A robot commits libel. Who is responsible?

A robot commits libel. Who is responsible?

By Guest Blogger Peter Georgiev, a graduate research assistant at Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and foreign correspondent for the Bulgarian National Television.

“I will work tirelessly to keep you informed as texts will be typed into my system uninterrupted.”

This is how Xinhua News’ artificial intelligence presenter announced itself to the global audience at the World Internet Conference in November. Modeled on a real anchor Zhang Zhow, the virtual newsreader is said to be the first of its kind, according to China’s state news agency. But signs that automated journalism will soon play a central role in the news media industry have long been there.

For news organizations, algorithms generating compelling narratives are an exciting prospect. Many would have raised an eyebrow when the Associated Press started relying on automation to cover minor league baseball and transform corporate earnings into publishable stories. Fast forward a couple of years and now it seems almost impossible to find a major news outlet that is not experimenting with their own robot reporter.

From a business perspective, that makes complete sense. News bots are convenient, cheap and don’t complain when asked to produce an article at 3 a.m. on a Saturday. Most of all, they are quick. In 2015, NPR’s Planet Money podcast set up a writing contest between one of its journalists and an algorithm. Spoiler alert: the algorithm won. It wasn’t even close.

Yet, for all their apparent infallibility, bots, like their human predecessors, are also vulnerable to mistakes. In the news business, one of the worst mistakes is committing libel. So, how should courts treat cases in which a robot generates a defamatory statement? Legal and tech experts believe now is the time to decide.

Thanks to a series of landmark rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in the second half of the previous century, the First Amendment provides strong protection to journalists in defamation lawsuits. Public officials can’t recover damages for libel without first proving that the defendant had acted with “actual malice” — knowing that a statement was false or demonstrating reckless disregard for the truth.

“That just doesn’t work very well with an algorithm,” says Lyrissa Lidsky, dean of University of Missouri’s School of Law and an expert in First Amendment law. “It’s hard to talk about the knowledge that an algorithm has or whether an algorithm acted recklessly.”

Bots don’t make conscious choices when producing content. They behave on the basis of human-written code. Yet, programmers may not always be able to predict every single word of a story or its connotation, especially when machine learning is involved.

“As these cases start to arise and be litigated, there’s going to be a lot of education of the public about how algorithms work and what choices are made in designing algorithms,” Lidsky says.

While a bot cannot act with actual malice, its designer can. Robot reporting may appear to be impartial and objective, but humans often build their own biases into automated systems. This poses potential risks to publishers.

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First-time presidential candidate: ‘It got real gay real quick’

South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg answers questions during a sold-out fundraising event at Bar Lubitsch in West Hollywood, Calif., last month. (Allison Zaucha/For The Washington Post)

Chelsea Janes reports for the Washington Post

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Pete Buttigieg was sitting in the back of a black SUV with a couple of staffers, sipping a still-steeping cup of tea to ease the fatigue from his suddenly frenetic schedule, when he looked out the window and interrupted himself.

“Man,” said Buttigieg, taking in the rainbow-hued signs and colorfully dressed passersby that signaled he had entered West Hollywood, Los Angeles’s de facto gay neighborhood. “It got real gay real quick out there.”

Few Democratic presidential candidates could assess their surroundings so bluntly without seeming painfully out of line. But Buttigieg is not like any other Democratic presidential candidate — in part, if not exclusively, because he is gay.

He was also a Rhodes scholar, a McKinsey & Co. consultant who pored over grocery prices and a military officer in Afghanistan. He was a mayor at 29 and reelected at 33. All of those experiences, he says, have chiseled him into the surprising presidential candidate he is at 37, barely beyond the constitutional age requirement for the job.

So has the fact, Buttigieg says, that he needed the Supreme Court to give him the freedom to marry his partner, Chasten Glezman. Same-sex marriage was illegal in Indiana until 2014, and he cites that to illustrate how government alters lives; his marriage exists, he tells voters at every stop, “by the grace of one vote on the Supreme Court.”

Buttigieg’s emergence gives Americans their second openly gay presidential candidate — activist Fred Karger sought the GOP nomination in 2012 — but the first, by far, to earn so much attention. Many gay Americans are celebrating Buttigieg’s quick climb as a sign of tangible progress. Others, mainly outside that community, wonder whether talking about Buttigieg’s candidacy as historic means undermining the notion that sexuality doesn’t matter.

“I don’t know which response I like more — the response that talks about how much it means to people or the response that people don’t care,” Buttigieg said. “I think it’s most significant for people who have a problem with it, or for people who are in the same boat and are struggling with it.”

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Three Mile Island nuke dismantling could take six decades, more than $1 billion

Andrew Maykuth reports for the Philadelphia Inquirer

Three Mile Island nuclear reactor dismantling could take six decades, more than $1 billion — **CLEM MURRAY / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER**

Exelon Generation, which plans to shut down Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear reactor in September unless Pennsylvania lawmakers come to its rescue, says it would take nearly 60 years and $1.2 billion to completely decommission the Dauphin County site.

The company, in a report filed Friday with federal regulators, said it plans to remove Unit 1′s nuclear fuel from the reactor immediately after shutdown. The uranium fuel-rod assemblies would cool in spent fuel pools for three years until they are moved to above-ground sealed canisters in 2022.

But the reactor’s cooling towers and other large components would remain standing until 2074, according to Exelon’s Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report, filed Friday with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. All radioactive material would be safely stored or removed from the site by 2078.

Plant operators are required to submit a decommissioning plan within two years of shutdown, but the timing of the report provided Exelon with an opportunity to refocus public attention on pending Pennsylvania legislation that would provide ratepayer subsidies to nuclear power producers. Exelon says it is prematurely shutting down Unit 1 because it is losing money.

Exelon’s critics objected to the announcement, saying the choice to decommission the reactor site over the long term rather than pursue an accelerated decontamination schedule is an attempt to increase pressure on Pennsylvania policymakers to enact a proposed $500 million nuclear industry rescue and keep TMI open.

“This is a veiled extortion attempt,” said Eric Epstein, chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, a Harrisburg nuclear watchdog group.

Epstein feared that Exelon’s prolonged decommissioning schedule would delay the completion of cleanup of the damaged TMI Unit 2, which was permanently shut down in 1979 after America’s worst commercial nuclear accident. FirstEnergy Corp., which owns Unit 2, has said it plans to coordinate the final cleanup of its dormant reactor with Exelon’s decommissioning of Unit 1.

**CLEM MURRAY**Exelon announced plans Friday for decommissioning the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor after shutdown in September. The plans call for the dismantlement of the cooling towers and buildings in 2074, and final site restoration in 2079-2081. CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer

Neil Sheehan, an NRC spokesperson, said the timeline for the final cleanup of the damaged reactor needs to be sorted out in light of Exelon’s announcement.

“Exelon is retreating from a timely cleanup of TMI-1, and this announcement means the damaged reactor — TMI-2 — will not be cleaned up until almost 100 years after the meltdown,” Epstein said.

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Meet the two men who handle the entire trash cleanup of Temple U’s main campus

Claire Wolters reports for the Temple News

Michael Williams Sr., one of the two main drivers for Temple’s Service Operations Department,
CLAIRE WOLTERS / THE TEMPLE NEWS

Michael Williams Sr. and Lance King make up the two-man team that hauls, drives and disposes of the trash at Temple University. Their day begins at 6 a.m. when they rev up the trash truck and ends around 3 p.m., or whenever the last of the mess has been dealt with.

The two are drivers for Temple’s Service Operations Department, a team of about 13 workers who manage everything from garbage disposal to transportation of students and athletic teams. Williams and King do a little of each task, but primarily collect trash.

Each week, the men collect approximately 15 tons of trash from dumpsters stationed behind university buildings on Main Campus, Temple University Hospital and Ambler Campus, said William Majzik, the assistant facilities manager. Dumpsters hook on the back of the truck while tipsters are manually tipped in.

The crew is not legally responsible for cleaning up student residences and homes in the area around Main Campus, which falls outside of their jurisdiction. But due to the large accumulation of waste from college parties or move-out days, the crew is sometimes called upon by Temple Police to also sweep up “Temple-affiliated neighborhood trash,” Majzik said.

One of the biggest obstacles the crew faces is rodents, said Majzik, who has worked at Temple for 20 years. Back in the early 2000s, this meant mice. Now, “rodents” encapsulate a larger range of creatures, including hungry rats that crawl in and curl up in the back of the truck, he said.

“You really can’t exterminate a trash truck,” Majzik added. “They can come from anywhere.”

When dealing with rats, William Parker, who worked as a driver this fall, said, “We run.”

“Fast,” added Christopher Rhone, his former partner.

Parker recently advanced to a general mechanic position at Temple after working in the Service Operations Department for 17 years, and Rhone is taking a medical leave, Majzik said.

Williams and King quickly transitioned to fill Parker’s and Rhone’s shoes. King has worked at Temple for 13 years and has been driving the trash truck for five weeks, while Williams has worked at Temple for 20 years, spending his time in Grounds Maintenance.

“Work is work,” Williams said. “It’s a little dirtier, that’s about it.”

Both men grew up in Philadelphia — Williams in North Philadelphia and King in West Philadelphia — and said the streets used to be much cleaner.

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If Gov. Larry Hogan signs the bill, Maryland will become the first state in the country to ban foam food containers

Maryland Del. Brooke Lierman was the sponsor and principal advocate for the bill. (Astrid Riecken / For The Washington Post)

Luke Broadwater reports for The Baltimore Sun

The Maryland General Assembly gave final approval Wednesday night to a bill that would make Maryland the first state in the country to ban polystyrene foam food containers and cups.

The House of Delegates voted 100-37 to approve the legislation sponsored by Del. Brooke Lierman, a Baltimore Democrat.

It was Lierman’s third attempt to pass the bill.

“After three years of hard work, I’m thrilled to see Maryland be a leader in the fight to end our reliance on single-use plastics that are polluting our state, country, and world by passing a bill to prohibit foam food containers,” Lierman said. “The health of the Chesapeake Bay, our waterways, our neighborhoods, and our children’s futures depends on our willingness to do the hard work of cleaning the mess that we inherited and created.”

The legislation had already passed the state Senate by a 31-13 vote. The Senate bill was sponsored by Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Montgomery County Democrat.

The measure now advances to the desk of Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who has not taken a position yet on whether he would sign the bill.

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Lead is heavy, so is the cost of getting it out of New Jersey’s water pipes, DEP testifies

Some 350,000 supply lines bringing drinking water to New Jersey residents are thought to have lead components

*Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Catherine McCabe*

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:

It could cost up to $2.3 billion to replace all of the estimated 350,000 water-service lines in New Jersey with lead issues, according to projections by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Where the state is going to find the money to tackle the problem remains a mystery, one that popped up as DEP Commissioner Catherine McCabe was questioned yesterday by lawmakers during the agency’s annual appearance before the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.

“That’s a statewide problem,’’ said Sen. Troy Singleton (D-Burlington), referring to lead service lines that contribute to unsafe levels of the heavy metal in drinking water, not only in urban areas, like Newark and Trenton, but all over the state.

“In terms of financing, that’s our biggest challenge,’’ McCabe replied. “We don’t have enough funds to do it. I would put the ball back in the Legislature’s court so that we all could work together to brainstorm ways to help the people who have to replace those lead lines.’’

The issue of how to address the state’s well-recognized problems with lead in drinking water has emerged as a priority ever since Gov. Phil Murphy said it is time to focus on water-infrastructure problems in his State of the State address in January. More than 1.5 million people in New Jersey get their potable water from service lines with elevated levels of lead, according to Murphy.

Current patchwork fix doesn’t hit the mark

The department arrived at the projected $2.3 billion cost by taking the estimate of 350,000 lead service lines in New Jersey provided by the American Water Works Association and assuming an average replacement cost of $6,500 ($3,000-$10,000, depending on location).

With no permanent funding in place, the state is relying on a patchwork of ways to finance replacement of lead lines — some on the local level, others with the state providing funding assistance.

Lead pipe replacement, Newark — Credit: NJTV News Replacing lead pipes in Newark

In March, Newark launched a $75-million bonding program designed to replace up to 15,000 service lines from the curb into residences. Those lines have been found to be leaching lead, making it unsafe particularly for young children and infants living in the homes.

Besides Newark, the city of Trenton and the Suez company have been ordered to replace lead service lines, the latter in homes in northern New Jersey where 8,600 of its customers are estimated to have lead service lines.

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