Економіка

Kyiv, Ukraine — Ukraine has an AI-generated spokesperson called Victoria who will make official statements on behalf of its foreign ministry.

The ministry said on Wednesday that it would “for the first time in history” use a digital spokesperson to read its statements, which will still be written by humans.

Dressed in a dark suit, the spokesperson introduced herself as Victoria Shi, a “digital person,” in a presentation posted on social media.

The figure gesticulates with her hands and moves her head as she speaks.

The foreign ministry’s press service told AFP that the statements given by Shi would not be generated by AI but “written and verified by real people.”

“It’s only the visual part that the AI helps us to generate,” it said.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the new spokesperson was a “technological leap that no diplomatic service in the world has yet made.”

The main reason for creating her was “saving time and resources” for diplomats, he said.

Shi’s creators are a team called The Game Changers who have also made virtual reality content related to the war in Ukraine.

The spokesperson’s name is based on the word victory and the Ukrainian for artificial intelligence: shtuchniy intelekt.

Shi’s appearance and voice are modeled on a real person: Rosalie Nombre, a singer and former contestant on Ukraine’s version of The Bachelor reality show.

Nombre was born in the now Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

She has 54,000 followers on her Instagram account, which she uses to discuss stereotypes about mixed-race Ukrainians and those who grew up as Russian speakers.

The ministry said that Nombre took part free of charge.

It stressed that Shi and Nombre “are two different people” and that only the AI figure gives official statements.

To avoid fakes, these will be accompanied by a QR code linking them to text versions on the ministry’s website.

Shi will comment on consular services, currently a controversial topic.

Ukraine last week suspended such services for men of fighting age living abroad, making it necessary for them to return to their country for administrative procedures and potentially face the draft. 
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STAVANGER, Norway — A convicted sex offender is asking the Norwegian Supreme Court to declare social media access is a human right.

The case before the court Thursday involves a man who molested a minor and used the Snapchat messaging app to connect with young boys.

The unnamed offender was sentenced last year to 13 months in prison and banned from using Snapchat for two years.

His lawyers argue that depriving him of his account is unlawful under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case turns on how vital social media has become for freedom of expression, even though the court must decide the case through laws that predate such sites.

“The case raises important questions about the extent to which the state can restrict access to social media platforms, which are significant tools for exercising the right to freedom of expression and maintaining social connections,” defense lawyer John Christian Elden said.

A November 2023 appeal against the ban failed with the state successfully arguing the ban was “proportionately measured against the fact that the defendant has used Snapchat to exploit children sexually.” The Appeal Court added that he still had the right to use other social media. If the Supreme Court also upholds the decision, the offender could attempt to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

The European convention has been used before to test the limits on Norwegian justice. Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who murdered 77 people in 2011, lost a court challenge in February that argued being held in isolation while serving his prison sentence amounted to inhumane punishment under the convention.

Signatories to the ECHR agree to abide by 18 articles guaranteeing citizens rights including life, liberty and freedom of expression. Norway was the second country to ratify the convention in 1952, after the United Kingdom.

Snapchat, run by Snap Inc., allows users to send and receive messages that disappear once they are read. Users also can physically locate other users who opt in to location tracking.

Snap prohibits child sexual exploitation on the app but allows accounts to be create anonymously. In an email it said, “when we disable accounts for sexual exploitation and grooming behavior, we also take steps to block the associated device and other accounts connected to the user from creating another Snapchat account.”

Snap disabled 343,865 accounts connected with child sexual exploitation in the second half of 2023. It sanctioned 879 accounts in Norway though it is not clear how many of these were permanently disabled.

The Norwegian court will issue its ruling in the coming weeks.
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WASHINGTON — Hackers who breached UnitedHealth’s tech unit in February potentially stole data from a third of Americans, the largest U.S. health insurer’s CEO told a congressional committee on Wednesday.

Two congressional panels grilled CEO Andrew Witty about the cyberattack on the company’s Change Healthcare unit, which processes around 50% of all medical claims in the U.S.

The breach has caused widespread disruptions in claims processing, impacting patients and providers across the country.

Witty fielded heated questions from House Energy and Commerce Committee members about the company’s failure to prevent the breach and contain its fallout.

Pressed for details on the data compromised, Witty said protected health information and personally identifiable information pertaining to “maybe a third” of Americans was stolen.

“We continue to investigate the amount of data involved here,” he added. “We do think it’s going to be substantial.”

The cybercriminal gang AlphV hacked into Change on Feb. 12 using stolen login credentials on an older server that did not have multifactor authentication, Witty said.

“It was … a platform which had only recently become part of the company was in the process of being upgraded,” Witty said, referring to UnitedHealth’s $13 billion acquisition of Change in 2022.

The platform also did not have the security measures prescribed in a joint alert issued by the FBI and U.S. cyber and health officials in December 2023 to specifically warn about AlphV, or BlackCat, targeting healthcare organizations.

UnitedHealth paid the gang around $22 million in bitcoin as ransom, Witty said, adding that however there was no guarantee that the breached data was secure and could not still be leaked. Another hacking group claiming to be an offshoot of AlphV said last month it had a copy of the data, though the company has not verified that claim.

The Senate Finance Committee probed the outsized influence of UnitedHealth – which has a market capitalization of $445 billion and annual revenue of $372 billion – on American health care. But Witty said the company’s problems were not a threat to the broader economy.

Senator Bill Cassidy said senators on the panel “would have to ask, is the dominant role of United too dominant because it is into everything and messing up United messes up everybody?”

“My point is, the size of United becomes a it’s almost a too big to fail and sure, because if it fails, it’s going to bring down far more than it ordinarily would,” Cassidy said.

Witty said in response, “I don’t believe it is because actually despite our size, for example, we have no hospitals in America, we do not own any drug manufacturers.”

Yet, Change processes medical claims for around 900,000 physicians, 33,000 pharmacies, 5,500 hospitals and 600 laboratories in the U.S.

U.S. military members’ data was also stolen in the hack, Witty revealed, without saying how many of them were impacted.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden called the hack a national security threat.

“I believe the bigger the company, the bigger the responsibility to protect its systems from hackers. UHG was a big target long before it was hacked,” he added.

“UnitedHealth Group has not revealed how many patients’ private medical records were stolen, how many providers went without reimbursement, and how many seniors are unable to pick up their prescriptions as a result of the hack,” said Wyden.

In letters to both congressional committees, the American Hospital Association said an internal survey of its members found that 94% of hospitals reported damage to cash flow, and more than half reported “significant or serious” financial damage due to Change’s inability to process claims.

Similarly, 90% of respondents to an American Medical Association survey of doctors said they continue to lose revenue because of the hack, according to the group’s written testimony to the Senate Finance Committee.
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Washington — A majority of Americans believe that China uses TikTok to shape U.S. public opinion, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted as Washington moves closer to potentially banning the Chinese-owned short-video app.

Some 58% of respondents to the two-day poll, which closed on Tuesday, agreed with a statement that the Chinese government uses TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, to “influence American public opinion.” Some 13% disagreed, and the rest were unsure or didn’t answer the question. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to see China as using the app to affect U.S. opinions.

TikTok says it has spent more than $1.5 billion on data security efforts and would not share data on its 170 million U.S. users with the Chinese government. The company told Congress last year that it does “not promote or remove content at the request of the Chinese government.”

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Joe Biden last week signed legislation giving ByteDance 270 days to divest TikTok’s U.S. assets or face a ban.

TikTok has vowed to challenge the ban as a violation of the protections of free expression enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and TikTok users are expected to again take legal action. A U.S. judge in Montana in November blocked a state ban on TikTok, citing free-speech concerns.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll found 50% of Americans supported banning TikTok, while 32% opposed a ban and the rest were unsure. The poll only surveyed U.S. adults and doesn’t reflect the views of people under age 18, who make up a significant portion of TikTok’s users in the United States. About six in 10 poll respondents aged 40 and older supported a ban, compared with about four in 10 aged 18-39.

The poll showed 46% of Americans agreed with a statement that China is using the app to “spy on everyday Americas,” an allegation Beijing has denied.

The app is ubiquitous in America. Even Biden’s re-election campaign is using it as a tool to win over voters ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election. Biden’s rival, Republican Donald Trump, who has criticized a potential ban and is the majority owner of the company that operates his social media app Truth Social, has not joined.

A majority of Americans, 60%, said it was inappropriate for U.S. political candidates to use TikTok to promote their campaigns.

Biden’s signing of the law sets a Jan. 19 deadline for a sale — one day before his term is set to expire — but he could extend the deadline by three months if he determines that ByteDance is making progress on divesting the app.

The poll, which was conducted online, gathered responses from 1,022 U.S. adults nationwide and had a margin of error of about 3 percentage points.
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