Category: Media and News

The Coming Tsunami of Transnational Repression

Professor Ronald Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab at U of Toronto, appeared before the House of Commons’ Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (SDIR) on March 23rd, 2026, to testify on transnational repression. His brief included a discussion of artificial intelligence and its potential use for repression. He also had a clear recommendation that the government should regulate AI. Here is the recommendation from the text of his testimony:

Regulate AI. The government must squarely and soberly address the huge potential for widespread harm associated with LLMs and AI systems, as well as social media
platforms which are connected to them. Although there are many potential economic and other benefits associated with these systems, the current political and economic context all but assures there will also be major harms emanating from their use and abuse. The government should cease any cooperation with governments on AI that are known perpetrators of TNR and DTR. It should engage in meaningful public consultation with affected communities on how these systems have begun to negatively affect peoples’lives, as called for by the People’s Consultation on AI. And it should find ways to regulateAI uses, particularly among public agencies, to mitigate harms and ensure equitable outcomes. Part of this regulation must include independent due diligence audits of all tech platforms in a transparent and accountable manner consistent with Charter of Human Rights protections on freedom of speech and access to information.

I read about this in a story in the Globe and Mail.

Enshittification

The Norwegian Consumer Council has released a punchy video about enshittification. If you go to the web site at the end you get to a page about Breaking Free. This has a link to a report on Breaking Free: Pathways to a Fair Technological Future (PDF) which argues that generative AI is the next frontier to enshittification. They point to how AI can generate large quantities of slop now sloshing around the internet.

The neologism enshittification was coined by Cory Doctorow. His web site has links to his book on it and videos of him talking about it.

The good news is, as Doctorow puts it in his book on the subject, “A new, good internet is possible. More than that, it is essential.” The final section 5 of the Norwegian report offers advice on how we can break free.

For me, it is essential that we resist the network effect, and just drop services that become unacceptably shitty. When they change the privacy settings, just drop it. It may be painful and it may feel as if your social life won’t recover, but that is what they want you to believe.

Anthropic is standing up to the Department of War (DoW) on what we might call ethics issues. This story has some interesting angles. 

Originally Anthropic had a contract with the DoW to provide AI services across the government. They had two red lines:

  1. Their AIs couldn’t be used for fully autonomous lethal weapons.
  2. Their AIs couldn’t be used for mass surveillance of US citizens.

The government pushed back and eventually cancelled the contract. Then they designated Anthropic a Supply Chain Risk which could make it hard for any government agency to contract with them. So … they are suing now. Here are some interesting links on the story:

Both are short and worth reading.

We’re Norman Rockwell’s family. Trump’s DHS has shamefully misused his work. | Opinion

The Problem We All Live With, Norman Rockwell, 1964

As Norman Rockwell’s family, we know he’d be devastated to see the Department of Homeland Security’s unauthorized misuse of his work.

Members of my family noticed over the last weeks that the DHS is using Norman Rockwell’s works without permission. We got together to write this opinion peice, We’re Norman Rockwell’s family. Trump’s DHS has shamefully misused his work. | Opinion. 

If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.

ArtNet now has a story about our Opinion as does the New York Times.

Apertus | Swiss AI

Switzerland has developed an open set of models, Apertus | Swiss AI, that is trained on a documented training set, “developed with due consideration to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws, and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act.”

EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) has released Apertus, Switzerland’s first large-scale open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity. Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages – 40% of the data is non-English – Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others. Apertus serves as a building block for developers and organizations for future applications such as chatbots, translation systems, or educational tools.

This project should interest us in Canada as we are talking Sovereign AI. Should Canada develop its own open models? What advantages would that provide? Here are some I can think of:

  • It could provide an open and well maintained set of LLMs that researchers and companies could build on or use without fear that access could be changed/pulled or data logged about usage.
  • It could be designed to be privacy protecting and to encourage adherence to relevant and changing Canadian laws and best practices.
  • It could be trained on an open and well documented bilingual data that would reflect Canadian history, culture, and values.
  • It could be iteratively retrained as issues like bias is demonstrated to be tied to part of the training data. It could also be retrained for new capacities as needed by Canadians.
  • It could include ethically accessed Indigenous training sets developed in consultation with indigenous communities. Further, it could be made available to indigenous scholars and communities with support for the development of culturally appropriate AI tools.
  • We could archive code, data, weights, documentation in such a way that Canadians could check, test, and reproduce the work.

I wonder if we could partner with Switzerland to build on their model or other countries with similar values to produce a joint model?

Personal Superintelligence

Explore Meta’s vision of personal superintelligence, where AI empowers individuals to achieve their goals, create, connect, and lead fulfilling lives. Insights from Mark Zuckerberg on the future of AI and human empowerment.

Mark Zuckerberg has just posted his vision of superintelligence: Personal Superintelligence. He starts by reiterating what a lot of people are saying; namely that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or superintelligence is coming soon,

Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.

He distinguishes what Meta is going to do with superintelligence from “others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, …”. The “others” here is a poke at OpenAI who, in their Charter, define AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work …” He juxtaposes OpenAI as automating work (for companies and governments) while Meta will put superintelligence in our personal hands for creative and communicative play.

Along the way, Zuckerberg hints that future models may not be open any more, a change in policy. Until now Meta has released open models rather than charging for access. Zuckerberg not worries that “superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns.” For this reason they will need to “be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.”

Why don’t I trust either Meta or OpenAI company?

Brandolini’s law

In a 3QuarksDaily post about Bullshit and Cons: Alberto Brandolini and Mark Twain Issue a Warning About Trump I came across Brandolini’s law of Refutation which states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

This law or principle goes a long way to explaining why bullshit, conspiracy theories, and disinformation are so hard to refute. The very act of refutation becomes suspect as if you are protesting too much. The refuter is made to look like the person with an agenda that we should be skeptical of.

The corollary is that it is less work to lie about someone before they have accused you of lying than to try to refute the accusation. Better to accuse the media of purveying fake news early than to wait until they publish news about you.

As for AI hallucinations, which I believe should be called AI bullshit, we can imagine Rockwell’s corollary:

The amount of energy needed to correct for AI hallucinations in a prompted essay is an order of magnitude bigger than the work of just writing it yourself.

News Media Publishers Run Coordinated Ad Campaign Urging Washington to Protect Content From Big Tech and AI

Today, hundreds of news publishers launched the “Support Responsible AI” ad campaign, which calls on Washington to make Big Tech pay for the content it takes to run its AI products.

I came across one these ads about AI Theft from the News Media Alliance and followed it to this site about how, News Media Publishers Run Coordinated Ad Campaign Urging Washington to Protect Content From Big Tech and AI. They have three asks:

  • Require Big Tech and AI companies to fairly compensate content creators.
  • Mandate transparency, sourcing, and attribution in AI-generated content
  • Prevent monopolies from engaging in coercive and anti-competitive practices.

Gary Marcus has a substack column on Sam Altman’s attitude problem that talks about Altman’s lack of a response when confronted with an example of what seems like IP theft. I think the positions are hardening as groups begin to use charged language like “theft” for what AI companies are doing.

Responsible AI Lecture in Delhi

A couple of days ago I gave an Institute Lecture on What is Responsible About Responsible AI at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. In it I looked at how AI ethics governance is discussed in Canada under the rubric of Responsible AI and AI Safety. I talked about the emergence of AI Safety Institutes like CAISI (Canadian AI Safety Institute.) Just when it seemed that “safety” was the emergent international approach to ethics governance, Vice President JD Lance’s speech at the Paris Summit made it clear that the Trump administration in not interested,

The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. (Vance)

Trump eliminates Biden AI policies

Trump has signed an Executive Order “eliminating harmful Biden Administration AI policies and enhancing America’s global AI dominance.” (Fact Sheet) In a Fact Sheet he calls Biden’s order(s) dangerous and onerous using the usual stifling innovation argument:

The Biden AI Executive Order established unnecessarily burdensome requirements for companies developing and deploying AI that would stifle private sector innovation and threaten American technological leadership.

There are, however, other components to the rhetoric:

  • It “established the commitment … to sustain and enhance America’s dominance to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” The human flourishing seems to be
  • It directs the creation of an “AI Action Plan” within 180 days to sustain dominance. Nothing is mentioned about flourishing in regards to the plan. Presumably dominance is flourishing. This plan and review of policies will presumably where we will see the details of implementation. It sounds like the Trump administration may keep some of the infrastructure and policies. Will they, for example, keep the AI Safety Institute in NIST?
  • There is an interesting historic section reflecting back to activities of the first Trump administration noting that “President Trump also took executive action in 2020 to establish the first-ever guidance for Federal agency adoption of AI to more effectively deliver services to the American people and foster public trust in this critical technology.” Note the use of the word “trust”. I wonder if they will return to trustworthy AI language.
  • There is language about how “development of AI systems must be free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” My guess is that the target is AIs that don’t have “woke” guardrails.

It will be interesting to track what parts of the Biden orders are eliminated and what parts are kept.