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The CEO of TikTok tried to calm critics’ fears about the security of his company’s app during an appearance Thursday.

Shou Chew was asked at a TED2023 Possibility conference if he could guarantee Beijing would not use the TikTok app, owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, to interfere in future U.S. elections.

“I can say that we are building all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening,” Chew said. “And I’m very confident that with an unprecedented amount of transparency that we’re giving on the platform, we can, how we can reduce this risk to as low as zero as possible.”

Chew made the comments in Vancouver at the TED organization’s annual convention, where artificial intelligence and safeguards were discussed.

U.S. lawmakers and officials are ratcheting up threats to ban TikTok, saying the Chinese-owned video-sharing app used by millions of Americans poses a threat to privacy and U.S. national security.

U.S. lawmakers have grilled Chew over concerns the Chinese government could exploit the platform’s user data for espionage and influence operations in the United States.

U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted in March, “It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data.”

U.S. Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, was even more blunt in February, telling the committee, “Make no mistake, TikTok is a national security threat. … It’s a spy balloon in your phone.”

He was referencing a Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the United States in early February before being shot down off the southeastern U.S. coast.

Several governments, including Canada and the U.S., have banned the TikTok app from government-issued smartphones, citing concerns the Chinese government could exploit the platform’s user data for espionage and influence operations in the United States.

Chew says TikTok has never stored data from Americans on servers in China.

“All new U.S. data is already stored in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure. So it’s in this protected U.S. environment that we talked about in the United States,” he said. “We still have some legacy data to delete in our own servers in Virginia and in Singapore. Our data has never been stored in China.”

“It’s going to take us a while to delete them, but I expect it to be done this year,” he said.

Chew also emphasized TikTok’s efforts to moderate content. When asked how many people are reviewing content posted to the platform, Chew said the numbers and cost are huge.

“The group is based in Ireland and it’s a lot of people. It’s tens of thousands of people,” Chew said. “It’s one of the most important cost items. And I think it’s completely worth it.”

Speaking to a TED conference dominated by discussions of artificial intelligence, Chew said a lot of moderation on TikTok is done by machines.

“The machines are good, they’re quite good, but they’re not as good as you know, they’re not perfect at this point. So you have to complement it with a lot of human beings today,” he said.

VOA’s Masood Farivar contributed to this report. 
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While artificial intelligence, or AI, is not new, the speed at which the technology is developing and its implications for societies are, for many, a cause for wonder and alarm.

ChatGPT recently garnered headlines for doing things like writing term papers for university students.

Tom Graham and his company, Metaphysic.ai, have received attention for creating fake videos of actor Tom Cruise and re-creating Elvis Presley singing on an American talent show. Metaphysic was started to utilize artificial intelligence and create high-quality avatars of stars like Cruise or people from one’s own family or social circle.

Graham, who appeared at this year’s TED Conference in Vancouver, which began Monday and runs through Friday, said talking with an artificially created younger self or departed loved one can have tremendous benefits for therapy.

He added that the technology would allow actors to appear in movies without having to show up on set, or in ads with AI-generated sports stars.

“So, the idea of them being able to create ads without having to turn up is – it’s a match made in heaven,” Graham said. “The advertisers get more content. The sports people never have to turn up because they don’t want to turn up. And everyone just gets paid the same.”

Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that provides free teaching materials, sees AI as beneficial to education and a kind of one-on-one instruction: student and AI.

His organization is using artificial intelligence to supplement traditional instruction and make it more interactive.

“But now, they can talk to literary characters,” he said. “They can talk to fictional cats. They can talk to historic characters, potentially even talk to inanimate objects, like, we were talking about the Mississippi River. Or talk to the Empire State Building. Or talk to … you know, talk to Mount Everest. This is all possible.”

For Chris Anderson, who is in charge of TED – a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to spread ideas, usually in the form of short speeches – conversations about artificial intelligence are the most important ones we can have at the moment. He said the organization’s role this year is to bring different parts of this rapidly emerging technology together.

“And the conversation can’t just be had by technologists,” he said. “And it can’t just be heard by politicians. And it can’t just be held by creatives. Everyone’s future is being affected. And so, we need to bring people together.”

For all of AI’s promise, there are growing calls for safeguards against misuse of the technology.

Computer scientist Yejin Choi at the University of Washington said policies and regulations are lagging because AI is moving so fast.

“And then there’s this question of whose guardrails are you going to install into AI,” she said. “So there’s a lot of these open questions right now. And ideally, we should be able to customize the guardrails for different cultures or different use cases.”

Another TED speaker this year, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has been studying AI for 20 years and is currently a senior research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in California. He has a more pessimistic view of artificial intelligence and any type of safeguards.

“This eventually gets to the point where there is stuff smarter than us,” he said. “I think we are presently not on track to be able to handle that remotely gracefully. I think we all end up dead.”

Ready or not, societies are confronting the need to adapt to AI’s emergence.
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This time it’s for real. 

Many of Twitter’s high-profile users are losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identities and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform. 

After several false starts, Twitter began making good on its promise Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t each pay a monthly fee to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system—many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific time. 

High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyonce, Pope Francis and former President Donald Trump.

The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure the users are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration. 

Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to “Star Trek’s” William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, James’ blue check indicated that the account paid for verification. “Seinfeld” actor Jason Alexander pledged to leave the platform if Musk took his blue check away. 

‘Anyone could be me’

“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now. The verification system is an absolute mess,” Dionne Warwick tweeted Tuesday. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could [and will] be going toward my extra hot lattes.” 

On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check. 

After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for premium subscriptions. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become undeserved or “corrupt” status symbols for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership. 

Twitter began tagging profiles with blue check marks about 14 years ago. One main reason for doing so was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names. 

One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting a blue check to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to suspend the service days after its launch. 

The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of Twitter’s iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently. 
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SpaceX’s giant new rocket blasted off on its first test flight Thursday but exploded minutes after rising from the launch pad and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Elon Musk’s company was aiming to send the nearly 400-foot (120-meter) Starship rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. It carried no people or satellites.

The plan called for the booster to peel away from the spacecraft minutes after liftoff, but that didn’t happen. The rocket began to tumble and then exploded four minutes into the flight, plummeting into the gulf. After separating, the spacecraft was supposed to continue east and attempt to circle the world, before crashing into the Pacific near Hawaii.

Throngs of spectators watched from South Padre Island, several miles away from the Boca Chica Beach launch site, which was off limits. As it lifted off, the crowd screamed: “Go, baby, go!”

The company plans to use Starship to send people and cargo to the moon and, eventually, Mars. NASA has reserved a Starship for its next moonwalking team, and rich tourists are already booking lunar flybys.

It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s try was scrapped by a frozen booster valve.

At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, Starship easily surpasses NASA’s moon rockets — past, present and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with fast turnaround, dramatically lowering costs, similar to what SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets have done soaring from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Nothing was to be saved from the test flight.

The futuristic spacecraft flew several miles into the air during testing a few years ago, landing successfully only once. But this was to be the inaugural launch of the first-stage booster with 33 methane-fueled engines.
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