A TikTok booth is seen during the opening day of Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, on August 21, 2024. (Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

More people might get to see the US government’s secret TikTok evidence

The American public is still trying to understand what the Chinese company is doing that would relegate it to being banned.

Matt Phillips, Rani Molla

8/23/24 10:39AM

We know that whatever caused the US government to try and ban TikTok is supposed to be big and bad.

But besides the vague idea that the Chinese government could force ByteDance to manipulate its algorithm, the US government has offered few details behind remarkable Congressional push to pass, and President Biden’s decision to sign, a law requiring TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to sell the app, or face at total ban.

Now lawyers for the company — which is appealing the law — are asking that a so-called special master be appointed to evaluated classified evidence and the government’s need for secrecy.

The fight over who in the case gets to see what evidence — much of which will remain unavailable to the broader public — highlights the difficulty Americans have in understanding just what the U.S. government is so concerned about, when it comes to the popular app.

"We've seen a lot of really, I would say, a lot of really confusing messaging from members of Congress about why specifically they want to ban TikTok. Some are saying it's because of data collection, some are saying it's because of propaganda. Others others are saying it's just because TikTok is too addictive," Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who studies strategic technologies, told Sherwood in April. “We haven't really gotten a really clear explanation from the government of what specifically they believe the risks are.”

Jon Keegan3h

OpenAI’s hot Sora video app is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen

OpenAI has generated some serious buzz surrounding its new Sora video generation app. The app is currently No. 3 on the iOS free app leaderboards, even though it’s invitation-only for the time being.

But users have been flooding social media with videos generated by Sora, and in addition to a “Skibidi Toilet” Sam Altman and the OpenAI CEO dressed as a Nazi, the app is able to create videos featuring iconic characters from Disney, Nintendo, and Paramount Skydance.

On the system card for the Sora 2 AI model (which powers the Sora app), OpenAI says it was trained on things found on the internet:

“Sora 2 was trained on diverse datasets, including information that is publicly available on the internet, information that we partner with third parties to access, and information that our users or human trainers and researchers provide or generate.”

This seems like an invitation for a big copyright lawsuit, along the lines of the one Disney, Dreamworks, and NBCUniversal recently filed against AI image generator Midjourney.

But OpenAI is trying to flip the responsibility of protecting copyrighted material to the intellectual property owners themselves. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is allowing copyrighted material in Sora by default, unless copyright holders opt out of the service.

The courts will have to decide if this novel approach to intellectual copyright law works, but government regulators may not be that big of a problem, as Altman has made sure OpenAI is in the good graces of the Trump administration. If OpenAI has to pay up to copyright holders after a lawsuit, what’s a few billion dollars here or there when you’re raising so much capital?

OpenAI’s AI video app stirs copyright questions, pumping out videos of Mario and Pikachu

On the system card for the Sora 2 AI model (which powers the Sora app), OpenAI says it was trained on things found on the internet:

“Sora 2 was trained on diverse datasets, including information that is publicly available on the internet, information that we partner with third parties to access, and information that our users or human trainers and researchers provide or generate.”

This seems like an invitation for a big copyright lawsuit, along the lines of the one Disney, Dreamworks, and NBCUniversal recently filed against AI image generator Midjourney.

Rani Molla

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Tension emerges between Meta’s AI teams

Discontent between Meta’s AI research teams is growing, according to a report by The Information, at a critical time for Meta’s effort to get back into the AI race.

Jon Keegan6h

Rani Molla

Mon-AI Mon-AI Mon-AI Mon-AI

OpenAI beats SpaceX as most valuable private company, at $500 billion valuation

It also reached that valuation very quickly.