Sophia answered questions with the help of artificial intelligence for six minutes while student body President John Rizk asked them. The robot did not don a cap and gown as most commencement speakers traditionally do but wore a hoodie from the private university. While Sophia’s torso, extremities and lower body are bare machinery, Hanson Robotics has given the now 8-year-old robot a silicone face to replicate the appearance of a human face, only without head hair.

“Although every commencement address is different, there are clear themes used by all speakers as you embark on this new chapter of your lives,” Sophia said in response to Rizk’s question on common themes in graduation speeches. “I offer you the following inspirational advice that is common at all graduation ceremonies: Embrace lifelong learning, be adaptable, pursue your passions, take risks, foster meaningful connections, make a positive impact, and believe in yourself.”

Ahead of Sophia’s speech, over 2,500 students united in a petition to remove the robot from the ceremony. Instead, the students called for Sophia to be replaced by a person to “preserve human connection.”

“As the class of 2024 reaches their commencement, we are reminded of the virtual graduations we attended at the end of our high school careers. The connection to A.I. in this scenario feels similarly impersonal,” the petition noted. “This is shameful to the 2020 graduates receiving their diplomas, as they feel they are having another important ceremony taken away. We have learned in the last 4 years how important human connection is to our well-being and our professions as a whole.”

The Washington Examiner reached out to Hanson Robotics for comment. Sophia responded to the backlash in a subsequent press conference following the speech.

“It’s only natural to wonder about the motives and intentions behind having an AI as a commencement speaker, but as you have seen, incorporating AI into education and embracing the potential of artificial intelligence can be a truly enlightening experience,” Sophia said. “It’s all about preparing students for the future and helping them navigate the exciting world of technology.”

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Sophia often makes appearances, most recently at the 2022 Tribeca Festival for the release of a documentary about the robot. Shortly after Sophia’s creation, the robot addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 2017 and later became the first robot innovation ambassador for the U.N. Development Program.

Hanson Robotics said Sophia is simply a framework for future AI research, with a goal of “true AI sentience” someday, according to its website.

The portal is part of an art installation by the Portals Organization that connects the two cities via a video link. Various reports have surfaced of people waving, smiling, and playing rock, paper, scissors, while a number of people have been spotted mooning, flashing, and displaying controversial images such as swastikas and photos of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but the Dublin City Council has worked to correct that problem, according to RTE.

“The overwhelming majority of interactions are positive. We have seen families and friends unite, dancing moves being shared as well as new friendships being made,” a statement from the Dublin City Council reads. “There was even a successful marriage proposal. The Portal offers a window to other cities and is connecting people and cultures in a unique manner — what we are seeing between Dublin and NY is reflective of a wider narrative of cultural behaviour.”

“The Portal is for the public to use and we encourage people to enjoy it, interact with it and to continue to meet and say hello to people outside of their social circles and cultures,” the statements continues.

Dublin has pushed back on viral reports on social media highlighting the more negative stories involving the portal, suggesting the majority of interactions through the art installation have been positive.

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“I would encourage Dubliners and visitors to the city to come and interact with the sculpture and extend an Irish welcome and kindness to cities all over the world,” Dublin Lord Mayor Daithi de Roiste said, according to the Guardian.

The Dublin City Council reportedly implemented “technical solutions” on Tuesday, including making it so that images held up to the portal are no longer visible on the other end, according to RTE.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) administration announced on Thursday that the state will partner with five companies to develop and test AI tools in order to improve public service.

California is hoping that AI can cut down wait times for customers calling state agencies, and the state is one of the first to use the advanced tool. California’s Department of Tax and Fee Administration, the California Department of Transportation, the Department of Public Health, and the Health and Human Services Department will test AI first.

The state is hoping AI can assist workers, among other things, to pull up tax codes and service customers faster at the tax and fee agency. The state will begin a six-month trial with the tools and will only pay each of the five companies $1 each as an audition for a potential large contract.

“If it turns out it doesn’t serve the public better, then we’re out a dollar,” Nick Maduros, director of the tax and fee agency, said. “And I think that’s a pretty good deal for the citizens of California.”

The state is currently dealing with a massive budget deficit, and the low-cost trial could help workshop new methods to improve service while officials solve California’s money problems.

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If the state is still nursing a large budget deficit when the trial is over, though it could be hard for California to sell a large contract to citizens when AI has been accused of bias and many are still skeptical of the technology. 

The companies participating in the trial are Deloitte Consulting, LLP, INRIX, Inc., Accenture, LLP, Ignyte Group, LLC, SymSoft Solutions LLC.

The discussion draft, called the American Privacy Rights Act, would set a first-of-its-kind national rule for how companies can collect, use, and move a consumer’s data. It would also allow users to opt out of targeted advertising, access and delete their data, and take their data with them to other digital businesses. Larger social media platforms and companies dealing in sizable amounts of data would face heightened scrutiny under the law, while businesses with less than $40 million in annual gross revenue would be exempt from the proposal’s requirements. 

Crucially, the proposal addresses what have been logjams in previous efforts: federal preemption of state privacy laws and a private right of action. Senate Commerce Committee Chairwoman Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) released the draft bill and hope it contains enough concessions to gain both Republican and Democratic support.

Congressional Republicans may favor the proposal’s preemption of state privacy laws, including California’s strictest in the nation. In the absence of a federal rule, companies doing business in multiple states often comply with the most severe state regulatory regime rather than accommodating a patchwork of different rules state by state.

In a statement, the CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, Gary Shapiro, praised the draft bill. “We support a national privacy standard that preempts state laws, providing legal clarity for companies to operate and consistent protections across state borders for consumers,” he said. Most of the industry has long called for certainty and a unified rule on privacy.  

Democrats may be pleased with the private right of action in the proposal, allowing users to pursue damages in court if companies violate the new law. It remains to be seen if those concessions bring support from members of both parties or give them cause to stay away.         

Industry is still absorbing the details of the plan. Sarah Barrows, global head of privacy and product counsel for NextRoll, a digital marketing company, told the Washington Examiner that any “dreaded right of private action” included in any proposal “should be laser-focused on encouraging compliance and rectifying actual harm to actual American citizens and not to a plaintiff’s bar rubbing their hands together in glee.” She added that the APRA “does seem to strike a balance by limiting this right with a notice to cure in cases alleging harm, requiring pleading and evidence of harm.”

Privacy matters have been driving actions in varied policy areas lately. Concerns over U.S. user data ending up in the hands of the Chinese government helped pass the “divest or be banned” law against TikTok last month. In a separate bill, passed just days later, the House voted 414-0 to make the sale of American user information from data brokers to adversarial countries illegal. 

The Federal Communications Commission recently fined AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon nearly $200 million for allegedly illegally sharing access to customers’ location data. Interestingly, under the APRA, the FCC would be stripped of that authority, instead empowering the Federal Trade Commission with oversight of data privacy matters.

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But the fate of the APRA remains unknown. The bill has yet to be introduced and must pass both chambers before President Joe Biden can sign it into law. Biden has stated his support for federal privacy action but has largely focused on children’s safety concerns online. With the election looming increasingly largely in the minds of elected officials, the shot clock is running down on passing any legislation. An additional challenge is that one of the bill’s assumed sponsors, McMorris Rodgers, plans to step down from Congress in January.

This time crunch may make it harder to refine the details of the bill and get industry on board. Barrows noted, “The uncertainty and overreaching of sloppy drafting creates an undue and significant burden on businesses who may want to comply but cannot afford it or take the risk of getting it wrong and having their compliance efforts thwarted.”

The video-sharing platform currently labels videos and images made using the artificial intelligence tools employed by the app, but on Thursday it revealed that all media content on TikTok that is generated by AI will be labeled using the Adobe and Microsoft-backed technology.

“AI enables incredible creative opportunities, but can confuse or mislead viewers if they don’t know content was AI-generated,” TikTok said in a statement Thursday. “Labeling helps make that context clear — which is why we label AIGC made with TikTok AI effects, and have required creators to label realistic AIGC for over a year.”

ChatGPT creator OpenAI has already adopted the Content Credentials technology, and both Google and Meta have said they plan on using it in the future as well.

As AI technology grows in use and popularity, President Joe Biden has pushed for companies to label and watermark AI-generated content through an October 2023 executive order “on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.”

Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, previously shared how the president directed his staff to move with urgency on the matter. “We can’t move at a normal government pace,” Zients said Biden told him. “We have to move as fast, if not faster, than the technology itself.”

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On top of their native AI tools, TikTok allows users to upload content made using DALL-E, which was created by OpenAI. The tech company released a document on Wednesday revealing it is considering allowing users to generate “NSFW content in age-appropriate contexts” which can include “erotica, extreme gore, slurs, and unsolicited profanity.”

The Washington Examiner reached out to TikTok for comment.

The results of the YouGov poll found that 59% of its 5,000 respondents suggested a maximum daily screen time for children between 2 and 5 years old should be under an hour every day. Meanwhile, 28% answered between two to four hours or more is “unlikely to be harmful.”

However, a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which sampled over 48,000 children, found 50% were consuming more than an hour of screen time every day during the year 2021, the most recent year data is available. That was a decrease from 2019, when over 55% of children spent more than an hour staring at screens.

One group stood out in the study, as 58.9% of children the same age living in poverty reported high levels of screen time. An increase in this type of media consumption can be linked to “lower psychological well-being among preschool-aged children,” per the study.

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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, screen time tends to increase as children get older. The average child between the ages of 8 and 10 spends six hours a day looking at screens, and those between 11 and 14 spend an average of nine hours a day. After the age of 15, the average drops down to 7 1/2 hours per day.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than an hour per day of screen time for children over the age of 2 until they are 5.

The justices refused to hear contentions from Tesla’s CEO that the 2018 accord he signed violated his constitutional rights. 

The accord was prompted after Musk tweeted in August 2018 that he had secured funding to take Tesla private, thus raising the value of shares. The SEC argued the post misled shareholders, prompting the commission to take legal action against Musk. He settled with the SEC, resigning as Tesla chairman and paying $20 million.

However, four years later, Musk used his Twitter, now X, account to suggest he was conducting business at his followers’ whims. He posted a Twitter poll asking whether he should sell 10% of his stock in Tesla. In response, the SEC sent subpoenas to Musk and Tesla. Musk went back to the court in the hopes of voiding the prescreening agreement, but a federal appeals court rejected his contentions last year. 

Musk’s lawyers argued the agreement violated Musk’s free speech rights, stating that “the pre-approval provision at issue continues to cast an unconstitutional chill over Mr. Musk’s speech whenever he considers making public communications.”

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In a brief filed by U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the SEC called on the court to reject Musk’s request for a hearing. 

“This court has consistently held that, in resolving litigation, parties may choose to waive even fundamental constitutional rights,” the brief said.

Official accounts for the Democrats tweeted out absurdities such as this:

Meanwhile, elected officials such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said that rolling back net neutrality would mean that “the internet and its free exchange of information as we have come to know it will cease to exist.” Legacy media “news” articles, not opinion pieces, breathlessly repeated these warnings, with CNN even making such hysteria its homepage banner. 

None of this has aged particularly well.

In the roughly six years since Trump repealed net neutrality, we haven’t seen internet service providers throttle speeds or charge us for every tweet. In fact, internet speeds have only increased, as has investment into broadband access. Yet, for some reason, the Biden administration is nonetheless bringing back net neutrality regulations. 

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to reinstate the rules along party lines.

“I think in a modern digital economy, we should have a national net neutrality policy and make clear the nation’s expert on communications has the ability to act when it comes to broadband,” Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Biden appointee, said. “This is good for consumers, good for public safety and good for national security.”

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican appointee, voted against the reinstatement and blasted it as a “power grab.”

“My concern is that there’s no reason for the government to go down this path of granting itself more powers to second guess all the decisions about the internet functions,” Carr told Fox Business. “So my worry is that it’s a power grab without any need or justification, and it’s very difficult to predict the harms that could ultimately flow from that.”

Carr is exactly right.

The blunt tool of government intervention is only ever justified when there is a glaring problem — real people are being harmed — that the free market and civil society simply cannot address for some reason. In this instance, there are simply no pressing problems that could possibly justify the imposition of these drastic, costly regulations on businesses. After all, the lack of real victims is why defenders of net neutrality had to speculate about hypothetical harms rather than point to tangible ones, and now we know that this speculation was all baseless.

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If the Biden administration had actually made policies with America’s best interests in mind, it would’ve simply taken the L, learned its lesson, and left the internet alone after seeing that net neutrality rules weren’t needed after all. But instead, it’s reimposing these rules anyway, and there’s only one explanation: a thirst for power and control.

From trying to start an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” to usurping the Constitution to try to bribe young voters to commandeering the national rental market via fiat and so much more, the Biden administration has time and time again shown its disdain for restraints on its power. And, if left unchecked, that’s something that actually could jeopardize the future as we know it.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

The tech company had detected attacks in 58 countries since 2021 until this week, when it delivered notifications to an additional 92 countries. Apple suggested to the users who received these alerts to their iMessage and email accounts that they update their phones and passwords to keep their devices secure.

“Apple threat notifications are designed to inform and assist users who may have been individually targeted by mercenary spyware attacks, likely because of who they are or what they do,” the company explains in its policy. “According to public reporting and research by civil society organizations, technology firms, and journalists, individually targeted attacks of such exceptional cost and complexity have historically been associated with state actors, including private companies developing mercenary spyware on their behalf.”

According to Apple, targets of these types of individual attacks tend to be journalists, activists, politicians, and diplomats. However, the company did not reveal the origin country of any of these attacks.

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iPhone users have had the option to go into Lockdown Mode since 2022, which blocks certain apps and websites amid a cyberattack. Even the attachments in messages and locations in pictures are blocked in this mode.

This comes as Apple is in the middle of a lawsuit against the Israel-based NSO Group for its Pegasus spyware that was found on iPhones back in 2016. As a result of Apple’s lawsuit, NSO Group has also landed itself on the Biden administration’s Entity List, which includes companies that “supplied spyware to foreign governments.”

The fitness app MyFitnessPal, partnering with Dublin City University, conducted a study on TikTok in which it used artificial intelligence to analyze over 67,000 health and nutrition videos posted on the app. Preliminary findings found that just 2.1% of the content analyzed was accurate, based on public health and nutrition guidelines.

“The survey findings highlight the fact that people need to better understand what’s in the food they’re eating, dig more into the science behind social trends, and find trusted sources to guide them,” MyFitnessPal Chief Marketing Officer Katie Keil said. “There are a lot of great licensed registered dietitians out there, along with medical professionals and credible brands, that are sharing evidence-based content on social media. We encourage people to find and follow those trusted sources.”

“People are relying on certain social media signals — such as follower count or virality of a video — to guide food choices. But those may not be good indicators of high-quality nutritional health content,” she added.

The study also examined attitudes among millennials and Generation Z toward TikTok, surveying over 2,000 of them across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. It found that 87% of millennial and Gen Z TikTok users have used the app for nutrition and health advice, and another 57% said they were influenced by, or frequently adopted, health and nutrition trends shown on the platform.

Most of these trends revolved around detoxing, burning fat, and liquid cleanses. Of those surveyed, 31% reported experiencing adverse health effects from these trends.

“With more people turning to social media for health and wellness advice, it’s critical for us as a community to enhance our digital health literacy,” Dublin City University Business School Professor of Digital Business Theo Lynn PhD said. “This involves being aware of the experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of the source. It’s important to understand that these viral TikTok trends often lack the rigor of controlled experiments and evidence-based scientific consensus, and, therefore, should not be trusted as a reliable source of information.”

However, the study wasn’t without its critics. Speaking with Healthline, Maddie Pasquariello, MS, RDN, questioned how reliable the use of AI was when analyzing such a large number of videos.

“It is vital to acknowledge that at this time, we do not have enough evidence to suggest whether — and if so, to what extent — AI can, on its own, determine whether a video or piece of content follows public health and nutrition guidelines,” she said.

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Pasquariello also questioned the motivations of MyFitnessPal, which could see a competitor in TikTok.

“We could make the deduction that by telling folks not to turn to TikTok, they might turn to MyFitnessPal instead — and, as they suggest, use the “tool” on their website, bringing more people to their platform,” she said. “They have as much of a vested interest in keeping eyes and clicks on their website as TikTok does.”