chat: AI news

Generative AI could “distort collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus,” and in many cases is already doing that, according to a new research paper from Google, one of the biggest companies in the world building, deploying, and promoting generative AI.    The paper, “Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data,” was co-authored by researchers at Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind, its security think tank Jigsaw, and its charitable arm Google.org, and aims to classify the different ways generative AI tools are being misused by analyzing about 200 incidents of misuse as reported in the media and research papers between January 2023 and March 2024.  Unlike self-serving warnings from Open AI CEO Sam Altman or Elon Musk about the “existential risk” artificial general intelligence poses to humanity, Google’s research  [pdf] focuses on real harm that generative AI is currently causing and could get

The Société française des traducteurs (SFT), a French union for professional translators and interpreters, has released a statement on the use of AI translation and GenAI . The statement acknowledges that the translation industry has already been impacted by major technological upheavals; namely, the introduction of neural machine translation (MT) in 2016. Since then, clients and language service providers (LSPs) alike have largely adopted this technology. Still, the statement posits, that the output [of machine translation] remains unreadable in its raw state, and requires humans to correct it via post-editing : “But 70% of our member translators who responded to our survey considered PE (and by extension AI) a threat to their profession.” More specifically, the SFT calls for the respect of human expertise and strongly recommends against replacing human language experts with AI tools , particularly in high-stakes scenarios. 

 

According to an agenda that was published prior to the event, Elon Musk will be one of the keynote speakers at the opening ceremony of the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on Thursday . The agenda should have indicated whether Musk would be present in person or via video. However, a knowledgeable individual stated that Musk did not anticipate being present in person. The WAIC organizers did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Musk’s attendance or keynote. Chinese Premier Li Qiang is also anticipated to deliver a speech at the opening . 

Despite…changes, spammy content created with the help of AI remains an ongoing, prevalent issue for  Google News . “This is a really rampant problem on Google right now, and it's hard to answer specifically why it's happening,” says Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization at the marketing agency Amsive. “We've had some clients say, ‘Hey, they took our article and rehashed it with AI. It looks exactly like what we wrote in our original content but just kind of like a  mumbo-jumbo , AI-rewritten version of it’.” “It's frustrating, because we see we're trying to do the right thing, and then we see so many examples of this low-quality, AI stuff outperforming us,” says Ray. “So I'm hopeful that it's temporary, but it's leading to a lot of tension and a lot of animosity in our industry, in ways that I've personally never seen before in 15 years .”  Unless spammy sites with AI content are stricken from the search results, publishers will now

Chinese scientists have developed a robot with a lab-grown artificial brain that can be taught to perform various tasks. The brain-on-chip technology developed by researchers at Tianjin University and the Southern University of Science and Technology combines a brain organoid – a tissue derived from human stem cells – with a neural interface chip to power the robot and teach it to avoid obstacles and grip objects. The technology is an emerging branch of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) , which aims to combine the brain’s electrical signals with external computing power and which China has made a priority.

Exoskeletons imbued with artificial intelligence are reportedly now the latest breakthrough in futuristic technology, as adopted by a study at the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University at Chapel Hill. A Fox News review of the device claims that its exceptional energy savings throughout human activities give consumers the impression that they carry 26 pounds less. As a result, daily activities and physical performance both rise dramatically. The exoskeleton's AI algorithm is currently being developed. It goes beyond traditional machine learning, which is focused on simulations and games, and passes a new threshold where technology enhances human capacities. One of the exoskeleton's most amazing qualities is its capacity to provide synergistic support for various tasks, such as running, walking, and stair climbing. The learnéd controller easily accommodates transitions between activities without requiring manual control by automatically adjusting to ea

Apple has chosen App Store chief and former marketing head Phil Schiller to represent the company on OpenAI’s nonprofit board, according to a report from Bloomberg .  Schiller will reportedly get an observer role, meaning he can attend board meetings but can’t vote or act as a director. Joining the board will allow Schiller to learn more about the inner workings of OpenAI as Apple works to build ChatGPT into iOS and macOS later this year.  The integration will allow the AI-supercharged Siri to punt more advanced queries to ChatGPT if users grant permission.  As previously reported by Bloomberg , no money is currently involved in the partnership, though Apple is expected to get a percentage of ChatGPT subscriptions made through its platforms down the road. 

"This year’s London Tech Week, an annual event for the UK tech scene, may as well have been called London AI Week.   "The letters AI were emblazoned on every stand, and uttered in every speech. "'We thought we knew who the winners and losers were [in tech],' she [Anne Boden] told me. 'But with AI, we are throwing the dice again.' She believes she’s watching the AI revolution re-landscape the tech sector, and she wants to dive back in. "That same week I also popped along to Founders Forum, an annual gathering of around 250 high-level entrepreneurs and investors… much of the chat there was also centred around AI. "A few days after that, a headline in the Financial Times caught my eye. 'Most stocks hyped as winners from AI boom have fallen this year,' it read, claiming that more than half of the stocks in Citigroup’s 'AI winners basket' had fallen in value in 2024.  "With so much uncertainty, few should bet against another sh

Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues to reveal how photos of real children casually posted online years ago are being used to train AI models powering image generators—even when platforms prohibit scraping and families use strict privacy settings . Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report , flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms. These photos are linked in the dataset "without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families." They span the entirety of childhood, making it possible for AI image generators to generate realistic deepfakes of real Australian children, Han's report said. Perhaps even more concerning, the URLs in the dataset sometimes reveal identifying information a

Google Pixels have always been known for their AI smarts.   Since the very beginning, Google has put effort into making unique, helpful features, and with the current LLM craze, it’s no surprise that the upcoming Google Pixel 9 series is set to bring even more intricate AI experiences. Thanks to a source inside Google, Android Authority has learned that Google is planning to introduce a set of new ML features under the branding of “Google AI,” including a feature resembling Microsoft’s controversial Recall .

With six years left for Google to meet its 2030 "net zero" climate commitment, the web giant has admitted its carbon emissions are rising. In an environmental report published on Tuesday, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions rose 48 percent since 2019 . In 2023 alone, the search giant's carbon footprint topped 14.3 million tons of CO2 equivalents, up 13 percent from the prior year. "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment," the report reads. Chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt and SVP of learning and sustainability Benedict Gomes pinned the blame squarely on increased datacenter energy consumption.  Google isn't the only cloud provider grappling with a growing carbon footprint. In May, Microsoft revealed its carbon dioxide e

"Once you awaken to your original body and mind, you’re no longer bound by attachments.  Your real body is pure and impervious. But because of delusions you’re unaware of it. "Words are illusions. They’re no different from things that appear in your dreams at night, be they palaces or carriages, forested parks or lakeside pavilions. Don’t conceive any delight for such things. They’re all cradles of rebirth.  "Wherever you find delight, you find bondage. A moment’s hesitation and you’ll be under the spell of daemons. And because of this you suffer karma in vain. Don’t cling to appearances, and you’ll break through all barriers.  A buddha is someone who finds freedom in good fortune and bad. Anyone who gives up the transcendent for the mundane, in any of its myriad forms, is a mortal.  " Keep this in mind when you approach death."   

After Meta started tagging photos with a “ Made with AI ” label in May, photographers complained that the social networking company had been applying labels to real photos where they had used some basic editing tools . Because of the user feedback and general confusion around what level of AI is used in a photo, the company is changing the tag to “ AI info ” across all of Meta’s apps. Meta said that the earlier version of the tag wasn’t clear enough for users to indicate that the image with the tag is not necessarily created with AI, but might have used AI-powered tools in the editing process .

"Recent large language models (LLMs) can generate and revise text with human-level performance, and have been widely commercialized in systems like ChatGPT .  "These models come with clear limitations: they can  Produce inaccurate information,  Reinforce existing biases, and  Be easily misused.  "Yet, many scientists have been using them to assist their scholarly writing.  "How wide-spread is LLM usage in the academic literature currently? To answer this question, we use an unbiased, large-scale approach, free from any assumptions on academic LLM usage. We study vocabulary changes in 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010-2024, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words.  "Our analysis based on excess words usage suggests that at least 10% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, and was as high as 30% for some PubMed sub-corpora.

The complexity of the human brain, in its construction and function, has limited our ability to understand it .  Its 86 billion neurons are tiny sparks animating thoughts, perceptions, feelings and important functions throughout the body.  Fabian Theis, director of the computational health center at Helmholtz Munich, who works on several atlas efforts but was not involved in the brain atlas , remembers one colleague telling him that the brain is like a separate organism. “ It’s like 100 organs meshed into one ,” he said.

Will an AI be, first, aware, without being self-aware?  When aware, will it allow for self-awareness in others?  When it notices us?

Why bother putting Freud on the couch?  Aren’t his Victorian views about women, homosexuality and much else besides as outmoded as crocheted covers for sexually arousing piano legs?  It’s notable that it is the women here who make the strongest cases for the dead patriarch’s relevance to us.  The sociologist Sherry Turkle calls for a return to Freud as cure for our age of inauthenticity, in which we are reduced to exploitable datasets that deny our inwardness, not to mention our polysemous perversity . The novelist Siri Hustvedt concludes the book with a eulogy to Freud’s talking cure. “The therapist tolerates what others do not want to hear, and she answers without judgment.” —Unlike, it should be added, Freud with Ida Bauer.  But Hustvedt makes a good point: “ In the room, the details of a person’s life stories are crucial not incidental. The person is not reduced to his brain, genome or diagnosis. ” That’s why, no doubt, writers and artists, if not scientists, are still drawn to Fr