chat: AI news

It’s all too easy to say that creativity is, at its heart, combinatory.   "Chaucer would have thought that literature was about retelling good stories, and not necessarily original ones; The Canterbury Tales steals from many models, ranging from classical literature to Dante. So do Shakespeare’s plays. But in both cases, thinking that these works could come from recombining the original works misses the point. What makes them worth reading isn’t that they’re retellings of old material, it’s what isn’t in the original."  Mike Loukides

Good artists copy, great artists steal —and generative AI does the marketing for both...   Rather than reflexively demanding a cut of what is likely to be very little revenue from the “pedestrian” and derivative material generated using AI, artists should see it instead as a superb advertisement for their unique creative skills that software algorithms simply can’t match.

Copyright policy is a sticky tricky thing, and there are battles that have been fought for decades among public and corporate interests. Typically, it’s the corporate interests that win — especially the content industry. We’ve seen power, and copyrights, collect among a small group of content companies because of this. But there is one significant win that the public interest has been able to defend all these years: Fair Use.  Matthew Lane: Let's not flip sides on IP maximalism because of AI : Stop trying to bring the "on a computer" problem to copyright... 

Facebook and Instagram are getting some new AI-powered creative tools that will allow users to edit their photographs and produce “high-quality videos” using text descriptions. On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two new capabilities built on Emu — the company’s foundation model for image generation — that are being integrated into Facebook and Instagram.  Meta says Emu Edit “precisely follows instructions” to avoid altering anything besides user-specified changes.  

"There's absolutely no probability that you're going to see this so-called AGI, where computers are more powerful than people, in the next 12 months. It's going to take years, if not many decades, but I still think the time to focus on safety is now," he [Brad Smith] said... So, no chance of super-intelligent artificial intelligence being created within the next 12 months, and [he]  cautioned that the technology could be decades away .

ChatAI promises to protect your private information while you are using it.   "It will not collect or save any data used in the App. Also, no data will be shared with third parties. The data used is encrypted in transit. You can request to delete them if you want.  "As a strong and intelligent AI chatbot App,  ChatAI  can act like a personal assistant and answer any question you propose; even AI dating chatbot in the app store can pretend to be a partner to spend time with users."  [This post is not an  endorsement of ChatAI app, and this blog is not affiliated with ChatAI's owner.]

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to test an AI-powered surveillance tower made by Palmer Luckey’s company Anduril in the Great Lakes region near the Canadian border, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media.   The news shows CBP’s continued investment in AI surveillance technology, both with regards to digital surveillance, like the monitoring of social media of travelers, and that in the physical world, such is the case with this planned surveillance tower and others CBP already uses. It also marks the first time that CBP will be testing a maritime tower that is specifically engineered to weather cold climates, CBP told 404 Media.

Introducing Amazon Q, a new generative AI-powered assistant "Today, we are announcing Amazon Q , a new generative artificial intelligence- (AI)-powered assistant designed for work that can be tailored to your business. You can use Amazon Q to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights, and take action by connecting to your company’s information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems. Amazon Q provides immediate, relevant information and advice to employees to streamline tasks, accelerate decision-making and problem-solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work."

Safety Brakes? Microsoft’s president says he doesn’t think artificial intelligence poses an immediate threat to humanity’s existence, but governments and businesses still need to move faster to address the technology’s risks by implementing what he calls “safety brakes.” They should be built into high-risk AI systems that control critical infrastructure such as electrical grids, water system and traffic.

Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT   "Our attack shows that, by querying the model, we can actually extract some of the exact data it was trained on.) We estimate that it would be possible to extract ~a gigabyte of ChatGPT’s training dataset from the model by spending more money querying the model.  "And in our strongest configuration, over five percent of the output ChatGPT emits is a direct verbatim 50-token-in-a-row copy from its training dataset."

LAPD Is Using Israeli Surveillance Software That Can Track Your Phone and Social Media    The software, built by Cobwebs Technologies, uses AI to track, surveil, and create profiles of people based on online and phone data.

US government investigates Cerebras' UAE-based partner: China could have access to the largest AI chips ever made, supercomputer with 54 million cores ...  "The U.S. government has raised concerns about G42, a United Arab Emirates-based technology holding company building up a network of A.I. supercomputers with massive performance. The company is apparently overseen by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed of the UAE and has connections with Chinese firms the U.S. considers security threats (such as Huawei). G42 is set to use CS-2 hardware from Cerebras , a company that recently criticized Nvidia for supplying A.I. and HPC GPUs to :arm' Chinese companies, according to a report from the  New York Times ."

Threat actors undertaking identity fraud have been using deepfakes ten times more in 2023 than in 2022, according to digital identity verification solutions provider Sumsub. In its third annual Identity Fraud Report , published on November 28, 2023, Sumsub found that artificial intelligence-powered techniques were among the top five tools used to conduct fraud online in 2023.

The process of finding a shared definition of Open Source AI is only in its infancy.  The Open Source AI Definition needs to cover all AI implementations and not be specific to machine learning, deep learning, computer vision or other branches. That requires using a generic term. For software, the word “program” covers everything, from assembly, interpreted to compiled languages. “AI system” is the equivalent in the context of artificial intelligence.  “Program” is to software as “AI system” is to artificial intelligence.

Teachers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to save time by "automating tasks", says a government report first seen by the BBC. The Department for Education (DfE) report is based on 567 responses to a call for evidence about AI in education, including schools, over the summer. Most submissions were from England. 

"The contemporary condition is that datafication has become essential to value creation and our societies are evermore shaped by large AI systems ( Morozov, 2019 ). Since ML systems, or models, work on translations of quantified phenomena in the world, the value of their learning largely depends on quantity, the amount of data they have. Theoretically if a model is given enough input about its context of operation– in aggregate we assume the surrounding world– then it should give out accurate conditions/outputs about that context– the world– as constructed by those who are in a position of framing in this mathematical, measurable sense."  AI has 99 problems

According to Orosz, Anna Boyle doesn’t exist. She is a fake. “I did more digging and found other fake speakers, going back years,” says Orosz. Two other profiles highlighted by Orosz as fakes are Alina Prokhoda , and Natalie Stadler , the latter featured in last year’s edition of the conference.  Tech industry insiders say fake female speakers were featured in the DevTernity conference lineup to create the illusion of diversity.

"The chief bottleneck in building large AI programs, such as expert systems, is recognized as being knowledge acquisition. There are two major problems to tackle: (1) building tools to facilitate the man-machine interface, and (2) finding ways to dynamically devise an appropriate representation. Much work has focused on the former of these, but our experience with AM and Eurisko indicates that the latter is just as serious a contributor to the bottleneck, especially in building theory formation systems. Thus, our current research is to get Eurisko to automatically extend its vocabulary of slots, to maintain the naturalness of its representation as new (sub)domains are uncovered and explored." Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work. January 1983 Source:  DBLP  Conference: Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Washington, D.C., August 22-26, 1983. Authors: Douglas B. Lenat ,  Cycorp, Inc. and  John Seely Brown

Outside of Sports Illustrated , Drew Ortiz doesn't seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he's described as "neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes." Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

What to Do When the Ghost in the Machine Is You: Limor Fried’s code is often a de facto standard, and now ChatGPT is using it... Fried: Some people are like, “Oh, so I don’t have to learn how to code.” No. You actually have to learn to code even more, because I would catch errors as [the AI] was going. It would make PDF parsing errors or the PDF would be vague. But it also caught a lot of mistakes that I would not catch. So a recent driver I did has three channels. In some device registers, the bit order is one, two, three. But in this device, the bit order is three, two, one. ChatGPT-4 actually caught that and knew to swap the register bits around. I was like, “Wait, why are you doing that?” And I looked: “Oh, my God. It actually got it right.” Profile of  Limor Fried