Connect with us

World News

AI nudes at Beverly Hills school exposed gaps in laws

Published

on


If an eighth-grader in California shared a nude photo of a classmate with friends without consent, the student could conceivably be prosecuted under state laws dealing with child pornography and disorderly conduct.

If the photo is an AI-generated deepfake, however, it’s not clear that any state law would apply.

That’s the dilemma facing the Beverly Hills Police Department as it investigates a group of students from Beverly Vista Middle School who allegedly shared photos of classmates that had been doctored with an artificial-intelligence-powered app. According to the district, the images used real faces of students atop AI-generated nude bodies.

Lt. Andrew Myers, a spokesman for the Beverly Hills police, said no arrests have been made and the investigation is continuing.

Security guards stand outside at Beverly Vista Middle School in Beverly Hills.

Security guards stand outside at Beverly Vista Middle School on Feb. 26 in Beverly Hills.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Beverly Hills Unified School District Supt. Michael Bregy said the district’s investigation into the episode is in its final stages.

“Disciplinary action was taken immediately and we are pleased it was a contained, isolated incident,” Bregy said in a statement, although no information was disclosed about the nature of the action, the number of students involved or their grade level.

He called on Congress to prioritize the safety of children in the U.S., adding that “technology, including AI and social media, can be used incredibly positively, but much like cars and cigarettes at first, if unregulated, they are utterly destructive.”

Whether the fake nudes amount to a criminal offense, however, is complicated by the technology involved.

Federal law includes computer-generated images of identifiable people in the prohibition on child pornography. Although the prohibition seems clear, legal experts caution that it has yet to be tested in court.

California’s child pornography law does not mention artificially generated images. Instead, it applies to any image that “depicts a person under 18 years of age personally engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.”

Joseph Abrams, a Santa Ana criminal defense attorney, said an AI-generated nude “doesn’t depict a real person.” It could be defined as child erotica, he said, but not child porn. And from his standpoint as a defense attorney, he said, “I don’t think it crosses a line for this particular statute or any other statute.”

“As we enter this AI age,” Abrams said, “these kinds of questions are going to have to get litigated.”

Kate Ruane, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said that early versions of digitally altered child sexual abuse material superimposed the face of a child onto a pornographic image of someone else’s body. Now, however, freely available “undresser” apps and other programs generate fake bodies to go with real faces, raising legal questions that haven’t been squarely addressed yet, she said.

Still, she said, she had trouble seeing why the law wouldn’t cover sexually explicit images just because they were artificially generated. “The harm that we were trying to address [with the prohibition] is the harm to the child that is attendant upon the existence of the image. That is the exact same here,” Ruane said.

There is another roadblock to criminal charges, though. In both the state and federal cases, the prohibition applies just to “sexually explicit conduct,” which boils down to intercourse, other sex acts and “lascivious” exhibitions of a child’s privates.

The courts use a six-pronged test to determine whether something is a lascivious exhibition, considering such things as what the image focuses on, whether the pose is natural, and whether the image is intended to arouse the viewer. A court would have to weigh those factors when evaluating images that weren’t sexual in nature before being “undressed” by AI.

“It’s really going to depend on what the end photo looks like,” said Sandy Johnson, senior legislative policy counsel of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, the largest anti-sexual-violence organization in the United States. “It’s not just nude photos.”

The age of the kids involved wouldn’t be a defense against a conviction, Abrams said, because “children have no more rights to possess child pornography than adults do.” But like Johnson, he noted that “nude photos of children aren’t necessarily child pornography.”

Neither the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office nor the state Department of Justice responded immediately to requests for comment.

State lawmakers have proposed several bills to fill the gaps in the law regarding generative AI. These include proposals to extend criminal prohibitions on the possession of child porn and the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images (also known as “revenge porn”) to computer-generated images and to convene a working group of academics to advise lawmakers on “relevant issues and impacts of artificial intelligence and deepfakes.”

Members of Congress have competing proposals that would expand federal criminal and civil penalties for the nonconsensual distribution of AI-generated intimate imagery.

At Tuesday’s meeting of the district Board of Education, Dr. Jane Tavyev Asher, director of pediatric neurology at Cedars-Sinai, called on the board to consider the consequences of “giving our children access to so much technology” in and out of the classroom.

Beverly Vista Middle School in Beverly Hills.

Beverly Vista Middle School on Feb. 26 in Beverly Hills.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Instead of having to interact and socialize with other students, Asher said, students are allowed to spend their free time at the school on their devices. “If they’re on the screen all day, what do you think they want to do at night?”

Research shows that for children under age 16, there should be no social media use, she said. Noting how the district was blindsided by the reports of AI-generated nudes, she warned, “There are going to be more things that we’re going to be blindsided by, because technology is going to develop at a faster rate than we can imagine, and we have to protect our children from it.”

Board members and Bregy all expressed outrage at the meeting about the images. “This has just shaken the foundation of trust and safety that we work with every day to create for all of our students,” Bregy said, although he added, “We have very resilient students, and they seem happy and a little confused about what’s happening.”

“I ask that parents continuously look at their [children’s] phones, what apps are on their phones, what they’re sending, what social media sites that they’re using,” he said. These devices are “opening the door for a lot of new technology that is appearing without any regulation at all.”

Board member Rachelle Marcus noted that the district has barred students from using their phones at school, “but these kids go home after school, and that’s where the problem starts. We, the parents, have to take stronger control of what our students are doing with their phones, and that’s where I think we are failing completely.”

“The missing link at this point, from my perspective, is the partnership with the parents and the families,” board member Judy Manouchehri said. “We have dozens and dozens of programs that are meant to keep your kids off the phones in the afternoon.”



Source link

World News

For sale: A piece of California’s country music history

Published

on



The famed Buck Owens Crystal Palace, where music legends including Willie Nelson, Dwight Yoakam, Garth Brooks and a young Taylor Swift have played, is up for sale, with the foundation that runs the Bakersfield venue planning to list it for $7 million on Monday.

The nightclub, museum and steakhouse was owned by its namesake Buck Owens, the country music trailblazer who bucked the slick commercial melodies of Nashville for a distinctly West Coast twang. Owens opened the Crystal Palace in 1996, watching it become a premier venue for the biggest names in country music, including himself. Buck and the Buckaroos played there every Friday and Saturday night until his death in 2006.

Jim Shaw, a member of the Buckaroos and a director of the Buck Owens Private Foundation, said that after 28 years of running the famed venue, the Owens family plans to step back and find new owners amid a challenging business climate. The foundation said in a statement that “since Buck’s passing in 2006, we’ve tried to maintain the excellence that he expected, even as it became more and more difficult during these challenging times of increasing food and labor costs.”

The venue is not closing and scheduled events will continue as planned, Shaw said.

“It’s business as usual for now,” Shaw said. “Ideally, someone who wants to keep it exactly as it is will come forward.”

Owens’ youngest son, Johnny Owens, wrote on Facebook that the family’s hope “is that a buyer steps forward with a vision for the future and a reverence” for his father and the Bakersfield Sound.

The Crystal Palace, located on Buck Owens Boulevard, is a major tourism staple for Bakersfield. The 18,000-square-foot venue is next to the city’s downtown entrance.

“It’s the No. 1 tourist attraction in Bakersfield,” Shaw said. “There are people stepping forward and we are waiting to see what happens. I am getting a lot of phone calls. I’m anxious to see what happens.”



Source link

Continue Reading

World News

2nd local radio host says they were given questions ahead of Biden interview

Published

on


A second local radio host on Saturday told ABC News that he was provided a list of questions in advance of his interview with President Joe Biden this week.

“Yes, I was given some questions for Biden,” Earl Ingram of CivicMedia told ABC News. Ingram, a prominent host of a Wisconsin radio station, interviewed Biden this week in the wake of his debate performance.

Ingram said he was given five questions and ended up asking four of them.

“I didn’t get a chance to ask him all the things I wanted to ask,” he said.

Ingram is the second interviewer who now says they were provided questions by Biden aides to ask the president this week. Earlier today, another local radio host who interviewed Biden this week told CNN she was given questions to ask Biden before the interview.

PHOTO: President Joe Biden speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Sherman Middle School, on July 5, 2024, in Madison, Wisconsin.  (Scott Olson/Getty Images)PHOTO: President Joe Biden speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Sherman Middle School, on July 5, 2024, in Madison, Wisconsin.  (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

PHOTO: President Joe Biden speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Sherman Middle School, on July 5, 2024, in Madison, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“We do not condition interviews on acceptance of these questions, and hosts are always free to ask the questions they think will best inform their listeners,” the Biden campaign told ABC News on Saturday.

Ingram told ABC he didn’t see anything necessarily wrong with the practice. “To think that I was gonna get an opportunity to ask any question to the President of the United States, I think, is a bit more than anybody should expect,” he said.

He continued that he was grateful for the opportunity to interview Biden at all.

“Certainly the fact that they gave me this opportunity … meant a lot to me,” Ingram said.

MORE: Wealthy Democratic donors sound alarm over Biden staying in race

On CNN earlier today, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, the host of WURD’s “The Source,” said Biden officials provided her with a list of eight questions ahead of their interview with Biden.

“The questions were sent to me for approval; I approved of them,” she said.

“I got several questions — eight of them,” she continued. “And the four that were chosen were the ones that I approved.”

Responding to Lawful-Sanders, Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said in a statement that it’s not “uncommon” for interviewees to share topics they would prefer. She noted that Lawful-Sanders was “free” to ask any questions she saw fit. She also noted that it was the campaign who sent over the questions and not the White House as other reports claim.

Lawful-Sanders did note in her interview with CNN that she ultimately “approved” the questions provided.

“It’s not at all an uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer. These questions were relevant to news of the day – the president was asked about this debate performance as well as what he’d delivered for black Americans,” the statement said.

“We do not condition interviews on acceptance of these questions, and hosts are always free to ask the questions they think will best inform their listeners. In addition to these interviews, the President also participated in a press gaggle yesterday as well as an interview with ABC. Americans have had several opportunities to see him unscripted since the debate.”

A source familiar with the Biden booking operation told ABC News that moving forward they will “refrain” from offering suggested questions to interviewers.

“While interview hosts have always been free to ask whatever questions they please, moving forward we will refrain from offering suggested questions.”

2nd local radio host says they were given questions ahead of Biden interview originally appeared on abcnews.go.com



Source link

Continue Reading

World News

President George W. Bush turns 78 years old

Published

on



George W. Bush, born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, was the 43rd President of the United States.

Bush was born to parents Barbara Bush and former President George H. W. Bush. He has five siblings; Jeb Bush, Marvin Bush, Neil Bush, Dorothy Bush Koch and Pauline Robinson Bush. Pauline was diagnosed with leukemia and passed away at age three.

He was formerly the Republican Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000.

WHY FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH IS WINNING … THE POST-PRESIDENCY

Bush was first elected to the White House in November 2000, and officially began his first term as president in January 2001, after he defeated Democrat Al Gore during the presidential election. Bush was reelected to his second term as the incumbent in November 2004, when he prevailed over Democrat John Kerry, and led the United States until January 2009 before handing over his torch to former President Barack Obama.

Bush married Laura Bush on November 5, 1977, the day after her 31st birthday, in her hometown of Midland, Texas. The couple were engaged in September 1977, and married less than two months later in a Methodist church. Bush and Laura met at a barbecue, and he took her to play mini-golf on their first date. 

The Bush’s share twin daughters, Barbara Pierce Bush and Jenna Bush Hager, born on November 25, 1981. Today, the couple also share four grandchildren; Mila, Poppy, Hal and Cora.

GEORGE BUSH, FORMER FIRST LADY ISSUE STATEMENT ON AFGHANISTAN WITH MESSAGE TO US TROOPS, VETERANS

During his presidency, Bush cared for his English springer spaniel, Spot Fetcher, who accompanied him to meetings in the Oval Office and on adventures throughout the White House. The dog was born to his parent’s dog, Millie.

On September 11, 2001, less than one year into Bush’s presidency, the Twin Towers in New York City were attacked by terrorists when airplanes hit both buildings, causing a collapse and thousands of lives lost. At the time, Bush was reading to elementary-aged children at a school in Sarasota, Florida. He was calmly and quietly advised of the attacks and quickly returned to Washington, where he was briefed alongside Vice President Dick Cheney.

Bush was regarded highly for his poise while learning of the attacks and for his demonstration of patriotism and leadership in the uncertain days and weeks following the hijackings of multiple planes on the day that shook America to her core.

SADDAM CAPTURED ‘LIKE A RAT’ IN RAID

On December 30, 2003, during Bush’s first term as POTUS, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader and executor of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., was captured by the American military

In the early morning of December 30, 2006, during Bush’s presidency, Hussein was hanged and executed for his crimes against humanity. Americans across the nation celebrated the death of Hussein and applauded Bush for promising the country he would take him out and following through.

While Bush was regarded for his dealings with the terrorist attacks, the signing of No Child Left Behind Act and the Patriot Act and the creation of the United States Department of Homeland Security, many Americans were unhappy with the sanctions of interrogation techniques, the war in Iraq and taxes while he was president.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP



Source link

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending

Copyright © 2024 World Daily Info. Powered by Columba Ventures Co. Ltd.