Articles and Columns for May 2023

• Is using Generative AI just another form of outsourcing?– Is the implementation of generative AI simply a new flavor of outsourcing? How does this digital revolution reflect on our interpretation of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) ethical guidelines? How can we ensure that we maintain the sacrosanct standards of our profession as we step into this exciting future? Josh Kubicki⁠, Business Designer, Entrepreneur, Professor University of Richmond School of Law, presents a starting point to explore potential ethics considerations surrounding the use of generative AI
• AI has social consequences, but who pays the price? Tech companies’ problem with ‘ethical debt’ – As a technology ethics educator and researcher, Carey Fiesler has thought about AI systems amplifying harmful biases and stereotypes, students using AI deceptively, privacy concerns, people being fooled by misinformation, and labor exploitation. Fiesler characterizes this not at technical debt but as accruing ethical debt. Just as technical debt can result from limited testing during the development process, ethical debt results from not considering possible negative consequences or societal harms. And with ethical debt in particular, the people who incur it are rarely the people who pay for it in the end.
• What are passkeys? A cybersecurity researcher explains how you can use your phone to make passwords a thing of the past – Passkeys are digital credentials stored on your phone or computer and are analogous to physical keys. You access your passkey by signing in to your device using a personal identification number (PIN), swipe pattern or biometrics like fingerprint or face recognition. You set your online accounts to trust your phone or computer. To break into your accounts, a hacker would need to physically possess your device and have the means to sign in to it. Dr. Sayonnha Mandal, cybersecurity researcher, believes that passkeys not only provide faster, easier and more secure sign-ins, they minimize human error in password security and authorization steps. You don’t need to remember passwords for every account and don’t need to use two-factor authentication.
• Presenter’s Guide Series Part IV: The Power of Asking Questions – In the fourth article in his series on presentations, Jerry Lawson advises us on creating compelling presentations. He advises that if the audience is not understood, not engaged, not brought into the conversation, the session usually dies on the vine. Asking the audience questions is one way to improve your training sessions.
• In the post-AI legal world, what will lawyers do? – Jordan Furlong writes the legal profession is about to go through what manufacturing already has. In the next few years, legally trained generative AI will replace lawyer labour on a scale we’ve never seen before. An enormous amount of lawyer activity consists of researching, analyzing, writing, developing arguments, critiquing counter-claims, and drafting responses. A machine has now come along that does most of these things, much faster than we do. Today, the machine needs lawyers to carefully review its efforts. Within two years, I doubt it will.
• The Survey Is Dead; Long Live the Survey: Can ChatGPT Replace Traditional Research Surveys? – Iantha Haight writes that her library recently hosted a guest speaker, David Wingate, a professor in BYU’s computer science department who does research on large language models, for a faculty lunch and learn. The entire presentation was fascinating, but the most intriguing part for me and many of the law faculty in attendance was the idea that generative AI systems will become so good they will be able to replace human subjects in answering research surveys. How? Generative neural networks trained on huge amounts of data—terabytes and even petabytes—ingest enough information about people that they can answer survey questions as if they were members of the survey population.
• Bees can learn, remember, think and make decisions – here’s a look at how they navigate the world – Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees, and an adjunct professor with the departments of Entomology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. He draws on his experience studying bees for almost 50 years to explore how these creatures perceive the world and their amazing abilities to navigate, learn, communicate and remember. Here’s some of what I’ve learned.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 27, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: Essay on the poisoning of LLMs—ChatGPT in particular; Chinese hackers seek capabilities to disrupt communications between US and Asia in event of crisis, Microsoft says; CISA and Partners Update the #StopRansomware Guide; and How To Switch to Using Passkeys With Your Google Accounts.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 20, 2023 – Five highlights from this week: Artificial Intelligence: Key Practices to Help Ensure Accountability in Federal Use; Don’t get scammed by fake ChatGPT apps: Here’s what to look out for; Apple Employees Forbidden From Using ChatGPT; and How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and Why You Should.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 13, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: Neighborhood Watch Out; The A.I.-PR Industrial Complex: Artificial intelligence hype is impressively meaningless; Some Google Drive files may land in the new Spam folder soon; and Your voice could be your biggest vulnerability – AI technology is fueling a rise in online voice scams.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 7, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: You Can’t Trust Your Browser’s ‘Lock’ to Tell You a Website Is Safe; So long passwords, thanks for all the phish; Amazon Clinic patients must sign away some privacy rights under HIPAA; and Apple and Google Collaborate on Anti-Stalker Tech.

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