UK's Starmer announces crackdown on AI chatbots in child safety push United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a crackdown on artificial intelligence chatbots that endanger children and pledged to seek broader powers to regulate internet access for minors. Starmer's office said on Monday that the government would target "vile and illegal content created by AI" and push for legal powers to act quickly on the findings of a public consultation that will consider a social media ban for children below 16 years of age. "Technology is moving really fast, and the law has got to keep up," Starmer said in a statement. "We are acting to protect children's wellbeing and help parents to navigate the minefield of social media," he said. The measures will require all AI chatbot providers to abide by digital safety laws, including a ban on creating sexualised images without a subject's consent.

One leading planning lawyer warned such AI services could'supercharge nimbyism'. One leading planning lawyer warned such AI services could'supercharge nimbyism'. Tools that help people scan applications and find grounds for objection have potential to hit government's housebuilding plans The government's plan to use artificial intelligence to accelerate planning for new homes may be about to hit an unexpected roadblock: AI-powered nimbyism. A new service called Objector is offering "policy-backed objections in minutes" to people who are upset about planning applications near their homes. It uses generative AI to scan planning applications and check for grounds for objection, ranking these as "high", "medium" or "low" impact. It then automatically creates objection letters, AI-written speeches to deliver to the planning committees, and even AI-generated videos to "influence councillors".

An AI tool has been used to review public responses to a government consultation for the first time and is now set to be rolled out more widely in an effort to save money and staff time. The tool, named "Consult", was first used by the Scottish government when it was seeking perspectives on the regulation of non-surgical cosmetic procedures such as lip filler. The UK government said the tool analysed responses and was able to produce results identical to human officials, and will now be used to review responses from other consultations, while also being developed further. While reviewing more than 2,000 responses, Consult identified key themes, which were then checked and refined by experts in the Scottish government. The government built Consult to be among its new package of AI tools, nicknamed "Humphrey", which they claim will "speed up work in Whitehall and cut back on consulting spending".

A group that includes sex workers, sex tech businesses, and sex educators has demanded a seat at the table to shape AI regulations that they say could lead to discrimination against them. A group of sex industry professionals and advocates issued an open letter to EU regulators on Thursday, claiming that their views are being overlooked in vital discussions on policing AI technology despite also being implicated in AI's momentous rise. In response to European internet regulations, a collective of adult industry members--including sex workers, erotic filmmakers, sex tech enterprises, and sex educators--urged the European Commission to include them in future negotiations shaping AI regulations, according to the letter, seen by WIRED. The group includes erotic filmmaker Erika Lust's company as well as the European Sex Workers' Rights Alliance campaign group, and is signed the Open Mind AI initiative. The group aims to alert the commission of what it says is a "critical gap" in discussions on AI regulation.

An artificial intelligence agent named Tala may open the door on a new way of gathering feedback from New Zealand's Samoan community. The Talanoa Project is a pilot project that uses IBM's artificial intelligence virtual agent solution, Watson, to interact in real time in Samoan for public consultation and community engagement. Developed and designed by Beca, business director Matthew Ensor said it was about consulting with'the silent majority' in the public on projects and community facilities. "We don't hear so much from the people where language is a barrier, where culturally there's no tradition of responding to public consultation. "We then created a conversational agent, it's like a chat-bot and what it does is it mimics the kind of conversation that you would have with a consultation expert," Mr Ensor said. "It will ask open questions about your thoughts on different things and really lets the person lead the conversation rather than a survey form where the questions are completely scripted." Steve O'Donnell from IBM New Zealand's Managing Partner for Global Business Services said this was the first time IBM Watson Assistant had been used for public consultation in New Zealand in a language other than English. "What we are seeing now is AI being able to scale down, and drive value in many industries," he said. "IBM Watson has already transformed the world of customer service, due largely to its ability to understand human sentiment and interact naturally with people and Tala is a promising first step towards that." The Talanoa Project, part funded by Callaghan Innovation, tested Tala among a few dozen Samoan speakers, asking them for their thoughts on their local community facilities. The focus group of Samoans ranged from 19-years of age to 77 being the oldest and included Samoan elders, law students, psychologists and sociologists. "It was overwhelmingly positive the response we got back from the Samoan community," Mr Ensor said. "We had a few people share that it was great to hear technology using their native language.

Power up your legal research with modern workflow tools, AI conceptual search and premium content sets that leverage Lexology's archive of 900,000 articles contributed by the world's leading law firms.

On 19 February 2020, the European Commission published a white paper on the use of artificial intelligence ("AI") in the EU (the "White Paper"). The White Paper forms part of the Commission President, Ursula Von der Leyen's, digital strategy, one of the key pillars of her administration's five year tenure, recognising that the EU has fallen behind the US and China with respect to the strategic deployment of AI. To tackle this problem, the Commission proposes a common EU approach to'speed up the uptake' of AI in the EU, whilst also tackling the human and ethical implications of AI's fast growing use in the EU, including the possible downsides of its use, such as opaque decision making and hidden, embedded gender and racial discrimination. In order to achieve a common EU approach to AI, and to create "trustworthy" AI that can rival developments in the US and China, the Commission proposes the creation of a regulatory framework for AI. Under the regulatory framework, AI applications deemed'high-risk' will be distinguished from'non high-risk' AI applications.

Timnit Gebru was wary of being labelled an activist. As a young, black female computer scientist, Gebru – who was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but now lives in the US – says she'd always been vocal about the lack of women and minorities in the datasets used to train algorithms. She calls them "the undersampled majority", quoting another rising star of the artificial intelligence (AI) world, Joy Buolamwini. But Gebru didn't want her advocacy to affect how she was perceived in her field. "I wanted to be known primarily as a tech researcher. I was very resistant to being pigeonholed as a black woman, doing black woman-y things."

New rules to let self-driving cars break the speed limit or mount kerbs to avoid accidents are being drawn up in a'digital Highway Code'. And in a radical legal move, it could be the car maker punished if a driverless car speeds without justification or causes a fatal accident. One key question in an official review launched yesterday is whether automated vehicles should, like human drivers, be allowed to break the rules for a greater good. Should they be programmed to mount the kerb to avoid a child in the road, let an ambulance go past, or if two cars are stuck in a narrow street? New rules to let self-driving cars break the speed limit or mount kerbs to avoid accidents are being drawn up in a'digital Highway Code'.

MEPs have approved rules for keeping humans firmly in charge of Artificial Intelligence (AI). They include ways to establish liability in law, for example where driverless cars cause accidents. They have also called for ethical standards to be built in to AI algorithms and robots that work for humans, and standardisation across Member States to ensure a level playing field for technology companies. After a heated debate, the vote was passed on Thursday by a large majority, 369 to 123 with 85 abstentions. But clauses that would introduce a basic state allowance for people who lose their jobs to robotisation were defeated. A coalition of right-wing parties voted them out.