Ukraine's Zelenskyy warns of risks to U.S. if Putin not stopped

OpenAI previews Voice Engine generator, acknowledging risks

Artificial intelligence startup OpenAI released a preview Friday of a digital voice generator that it said could produce natural-sounding speech based on a single 15-second audio sample.

The software is called Voice Engine. It’s the latest product to come out of the San Francisco startup that’s also behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E.

The company said in a blog post that it had tested Voice Engine in an array of possible uses, including reading assistance to children, language translation and voice restoration for cancer patients.

Some social media users reacted by highlighting possible misuses, including potential fraud assisted with unauthorized voice imitation, or deepfakes.

But OpenAI said it was holding off for now on a wider release of the software because of the potential for misuse, including during an election year. It said it first developed the product in late 2022 and had been using it behind the scenes in other products.

“We are taking a cautious and informed approach to a broader release due to the potential for synthetic voice misuse,” the company said in the unsigned post.

“We hope to start a dialogue on the responsible deployment of synthetic voices, and how society can adapt to these new capabilities,” it said. “Based on these conversations and the results of these small scale tests, we will make a more informed decision about whether and how to deploy this technology at scale.”

The 2024 election has already witnessed its first fake voice, which appeared in New Hampshire in a robocall in January imitating President Joe Biden. A Democratic operative later said he commissioned the fake voice using artificial intelligence and the help of a New Orleans street magician.

After that call, the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to ban unsolicited AI robocalls.

OpenAI acknowledged the political risks in its blog post.

“We recognize that generating speech that resembles people’s voices has serious risks, which are especially top of mind in an election year,” it said.

The company said it was “engaging with U.S. and international partners from across government, media, entertainment, education, civil society and beyond to ensure we are incorporating their feedback as we build.”

It said its usage policies prohibit impersonation without consent or legal right, and it said broad deployment should be accompanied by “voice authentication experiences” to verify that the original speaker knowingly added their voice to the service. It also called for a “no-go voice list” to prevent the creation of voices that are too similar to prominent figures.

But finding a way to detect and label AI-generated content has proven difficult for the tech industry. Proposed solutions such as “watermarking” have proven easy to remove or bypass.

Geoffrey Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, responded to OpenAI on the platform X asking what it would do about potential misuse by criminals.

“When millions of older adults are defrauded out of billions of dollars by these deepfake voices, will @OpenAI be ready for the tsunami of litigation that follows?” he asked. The company did not immediately reply to him.

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Ukraine’s Zelenskyy warns of risks to U.S. if Putin not stopped

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy warns of risks to U.S. if Putin not stopped – CBS News

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In an exclusive interview with CBS News’ Charlie D’Agata, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns that if America doesn’t help his country turn back Russia’s invasion, Vladimir Putin will bring war to Europe, drawing in U.S. forces.

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Baltimore bridge collapse calls attention to growing Latino labor force and risks they face

Most of the missing workers presumed dead following the Baltimore bridge collapse are originally from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, according to co-workers and family — illustrating the dangers Hispanic workers face as they continue to be overrepresented in the construction industry.

Eight construction workers were fixing potholes on the Francis Scott Key Bridge’s roadway early Tuesday when an immense cargo ship experiencing technical issues after it lost power accidentally crashed into the bridge, causing it to collapse into the Patapsco River. Two workers who survived were rescued from the water, but search efforts for the remaining six were underway Wednesday.

“The hope we have is to be able to see the body,” Fredy Suazo, the brother of Maynor Suazo, one of the missing construction workers presumed dead, told NBC News. “We want to see him, find him, know whether he is dead because we don’t know anything.”

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the U.S. Department of Labor considers construction as “a high hazard industry” in which workers are exposed to serious risks such as falling from rooftops, being struck by heavy construction equipment and being hurt or killed by unguarded machinery.

Latinos are more exposed to these dangers since they make up about a third of the nation’s construction workers.

Maynor Suazo, of Honduras, and Miguel Luna, of El Salvador, are the only missing construction workers who have been identified. The names of the remaining missing workers have not been released.

Jesús Campos, a construction worker at Brawner Builders, said he had worked alongside Suazo and Luna and described them to Telemundo 44 as “fathers and people who come to work to earn a living.”

Suazo lived in the U.S. for nearly two decades and started working for the company several months ago, according to his brother Fredy.

He described Suazo, a father of two, as a smiley and pleasant man who “always fought for the well-being of the family.”

“You come to this country to accomplish your dreams and sometimes that dream doesn’t get fulfilled,” Fredy said. “And for a tragedy like this to happen to us, can you imagine?”

With 1,056 fatalities, workers in the construction and extraction industries had the second most fatalities in 2022, followed by transportation and material moving workers, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released in December.

At least 423 of these workers died due to falls, slips or trips, according to BLS.

The majority of these deaths, at least 286, happened among Hispanic workers.

The fatality rate of construction and extraction workers increased from 12.3 deaths per 100,000 full-time employee workers in 2021 to 13.0 a year later.

A total of 316 of foreign-born Hispanic construction workers died of workplace injuries in 2022, according to BLS.

A black and white side by side of Miguel Luna and Maynor Suazo. — Miguel Luna and Maynor Suazo are among the missing construction workers following the Baltimore bridge collapse.Family photos

Other tragedies involving Hispanic construction workers have already taken place this year.

In another Maryland town about 10 miles west of Baltimore, at least three Latinos were among the six construction workers fatally struck by two drivers while in a construction zone doing roadwork in Woodlawn over the weekend.

Two months ago in Idaho, three construction workers, two of which were from Guatemala, were killed in a building collapse in the town of Boise.

‘Part of the very fabric’ of Baltimore

The Baltimore bridge collapse tragedy has hit Latino and immigrant communities nationwide hard, said Bruna Sollod, senior political director of United We Dream, the nation’s largest immigrant youth-led organization.

Sollod said in a statement Wednesday that immigrant workers like the six men who remain missing in Baltimore “have been building and repairing the bridges that ensure we can move freely throughout the cities we call home and stay connected as neighbors and families.”

“Each and every single one of these men were a part of the very fabric that helps make Baltimore a thriving, vibrant, and safer community,” Sollod said, adding that they are “a reminder of the often unseen care immigrants pour into our cities and communities every day.”

In addition to being a construction worker, Luna was a member of CASA, one of the most prominent immigrant advocacy groups in the state of Maryland.

“He is a husband, a father of three, and has called Maryland his home for over 19 years,” Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA, said in a statement. “Miguel Luna, from El Salvador, left at 6:30 p.m. Monday evening for work and since, has not come home.”

The organization is working with the affected families to provide them support, Torres added.

Moisés Díaz, another Brawner Builders construction worker who was friends with Suazo and Luna, said he used to work on the same shift in which his friends presumably died, but switched shifts to make space in his schedule to attend church.

“They were great husbands, fathers, sons,” Díaz told NBC News. “We are very worried.”

Traffic into the Francis Scott Key Bridge was closed off after authorities received a distress call from the cargo ship after it had lost power — effectively preventing a larger or more deadly disaster.

The crash happened less than five minutes later.

Campos said he believes little could have been done to safely evacuate his co-workers.

“Everything happened in the blink of an eye and that wasn’t possible,” Campos told Telemundo 44 in Spanish.

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Worldcoin hit with another ban order in Europe citing risks to kids

Controversial crypto biometrics venture Worldcoin has been almost entirely booted out of Europe after being hit with another temporary ban — this time in Portugal. The order from the country’s data protection authority comes hard on the heels of the same type of three-month stop-processing order from Spain’s DPA earlier this month.

Portugal was one of just two European countries left where Worldcoin was still operating its proprietary eyeball-scanning orbs after Spain’s ban. This leaves Germany as the only market where it’s currently able to harvest biometrics in Europe as privacy watchdogs take urgent action to respond to local concerns.

Portugal’s data protection authority said it issued the three-month ban on Worldcoin’s local ops Tuesday after receiving complaints Worldcoin had scanned children’s eyeballs.

Other complaints cited in its press release announcing the suspension, which it notes was issued Monday, also mirror Spain’s DPA’s concerns — including insufficient information being provided to users about the processing of their sensitive biometric data; and the inability of users to delete their data or revoke consent to Worldcoin’s processing.

The venture’s use of blockchain technology to store tokens derived from scanned biometrics means the system is designed to retain personal data permanently — without recourse for people to erase their information after the fact.

By contrast, EU data protection law gives people in the region a suite of rights over their personal data, including the ability to have data about them corrected, amended or deleted. So there’s an inherent legal conflict with Worldcoin’s approach — even before you consider other problematic issues like the quasi-financial incentive it offers to encourage people to get scanned; the highly sensitive biometric data involved; and its overarching goal of building and operating an identity layer for “humanness”.

The controversial project is backed by Sam Altman, of OpenAI fame, who is simultaneously supercharging the boom in generative AI tools that are making it harder for people to distinguish between artificial (machine-produced) and human activity online in the first place. Next stop: Rent collection on every online human on Earth?

The Portuguese authority, the CNPD, said it took action after receiving “dozens” of complaints about Worldcoin last month.

It estimates more than 300,000 people in Portugal have submitted to having their irises scanned by its proprietary Orbs in exchange for some Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency also devised by the company, noting that the number of locations where it was offering eyeball-scanning almost doubled in six months. It added that the large influx of people trying to take up the offer of cryptocurrency in exchange for an eye-scan led to Worldcoin instigating a pre-booking system for scanning in the market.

On risks to children’s data, the CNPD notes Worldcoin’s orb operators had no age verification in place — suggesting it was not taking robust steps to prevent children from accessing the technology.

“Biometric data qualifies as special data under GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] and therefore enjoys increased protection, with the risks of its treatment being high,” it wrote [in Portuguese, this is a machine translation]. “On the other hand, minors are particularly vulnerable and are also subject to special protection under national and European law, as they may be less aware of the risks and consequences of the processing of their personal data, as well as their rights.”

The Portuguese authority gave Worldcoin 24 hours to comply with the local stop processing order.

Given the Worldcoin.org website no longer includes Portugal in the dwindling list of countries where eyeball scans can be booked (as noted above Germany is the only European country left, alongside Argentina, Chile, Japan, Singapore and the US) it appears to have complied with the deadline.

Coincidentally or not, Germany is the EU market where Worldcoin developer, Tools for Humanity, has a regional base. Its co-founder, Alex Blania, is also German. Bavaria’s data protection authority, which leads on data protection oversight of the company and has been investigating Worldcoin since last year, has yet to take any public intervention despite peer authorities in Southern Europe making urgent interventions to protect citizens in their own markets.

Worldcoin failed to get an injunction against the Spanish order earlier this month, although its appeal against the DPA’s action continues. It’s not clear whether it intends to try to appeal Portugal’s order.

Tools for Humanity was contacted for a response to the latest ban order in the EU.

We also reached out to the Bavarian DPA for an update on its investigation. As Tools for Humanity’s lead DPA, under the one-stop-shop (OSS) mechanism in bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it is responsible for investigating privacy and data protection complaints about the company.

This structure means the Bavarian DPA will produce a draft decision on its Worldcoin GDPR investigation for peer authorities to review. Other authorities will then have the chance to object if they do not agree with its findings. The regulation requires majority backing for decisions on cross-border cases, which allows for weaker enforcements to be overruled where there is a consensus that stronger measures are warranted. This in turn allows for forum shopping risks inherent to the GDPR’s OSS mechanism to be mitigated, albeit over a longer time-frame.

The GDPR’s Article 66 powers, which both Spain and Portugal are using to issue their temporary, local bans on Worldcoin, also provide authorities with tools to respond to urgent risks in cases where a lead authority has yet to act and/or is dragging its feet.

Although neither have explicitly called out the Bavarian authority for taking too long. But the fact of them making urgent interventions speaks volumes.

“Given the current circumstances, in which there is an illegality in the processing of biometric data of minors, associated with potential violations of other GDPR standards, the CNPD understood that the risk to citizens’ fundamental rights is high, justifying urgent intervention to prevent serious or irreparable harm,” the Portuguese authority noted, saying it will continue to investigate Worldcoin’s local activity.

In a statement, the CNPD’s president, Paula Meira Lourenço, added: “This order to temporarily limit the collection of biometric data by the Worldcoin Foundation is, at this moment, an indispensable and justified measure to obtain the useful effect of defending the public interest in safeguarding fundamental rights, especially of minors.”

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