AI is coming for your memory, your politics and your cat videos

Why should big companies to look out for the public interest? [Bloomberg]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a price-fixing cartel of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. On Sundays, we look at the major themes of the week past and how they will define the week ahead. Sign up for the daily newsletter [here](. [Seen Your Video]( I learned a new Latin term this week (you’re never too old, people!): erga omnes, or “toward all.” Andreas Kluth [explained]( how the concept justifies seizing $300 billion in frozen Russian assets and giving the loot to Ukraine as war reparations. Erga omnes has all sorts of other explicit applications in international law: [corporate bribery](, [deep-sea mining](, [domestic terrorism](, [modern slavery](, [George Carlin’s]( potty mouth and so forth. But what about in a less legalistic sense — when do our society’s most powerful private entities have an ethical obligation to act responsibly, not just to shareholders and employees and the [artiodactyla]( they [slaughter]( and gorge on? Since we all know what “most powerful private entities” is code for, let’s go right to Silicon Valley and Sora, OpenAI’s new text-to-visual model, which last week confirmed the rule that every stunning breakthrough in 21st-century technology [involves a cat video](. So, what’s the erga omnes issue? “As usual, OpenAI won’t talk about the all-important ingredients that went into this new tool, even as it releases it to an array of people to test before going public,” [writes]( Parmy Olson. “Its approach should be the other way around. OpenAI needs to be more public about the data used to train Sora, and more secretive about the tool itself, given the capabilities it has to disrupt industries and potentially elections.” Pressed by Parmy over the state of “red-teaming” the technology — when specialists test an AI model’s security by pretending to be bad actors who want to hack or misuse it — an OpenAI spokeswoman said the company will take its own sweet time, natch. “It could become available to the public in August, a good three months before the US election,” Parmy warns. “OpenAI should seriously consider waiting to release it until after voters go to the polls.” Next up in Parmy’s corporate responsibility spotlight we have … OpenAI. Nudge me if you start to notice a pattern. “OpenAI [is rolling out]( what it calls a memory feature in ChatGPT,” Parmy explains. “The popular chatbot will be able to store key details about its users to make answers more personalized and ‘more helpful,’ according to OpenAI.” No word on how the red-teaming went for this one. Here are some examples of the key information that ChatGPT can store and recall about its users: I, for one, see nothing worrisome about a company that wields Sora’s lifelike video-making technology also holding personal data on the affections of a 2-year-old, do you? In the interest of sharing the shame, and also to work in the two greatest nerd icons of my childhood, we will move from [Startup Yoda]( to the [Eye of Sauron](. (Don’t worry, thanks to some really lame CGI, no [wargs]( were slaughtered or eaten in the making of The Two Towers.) Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has decided that, in a year in which 40% of the global population is holding elections, it will not “proactively amplify political content” from accounts people don’t follow into its feeds. “By default, executive Adam Mosseri explained, users will be shielded from such content unless they flick a switch in the settings,” Dave Lee [explains](. “What he didn’t make clear was what exactly could be considered political content. Presumably because this is impossible.” Indeed. Next up in the Companies Behaving Badly dishonor roll is … pretty much all of them. “Wednesday’s shooting at the Kansas City Super Bowl parade, which killed one person and injured more than 20, was the 49th mass shooting this year,” Beth Kowitt [writes](. “So far corporate America has offered primarily silence. This is a stark reversal from June 2022 when more than 500 CEOs and board chairs signed a letter urging the Senate to take ‘immediate action’ on gun violence.’ ”[1](#footnote-1)Immediate action was not taken — some might argue, as Dave does about parsing political content, because this is impossible. “Businesses all too often find themselves the unintended host of gun violence,” Beth notes. “20% of mass shootings have taken place at retailers; 15% at restaurants, bars and nightclubs; and 13% at factories and warehouses. … Some companies have even started to recognize the potential damage mass shootings and gun violence can have on their business in the [risk factors]( portion of their annual reports.” The circumstances are dreadful, and I’m all for companies trying to make the world a better place any way possible, but perhaps annual reports are more likely to get results than PR departments. Bonus [Know Your Product]( Reading: - The NFL Needs a Collective Response on Gun Control — J.A. Adande - We Need to Know How AI Firms [Fight Deepfakes]( — Parmy Olson - Elon Musk [Has a Lot to Say]( About Ukraine. And a Lot to Learn — Marc Champion - Cathie Wood May Have [Lost $14 Billion](. But She’s Interesting — Shuli Ren [Feedback Jam](: What’s the world’s most annoyingly high-minded company? Let me know at tharshaw@bloomberg.net. [What’s the World Got in Store](? - Feb. 21: Fed Minutes - Jerome Powell to Rates Traders: [I Told You So](. — Jonathan Levin - Feb. 21: Supreme Court hears Ohio v. EPA - America Needs Better Air But Businesses [Don’t Want to Clean Up]( — Carl Pope - Feb. 22: US Existing home sales - New York, You’re [Squeezing Out]( the Young and Ambitious — Conor Sen [My Old School]( No discussion of big money, bad ethics and football would be complete without the wellspring of them all: the Ivy League. In particular, “a class-action [lawsuit]( alleging that 17 of the nation’s top universities created a ‘price-fixing cartel’ that set financial aid packages artificially low and gave preferential treatment to wealthy applicants,” which Stephen Mihm [says](, “isn’t the first time the Ivies and their ilk have faced collusion allegations.” As with so many things in elite education, the conspiracy began with good intentions. Pardon the long block quote, but Stephen’s explanation is pretty fascinating: Prior to the postwar era, elite schools rarely competed for students, most of whom hailed from wealthy families and went to the same colleges their fathers — or occasionally, mothers — attended a generation earlier. … The trouble [started]( in the 1950s, when these schools began recruiting star athletes for their sports teams. Colleges soon found themselves locked in escalating bidding wars, offering ever-larger scholarships to lure top candidates. Unhappy with the drain on resources, they called a truce and started organizing meetings where they simply divvied up the athletic talent between them. These meetings [evolved]( to encompass the fates of other applicants, including meritorious students who came from lower-income families — another source of scholarship bidding wars. Soon the top schools in the Northeast were gathering three or four times a year to compare notes. In 1958, these confabs became known as the “Overlap Group,” nodding to the fact that they focused on students who had been admitted to multiple schools. This became a double-edged sword. “In theory, price fixing served the greater good. Admissions officers argued that by putting a ceiling on need-based aid, there was more money to go around for deserving students who could not otherwise afford to attend,” Stephen writes. “Undercutting this high-minded defense, though, was the fact that the Overlap schools also colluded on tuition increases as well as faculty and staff raises, both of which drove up the cost of attending.” As with high-minded corporate advocacy and pretty virtual kitties, perhaps it’s best not to look at this issue in Manichean terms. This horse-trading may have ended up giving legacy students a leg up, but the Ivy League is far less White than the nation as a whole; it arbitrarily set the life course for millions of 17-year-olds (including me[2](#footnote-2)), but an increasing number were from lower-income families; Congress furthered it with a skeezy antitrust exemption in 1994, but only on the grounds that the schools practiced need-blind admissions. While most of the schools named in the latest suit are likely to settle, Stephen would prefer to see the “gory details dragged into the light.” Shall we ditch [Lux et Veritas]( in favor of Erga Omnes? Notes: Please send jellyfish and feedback to Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net. [1] Bloomberg LP chairman Peter T. Grauer was a signatory. Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, helped found gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. [2] I know the details of how three Ivy coaches decided my fate over beers four decades ago; I may resent the fact, but I guess my kids owe their existence to it. Follow Us Like getting this newsletter? [Subscribe to Bloomberg.com]( for unlimited access to trusted, data-driven journalism and subscriber-only insights. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. Want to sponsor this newsletter? [Get in touch here](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Opinion Today newsletter. If a friend forwarded you this message, [sign up here]( to get it in your inbox. [Unsubscribe]( [Bloomberg.com]( [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022 [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( [Ad Choices](