Coon Rapids Gazette

Coon Rapids Gazette

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Get our latest articles delivered straight to your inbox. No spam, we promise.


Tom Borman, Contributing editor

New Zealand’s internet safety agencies came out fighting after getting called out for failing to protect Jacinda Ardern from the dark underbelly of social media.

Back in October 2023, Paul Hunt, the now dearly departed (from the Human Rights Commission) and politically correct Chief Human Rights Commissioner, decided to ruffle some feathers by firing off a letter to NZ Tech’s, Graeme Muller, essentially accusing X and Meta of leaving Jacinda Ardern out to dry in a sea of online hatred and violence.

The Human Rights Commission went full throttle, declaring New Zealand’s shiny new online safety code about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

According to an RNZ report from Guyon Espiner, NZ Tech lawyered up and came out swinging, accusing Hunt’s advisors of bias and threatening to sic the Auditor General and Public Service Commission on them.

The Hunt Letter

Paul Hunt

Hunt’s letter, which RNZ obtained via an Official Information request, painted a grim picture. Over 48 hours in September 2023, some X user with a following bigger than most small towns went on a rampage against Ardern.

Hunt said that over 48 hours in September 2023, an X user with more than 400,000 followers made a series of vile and abusive posts harassing Ardern.

“His targeted harassment is gendered, includes explicit and implicit references to sexual assault and rape and, as a harassment campaign led by a high-profile influencer, meets the description of technology-facilitated gender-based violence,” Hunt said in the letter.

“The replies and re-posts are typified by violence, misogyny, and hate.”

Hunt, a former human rights and civil liberties lawyer from London and former Waikato University lecturer, was famously identified for labelling colonisation as “the major issue of our time”.

His letter to the technies referenced a cesspool of abuse regarding Ardern. “Dog, pest, pig… rodent, vile, bitch and witch.” (That’s just the PG version.)

Death threats were tossed around freely as well.

Hunt claimed X and Meta were dragging their feet, violating not just human rights but also their own online safety code.

The Code of Practice for Online Safety and Harms was launched in 2022 by Netsafe and NZTech and signed by tech firms Meta, Google, TikTok, Twitch and X.

Anna Adams Lawfuel

In response the two agencies hired barrister Anna Adams of Bankside Chambers, (pictured), former Chair of Meredith Connell and former prosecutor and regulatory and administrative law expert, who wrote a robustly worded letter to Hunt.

“The commission’s actions in sending the letters appears unreasonable, unlawful, and outside its statutory functions as a Crown entity,” she wrote.

She said the HRC “appears to have allowed itself to be captured by a group of outsiders – the IAG – with an agenda to fix the Code”.

The IAG is the  Independent Accountability Group set up by the HRC to review the code of practice for online safety, and was signed by Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google (YouTube), Tik Tok, Twitch, and Twitter in 2022.

The ACT Party in particular has attacked the HRC saying it is a “hard-left organisation masquerading as a government department”.




Source link


As if launching a new AI model that shook the entire industry wasn’t enough, the Chinese startup DeepSeek followed up this week by releasing an AI image generator it claims provides “significant advancements in both multimodal understanding and text-to-image instruction-following capabilities.”

The new image-generation model is called Janus-Pro, and it aims to compete with US rivals like DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion. The new model claims to outperform its competition in areas such as image quality and accuracy.

AI Atlas art badge tag

The launch of Janus-Pro came only days after the release of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which made waves with its lightning-fast, highly logical responses, and for being trained more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of US models. 

DeepSeek’s model reportedly runs on less advanced Nvidia chips, raising questions about how China is competing without access to cutting-edge US technology. The iOS app has outpaced ChatGPT in downloads on the Apple App Store recently, and is still the No. 1 free app as of Jan. 31.

The back-to-back releases signal China’s push to gain footing in the growing AI arms race. Meanwhile, last week, President Donald Trump announced a new AI infrastructure initiative, pledging up to $500 million in partnership with OpenAI and other tech firms.

Watch this: What Is DeepSeek AI? Everything to Know About the Popular New AI

The release of R1 and Janus-Pro also coincides with increased scrutiny of Chinese tech companies, with tensions already high over TikTok’s data privacy concerns.

In an introduction on its download page, DeepSeek says: “Janus-Pro surpasses its previous unified model and matches or exceeds the performance of task-specific models. The simplicity, high flexibility, and effectiveness of Janus-Pro make it a strong candidate for next-generation unified multimodal models.”

The model ranges in size from 1 billion to 7 billion parameters, a key factor in its problem-solving capabilities.

The company calls Janus-Pro a “novel autoregressive framework” that solves previous challenges by separating the steps for analyzing and generating images, while still using a single, unified system to process everything.

“The decoupling not only alleviates the conflict between the visual encoder’s roles in understanding and generation but also enhances the framework’s flexibility,” DeepSeek wrote.

User response to Janus-Pro has been mixed so far, with some Redditors claiming the images resemble its competitors’ efforts from years past. To get a sense of how Janus-Pro compares to other AI image generators, check out this breakdown of performance between ChatGPT 4o, Qwen 2.5 and Janus-Pro from YouTuber EJack Yao.

Janus-Pro is currently available to download on the AI developer platform Hugging Face.





Source link

Recent Reviews