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mariacallous · 20 days

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On a stifling April afternoon in Ajmer, in the Indian state of Rajasthan, local politician Shakti Singh Rathore sat down in front of a greenscreen to shoot a short video. He looked nervous. It was his first time being cloned.

Wearing a crisp white shirt and a ceremonial saffron scarf bearing a lotus flower—the logo of the BJP, the country’s ruling party—Rathore pressed his palms together and greeted his audience in Hindi. “Namashkar,” he began. “To all my brothers—”

Before he could continue, the director of the shoot walked into the frame. Divyendra Singh Jadoun, a 31-year-old with a bald head and a thick black beard, told Rathore he was moving around too much on camera. Jadoun was trying to capture enough audio and video data to build an AI deepfake of Rathore that would convince 300,000 potential voters around Ajmer that they’d had a personalized conversation with him—but excess movement would break the algorithm. Jadoun told his subject to look straight into the camera and move only his lips. “Start again,” he said.

Right now, the world’s largest democracy is going to the polls. Close to a billion Indians are eligible to vote as part of the country’s general election, and deepfakes could play a decisive, and potentially divisive, role. India’s political parties have exploited AI to warp reality through cheap audio fakes, propaganda images, and AI parodies. But while the global discourse on deepfakes often focuses on misinformation, disinformation, and other societal harms, many Indian politicians are using the technology for a different purpose: voter outreach.

Across the ideological spectrum, they’re relying on AI to help them navigate the nation’s 22 official languages and thousands of regional dialects, and to deliver personalized messages in farther-flung communities. While the US recently made it illegal to use AI-generated voices for unsolicited calls, in India sanctioned deepfakes have become a $60 million business opportunity. More than 50 million AI-generated voice clone calls were made in the two months leading up to the start of the elections in April—and millions more will be made during voting, one of the country’s largest business messaging operators told WIRED.

Jadoun is the poster boy of this burgeoning industry. His firm, Polymath Synthetic Media Solutions, is one of many deepfake service providers from across India that have emerged to cater to the political class. This election season, Jadoun has delivered five AI campaigns so far, for which his company has been paid a total of $55,000. (He charges significantly less than the big political consultants—125,000 rupees [$1,500] to make a digital avatar, and 60,000 rupees [$720] for an audio clone.) He’s made deepfakes for Prem Singh Tamang, the chief minister of the Himalayan state of Sikkim, and resurrected Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, an iconic politician who died in a helicopter crash in 2009, to endorse his son Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, currently chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Jadoun has also created AI-generated propaganda songs for several politicians, including Tamang, a local candidate for parliament, and the chief minister of the western state of Maharashtra. “He is our pride,” ran one song in Hindi about a local politician in Ajmer, with male and female voices set to a peppy tune. “He’s always been impartial.”

While Rathore isn’t up for election this year, he’s one of more than 18 million BJP volunteers tasked with ensuring that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi maintains its hold on power. In the past, that would have meant spending months crisscrossing Rajasthan, a desert state roughly the size of Italy, to speak with voters individually, reminding them of how they have benefited from various BJP social programs—pensions, free tanks for cooking gas, cash payments for pregnant women. But with the help of Jadoun’s deepfakes, Rathore’s job has gotten a lot easier.

He’ll spend 15 minutes here talking to the camera about some of the key election issues, while Jadoun prompts him with questions. But it doesn’t really matter what he says. All Jadoun needs is Rathore’s voice. Once that’s done, Jadoun will use the data to generate videos and calls that will go directly to voters’ phones. In lieu of a knock at their door or a quick handshake at a rally, they’ll see or hear Rathore address them by name and talk with eerie specificity about the issues that matter most to them and ask them to vote for the BJP. If they ask questions, the AI should respond—in a clear and calm voice that’s almost better than the real Rathore’s rapid drawl. Less tech-savvy voters may not even realize they’ve been talking to a machine. Even Rathore admits he doesn’t know much about AI. But he understands psychology. “Such calls can help with swing voters.”

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 7 months

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By: Christina Buttons

Published: Nov 16, 2023

Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attacks represented the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. In the west, the most common reaction was grief and shock. Yet there’s also been no shortage of anti-Israel activists around the world who’ve taken to the streets, lauding the killers as “martyrs” and “freedom fighters.” Many of these events have been overtly antisemitic, with some even breaking out into chants of “gas the Jews.”

Young people, particularly those who self-identify as members of the progressive left, are disproportionately represented among those who’ve downplayed, dismissed, justified, or even celebrated Hamas’ actions. Claims of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” are now casually lobbed not only at Israel, but Jews more generally. Not surprisingly, this has been accompanied by a substantial increase in antisemitic hate crimes.

A survey of 2,116 registered U.S. voters, conducted in mid-October by The Harris Poll and HarrisX, revealed a striking generational divide on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Approximately half of those respondents aged 18 to 34 expressed the belief that the mass killing of Israeli civilians could be justified by Palestinian grievances. As the age of respondents increased, support for this proposition declined significantly. A similar pattern was reflected in the responses to other questions about Israel.

This result cannot be blamed—at least not entirely—on the political atmosphere on U.S. campuses, as only about 35 percent of Americans aged 25 and older in the United States have a bachelor degree. Almost all Americans consume social media in some form, however. And these online spaces are where much of the pro-terror radicalization seems to be occurring.

Video is an especially effective propaganda medium. From October 7 onwards, social media channels have been flooded with clips posted by high-follower accounts linked to Hamas. Some of the individuals spreading this content present as “journalists,” even though they’re known to have ingratiated themselves with Hamas’ leadership. In one notorious case, a CNN freelancer posted a photo of himself holding a grenade while he accompanied Hamas on the 10/7 rampage.

Even mainstream media outlets trying to act in good faith have been caught repeating fake news that’s been fed to them, directly or indirectly, by Hamas. In other cases, online opportunists, some of them with purely financial motives, have exploited the 10/7 attacks for personal gain, using AI-generated imagery and pro-Hamas bots to flood the internet with clickbait.

Instagram has become a particularly active arena for pro-Hamas propaganda. At last count, the hashtag #freepalestine had appeared on over 5.8-million posts, exceeding #standwithisrael’s 220,000 by a geometric factor of more than 20. Similarly, #gazaunderattack has amassed 1.8 million instances, an order of magnitude more than #israelunderattack’s 134,000.

Israel may have the upper hand in the unfolding military conflict within Gaza. But it is evident that Hamas and its allies are winning over many youth by weaponizing the pre-existing idioms of social-justice advocacy. Since 2020, Instagram, like all social-media platforms, has been awash with dubious slideshows purporting to educate users about “systemic racism,” “decolonization,” and the need for non-white people to rise up and “disrupt” our supposedly white-supremacist western societies. The formula worked as a means to promote Black Lives Matter protests. And anti-Israel groups are now seeking to copy this formula in their campaign to support Hamas.

In particular, these groups seek to replicate the powerful public reaction set off by video of George Floyd’s murderous mistreatment by Minneapolis police. War is hell, as the expression goes. And so in Gaza, as in every other military conflict known to history, there are instances of civilians being caught in the crossfire, or victimized by attacks against nearby military targets—scenes that are played up incessantly as evidence of supposed genocide.

I recognize these propaganda techniques because back in 2020, I was responsible for curating and creating content for an influential progressive Instagram account with more than 730,000 followers. My role was to keep people engaged and enraged. Like many other old-fashioned liberals, I’d mistakenly perceived the social-justice phenomenon as a moral extrapolation of the civil-rights movement. In time, I realized that what I was really doing was signal-boosting the values of far-left academics seeking to destroy liberal values. Part of that Marxist-inspired academic movement involves slotting whole swathes of humanity into boxes marked either “oppressor” or “oppressed.” Having put the Palestinians in the second box, these ideologues are inclined to support any action, however monstrous, presented as a strategy of liberation.

As it turns out, being an anti-oppressive social-justice revolutionary can be quite lucrative. Among the most prolific disseminators of anti-Israel propaganda, for instance, is the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), a well-funded California-based nonprofit founded by “concerned Americans.” The IMEU Instagram account now has 700,000 followers, over 200,000 of these having been recruited since 10/7.

According to IMEU Communications Director Omar Baddar, who draws a $100,000 annual salary from the organization, the group has had the most “success” with young users. In a 2021 online workshop, he discussed his strategy of leveraging “social justice content” on Instagram, while citing studies that show Americans’ growing reliance on social media for news. He noted that, unlike mainstream outlets (which typically employ stringent fact-checking techniques and attempt to provide balanced reporting), social media allows him more direct control of a desired narrative. When it comes to the narrative surrounding violence, for instance, “Israel, as an occupying power, is inherently the initiator of [all] violence.”

As noted above, a key part of this strategy involves drawing linkages to pre-existing social-justice ideas and memes. “Jim Crow segregation is obviously something that every American understands, so explaining how the parallels between Israeli apartheid and that are very useful,” Baddar told his audience. He even hints at exploiting Americans’ feelings of guilt over slavery (and white guilt, more generally) as a useful tactic.

As the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values has noted, this type of approach can seduce even some Jewish groups, many of which now tend to prioritize trending social-justice slogans and buzzwords over the actual interests of Jewish people. This includes Jewish Voice for Peace, whose influential Instagram account is nearing the million-follower mark.

Sayf Abdeen, who made a name for himself as a “Diversity, Inclusion and Overseas officer” at the London School of Economics, is another well-heeled propagandist who’s become an expert at attracting the attention of young, low-information Instagram addicts. His popular account is called Let’s Talk Palestine, a nod to a popular 2020 social-justice slideshow page called So You Want to Talk About. He notes that “anger or frustration is really good at galvanizing people and attracting attention.” And once you’ve gotten them riled up, he advises, hit them with a “call to action” that transforms ordinary youth into activists.

In this regard, Baddar is particularly interested in getting his audience to enroll in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns; and, of course, to donate money to the IMEU. The group has ramped up its Instagram activity to between four and eight posts daily, with each depicting Israel as the sole aggressor in an unprovoked attack on Palestinians (which the IMEU naturally characterizes as “genocide”). The strategy has proven effective, as the IMEU is gaining approximately 5,000 to 10,000 new followers every day.

As a means of sensationalizing its content, the IMEU often parrots the high casualty figures sourced from Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health ministry, figures to which U.S. President Joe Biden assigns “no confidence.” (While any loss of civilian life is tragic, Hamas has a history of dramatically inflating casualty counts as a means to garner sympathy for its cause. Such figures are often debunked after follow-up investigations.)

The IMEU has posted claims that deny or downplay the horrors of October 7, even in the face of forensic evidence confirming Hamas’ atrocities. Their posts sow distrust in more credible sources, including the White House, with the apparent goal of keeping users inside a propaganda cocoon. IMEU posts that spuriously blamed Israel for a deadly October 17 explosion on the grounds of Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital remain uncorrected on the group’s feed, even weeks after evidence revealed that the deaths—dozens, not hundreds, as Hamas had initially claimed—were the result of a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket. The fact that Palestinians killed their own people and then tried to blame Israel for it apparently isn’t part of the preferred IMEU narrative.

Numerous posts accuse Israel of targeting hospitals and civilian areas, while neglecting to mention that Hamas has long used these locations as headquarters and ammunition depots. The IMEU also passes over the fact that Hamas has instructed civilians to stay in the most dangerous areas; and in some cases has physically blocked non-combatants from heading to safer areas in the south of Gaza, as part of an apparent strategy of maximizing Palestinian civilian casualties for propaganda purposes. One might think that a group devoted to a proper “understanding” of the Middle East conflict—that’s the U in IMEU, remember—might see these facts as significant.

Despite the manipulative and deceptive nature of IMEU’s propaganda campaign, Instagram— which is owned by Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, Inc.—doesn’t seem to have taken measures to fact-check, correct, or contextualize any of its posts. By contrast, on X (formerly Twitter), users are better protected thanks to the new “Community Notes” feature. Earlier this year, the IMEU posted a video that, it claimed, showed “Israeli soldiers attack[ing] Palestinians,” which went viral after being shared by U.S. congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. In fact, the video showed Israeli police officers breaking up a fight among Palestinian teenagers. Embarrassed by the correction, the IMEU deleted the post.

To be fair, the Instagram platform wasn’t designed for in-depth political discussions: Following its initial release in 2010, it was mostly used by users seeking to show off pictures of nature, vacations, fashion, pets, shopping “hauls,” and recipes. Unlike X, it doesn’t encourage users to embed clickable links and launch into multi-thread arguments. As a result, there’s been less public scrutiny of the role that Instagram plays in forming public attitudes on serious political issues, as compared to Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. As the IMEU example shows, that needs to change.

A dominant conceit within the social-justice movement is that its leading activists are plucky, grass-roots figures powered by big hearts but small budgets. But the IMEU's financial statements indicate assets of over $3 million. In 2022 alone, the group received $1.49-million in donations, and held a gala event that netted $659,000. Prominent donors have included George Soros; and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (which has donated millions of dollars to dozens of anti-Israel causes and BDS campaigns).

What would a true “understanding” of the Middle East conflict look like? It might start with an acknowledgement of the fact that Israel’s military has repeatedly instructed Gazan civilians to evacuate areas in which it intends to conduct ground operations—the exact opposite of what one would expect from a “genocidal” military hegemon seeking to round up and exterminate a civilian population. Because Hamas hides its operatives in hospitals, schools, and civilian homes, and ignores the principle of distinction, it is the terrorist group, not the Israeli soldiers fighting it, that should be held responsible for civilian deaths, according to international law. Investigations into alleged crimes committed by Israel during past wars or conflicts haven’t resulted in formal charges or convictions, which says quite a lot given the enthusiasm that many international leaders have for turning the Jewish state into an international pariah.

Being a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations, Israel is bound by the laws of war, and has every incentive to minimize civilian casualties where possible, while Hamas has every incentive to maximize them: Indeed, for Hamas’ propaganda purposes, there is scant difference between a dead Jew and a dead Palestinian—the former being held up as purported evidence of Hamas’ military prowess and the latter being presented as evidence of Palestinian victimization.

Hamas, which became the dominant force in Gaza following Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza two decades ago, has operated as an Islamist kleptocracy, hoarding hundreds of millions of dollars while 80 percent of Gazans languish in poverty. How morally grotesque is it that western activists and hash-taggers who fly the banner of social justice have tied their cause to a terrorist group that steals humanitarian aid and uses women and children as human shields?

The group’s founding covenant, drafted in 1988, endorses the extermination of Jews and their state. And Hamas leaders have vowed to repeat the mass murders of October 7 until that goal is achieved. The idea that Israel must now grant a “ceasefire” to this same group, as many activists are demanding on social media, is absurd. The proper time for a ceasefire was October 6. The idea of Israel willfully calling off its military operations so that Hamas can have the chance to better redeploy its remaining forces in Gaza City is ludicrous.

* * *

“It’s just social media,” some may say. “You can just log off.” But it’s not that easy. Rightly or wrongly, many of us have come to see our socials as a window into what the rest of the world thinks. And the Jewish people I’ve spoken to on Instagram have told me that these last few weeks have been some of the worst of their lives—in part because every time they look at their phone, they see legions of users cheering on the same terrorists who murdered defenseless Israeli men, women, and children.

One Jewish man told me that he’d recently purchased a gun, and was now enrolled in firearms training. Others told me that they’ve upgraded their home security systems. One woman told me that she’s had talks with her daughter about not advertising her Jewish faith in public—“because I’m genuinely afraid of hateful people who’ve been brainwashed.” Meanwhile, efforts to fight back online can have unpredictable results. One woman I know, who’s employed in the progressive nonprofit sector, confided that her own colleagues attempted to have her fired after they saw her pro-Israel social media posts.

Calling out terrorist propaganda disguised as social-justice mantras shouldn’t be a lonely or professionally risky task: We should all be doing it. Not just because there’s inherent value in promoting truth, debunking falsehoods, and fighting antisemitism (in both letter and spirit); but also because some sizeable fraction of the young Instagram junkies who are now spreading Hamas propaganda will come to actually internalize the proposition that terrorism is justified in the name of social justice.

The 10/7 attacks won’t be the last mass-casualty Islamist terrorist massacre. And Israel is hardly the only country that Islamists target. If—god forbid—the United States suffers another 9/11-scale attack, will these same pro-Hamas meme peddlers similarly excuse it as the righteous fury of the world’s oppressed? As awful as post-10/7 Instagram has been, it has at least supplied us with a cautionary glimpse into the hive mind of the online social-justice community. If these repugnant attitudes spread and metastasize, none of us can say we weren’t put on notice.

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appson-technologies · 12 days

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Deepfakes: A Looming Threat or Misunderstood Masterpiece?

Imagine a world where trust crumbles at the click of a button. A world where a meticulously crafted video depicts a world leader declaring war, or a celebrity admitting to a crime they never committed. This unsettling reality is no longer the stuff of science fiction; it’s the chilling present powered by deepfakes.

Deepfakes are a form of artificial intelligence (AI) used to manipulate video and audio content. By leveraging deep learning algorithms, these tools can seamlessly superimpose a person’s likeness onto another’s body, creating hyperrealistic videos that blur the lines between truth and fiction. While the technology holds immense potential for entertainment and creative expression, its malicious applications pose a significant threat to democracy, social stability, and even national security.

Part 1: The Puppet Master’s Toolkit: How Deepfakes Work

So, how exactly do deepfakes pull off their illusionary feats? Here’s a peek under the hood:

Deep Learning Algorithms: Deepfakes rely on a type of AI called deep learning. These algorithms are trained on massive datasets of images and videos. By analyzing facial features, expressions, and body language, the AI learns to map one person’s likeness onto another’s movements. Autoencoders: These are specialized neural networks that play a crucial role in deepfake creation. One part of the autoencoder encodes the source video (the person whose likeness is being borrowed), while the other part decodes it, reconstructing it with the target person’s face. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): This AI technique pits two neural networks against each other. One network, the generator, creates synthetic images or videos, while the other, the discriminator, tries to distinguish the fakes from the real ones. This constant competition between the networks refines the generator’s ability to produce increasingly realistic deepfakes. The Evolution of Deepfakes: From Crude Attempts to Eerie Accuracy

The deepfake phenomenon has seen a rapid evolution. Early attempts were often easy to spot, with telltale signs like unnatural body movements or jittery facial expressions. However, advancements in AI have led to a dramatic rise in the quality of deepfakes. Today, even trained professionals can struggle to distinguish between real and manipulated videos. This concerning trend highlights the need for robust detection methods and public awareness campaigns.

Part 1: Beyond Entertainment: The Malicious Applications of Deepfakes

While deepfakes have garnered attention for their use in humor and satire, their potential for harm cannot be ignored. Here’s a glimpse into the dark side of this technology:

Weaponizing Information: Deepfakes can be used to spread misinformation and sow discord. Imagine a fabricated video of a political candidate making inflammatory statements, or a doctored clip inciting violence between ethnic groups. Such deepfakes have the power to manipulate public opinion and destabilize societies. Tarnishing Reputations: Deepfakes can be used to smear the reputation of individuals. A fabricated video of a celebrity engaging in scandalous behavior could damage their career and personal life. Financial Fraud: Deepfakes can be used to impersonate executives or CEOs in order to conduct fraudulent transactions or manipulate stock prices. The Chilling Effect: How Deepfakes Can Erode Trust in Everything We See

The pervasiveness of deepfakes can have a chilling effect on society. As the line between real and fake blurs, people may become increasingly skeptical of all video evidence. This erosion of trust can have a ripple effect, impacting everything from journalism and political discourse to legal proceedings and social interactions.

Part 2: Deepfakes: A Threat to National Security

The potential for deepfakes to disrupt national security is a growing concern. Here’s how this technology can be weaponized against nations:

Sow Discord Between Allies: Deepfakes can be used to manipulate international relations. Imagine a fabricated video depicting a foreign leader making hostile remarks about another nation. Such deepfakes could trigger diplomatic crises and undermine alliances.

Disrupting Critical Infrastructure: Deepfakes can be used to target critical infrastructure control systems. Imagine a fabricated video order from a high-ranking official instructing technicians to shut down a power grid or disrupt air traffic control systems. Such manipulations could have devastating consequences.

Erosion of Public Morale: Deepfakes can be used to spread fear and panic within a nation. Imagine a fabricated video of a military attack or a natural disaster. Such deepfakes could trigger mass panic and destabilize societies.

Beyond the Headlines: Deepfakes and the Challenges of Detection

The ability to detect deepfakes is crucial to mitigating their threats. However, this presents significant challenges:

The Ever-Evolving Threat: Deepfake creators are constantly refining their techniques. As deepfakes become more sophisticated, existing detection methods may struggle to keep pace.

The Limits of Technology: Developing robust deepfake detection tools is an ongoing process. Machine learning algorithms used for detection require vast amounts of training data, and even then, they may not be foolproof. Additionally, bias in training data sets can lead to biased detection algorithms.

The Human Factor: Human judgment remains crucial in the fight against deepfakes. Training media professionals, journalists, and the public to identify potential manipulation in videos is essential. Critical thinking skills and understanding the hallmarks of deepfakes are necessary to identify manipulated content.

A Race Against Time: The Need for a Multi-Pronged Approach

Combating the deepfake threat necessitates a multi-pronged approach:

Technological Advancements: Investing in research and development of deepfake detection tools is crucial. Collaboration between academia, tech companies, and government agencies is essential to stay ahead of the curve. This includes exploring techniques like anomaly detection and analyzing video content for inconsistencies that might indicate manipulation.

Promoting Media Literacy: Educating the public on how to identify and critically evaluate video content is vital. Raising awareness about deepfakes and providing resources for verification can empower individuals to become discerning consumers of information. Educational initiatives can teach people to look for visual inconsistencies, unusual body language, and inconsistencies in audio to identify potential deepfakes.

Regulation and Legal Frameworks: Developing legal frameworks to address the malicious use of deepfakes is crucial. Legislation that criminalizes the creation and dissemination of deepfakes intended to cause harm is necessary to deter bad actors. This might involve “right of reply” laws that allow individuals to have deepfakes removed or countered if their likeness is used without consent.

Part 2: A Beacon of Hope: Countering the Deepfake Threat

While the challenges are significant, there are reasons for optimism. Here’s a look at some promising countermeasures:

Digital Watermarking: Embedding invisible codes into videos can help identify manipulation attempts. This technology can help establish video provenance and deter the creation of deepfakes.

Blockchain Technology: Blockchain’s secure and immutable ledger system can be used to track and verify the origin of videos. This can provide a trusted record of a video’s authenticity.

Transparency and Source Verification: Encouraging platforms and content creators to be transparent about the use of AI-generated content can help build trust with viewers. Source verification tools that identify the origin of video content can also play a role. Platforms can implement measures to flag or remove deepfakes identified by users or detection algorithms.

Part 3: Deepfakes: A Tool for Good? Exploring the Positive Applications

While the potential for misuse is undeniable, deepfakes are not inherently bad. This technology holds immense potential for positive applications across various sectors, revolutionizing fields like entertainment, education, and historical preservation.

Revolutionizing Film and Entertainment: Deepfakes can be used to create hyperrealistic special effects that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive. Imagine a scenario where a younger version of an actor can be seamlessly integrated into a film without the need for complex makeup or de-aging techniques. Deepfakes can also be employed to create personalized and interactive experiences. Imagine video games where players can interact with characters whose appearances are customized based on their preferences.

Preserving History: Deepfakes can be used to breathe new life into historical footage. Imagine restoring old, damaged films or documentaries with enhanced resolution and clarity. Deepfakes can also be used to bring historical figures to life in educational documentaries, allowing viewers to connect with the past in a more engaging way.

Accessibility in Education: Deepfakes can be used to create personalized learning experiences for students with disabilities. Imagine a scenario where sign language interpretation is seamlessly integrated into educational videos, or where historical figures deliver lectures in multiple languages using deepfake technology. This can create a more inclusive learning environment for all students.

Social Impact and Awareness: Deepfakes can be used to raise awareness about social issues. Imagine creating a powerful public service announcement using deepfakes to depict the devastating consequences of climate change or promote empathy for refugees.

The Ethical Considerations: Balancing Innovation with Responsibility

While the potential benefits of deepfakes are enticing, it’s crucial to acknowledge the ethical considerations surrounding their development and use. Here are some key areas of focus:

Combating Bias: Deepfakes, like any AI technology, can perpetuate existing biases. The algorithms used to create deepfakes are trained on data sets, and if those data sets are biased, the resulting deepfakes will be biased as well. Ensuring fairness and inclusivity in the development and application of this technology is essential. This includes diverse representation in training data and careful consideration of potential biases in the algorithms themselves.

Protecting Privacy: The potential misuse of deepfakes for non-consensual manipulation of a person’s likeness raises privacy concerns. Deepfakes could be used to create damaging or defamatory content without a person’s consent. Establishing clear ethical guidelines and legal frameworks to protect individual privacy is critical. This might involve regulations requiring consent for using someone’s likeness in a deepfake, or the development of technological solutions to identify and remove unauthorized deepfakes.

Transparency and User Education: Promoting transparency and educating users about deepfakes is crucial. Platforms and content creators should be transparent about the use of AI-generated content to build trust with viewers. Initiatives to educate the public on how to identify and critically evaluate video content can empower individuals to become discerning consumers of information.

Part 4: The Future of Deepfakes: Navigating the Ethical Landscape

As deepfake technology continues to evolve, navigating the ethical landscape is crucial. Here are some key considerations for shaping the future of this technology:

Open Dialogue and Collaboration: Fostering open dialogue between policymakers, technologists, academics, and the public is essential to ensure responsible development and deployment of deepfake technology. Discussions should address potential risks and benefits, and involve diverse perspectives to develop effective solutions.

Regulation and Legal Frameworks: While regulations should not stifle innovation, developing legal frameworks to address the malicious use of deepfakes is crucial. Legislation that criminalizes the creation and dissemination of deepfakes intended to cause harm is necessary to deter bad actors.

Technological Advancements for Detection and Mitigation: Continued research and development of deepfake detection tools is crucial. Collaboration between academia, tech companies, and government agencies can accelerate advancements in this area. Additionally, exploring technological solutions like digital watermarking and blockchain technology can further mitigate the risks associated with deepfakes.

Conclusion

Deepfakes are a powerful tool with the potential to revolutionize various fields. However, their ability to manipulate reality also poses significant threats. By acknowledging the challenges, fostering open dialogue, and developing responsible applications, we can harness the potential of deepfakes for good while mitigating the risks associated with this ever-evolving technology. The future of deepfakes depends on the choices we make today.

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go2market · 1 month

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Enhance Voter Communication And Political Campaign Strategy By Using AI Enriched Personalized Voice And Video Messages

Connect directly with voters and make an impact by sending AI-enriched Personalized Video messages through WhatsApp and personalized voice messages using voice broadcasting technology. Connect with go2market to fuel your campaigns with the power of AI.

#go2marketindia #Personalized Voice And Video Messages #serviceprovider #ai voice #ai video #elecction 2024

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nexamhome · 4 months

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The Dark Side of Deepfakes: Challenges and Solutions

Deepfakes, created with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), have emerged as a dangerous weapon used to manipulate global narratives and spread computational propaganda and disinformation at unprecedented scale and speed. While they are being utilized by malicious actors in an attempt to influence elections and sow civil unrest, we are also seeing them being used for revenge porn, bulling, fake video evidence in courts, market manipulation, and blackmail (GRD09).

In the hands of hackers, terrorists, political agitators, hacktivists, or even foreign states, deepfakes can be weaponized and targeted towards specific social media audiences and demographic groups to create a sense of discord, distrust, and instability in societies. Such disinformation campaigns have already led to real-world consequences like health and security risks, property damage, and even deaths. It is also believed that the growing prominence of this phenomenon has contributed to the ongoing “infopocalypse” that currently drives people to believe any information as long as it supports their existing beliefs or bolsters their status as a victim.

As such, the misuse of deepfakes threatens to erode the public’s trust in the media, celebrities, and public figures. It could also cause serious harm to companies’ brands by allowing executives to be digitally impersonated for stock or market manipulation, product announcements, brand tech ogle sabotage, and to conduct blackmail and embarrassment of management (FRB04).

Although most deepfakes today appear as harmless memes on social platforms or artistic works featuring dead or living public figures, this does not mean that they can be ignored. The technology that powers these creations is called Generative Adversarial Networks, which consists of two artificial neural networks working together to create realistic-looking media. The first network, referred to as the generator, is trained on a large dataset of photos or videos of a person, and it attempts to produce new media that looks similar to those examples. The second network, known as the discriminator, is then fed the new data and tries to determine whether or not it is real. The more the generator and discriminator are fed, the better they become at producing real-looking images and videos.

The good news is that there are multiple efforts to mitigate the impact of deepfakes, including creating AI tools that curb access to explicit images and protect individuals from non-consensual content. Additionally, social media sites and other tech companies are tightening their rules and enacting laws to better protect users.

However, none of these measures will be effective unless they are accompanied by a broader technology website and more comprehensive approach. A global and collaborative effort is needed to recognize the severity of this issue and stop its proliferation. Otherwise, we will be left to grapple with the dangers of a world where anything can go viral, and the lines between truth and fiction have blurred so much that it is difficult to discern which is which. This is a dangerous place to be in and requires that we take a step back to consider the bigger picture.

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lilyatom · 4 months

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Social Media: A Digital Tapestry of Connection and Complexity

In the vast landscape of the internet, social media stands as a dynamic force, weaving connections and complexities in the lives of billions. From its humble beginnings to becoming an integral part of our daily existence, social media has evolved, leaving an indelible mark on society.

Evolution of Social Media

Social media's journey is a fascinating tale of innovation and adaptation. Starting from basic online forums, it has transformed into a multifaceted realm, embracing various platforms and technologies. Key milestones such as the advent of Friendster and the rise of Facebook have shaped the digital landscape we know today.

Popular Social Media Platforms

Facebook: The social giant that redefined online interactions, connecting friends and family across the globe.

Instagram: A visual playground for creatives, where images and videos paint a vivid picture of individual stories.

Twitter: The microblogging platform that turns concise thoughts into powerful conversations.

LinkedIn: The professional network, bridging gaps and creating opportunities in the business world.

TikTok: A cultural phenomenon, where short videos redefine entertainment and creativity.

Social Media and Personal Branding

In an era where the personal and professional blend seamlessly, social media plays a pivotal role in shaping individual brands. Crafting a compelling online presence opens doors to career opportunities and personal growth.

Social Media and Business

For businesses, social media is more than a platform for sharing cat videos. It's a strategic marketing tool, fostering customer engagement and brand loyalty. Successful campaigns harness the power of hashtags, influencers, and compelling content.

The Dark Side of Social Media

However, the allure of social media is not without its shadows. Cyberbullying and privacy concerns cast a dark cloud over the digital landscape, prompting conversations about the ethical use of these platforms.

Social Media and Mental Health

The impact on mental health is a topic of increasing concern. As we scroll through curated lives, the pressure to measure up takes a toll. Striking a balance for a healthier online experience is crucial.

Trends in Social Media

Video content dominates the current landscape. From live streams to short-form videos, user-generated content continues to captivate audiences. Influencer marketing and augmented reality are also on the rise, shaping the way we consume and interact online.

Impact on Society

Social media is not just a virtual space; it's a powerful influencer in the real world. From political movements to social causes, its impact reverberates through society, shaping opinions and driving change.

Future of Social Media

What lies ahead? As technology advances, social media will continue to evolve. Virtual reality, blockchain, and AI are poised to redefine the digital experience, offering glimpses into a future where connectivity knows no bounds.

Best Practices for Social Media Users

In this ever-connected world, safeguarding your online presence is paramount. Adjusting privacy settings, fact-checking before sharing, and promoting responsible online behavior contribute to a positive digital ecosystem.

Case Studies

Exploring successful social media campaigns provides insights into effective strategies. Conversely, analyzing failures offers valuable lessons on pitfalls to avoid. It's a dynamic landscape where adaptability is key.

Social Media and Education

Beyond entertainment and networking, social media plays a crucial role in education. From online courses to collaborative learning platforms, it facilitates knowledge sharing and global connectivity. However, challenges like misinformation and distraction also surface.

Global Perspectives on Social Media

As social media transcends borders, its impact varies across cultures. Understanding these variations is essential for a nuanced view of the digital tapestry that connects us all.

Conclusion

Social media, with all its intricacies, is an integral part of our lives. Its influence is undeniable, from shaping individual identities to steering societal narratives. As we navigate this digital tapestry, it's crucial to approach it with awareness, responsibility, and a keen eye on the future.

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thefloralhouses · 5 months

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Ai people

Fake Face Generator

In the ever-evolving realm of technology, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force, revolutionizing industries and reshaping our daily lives. Among the myriad applications of AI, fake face generators have garnered significant attention, sparking both fascination and apprehension. These powerful tools, capable of synthesizing realistic facial images, have opened up a new frontier in digital manipulation, raising ethical concerns and societal implications.

Delving into the Mechanics of Fake Face Generation

At the core of fake face generation lays the concept of generative adversarial networks (GANs), a class of deep learning algorithms that excel at generating realistic imagery. GANs operate by pitting two neural networks against each other: a generator, tasked with creating fake faces, and a discriminator, responsible for distinguishing between real and fake images. Through an iterative process of training and refinement, the generator gradually learns to produce increasingly realistic facial images that can deceive even the most discerning eyes.

Unveiling the Applications of Fake Face Generation

The potential applications of fake face generation are as diverse as they are intriguing. In the entertainment industry, fake faces can be employed to enhance special effects, create digital avatars, and de-age or age-up actors seamlessly. In the healthcare domain, fake face generation can be utilized to protect patient privacy by generating anonym zed medical images for research purposes. Additionally, fake faces can be leveraged in educational settings to personalize learning experiences and enhance engagement.

Addressing the Ethical Concerns of Fake Face Generation

Despite the promising applications, fake face generation raises significant ethical concerns. The ability to manipulate facial imagery with such precision poses a serious threat to personal privacy and identity. Malicious actors can exploit fake faces to create deep fakes, videos or audio recordings that convincingly depict individuals engaging in actions or making statements they never did. These deep fakes can be used for defamation, cyber bullying, and even political manipulation.

Navigating the Societal Implications of Fake Face Generation

The societal implications of fake face generation extend beyond individual privacy concerns. The proliferation of these technologies can erode trust in online interactions and fuel skepticism towards digital media. Moreover, the ability to create hyper-realistic fake faces could exacerbate societal biases and discrimination.

Charting a Responsible Path Forward

To mitigate the potential harms associated with fake face generation, a multi-faceted approach is required. Robust regulatory frameworks need to be established to prevent the misuse of these technologies. Additionally, public awareness campaigns should be conducted to educate individuals about the potential risks and ethical considerations surrounding fake face generation.

Conclusion

Fake face generators stand at the crossroads of innovation and societal responsibility. While these technologies offer immense potential for creative expression, entertainment, and research, they also pose significant threats to personal privacy, identity, and trust in digital media. As we navigate this uncharted territory, it is imperative to strike a balance between harnessing the transformative power of fake face generation and safeguarding the fundamental pillars of our digital society.

Visit for more: https://www.unrealperson.com/

#Ai people

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ai-generator17 · 9 months

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The connections between AI, digital media, and democracy are multifaceted and complex, and they have both positive and negative implications for the functioning of democratic societies. Here's an analysis of these connections:

Information Dissemination:

Positive: AI algorithms can help analyze vast amounts of data from digital media sources to identify trends, patterns, and emerging issues. This can aid journalists, policymakers, and citizens in making informed decisions and promoting transparency in a democracy.

Negative: AI-powered algorithms on social media platforms can amplify misinformation and filter bubbles. These algorithms prioritize content that generates engagement, which often leads to the spread of sensationalist or polarizing content. This can erode the quality of information available to citizens and undermine the democratic process.

Personalization:

Positive: AI can personalize content delivery, tailoring news and information to individual preferences. This can enhance user experience and engagement with digital media, making it more accessible and appealing.

Negative: Personalization can create echo chambers, where individuals are exposed only to information that aligns with their existing beliefs. This can lead to confirmation bias and hinder open dialogue, which is essential for democratic deliberation.

Censorship and Surveillance:

Positive: AI can be used for content moderation to remove harmful or illegal content, such as hate speech or graphic violence, from digital media platforms. This helps maintain a safer online environment.

Negative: AI-based surveillance and censorship can be abused by governments to stifle dissent and limit freedom of expression. This poses a significant threat to democracy, as it curtails citizens' ability to voice their opinions and access diverse information.

Manipulation and Deepfakes:

Negative: AI can generate highly convincing deepfake videos and manipulate digital content. This can be used to deceive the public, create fake news, and undermine trust in digital media and democratic institutions.

Accessibility and Inclusivity:

Positive: AI can improve accessibility by providing automated transcription, translation, and other assistive technologies for digital media content. This ensures that information is available to a wider and more diverse audience, promoting democratic inclusivity.

Election Interference:

Negative: AI can be used to manipulate elections through disinformation campaigns, voter profiling, and micro-targeting. This can undermine the integrity of democratic processes and lead to outcomes that do not accurately reflect the will of the people.

Ethical Considerations:

Positive: Discussions around the ethical use of AI in digital media can lead to the development of guidelines and regulations that protect democratic values, such as transparency in algorithmic decision-making.

Negative: The lack of clear ethical standards and regulations for AI in digital media can result in unintended consequences that threaten democracy, as seen in instances of algorithmic bias or discrimination.

In conclusion, AI's role in digital media has profound implications for democracy. While it has the potential to enhance information dissemination, personalization, and accessibility, it also poses risks such as misinformation, censorship, and election interference. The impact of AI on democracy will depend on how it is developed, deployed, and regulated, making it essential to strike a balance between innovation and safeguarding democratic principles.

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How can AI technology be positively deployed to underpin political institutions?

AI technology has the potential to positively impact political institutions in various ways, promoting transparency, efficiency, and better decision-making. Here are several ways in which AI can be deployed to underpin political institutions:

Data Analysis and Predictive Analytics: AI can help political institutions analyze vast amounts of data, including polling data, social media sentiment, and historical election results. Predictive analytics can be used to forecast election outcomes, identify emerging issues, and gauge public opinion.

Voter Engagement: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can engage with citizens to provide information about elections, candidates, and important issues. These tools can also help with voter registration and absentee ballot requests, making the electoral process more accessible.

Enhancing Policy Making: AI can assist policymakers in identifying trends and patterns in data that may inform better policy decisions. Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms can help in summarizing research papers, public comments, and legislative texts, making it easier for lawmakers to understand complex issues.

Election Security: AI can be used to enhance the security of elections by identifying and mitigating cyber security threats, such as hacking attempts and disinformation campaigns. Machine learning algorithms can help detect anomalies in voter registration data and voting patterns to prevent fraud.

Constituent Services: AI-powered chat bots and virtual assistants can handle routine constituent inquiries and complaints, freeing up human staff to focus on more complex issues. These tools can provide quick and efficient responses to common questions.

Redistricting: AI algorithms can assist in the redistricting process by ensuring that electoral districts are drawn fairly and without bias. By analyzing demographic data and historical voting patterns, AI can help create more representative and equitable districts.

Public Engagement and Feedback: AI can facilitate public engagement through online forums and social media. Sentiment analysis can help political institutions understand public sentiment and concerns, allowing them to respond more effectively to citizen feedback.

Resource Allocation: AI can help political campaigns and parties optimize their resource allocation by identifying key demographics and regions where they should focus their efforts to maximize impact.

Transparency and Accountability: AI can assist in monitoring campaign finance and political contributions, helping to ensure transparency and accountability in the political process.

Language Translation and Accessibility: AI-powered translation tools can make political information more accessible to citizens who speak different languages. This can help bridge language barriers and ensure that information is available to a wider audience.

Disaster Response and Crisis Management: During emergencies or natural disasters, AI can help political institutions analyze real-time data, predict the impact of disasters, and coordinate response efforts more effectively.

However, it's crucial to deploy AI technology in a way that prioritizes ethics, privacy, and fairness. Additionally, there should be transparency and accountability in the use of AI in political institutions to maintain public trust. Regular audits, data protection measures, and oversight mechanisms are essential to ensure that AI is deployed responsibly and for the benefit of society as a whole.

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Describe the process of audio event detection, recognition, and monitoring with AI Audio event detection, recognition, and monitoring with AI involves the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to analyze and understand audio signals, identify specific events or patterns, and continuously monitor audio data for relevant information. This process can have various applications, including surveillance, security, environmental monitoring, and more. Here's an overview of the steps involved:

Data Collection:

The process begins with the collection of audio data. This data can come from various sources, such as microphones, sensors, or audio recordings.

Data Preprocessing: Raw audio data is often noisy and may contain irrelevant information. Preprocessing steps are applied to clean and prepare the data for analysis. This can include noise reduction, filtering, and audio normalization.

Feature Extraction: Extracting relevant features from the audio data is crucial for AI models to understand and identify events. Common audio features include spectral features (e.g., Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients - MFCCs), pitch, tempo, and more. These features help represent the audio data in a format suitable for machine learning.

Machine Learning Models: AI models, such as deep neural networks (e.g., convolutional neural networks - CNNs, recurrent neural networks - RNNs) or more advanced models like deep learning-based spectrogram analysis models, are trained using labeled audio data. This training process allows the AI model to learn patterns and characteristics associated with specific audio events.

Event Detection:In this stage, the trained AI model is applied to real-time or recorded audio streams. The model analyzes the audio data in segments, attempting to detect the presence of specific events or sounds. This could be anything from detecting gunshots in a security system to identifying animal sounds in environmental monitoring.

Event Recognition:Once an event is detected, the AI system can further analyze and recognize the event's nature or category. For instance, it can differentiate between different types of alarms, voices, musical instruments, or specific words in speech.

Monitoring and Alerting:The system continuously monitors the audio data and keeps track of detected and recognized events. When a relevant event is detected, the system can trigger notifications or alerts. This is especially useful in security and surveillance applications, where timely response is crucial.

Feedback and Improvement: Over time, the AI model can be fine-tuned and improved by continuously feeding it more labeled data, incorporating user feedback, and adjusting its parameters to reduce false positives and false negatives.

Post-processing: To enhance the accuracy of the system, post-processing techniques can be applied to the detected events. This may involve contextual analysis, temporal analysis, or combining audio data with other sensor data for better event understanding.

Visualization and Reporting: The results of the audio event detection and monitoring can be visualized through user interfaces or reports, making it easier for users to understand and act on the information provided by the AI system.

Overall, audio event detection, recognition, and monitoring with AI leverage machine learning to provide real-time insights and actionable information from audio data, enabling various applications across different domains. The effectiveness of such systems depends on the quality of training data, the sophistication of AI models, and the post-processing techniques applied.

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purple-slate · 1 year

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Telesales with Voice Assistants: How to Boost Outbound Sales with Voice AI?

Nowadays, if you want to stay afloat and thrive as a company, you need a robust technology base. Technology breaks old rules and provides new tools for more effective sales. With recent advancements in AI, speech recognition, NLU, and NLG more and more organizations are turning towards conversational AI as a primary means to communicate with their customers. Apart from customer experience, conversational AI is being widely adopted to automate marketing and sales processes as well. Conversational AI typically works as a voice assistant in several use cases such as virtual assistant, agent assistant, and conversational IVR applications.

Combining the power of AI and Machine Learning, organizations can automate voice assistants to take over mundane sales tasks such as outbound sales calls. This is one of the many ways that organizations can use AI to save money and reduce the load on sales teams.

Agent Productivity

Automating outbound telesales with voice AI assistants can bring an organization’s call center costs down tremendously. Instead of hiring staff to run a telesales campaign, outbound calls can be automated to take up repetitive tasks and free up the bandwidth of agents. Reducing such mundane tasks can help boost productivity as well among agents. Apart from this, voice AI is also effective at improving sales using empathy. With human agents, it is difficult to ensure that the agents are empathetic and polite enough while making their outbound calls. With voice AI assistants, every call is made on time, with empathy and enthusiasm, and most importantly without fatigue.

Here’s an elaborate example of how voice AI assistants help in driving sales in the insurance industry while ensuring operational efficiency.

youtube

Additionally, when in need of human intervention, agents also get a unified document of customer details, with the help of voice conversational AI, and let them focus on serving their customers instead of wasting time searching for information.

Cart Abandonment

Card abandonment is a complex issue to solve and voice AI has been proven to be effective at improving conversion rates. Most customers abandon carts when they don’t find answers to their questions at the right time. With voice assistants always available, customers can get their questions answered instantly during their buying journey. After they get answers on time, they make a decision, make the purchase, and do not abandon the product in the cart.

In the case of businesses like dental healthcare and real estate, an abandoned cart could mean making appointments and not showing up in person. In such scenarios, voice AI can help by making automated calls to customers reminding them of their appointments and other important details.

Upselling

Automated outbound calls are a great way to upsell products and services to your customers. Up-selling and cross-selling during a sales cycle are usually up to the sales agent and it is heavily manual. Voice AI removes this obligation from an organization’s sales team and provides them with tools to better manage complex cases. Voice assistants can up-sell or cross-sell seamlessly during a conversation based on the user’s profile and previous interactions with the AI and offer them complementary products or services based on their behavior.

Sales AI assistant can also be equipped with co-browsing technology through which they can follow the customer’s activity on the business application or website and offer real-time guidance. By hand-holding customers through their buying journey in this manner, voice AI can shorten the sales cycle, and assist customers in making decisions by upselling before the customer completes their purchase.Here’s a video on how voice AI assistants can help customers and up-sell products and services through guided web browsing.

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Qualifying Leads

AI-powered voice assistants can speed up the process of qualifying customers and filter them with minimal to no human involvement. By automating in this manner, leads are qualified before they are let into the sales funnel. Apart from this, voice AI can automate communications completely through the entire sales cycle from awareness to point of purchase. After a customer enters their primary details on the website, the voice assistant can connect with the customer through a phone call, understand their requirements through a simple conversation, qualify and instantly push them down the sales funnel.

Conclusion

Automating AI sales calls with the help of voice assistants can definitely save lots of time for sales agents, improve operational efficiency, cut costs, and speed up sales cycles. Outbound calling is a valuable service to offer. When done correctly, it can enhance customer satisfaction and boost revenue. While organizing outbound calling used to be time-consuming, automated outbound calling solutions have made it easier and minimized resources requirement. To leverage voice AI to its fullest potential, all you need to do is find a partner who understands your needs thoroughly.

Get in touch with our experts to learn more about how voice assistants can make your sales processes more effective.

#voice assistants #voice ai #ai sales calls #virtual assistant #outbound telesales #voice conversational ai #Youtube

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voicebrodcasting · 1 month

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Personalized Videos for Voters for Political Campaigns

Connect directly with voters and make an impact by sending AI-enriched personalized voice and video messages. Start today with go2market

#Personalized Video Messaging for Political Campaigns #AI-enriched voice messages for political campaigne #AI-powered personalized video for political campaign #Send Personalized video messages with AI #Personalized Videos for Voters with AI #Voter Communication with AI #AI Voice & Video Messages #Personalized Video Messages #Personalized Voice Messages #go2market #political survey companies in india #voice broadcasting #best election survey agencies in india #bulk sms service provider in delhi

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vegan-and-sara · 4 years

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Full article:

By Drew Harwell and Eva Dou

Dec. 8, 2020 at 7:30 a.m. PST

The Chinese tech giant Huawei has tested facial recognition software that could send automated “Uighur alarms” to government authorities when its camera systems identify members of the oppressed minority group, according to an internal document that provides further details about China’s artificial-intelligence surveillance regime.

A document signed by Huawei representatives — discovered by the research organization IPVM and shared exclusively with The Washington Post — shows that the telecommunications firm worked in 2018 with the facial recognition start-up Megvii to test an artificial-intelligence camera system that could scan faces in a crowd and estimate each person’s age, sex and ethnicity.

If the system detected the face of a member of the mostly Muslim minority group, the test report said, it could trigger a “Uighur alarm” — potentially flagging them for police in China, where members of the group have been detained en masse as part of a brutal government crackdown. The document, which was found on Huawei’s website, was removed shortly after The Post and IPVM asked the companies for comment.

Such technology has in recent years gained an expanding role among police departments in China, human rights activists say. But the document sheds new light on how Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, has also contributed to its development, providing the servers, cameras, cloud-computing infrastructure and other tools undergirding the systems’ technological might.

John Honovich, the founder of IPVM, a Pennsylvania-based company that reviews and investigates video-surveillance equipment, said the document showed how “terrifying” and “totally normalized” such discriminatory technology has become.

“This is not one isolated company. This is systematic,” Honovich said. “A lot of thought went into making sure this ‘Uighur alarm’ works.”

Huawei and Megvii have announced three surveillance systems using both companies’ technology in the past couple years. The Post could not immediately confirm if the system with the “Uighur alarm” tested in 2018 was one of the three currently for sale.

Both companies have acknowledged the document is real. Shortly after this story published Tuesday morning, Huawei spokesman Glenn Schloss said the report “is simply a test and it has not seen real-world application. Huawei only supplies general-purpose products for this kind of testing. We do not provide custom algorithms or applications.”

Also after publication, a Megvii spokesman said the company’s systems are not designed to target or label ethnic groups.

Chinese officials have said such systems reflect the country’s technological advancement, and that their expanded use can help government responders and keep people safe. But to international rights advocates, they are a sign of China’s dream of social control — a way to identify unfavorable members of society and squash public dissent. China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

First she survived a Uighur internment camp. Then she made it out of China.

Artificial-intelligence researchers and human rights advocates said they worry the technology’s development and normalization could lead to its spread around the world, as government authorities elsewhere push for a fast and automated way to detect members of ethnic groups they’ve deemed undesirable or a danger to their political control.

Maya Wang, a China senior researcher at the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said the country has increasingly used AI-assisted surveillance to monitor the general public and oppress minorities, protesters and others deemed threats to the state.

“China’s surveillance ambition goes way, way, way beyond minority persecution,” Wang said, but “the persecution of minorities is obviously not exclusive to China. … And these systems would lend themselves quite well to countries that want to criminalize minorities.”

Trained on immense numbers of facial photos, the systems can begin to detect certain patterns that might differentiate, for instance, the faces of Uighur minorities from those of the Han majority in China. In one 2018 paper, “Facial feature discovery for ethnicity recognition,” AI researchers in China designed algorithms that could distinguish between the “facial landmarks” of Uighur, Korean and Tibetan faces.

But the software has sparked major ethical debates among AI researchers who say it could assist in discrimination, profiling or punishment. They argue also that the system is bound to return inaccurate results, because its performance would vary widely based on lighting, image quality and other factors — and because the diversity of people’s ethnicities and backgrounds is not so cleanly broken down into simple groupings.

Such ethnicity-detection software is not available in the United States. But algorithms that can analyze a person’s facial features or eye movements are increasingly popular in job-interview software and anti-cheating monitoring systems.

Clare Garvie, a senior associate at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology who has studied facial recognition software, said the “Uighur alarm” software represents a dangerous step toward automating ethnic discrimination at a devastating scale.

“There are certain tools that quite simply have no positive application and plenty of negative applications, and an ethnic-classification tool is one of those,” Garvie said. “Name a human rights norm, and this is probably violative of that.”

Huawei and Megvii are two of China’s most prominent tech trailblazers, and officials have cast them as leaders of a national drive to reach the cutting edge of AI development. But the multibillion-dollar companies have also faced blowback from U.S. authorities, who argue they represent a security threat to the United States or have contributed to China’s brutal regime of ethnic oppression.

Eight Chinese companies, including Megvii, were hit with sanctions by the U.S. Commerce Department last year for their involvement in “human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance” against Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups.

The U.S. government has also issued sanctions against Huawei, banning the export of U.S. technology to the company and lobbying other countries to exclude its systems from their telecommunications networks.

Huawei, a hardware behemoth with equipment and services used in more than 170 countries, has surpassed Apple to become the world’s second-biggest maker of smartphones and is pushing to lead an international rollout of new 5G mobile networks that could reshape the Internet.

And Megvii, the Beijing-based developer of the Face Plus Plus system and one of the world’s most highly valued facial recognition start-ups, said in a public-offering prospectus last year that its “city [Internet of Things] solutions,” which include camera systems, sensors and software that government agencies can use to monitor the public, covered 112 cities across China as of last June.

The “Uighur alarm” document obtained by the researchers, called an “interoperability test report,” offers technical information on how authorities can align the Huawei-Megvii systems with other software tools for seamless public surveillance.

The system tested how a mix of Megvii’s facial recognition software and Huawei’s cameras, servers, networking equipment, cloud-computing platform and other hardware and software worked on dozens of “basic functions,” including its support of “recognition based on age, sex, ethnicity and angle of facial images,” the report states. It passed those tests, as well as another in which it was tested for its ability to support offline “Uighur alarms.”

The test report also said the system was able to take real-time snapshots of pedestrians, analyze video files and replay the 10 seconds of footage before and after any Uighur face is detected.

The document did not provide information on where or how often the system is used. But similar systems are used by police departments across China, according to official documents reviewed last year by the New York Times, which found one city system that had scanned for Uighur faces half a million times in a single month.

Jonathan Frankle, a deep-learning researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said such systems are clearly becoming a priority among developers willing to capitalize on the technical ability to classify people by ethnicity or race. The flood of facial-image data from public crowds, he added, could be used to further develop the systems’ precision and processing power.

“People don't go to the trouble of building expensive systems like this for nothing,” Frankle said. “These aren't people burning money for fun. If they did this, they did it for a very specific reason in mind. And that reason is very clear.”

It’s less certain whether ethnicity-detecting software could ever take off outside the borders of a surveillance state. In the United States and other Western-style democracies, the systems could run up against long-established laws limiting government searches and mandating equal protection under the law.

Police and federal authorities in the United States have shown increasing interest in facial recognition software as an investigative tool, but the systems have sparked a fierce public backlash over their potential bias and inaccuracies, and some cities and police forces have opted to ban the technology outright.

Such technologies could, however, find a market among international regimes somewhere in the balance between Chinese and American influence. In Uganda, Huawei facial recognition cameras have already been used by police and government officials to surveil protesters and political opponents.

“If you’re willing to model your government and run your country in that way,” Frankle said, “why wouldn’t you use the best technology available to exert control over your citizens?”

Discrimination against Uighurs has long been prevalent in the majority-Han Chinese population. In the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, authorities have cited sporadic acts of terrorism as justification for a harsh crackdown starting in 2015 that has drawn condemnation from the United States and other Western nations. Scholars estimate more than 1 million Uighurs have been detained in reeducation camps, with some claims of torture.

U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien called the repressive treatment of minority groups in Xinjiang “something close to” genocide, in an online event hosted by the Aspen Institute in October.

Under international pressure, Xinjiang authorities announced last December that all reeducation “students” had graduated, though some Uighurs have since reported that they were forced to agree to work in factories or risk a return to detention. Xinjiang authorities say all residents work of their own free will.

The U.S. government has banned the import of certain products from China on the basis that they could have been made by forced labor in Xinjiang.

One of the Huawei-Megvii systems offered for sale after the “Uighur alarm” test, in June 2019, is advertised as saving local governments digital storage space by saving images in a single place.

Two other systems, said to use Megvii’s surveillance software and Huawei’s Atlas AI computing platform, were announced for sale in September. Both were described as “localization” of the products using Huawei chips and listed for sale “only by invitation.” Marketing materials for one of those systems say it was used by authorities in China’s southern Guizhou province to catch a criminal.

Some things people outside of China can do to help:

Folks in the US: contact your house representative and your state senators. Demand that they support the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019 (H.R. 649), and that they take further action against the genocide in Xinjiang. You can even link this article or copy and paste paragraphs (with citation) in your email if writing is intimidating for you.

Folks from most countries can write to your ambassador in China.

Avoid buying from companies that use Uighur slave labor.

Read the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s analysis of slave labor and re-education camps in Xinjiang.

Boycott the Beijing 2022 Olympics.

#islamophobia #uighur genocide #china #huawei #beijing 2022

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santos45-blog2 · 4 years

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The Biggest Trends in Digital Marketing in 2020

Digital marketing trends should not be ignored but embraced by all industries. long gone the days where just a simple website and a Facebook page will be what you would need. The digital landscape is evolving so quickly that it is difficult to keep up with all the changes, so the best option is to get a digital marketing agency that is all the time looking at the latest trends and invention. As per my research, there are 2 million lines of work in the UK alone that do not have a website and is costing them over £343 billion each year. The new applied science and tools will come at the time where it must need and will force marketing agencies and governance to adapt very quickly if they want to continue ranking at the top. if you do not adapt you will be left behind, this article will prepare you to be ready for 2020 and beyond. 1. Facebook getting to the peak Facebook is no longer the king of social media in the world. According to Forbes, half of their user's age 65. Facebook is losing ground with younger demographics as they are moving away to a more visual interactive experience that can now be offered by platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok that have an explosive users adoption. The biggest factor is that Facebook has lost important credibility and many people have grown frustrated and resentful with the proliferation of fake news, propaganda in politics and cyberbullying. this has left me to conclude that Facebook could be very unsuitable for some campaigns especially as it is trending downwards around younger people, on the other hand, Facebook still has a larger share of the market around America. Now is more important than ever to check if your target audience is still on Facebook and not waste your marketing budget. 2. Kids are in love with Instagram Instagram has risen to over one billion users and that is a massive accomplishment and that makes it one of the most rapid-growing social media platforms and the user base is from a younger demographic, as it is mostly under 30. on the other hand, Facebook is losing much the younger demographics by starting to have a reputation as the social media platform for older people, perhaps they are faithful users that have grown old together with the platform. 3. Chatbots Will be at the top of Customer Service Chatbots are artificial intelligence (AI) software that can help by acting as a virtual assistant to help users complete their goals by naturally interacting with humans, this can be seen through the use of text chat windows and also with verbal interaction and over time as the system collects more data insights, the AI will be able to learn more about the customers that make a more personalized service that can improve the customer's experience. And is very easy to understand why: Instant response to customer queriesNo need for breaks, Vacations or overtime24 hours service 4. Video is now a key tool If businesses are not using video marketing, now it is a good time to get on board. The big issue is that the text-based content cannot compete anymore with the power of video and this can be seen especially when it comes to selling products and services online. a good example of this change is the with the Chinese streaming video operator Bilibili where generated more than 315 million views. We are now in the video mad generation when we share videos about everything, learn more about brands and what they have to offer. Video marketing is highly engaging and simultaneously can be accessed from anywhere when most users have a mobile device, making Live streaming a compelling method of marketing when combined with influencers marketing. Interacting directly with comments is a huge draw for an audience and this has created a new generation of social influencers such as celebrities, athletes, and musicians. Ninja recently signed an exclusive deal with Mixer, which was a power play by the Microsoft-company in recognition of the expected value of live video streaming in the year ahead. Alibaba’s Taobao Live reaches sales of US$280 million in opening 90 minutes of China’s midyear shopping festival Sales on Taobao Live hit 2 billion yuan (US$280 million) just 90 minutes after the midyear shopping festival officially launched at midnight on June 1 Dong Mingzhu, the ‘home appliances queen’, sold 310 million yuan worth of goods in a three-hour live streaming event on short video platform Kuaishou last month This has been sourced from the South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. 5. Good Content Still Matters The quality is always going to matter but now there is more emphasis on the context and targeting. Google is developing a more sophisticated process of understanding online content, so we now have to consider about our target market and how they can be tailored into a more engaging content . the new algorithm helps the search engine giant get a better understanding of the natural language in user search queries.SEO trends is still important but more important is to ensure that a website has fast speeds,useful links and well-written content. 6. Personalized your email Email is still a powerful channel of communication, with billions still using it for many reasons, the new algorithm helps the search engine giant get a better understanding of the natural language in user search queries. Email marketing in itself continues to be important and is evolving from generic marketing emails that are not very effective as they have been before and is moving into combination automation with a high level of personalization making email marketing crucial in 2020. When you can trigger your email marketing to something specific, such as a user browsing a particular product, and then follow up with a promotional price or demo video in a personalized email, this can be very effective. 7. Interactive Content Will be in demand Interactive content is highly effective in educating the buyer because people can click on, swipe, interact online. Companies experiment with interactive content types, such as: Quizzes and pollsAugmented reality ads360-degree videos Will be more noticed as we will see an increase in the number of cutting-edge marketing technology, such as augmented reality and video content, to offer people a more immersive, engaging experience. 8. Voice Interaction still growing People like to talk and that is the preferred way to interact and now machines are finally catching up to the way people want to search, shop and discover new things. Marketers targeting voice search users should remember to right in a conversation. 9. Marketing in Messaging Apps Social messaging apps are not just for staying in touch with friends and family. Businesses are taking a significant interest in apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram in recent times, and it's no surprise when you consider the opportunities: 1.3 billion monthly users are active on Facebook Messenger, sending more than 10 billion messages every month.WhatsApp has 1.6 billion active users, sending over 55 billion messages every day. The traditional channels like email and social media are far from dead, there is no denying that people are more active on instant messaging apps. In the next five years, messenger marketing is expected to be the number one marketing channel in the world. Therefore, a logical step for brands to start connecting with people on these platforms. Marketing through Facebook Messenger generates 80 times more engagement than organic posts on the Facebook News Feed. Messaging apps allow companies to reach a broad audience with short, personalized texts. In 2020, one can expect to see more marketing in messaging apps, with many companies, including video and interactive content to engage users. 10. Omnichannel Marketing is Now Vital Omnichannel marketing is the practice of marketing across multiple platforms, including email, apps, social media, and your website blogs. This approach enables businesses to connect with customers on more digital touchpoints, effectively offering a better user experience. By delivering a seamless, consistent voice and cohesive brand message across all channels, one can generate much better results. Omnichannel marketing will enable better customer retention, average order value, and purchase frequency are all higher when you have multiple channels, and when the AI technology improves, companies can leverage data insights and machine learning to get a better understanding of customer behaviours, and then personalize it at the highest level. Read the full article

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megacircuit9universe · 4 years

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Trumpty Dumpty

WED FEB 05 2020

There used to be a legend, in my family, that my mom’s grandfather on her mother’s side, was the son of an, “Indian squaw.” Without getting too technical, research on Ancestry.Com about the woman in question, proved beyond all doubt that she was white as the driven snow.

Why? Because she happened to be Mormon... and Mormons happen to be extremely serious about genealogy... and have been since long before the internet came along.

This woman, my great great grandmother, had a thoroughly researched family tree on Ancestry going back to the Mayflower*... as do all Mormons, because they take history seriously.

I am certain this is why Mitt Romney, today turned out to be the one and only Republican who voted to convict and remove Donald Trump.

...Because while all this talk about how they’ll be viewed by history rings hollow to every other GOP Senator currently in Congress, to Mitt Romney, it means something, because he knows his descendants will never forget who he was, or what he did with his life... and that to join in on the acquittal of Trump would bring shame to his family for generations to come.

And he knew that... because we all know, that nobody in the near future, or the distant future, or the very remote future, will ever think of Donald Trump as anything but a shitty person, a terrible President, and an appallingly myopic world leader.

But yes... there was no flash removal of Trump today. He was acquitted, to the shock of nobody. But it is worth mentioning that the 48 Senators who voted to convict and remove Trump, represent eighteen million more people than the fifty-two Senators who acquitted him.

Eighteen million.

Immediately after his acquittal, Trump tweeted a CGI video flying over Trump campaign signs that said, “Trump 2020,” then, “Trump 2024,” then 28, 30, 40, and so on until beyond the year 9000 or some bullshit, before ending on Trump 4EVA.

I saw this, passing by a TV at work today, an it spooked me pretty good, because... well, here at MegaCircuit9Universe we talk a lot about time travel and in our model, he (his hyperversal twins on all worldlines) are well known for always attempting to, and sometimes succeeding at, becoming a dictator for life.

News folk passed this tweet off as a simple troll, as the video was a modified version of one created last year by Time Magazine (of all magazines) to promote an article about how Trumpism will outlast Trump.

I didn’t read that article, so I can’t comment on it, but the point here is, that was not just a simple troll. That was Trump, surviving one of the final checks on his power, putting us on notice of his intention to be our new dictator for life.

I wonder what the AI bot coalition is thinking about that today... especially since yesterday, at the State of the Union address, he continued to crow about, and take full credit for, the booming economy... that they continuously keep from derailing... because for most of them, it is the primary objective.

I would presume that they, as bots, would seek to exhaust every other possible option available, before actually allowing the economy to tank. And... there are still other options to exhaust in the quest to dislodge Trump from power... within a reasonable time frame.**

This same truth is what likely lead Speaker Pelosi to, just at the end of Trump’s ridiculous SOTU speech (in which he stopped to administer surprise gifts to audience members, encourage cheers of four more years, and in general made the affair a circus of lies) To tear up her copy of the speech, on camera, standing directly behind him.

I should stop to note here that his SOTU, for as crazy as it was, was quite positive in tone... so, very much the opposite of the one I recently suggested might flip the Senate against him... one full of wrath and nonsensical raving.

At any rate, Pelosi’s stunt of ripping up the speech had the immediate effect of stealing all the press coverage about SOTU for the rest of the night and into today. From the minute the speech was over, the only thing anybody in the media or online wanted to talk about was this stunt of hers... with it going viral on social media in the form of animated GIFs... being praised by the left, and decried by the right.

But many now speculate that this was also a signal that the House is not done with Trump. Indeed, some say the whole Impeachment trial, it’s timing delayed by a month, thanks to the Speaker, has been a kind of opening act to warm the audience up for the headliner act... which will be about court cases landing against his obstruction of subpoenas, his taxes coming out finally, more FOIA requests coming to fruition, more crimes coming to light, etc.

It doesn’t require any aluminum foil to imagine that such a second act... or third act, if you count the Mueller probe as act one... could finally bring the roof down on Trump’s head in this, an election year.

We all know the Ukraine shakedown was just the tip of an enormous iceberg, which, beneath the water’s surface, is the size of Mauna Kea... and that a shit ton of it will be coming to light soon... as courts strike down his past attempts at damage control... grant information requests to newspapers... as oversight hearings continue in the house... as books are published... and on.

What’s different now, after the impeachment trial, is that we all now also know which Senators are consciously complicit in Trump’s grand crime scheme, and it’s cover up.

We’ve had an idea for a while which House Representatives were complicit (Nunes), but that’s not such a big deal anymore, as we got back the House in 2018, but it took this impeachment trial to expose those poker faced Senators.

Senators play things a lot closer to the vest (Except for McConnell and Graham) which is natural, given that there are only 100 of them, and each one has a lot more power than the average House Rep... thus, a lot more power to lose, if they dirty their shoes in the muck that Reps will occasionally roll about in like swine.

The Impeachment essentially put a gun to their heads... confess your loyalty, Trump or the Constitution... because it cannot be both.

And now that 52 of them confessed, beyond any doubt, that their loyalty is to Trump, over the Constitution... well, now they’re all fair game, when it comes to exposing the greater bulk of that corruption iceberg.

Lev Parnas named Lindsey Graham as being in the loop with the Ukraine extortion scheme... and Bolton named Cipollone. And now you can bet your ass a lot more Senators and White House cabinet members will be exposed as being in that loop... and other loops... all looping around Trump... who is looping around Putin.

And I’ll leave the impeachment and SOTU analysis there for tonight.

Because I still have to talk about Iowa!

-------------------------------

So, in chronological order, on February 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th, it was... Super Bowl, Iowa, SOTU, and Impeachment.

Ignoring the Super Bowl, which had no real impact on anything here, Iowa, back on the 3rd, is still not resolved tonight as I write.

The Iowa Democratic Party refused to release any election results at all, the night of the caucuses... citing bullshit technical problems. The next day, they released 62% of the results. Then today... released up to 81% of the results... which were found, by sharp eyed election officials to have glaring errors, which IDP then, grudgingly corrected... while still not giving us 100% of the results at the time of writing.

In a nutshell, the original excuse of technical problems with some app they were using doesn’t hold water two days later, because there should have been plenty of time by now to count the paper record by hand, and so it does look as though the IDP simply did not like the results on election night... and has been scrambling to finesse them, ever since.

Why did they not like the results? Because, as I predicted, Joe Biden bit the dust, in this first primary election of the season, coming in a distant fourth place. But even worse... Bernie Sanders knocked it out of the park.

That, for the DNC, is not an acceptable outcome, and so, one would assume, they put pressure on IDP to hold off on announcing and, please double, triple, and quadruple check everything, until... they get something they can live with.

We saw the DNC do this in 2016, when Hillary was their darling, so... the only thing surprising here, is the level of desperation... over-reaching this far to suppress the results, this early on in the game.

The Faustian bargain the DNC (and IDP) are soo sloowly arriving at, is that Pete Buttigieg, who seems to have come in second in reality, should be presented to the world as having come in first... because if there’s no amount of finesse that can save Joe Biden from his pitiful numbers, then hand the centrist torch to Buttigieg. But no way in hell can Bernie Sanders get the political momentum he, and his voters earned out of this!

This does tend to expose how corrupt the DNC still is, and serve to remind us how we got Donald Trump in the first place... after they played this game in 2016, manufacturing consent for Hillary Clinton that did not exist on the ground.

But this time around, it’s not gonna play.

It’s not gonna wash.

It’s not gonna work.

It won’t work because, Bernie has too much of a head of steam, and there is nobody else in the field that can stop him.

Warren looked good until she revealed that she was not really for Medicare for all, but just some public option compromise bullshit. She’s been failing ever since that reveal, and her lame attempt to cast Bernie as a sexist hurt her even worse.

Biden, as predicted earlier in this blog, just has no game, and is running out of money quick. He’ll be gone before Super Tuesday in March.

Buttigieg blew his wad on Iowa and at the moment is simply a centrist place holder for Biden. All of his support will go to Bloomberg, as soon as Bloomberg enters the race in March.

This will leave it between Bernie and Bloomberg through the spring... but Bloomberg has no legs.

How do I know that? Well, as a billionaire trying to buy the election, he’s hemorrhaging millions out of pocket right now, just to stay relevant. And, while being a billionaire, he can afford to hemorrhage millions forever, without feeling the slightest bit faint, it’s a sign of failure that he has to go this route.

Where are his donors? He doesn’t have any because he has no ground game at all. All he has are ads. This is just a publicity stunt at it’s heart.

Obama, famous for his relentless ground game, blew away this kind of media blitz, money-is-no-object, opposition both times out. In his case they were being funded by SuperPacs, but it’s the same strategy of just pouring millions into ads without knocking on any doors.

Bernie Sanders has an even more relentless ground game than Obama ever had, without being funded by any corporate donors or super pacs... with more money than any of his rivals (other than Bloomberg) coming from the donations of regular wage workers.

He also has one magic card that even Trump can never possess... the 18 to 45 vote!

Trump won in 2016 by cobbling together a coalition of white schizophrenics, criminally insane white nationalists, Book of Revelation lunatics, and a freight train of garden variety conservative cowards, groomed by their elders to worship whoever seems to hold the scepter of authority no matter what they say or stand for.

That was a clever way to wring the last ounces of water there was left out of the damp cloth that is the white, conservative, male vote, in a post Obama universe.

But!..

Those hard won numbers in just the right districts, in just the right states... pale in comparison to the numbers available to he who can unlock the all-race, all-gender, 18 to 45 vote.

And Bernie has done that, this time around.

There is opposition to him, among the centrist boomers, and even some GenX and so-called, X-ennials... fearing that his nomination is just what Trump wants, and will seal our doom.

But even in the Primary season to come... that’s not gonna make a difference. By the Convention, the DNC will have no other choice than to nominate Sanders.

That’s my prediction.

Okay... extra long entry for an extra crazy start to February.

I’m going to bed.

*When you go back enough generations, everybody has some claim to a Mayflower passenger in their family tree... just as everybody can claim to be a descendant of Genghis Khan.

It’s just a quirk of the fact that every generation you go back, you are covering exponentially more people.

The point here is that my great great grandmother had an exhaustive family tree researched by many others... going back to the point where it becomes meaningless (mayflower) which guarantees beyond any doubt, she was not an, “Indian squaw,” as family legend contended.

** Economy Bots seek to unseat Trump because he has abused the legacy Presidential power of tariffs, which artificially changes the prices of things in a way they cannot control.

Thus, the reasonable time frame for removing Trump, is... sooner than he can tank the economy all by himself... which, since the inverted yield curve of mid 2018, has meant: as soon as possible.

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buzrushcommunity · 4 years

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Succeed Through Online Marketing

How Electronic Advertising and marketing Will Change: 17 Forecasts for 2020

Electronic advertising is not any unknown person to modifications.

Succeed Through Online Marketing - We have to stay on our toes if we want to stay relevant with the never ending changes to algorithms and regulations and part of that is positioning ourselves for success.

Precisely what is digital marketing planning to look like in 2020?

We experienced possessed 17 computerized entrepreneurs weigh into tell us what they see about the horizon, therefore we can all prepare accordingly and also a great season ofclicks and engagement, and sales.

Allow me to share 17 forecasts for electronic advertising and marketing in 2020.

Benton Crane, CEO of Harmon Brothers

Ad platforms (looking at you Facebook or twitter) continues to highlight shorter content material (needless to say, they want to offer more thoughts). Brief-type, nonetheless, limits what you can do to construct your company persona, voice, and world.

We foresee the profitable strategy may be to perform advertising chess, not checkers. In chess your parts have various strengths and weaknesses, whilst all checkers parts are identical. If you build up your web marketing strategy use a mixture of simple, medium sized, and lengthy-develop information. Don’t stop building your brand character, voice, and universe with longer-form content, although use the short-form content to appease Facebook’s algorithms.

Logan Fletcher, Content material Marketing Administrator

If you aren’t posting videos on social media, 2020 NEEDS to be the year you start, otherwise, you’ll get left behind, Succeed Through Online Marketing -.

Beyond that, we foresee a higher appearance of companies on social websites, since they try to create a technique that can help them purchase an advantage on opponents. Online video on sociable systems will probably continue being with the fore-front of effective methods.

Not only are B2B companies going to focus on creating video for LinkedIn, but they will also start to take notice of IGTV. With changes to Instagram’s algorithm formula, video clip placed on IGTV will go to the top of your followers’ rss feeds, and also be discovered much more prevalently on users’ investigate web pages. This will result in more movie prospects, a more substantial audience, and more advantages.

What different will we see in 2020? We believe that online marketers will begin focusing more on consumer demands, instead of “marketing requires.” Entrepreneurs will start responding to customers’ questions directly that will create campaigns that solution these inquiries. The only real individuals who actually make a difference are definitely the people who we want using our service or product. Refocusing what exactly is sent to customers will be a pattern in 2020 that many firms will not be capable of disregard.

Michelle Barnum Smith, AMZ Messenger Bot Group

The Amazon marketplace is consistently in flux. There are far more individual label retailers now than before as well as the marketplace may become much more competing. To stay in the video game, sellers really need to be tough and flexible.

Probably the most crucial methods to adjust is to possess a brand name-attitude. A product is not pretty much turning up having a individual merchandise-it’s about creating a local community of fervent buyers. The best and easiest method to start off is by using driving a vehicle your very own outside website traffic employing Talk Advertising and marketing tactics by way of ManyChat.

ManyChat tends to make chat advertising and marketing an omni-channel expertise. Now dealers can operate multichannel promotions through a single tool and reach their viewers in the most efficient techniques possible. Chitchat advertising will certainly make market developing, item establishing, and item advertising seamless for Amazon . com Dealers.

Tara Robertson, Director of Customer Marketing and advertising at Sprout Sociable

2020 is all about refinement. Brands not just need to focus on who they really are but moreover, the way they are different from competitors that will create remarkable experiences for customers. In ahead of time, online marketers will emphasis much more about becoming buyer obsessed by making certain each and every touchpoint is steady and purposeful. Supplying outstanding consumer experiences has stopped being a “nice to have,” but an hope-specifically as businesses aim to get noticed inside their saturated markets.

For that conclusion, there will be an increased desire for content and experience that favors high quality more than quantity. We are living in the age of authentic marketing along with the a lot more related and relatable your marketing and advertising is, the better dedicated your market can become. It is not simply regarding the new system, sophisticated AI, or even a powerful technology stack. The truth is, I actually think it will likely be the opposite.

We have to cut back time contemplating our automation plus more time considering the way you can connect with our buyers and each and every other. We expect far more customization than ever before as buyers and it is essential that marketing and sales crews fully grasp the and this need for connection.

Jenna Snavely, Creation Content Manager at DigitalMarketer

I talk to a lot of experts in the industry, as host of The DigitalMarketer Podcast. From all of the my podcast job interviews across the minimum year, the marketplace developments we have been viewing carefully at DM, and my own acquiring habits-I believe the easiest way to get support in 2020 (or maintain your steer) will be serialized consumable online video content.

It is a huge opportunity to outline your company sound and make a crowd, and the majority of importantly…it’s a way to more than-produce.

Manufacturers which do the difficult job, receive the payout.

Nathalie Lussier, Founding father of AccessAlly

Succeed Through Online Marketing - In 2020, I forecast that more men and women will carry on and “cut the cord” from cord and proceed to streaming options for their entertainment. It’s approximated that 45 mil men and women will depart their cable tv or satellite suppliers in 2020.

Exactly what does that pertain to digital marketing and advertising?

This means that as interest changes far from classic Television set advertising, more marketers will have to get innovative and find approaches to get to individuals on-line alternatively.

That may be the two a true blessing and a curse: It’s going to raise the cost of advertising on the hottest platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Google, although it’s going to create more work for digital agencies.

Brand names may not be moving all their dollars to “pay for every click” advertising, they will often also up their content material advertising and marketing budgets in order to happen in social offers and chats, also! Content marketing organizations, be aware!

Splintering Community Platforms

For businesses that want to boost their communities on the internet (and who does not? ) there is an intensifying have to take acquisition of community place.

For many years the right spot to host a group has become via Facebook organizations. There is a great deal of growth and engagement on Facebook or twitter, because of an previously a built in habit (or possibly is it an dependency? !).

However, the tech giant has experienced some political and ethical backlash and more digital business owners are looking for alternatives.

I foresee that programs that permit you to generate neighborhood “on your very own turf” like Palapa, Mighty Sites, BuddyBoss, and Wp are going to see plenty of development.

However, as much as I see people building these networks outside of the Facebook ecosystem, those that have tried and failed say the the vortex is strong… and engagement isn’t as high.

So, there will likely be a splintering of communities across different platforms, and I suspect also a consolidation for those groups that don’t get enough traction off Facebook when they return.

Intensifying Polarization & Woke Advertising

So will the political polarization in 2020, as the planet’s climate continues to heat up.

Brand names can have an option to help make: remain neutral or have got a perspective.

The companies that stay higher than the fray will steer clear of the drama and the unpredictability that comes with going into the chat on everyone’s thoughts.

But those businesses that can genuinely share their point of view, will get long-term customer loyalty for being happy to place their ideals above short-run income. According to Cone Communications, 92% of consumers say they have a more positive image of a company when the company supports a social or environmental issue.

Yes, you will see drop out from businesses that embark on “woke marketing” and combine activism or national politics inside their message.

More businesses will be willing to put their reputations on the line to connect with Gen Z and Millennials who are more discerning about where they spend their hard earned dollars… and how it impacts the world at large. That is my prediction.

Rachel Pedersen, Chief executive officer in the Viral Touch And Social Media Marketing United

2020 is the 12 months the facade of flawlessly polished marketing burns and crashes. A lot of people happen to be burned up by influencers faking it with ideal photoshoots, and people are desperate for validity.

They will be looking for context outside of keynotes, as consumers get hungry for REAL answers. They are looking for signs and symptoms of congruency - proof that the favored individuals on systems are jogging the stroll.

In 2020 the internet marketer who supplies all-access, behind the curtain, contextual marketing is the winner. It is the entire year of humanized marketing.

Right here is how you can beat the band wagon internet marketers in 2020:

1.Tik. Tok: The clock is ticking. TikTok is actually a rare foundation that reveals a lot more measurements and permits audiences to adore your creative, impromptu and unpolished or UCG content.

2.Go live. Anywhere. Display the mayhem of getting prepared for an occasion with 3 kids when your baby provides the influenza along with your previous thoroughly clean outfit was *coughing* messed up.

3.Report your podcast in person situations. Enable your market to FEEL your life and surroundings with the mp3.

4.Decline Photoshop. So you have a scar on your eyebrow? The vacation consuming magically extra another 15 pounds in your photographs? Permit it to be. Let them see.

5.Online video conveys all. Shoppers are looking for contextual signs in your marketing with video. They desire over a best established and script. They need to see your identiity. Let them have more to work alongside.

6.Tell the reality. So, 2019 was a hard year? Tell them. And do not just clean it off with all the common ‘Oh gentleman, it was a challenging calendar year! ’ Tell them what went wrong. Inform them the way your cardiovascular system shattered. Let them know regarding the nighttime once you almost cease. Let them know concerning the mistakes that almost ruined you. Just inform them the truth.

Jody Milward, Founding father of Interpersonal Charlie

A game changer for Mentors and Electronic program designers starting 2020 is to include a Personal Liquidating Offer (SLO) at the front end conclusion in their Facebook or twitter Advertising. Because with the rising costs of Facebook ads, these offers weren’t profitable, over the years coaches have been told to drop the low ticket offers and focus entirely on High ticket sales.

But that is EXACTLY why they should be part of product suite in 2020. We’re experiencing individuals generating 6 stats in less than a 12 months by using a $27 provide. As an example, Allie Bjerk, runs Facebook advertising to frosty traffic on her SLO using a $27 offer you. This has made practically $500,000 in 9 months having an total 2.4 by ROAS. So, not only is she generating covering and leads her ad spend, she’s also making money. When she promoted her higher ticket offer she experienced a good quality market of consumers and of individuals who joined, 70% got bought her $27 offer.

Then there’s Ashley who has an SLO for Freelance writers and it is covering up her ad invest as she will grow her subscriber list. Engaged community and her SLO was a major contributor to the success of her five figure program launch, by having people come into her community via a paid offer she’s seeing significant growth in her Facebook Group with a lively.

A great SLO can not only cover your advert invest but in addition make you funds when attracting an excellent audience of buyers, as an alternative to plenty of tyre kicking inexpensive leads who never ever even go and available your emails. When the intitial front end offer you is mixed inside a product sales funnel with complementary upsells, we are finding what starts with a $27 provide actually have a standard purchase price of $61 along with an average charge for every transaction of $33.

So, rather than pouring money into free lead magnets and filling up your CRM with cheap unqualified leads, turning that lead magnet into an excellent low ticket offer to bring in quality customers who are actually paying to get on your email list, will make a massive difference to your Facebook Ad Budget and business in 2020.

(NOTE: Need to have a helping palm along with your electronic advertising initiatives? Or you would just like established, workable advertising and marketing instruments, techniques, and layouts to put into action in your organization? Look into the most up-to-date bargain from DigitalMarketer, and you will be moving toward aiding your small business grow.)

For more info visit:- BuzRush

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wolfliving · 4 years

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Meanwhile, in AI-ethics land

https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2019_Report.pdf

(...)

2.1 The Private Automation of Public Infrastructure

As attention to the concerns about AI infrastructures increases, we tend to see them discussed in terms of a dichotomy between public and private uses. This separation has always been false on some level and this year we have seen signs of its eventual collapse, with clear evidence of ongoing and expansive integration of public and private systems across many different AI domains.

AI and Neighborhood Surveillance

Troubling partnerships between government and private tech companies also emerged as a trend this year, especially those that extended surveillance from public environments into private spaces like private properties and the home.

For example, this summer, a Canadian RCMP troop in Red Deer, Alberta, launched a program called CAPTURE to enable “community assisted policing through the use of recorded evidence.”252The idea was for commercial businesses and personal residences with private security-camera infrastructure to effectively share the captured information on their private property with the police, under the guise of improved community safety. As of November, more than 160 properties are participating, effectively covering the entire map of the city, and providing access to the police surveillance of spaces previously inaccessible without a warrant and consent for entry.253 Since 2016, Project Green Light in the City of Detroit in the United States has been working in an almost identical fashion. By March of 2019, the mayor of Detroit decided to establish the “Neighborhood Real-Time Intelligence Program,” described as “a $9 million, state- and federally-funded initiative

AI Now 2019 Report page 36

that would not only expand Project Green Light by installing surveillance equipment at 500 Detroit intersections—on top of the over 500 already installed at businesses—but also utilize facial recognition software to identify potential criminals.”254

Amazon exemplified this new wave of commercial surveillance tech with Ring, a smart-security-device company acquired by Amazon in 2018. The central product is its video doorbell, which allows Ring users to see, talk to, and record those who come to their doorsteps. This is paired with a neighborhood watch app called “Neighbors,” which allows users to post instances of crime or safety issues in their community and comment with additional information, including photos and videos.255 A series of reports reveals that Amazon had negotiated Ring video-sharing partnerships with more than 700 police departments across the US. Partnerships give police a direct portal through which to request videos from Ring users in the event of a nearby crime investigation.256 Not only is Amazon encouraging police departments to use and market Ring products by providing discounts, but it also coaches police on how to successfully request surveillance footage from Neighbors through their special portal.257 As Chris Gilliard, a professor who studies digital redlining and discriminatory practices, comments: “Amazon is essentially coaching police on . . . how to do their jobs, and . . . how to promote Ring products.”258

Neighbors is joined by other apps like Nextdoor and Citizen, which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with one another. Ring, Nextdoor, and Citizen have all been criticized for feeding into existing biases around who is likely to commit crime; Nextdoor even changed its software and policies given extensive evidence of racial stereotyping on its platform.259 Others see these app-based surveillance operations sowing a climate of fear, while tech companies profit from a false perception that crime is on the rise.260

Smart Cities

Concerns about the privatization of public space took center stage this year in the debate around “smart cities” (municipalities that use data, sensors, and algorithms to manage resources and services).

Most smart-city initiatives rely on public-private partnerships and technology developed and controlled by tech companies, which shifts public resources and control over municipal infrastructure and values to these companies.261 Recent research has exposed the extent to which major tech companies such as IBM and Cisco have been “selling smartness” by disseminating narratives about urban challenges and technological solutions to those challenges.262 The Alphabet company Sidewalk Labs has similarly been producing vision documents replete with renderings of utopian urban scenes.263 These companies see the potential for massive profits: one report estimated the global smart cities market being worth $237.6 billion by 2025.

Smart-city projects around the United States and the world increasingly consolidate power in the hands of for-profit technology companies, while depriving municipalities and their residents of resources and privacy. The highest-profile example is in Toronto, the home of Sidewalk Lab’s project to develop “the world’s first neighbourhood built from the internet up.”265 A report in February 2019 found that Sidewalk Labs has expressed a desire to receive a portion of the property taxes and development fees (estimated at $30 billion over 30 years) associated with the project, which would otherwise go to the City of Toronto.266 And in June 2019, Sidewalk Labs released a Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP), describing plans to develop and manage a far larger plot of land than the 12 acres for which the company was initially given license to develop plans.267

Smart-city projects also lack transparency and genuine forms of civic participation.268 Sidewalk Labs’s civic engagement efforts have been described as a process of obfuscation and “gaslighting.”269 Similarly, a contract between urban-planning software company Replica (a Sidewalk Labs spinoff company) and the Portland, Oregon regional transportation planning agency provides no public access to Replica’s algorithms.270 Siemens is launching a €600 million smart-city neighborhood in Berlin, creating “laboratories in reality” with barely any public meetings so far.271

Many of these public-private partnerships directly enhance the government’s surveillance capabilities. Chicago and Detroit have both purchased software enabling them to deploy facial recognition in the video feeds from cameras across the cities.272 Similarly, the multinational Chinese tech company Huawei’s $1.5 billion project to create smart cities in Africa273 included a project in Nairobi where it installed 1,800 cameras, 200 traffic surveillance systems, and a national police command center as part of its “Safe City” program.274 Huawei’s Safe City technology has been used by some African governments to spy on political opponents.275

In other cities, behind-the-scenes data-sharing arrangements allow data collected by private companies to flow into law-enforcement agencies. San Diego has installed thousands of microphones and cameras on street lamps in recent years in an effort to study traffic and parking conditions; although the data has proven of little use in improving traffic, the police have used the video footage in more than 140 cases without any oversight or accountability.276 The City of Miami is actively considering a 30-year contract with Illumination Technologies, providing the company with free access to set up light poles containing cameras and license-plate readers, collecting information that will filter through the Miami Police Department (and that the company can use in unchecked ways).277 Documents obtained via public-records requests showed that 300 police departments in California have access, through Palantir, to data collected and stored by the Department of Homeland Security’s Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, without any requirement to disclose their access to this information.278

Numerous groups are beginning to push back on the encroaching privatization fueled by smart cities, with the most concerted and organized effort in Toronto. In February, a group of 30 Torontonians launched the #BlockSidewalk campaign,279 and has noted that the project “is as much about privatization and corporate control as it is about privacy.”280 In April, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) filed a lawsuit against Waterfront Toronto, arguing the organization abused its legal authority in granting Sidewalk Labs the authority to develop data-governance policy.281 And after Sidewalk Labs released its MIDP, the Chairman of Waterfront Toronto (the government task force charged with managing the Sidewalk Labs project) critiqued the proposal in a public letter as “premature.”282

By the end of October, Waterfront Toronto had reached a new agreement with Sidewalk Labs, restricting Sidewalk Labs to the original 12-acre parcel and asserting the government’s role as leading key components of the project.283 The project’s ultimate fate is still undetermined: Waterfront Toronto continues to review the project and will come to a final decision about whether to proceed by March 31, 2020.284

AI at the Border

AI continues to play a larger and more pernicious role in the targeting of immigrant populations within the United States....

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