided on whether to ban or allow the popular app, which has been downloaded onto about 100 million U.S. smartphones, or force its sale to an American buyer.

Earlier in January, Congress set up the House Select Committee on China, tasked with dealing with legislation to combat the dangers of a rising China.
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For New York teacher Michael Flanagan, the pandemic was a crash course in new technology — rushing out laptops to stay-at-home students and shifting hectic school life online.

Students are long back at school, but the technology has lived on, and with it has come a new generation of apps that monitor the pupils online, sometimes round the clock and even on down days shared with family and friends at home.

The programs scan students’ online activity, social media posts and more — aiming to keep them focused, detect mental health problems and flag up any potential for violence.

“You can’t unring the bell,” said Flanagan, who teaches social studies and economics. “Everybody has a device.”

The new trend for tracking, however, has raised fears that some of the apps may target minority pupils, while others have outed LGBT+ students without their consent, and many are used to instill discipline as much as deliver care.

So Flanagan has parted ways with many of his colleagues and won’t use such apps to monitor his students online.

He recalled seeing a demo of one such program, GoGuardian, in which a teacher showed — in real time — what one student was doing on his computer. The child was at home, on a day off.

Such scrutiny raised a big red flag for Flanagan.

“I have a school-issued device, and I know that there’s no expectation of privacy. But I’m a grown man — these kids don’t know that,” he said.

A New York City Department of Education spokesperson said that the use of GoGuardian Teacher “is only for teachers to see what’s on the student’s screen in the moment, provide refocusing prompts, and limit access to inappropriate content.”

Valued at more than $1 billion, GoGuardian — one of a handful of high-profile apps in the market — is now monitoring more than 22 million students, including in the New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles public systems.

Globally, the education technology sector is expected to grow by $133 billion from 2021 to 2026, market researcher Technavio said last year.

Parents expect schools to keep children safe in classrooms or on field trips, and schools also “have a responsibility to keep students safe in digital spaces and on school-issued devices,” GoGuardian said in a statement.

The company says it “provides educators with the ability to protect students from harmful or explicit content”.

Nowadays, online monitoring “is just part of the school environment,” said Jamie Gorosh, policy counsel with the Future of Privacy Forum, a watchdog group.

And even as schools move beyond the pandemic, “it doesn’t look like we’re going back,” she said.

Guns and depression

A key priority for monitoring is to keep students engaged in their academic work, but it also taps into fast-rising concerns over school violence and children’s mental health, which medical groups in 2021 termed a national emergency.

According to federal data released this month, 82% of schools now train staff on how to spot mental health problems, up from 60% in 2018; 65% have confidential threat-reporting systems, up 15% in the same period.

In a survey last year by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), 89% of teachers reported their schools were monitoring student online activity.

Yet it is not clear that the software creates safer schools.

Gorosh cited May’s shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 dead in a school that had invested heavily in monitoring tech.

Some worry the tracking apps could actively cause harm.

The CDT report, for instance, found that while administrators overwhelmingly say the purpose of monitoring software is student safety, “it’s being used far more commonly for disciplinary purposes … and we’re seeing a discrepancy falling along racial lines,” said Elizabeth Laird, director of CDT’s Equity in Civic Technology program.

The programs’ use of artificial intelligence to scan for keywords has also outed LGBT+ students without their consent, she said, noting that 29% of students who identify as LGBT+ said they or someone they knew had experienced this.

And more than a third of teachers said their schools send alerts automatically to law enforcement outside school hours.

“The stated purpose is to keep students safe, and here we have set up a system that is routinizing law enforcement access to this information and finding reasons for them to go into students’ homes,” Laird said.

‘Preyed upon’

A report by federal lawmakers last year into four companies making student monitoring software found that none had made efforts to see if the programs disproportionately targeted marginalized students.

“Students should not be surveilled on the same platforms they use for their schooling,” Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, one of the report’s co-authors, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a statement.

“As school districts work to incorporate technology in the classroom, we must ensure children and teenagers are not preyed upon by a web of targeted advertising or intrusive monitoring of any kind.”

The Department of Education has committed to releasing guidelines around the use of AI early this year.

A spokesperson said the agency was “committed to protecting the civil rights of all students.”

Aside from the ethical questions around spying on children, many parents are frustrated by the lack of transparency.

“We need more clarity on whether data is being collected, especially sensitive data. You should have at least notification, and probably consent,” said Cassie Creswell, head of Illinois Families for Public Schools, an advocacy group.

Creswell, who has a daughter in a Chicago public school, said several parents have been sent alerts about their children’s online searches, despite not having been asked or told about the monitoring in the first place.

Another child had faced repeated warnings not to play a particular game — even though the student was playing it at home on the family computer, she said.

Creswell and others acknowledge that the issues monitoring aims to address — bullying, depression, violence — are real and need tackling, but question whether technology is the answer.

“If we’re talking about self-harm monitoring, is this the best way to approach the issue?” said Gorosh.

Pointing to evidence suggesting AI is imperfect in capturing the warning signs, she said increased funding for school counselors could be more narrowly tailored to the problem.

“There are huge concerns,” she said. “But maybe technology isn’t the first step to answer some of those issues.”
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The United States and European Union announced Friday an agreement to speed up and enhance the use of artificial intelligence to improve agriculture, health care, emergency response, climate forecasting and the electric grid. 

A senior U.S. administration official, discussing the initiative shortly before the official announcement, called it the first sweeping AI agreement between the United States and Europe. Previously, agreements on the issue had been limited to specific areas such as enhancing privacy, the official said.  

AI modeling, which refers to machine-learning algorithms that use data to make logical decisions, could be used to improve the speed and efficiency of government operations and services.  

“The magic here is in building joint models [while] leaving data where it is,” the senior administration official said. “The U.S. data stays in the U.S. and European data stays there, but we can build a model that talks to the European and the U.S. data, because the more data and the more diverse data, the better the model.” 

The initiative will give governments greater access to more detailed and data-rich AI models, leading to more efficient emergency responses and electric grid management, and other benefits, the administration official said. 

Pointing to the electric grid, the official said the United States collects data on how electricity is being used, where it is generated, and how to balance the grid’s load so that weather changes do not knock it offline. 

Many European countries have similar data points they gather relating to their own grids, the official said. Under the new partnership, all that data would be harnessed into a common AI model that would produce better results for emergency managers, grid operators and others relying on AI to improve systems.  

The partnership is currently between the White House and the European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-member European Union. The senior administration official said other countries would be invited to join in the coming months.  
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An international ransomware network that extorted more than $100 million from hospitals and other organizations around the world has been brought down following a monthslong infiltration by the FBI, the Justice Department said Thursday.

The Hive ransomware group, known to operate since June 2021, targeted more than 1,500 victims, including hospitals, school districts and financial firms in more than 80 countries, DOJ and FBI officials said at a press conference. The network’s most recent victim in Florida was targeted about two weeks ago.

FBI agents, who penetrated the group’s computer networks last summer and thwarted multiple attacks, seized its two Los Angeles-based servers  Wednesday night, while taking control of darknet sites used by its affiliates, officials said.

German and Dutch police took part in the international law enforcement action.

Attorney General Merrick Garland and other top law enforcement officials announced the operation.

“Cybercrime is a constantly evolving threat,” Garland said. “But as I have said before, the Justice Department will spare no resource to identify and bring to justice anyone, anywhere, who targets the United States with a ransomware attack.”

In a ransomware attack, hackers encrypt the data on a victim’s network and then demand payments in exchange for providing a decryption key.

Hive used a “ransomware-as-a-service” model in which highly skilled developers build the malware and then recruit less-sophisticated affiliates to deploy them against victims.

Garland said Hive affiliates targeted “critical infrastructure and some of our nation’s most important industries.”

In August 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hive affiliates attacked a Midwest hospital’s network, preventing the medical facility from accepting new patients, Garland said.

The hospital was able to recover its data only after paying a ransom, the attorney general said.

While no arrests have been made in connection with the operation, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that “anybody involved with Hive should be concerned, because this investigation is very much ongoing.”

“We’re engaged in what we call ‘joint sequenced operations’ … and that includes going after their infrastructure, going after their crypto and going after the people who work with them,” Wray said.

FBI agents infiltrated Hive from July 2022 until its seizure, covertly capturing its decryption keys and sharing them with victims, saving the targets $130 million in ransom payments, officials said.

“Simply put, using lawful means, we hacked the hackers,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said.

In all, the FBI provided more than 300 victims with decryption keys, Garland said, among them a Texas school district, a Louisiana hospital, and a food services company that had been asked to make millions of dollars in ransom payments. The FBI also distributed more than 1,000 additional decryption keys to previous Hive victims.

The takedown represents a win for the Biden administration’s efforts to crack down on a recent surge in ransomware attacks that cost businesses and governments around the world billions of dollars a year.

U.S. banks and financial institutions processed nearly $1.2 billion in suspected ransomware payments in 2021, more than double the amount in 2020, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) reported in November.

Roughly 75% of the ransomware attacks reported in 2021 had a nexus with Russia, its proxies or persons acting on its behalf, according to FinCen, which also says the top five highest-grossing ransomware tools used in 2021 were all connected to Russian cyberactors.

Officials would not say whether Hive had any known links to Russia.

John Bennett, a former senior FBI official who is now managing director of the Cyber Risk Business Unit at Kroll, a cybersecurity services company, noted that the seizure notice on Hive’s website, written in both English and a Slavic language, suggests it is aimed at an Eastern European audience.

“The fact that it is basically being broadcast in a [Slavic] language, I think, is telling that that’s the target audience that they’re letting know that they got this,” Bennett said in an interview.

The gang’s takedown, Bennett said, is a sign of what is coming.

“I think this is telling that law enforcement is catching up very quickly to the capabilities of getting inside of these groups,” Bennett said.
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Facebook parent Meta is reinstating former President Donald Trump’s personal account after a two-year suspension following the January 6, 2021, insurrection. 

The company said in a blog post Wednesday it is adding “new guardrails” to ensure there are no “repeat offenders” who violate its rules. 

“In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation,” said Meta, which is based in Menlo Park, California. 

Trump, in a post on his own social media network, blasted Facebook’s decision to suspend his account as he praised his own site, Truth Social. 

“FACEBOOK, which has lost Billions of Dollars in value since “deplatforming” your favorite President, me, has just announced that they are reinstating my account. Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution!” he wrote. 

He was suspended on January 7, a day after the deadly 2021 insurrection. Other social media companies also kicked him off their platforms, though he was recently reinstated on Twitter after Elon Musk took over the company. He has not tweeted. 

Banned from mainstream social media, Trump has been relying on Truth Social, which he launched after being blocked from Twitter. 
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