Shelly Palmer – Think About This
... At its annual Build conference, Microsoft announced upcoming features for its Bing Image Creator and Designer, which will allow consumers to verify whether content was AI-created.
This isn't as simple as slapping on a visible watermark. The new system uses cryptographic methods to sign AI-generated content with metadata about its origin, but there's a hitch; to read this signature, platforms will need to adopt the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) interoperable specification, a standard developed with input from industry heavyweights including Adobe, Arm, Intel, and Truepic.
Microsoft's move aligns with broader industry trends. As generative AI takes hold, other companies are also adopting mechanisms to track media provenance. ...
See the full story here at Shelly's Blog: https://www.shellypalmer.com/?mc_cid=6e19ef5ab9&mc_eid=f55a714a2f
Cannes Diary: Will Artificial Intelligence “Democratize Creativity” or Lead to Certain Doom?
... The panelists had more technologies for them to try. Bulakh’s company re-created James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader voice as it sounded in 1977 for the 2022 Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Vince Lombardi’s voice for a 2021 NFL ad that aired during the Super Bowl. Bulakh drew a distinction between Respeecher’s work and AI that is created to manipulate, otherwise known as deepfakes. “We don’t allow you to re-create someone’s voice without permission, and we as a company are pushing for this as a best practice worldwide,” Bulakh said. She also spoke about how productions already use Respeecher’s tools as a form of insurance when actors can’t use their voices, and about how actors could potentially grow their revenue streams using AI. ...
One of the panel buzz phrases was “hyper-personalized IP,” meaning that we’ll all create our own individual entertainment using AI tools. Saar shared a video from a company he is advising, in which a child’s drawings came to life and surrounded her on video screens. “The characters in the future will be created by the kids themselves,” he says. Avoyan said the line between creator and audience will narrow in such a way that we will all just be making our own movies. “You don’t even need a distribution house,” he said. ...
Why we need a “Manhattan Project” for A.I. safety
... As cognitive scientist Gary Marcus and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress earlier this week, the singular nature of AI compels a dedicated national or international agency to license and audit frontier AI systems. ...
An AI trained on pharmaceutical data in 2022 to design non-toxic chemicals had its sign flipped and quickly came up with recipes for nerve gas and 40,000 other lethal compounds. ...
The favored metaphor in 2023 has been a Lovecraftian shoggoth, an alien intelligence on which we strap a yellow smiley face mask—but the human-likeness is fleeting and superficial. ...
It may be inauspicious to compare AI safety technology with the rapid nuclear weaponization of the Manhattan Project. In 1942, shortly after it began, the world's first nuclear chain reaction was ignited just a few blocks from where I sit at the University of Chicago. In July 1945, the world's first nuclear weapon was tested in New Mexico, and a month later, the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ...
See the full story here: https://www.salon.com/2023/05/18/why-we-need-a-manhattan-project-for-ai-safety/
Politicians and Tech Leaders Gather to Discuss Regulating AI
... “I can’t recall when we’ve had people representing large corporations or the private sector come before us and plead with us to regulate them,” said Durbin.
Montgomery called for “precision regulation” that would see rules governing AI in specific use-cases, rather than general regulation. “A chatbot that can share restaurant recommendations or draft an email has different impacts on society than a system that supports decisions on credit, housing, or employment,” she testified at “Oversight of AI: Rules for Artificial Intelligence.”
“How the technology might affect elections, intellectual-property theft, news coverage, military operations and even diversity and inclusion initiatives were among the topics covered,” The Wall Street Journal summarized, noting that “the hearing demonstrated the wide-ranging concerns prompted by rapid consumer adoption of AI systems like ChatGPT,” which rocketed to 100 million consumer users in two months. ...
Ownership of the data that AI trains on was a topic of discussion, with Altman saying “people should be able to opt out of having their data be used to train those models,” according to Politico. That subject had its own hearing Wednesday at a House session on “AI and Copyright Law.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/politicians-and-tech-leaders-gather-to-discuss-regulating-ai/
Telly Offers Free Smart TVs Featuring Ads on Second Screen
Telly, the TV hardware startup led by Pluto TV co-founder Ilya Pozin, is shaking up industry business models by offering 500,000 smart TVs free to consumers willing to watch 24/7 ads on a split screen with streaming TV shows and movies. ...
Calling his new venture “the biggest innovation in television since color,” Pozin said that “for too long, consumers have not been an equal part of the advertising value exchange. Companies are making billions of dollars from ads served on televisions, yet consumers have historically had to pay for both the TV and the content they watch. All of that changes today.” ...
Pozin emphasized the technological sophistication of his new set:
- Smart Screen: In addition to the informational feeds, “Telly’s artificial intelligence helps deliver reviews and content recommendations, all on one device” and provides a voice assistant that responds to “Hey Telly.”
- Video Calling: Allows viewers to hold work meetings or watch content together with friends and family.
- Video Games: Telly’s “Game Room” is programmed with more than 40 video games, from arcade classics to immersive multiplayer experiences.
- Fitness: Telly is equipped with advanced motion-tracking for its complement of fitness programs.
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/telly-offers-free-smart-tvs-featuring-ads-on-second-screen/
Meta’s Open-Source ImageBind Works Across Six Modalities
Meta Platforms has built and is open-sourcing ImageBind, an artificial intelligence that combines six modalities: audio, visual, text, thermal, movement and depth data. Currently a research project, it suggests a future in which AI models generate multisensory content. “ImageBind equips machines with a holistic understanding that connects objects in a photo with how they will sound, their 3D shape, how warm or cold they are, and how they move,” Meta says. In other words, ImageBind’s approach more closely approximates human thinking by training on the relationship between things rather than ingesting massive datasets so as absorb every possibility. ...
See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/metas-open-source-imagebind-works-across-six-modalities/
and here https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05665
How AI Knows Things No One Told It
... A growing number of tests suggest these AI systems develop internal models of the real world, much as our own brain does, though the machines’ technique is different. ...
The code for these programs is relatively simple and fills just a few screens. ...
Few had expected a fairly straightforward autocorrection algorithm to acquire such broad abilities. ...
Although an LLM runs on a computer, it is not itself a computer. It lacks essential computational elements, such as working memory. ... Instead he hypothesizes that the machine improvised a memory by harnessing its mechanisms for interpreting words according to their context—a situation similar to how nature repurposes existing capacities for new functions. ...
Researchers marvel at how much LLMs are able to learn from text. ... When they see the word “red,” they process it not just as an abstract symbol but as a concept that has certain relationship to maroon, crimson, fuchsia, rust, and so on. ...
By the time you type a query into ChatGPT, the network should be fixed; unlike humans, it should not continue to learn. So it came as a surprise that LLMs do, in fact, learn from their users’ prompts—an ability known as “in-context learning.” “It’s a different sort of learning that wasn’t really understood to exist before,” says Ben Goertzel, founder of the AI company SingularityNET. ...
Entire websites are devoted to “jailbreak” prompts that overcome the system’s “guardrails”—restrictions that stop the system from telling users how to make a pipe bomb, for example—typically by directing the model to pretend to be a system without guardrails. Some people use jailbreaking for sketchy purposes, yet others deploy it to elicit more creative answers. ... [PhilNote: this is how writers will use AI to write better plots involving stopping clever bad guys.] ...
See the full article here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-ai-knows-things-no-one-told-it/
USC launches $1B+ computing initiative including AI, AR, VR, robotics, gaming and blockchain
Seeded with a USD $260 million gift from the Lord Foundation of California, USC stated that the Frontiers of Computing initiative encompasses a multipronged effort to push the boundaries of computing into a new era, and includes:
- A new school: The USC School of Advanced Computing will be headquartered in a seven-story, 116,000 square-foot facility – the Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Human-Centered Computation Hall. The building, now under construction, will formally open in fall 2024.
- Recruitment: 30 new faculty will be hired in the first three years who are leaders in computer science and computing-based research, with USC aiming to hire 60 additional faculty and staff by 2030. USC noted that the new faculty members will hold appointments in multiple schools at USC in recognition that computational methods, particularly AI, are transforming the way people live and work.
- Economic impact: USC Frontiers of Computing will help to bolster the university’s influence on technology across various industries and expand its footprint in Silicon Beach on L.A.’s West side, which already is home to two of USC’s tech incubators; the Information Sciences Institute and Institute for Creative Technologies. USC currently has a USD $9 billion economic footprint in the L.A. area, according to a study in 2017, and its impact is expanding to the East Coast, with the new USC Capital Campus in Washington, D.C.
- ...
- See the full story here: https://www.auganix.org/vr-news-usc-launches-1b-computing-initiative-including-ai-ar-vr-robotics-gaming-and-blockchain/?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Spatial&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=258092762&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8-9-NTsJH8XMJ406Y0UhJFaGV_AWeprKJ3D_ovoyhlkSSgeS-nqLw_oFvgFcyfxYMifE8k1dnwk91wg30qvs-24FTzXw&utm_content=258092762&utm_source=hs_email
Learn more about it here: https://computing.usc.edu
AI startup Anthropic wants to write a new constitution for safe AI
...
“We really view it as a starting point — to start more public discussion about how AI systems should be trained and what principles they should follow,” he says. “We’re definitely not in any way proclaiming that we know the answer.”
This is an important note, as the AI world is already schisming somewhat over perceived bias in chatbots like ChatGPT. Conservatives are trying to stoke a culture war over so-called “woke AI,” while Elon Musk, who has repeatedly bemoaned what he calls the “woke mind virus” said he wants to build a “maximum truth-seeking AI” called TruthGPT. Many figures in the AI world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have said they believe the solution is a multipolar world, where users can define the values held by any AI system they use. ...
Kaplan says he agrees with the idea in principle but notes there will be dangers to this approach, too. He notes that the internet already enables “echo-chambers” where people “reinforce their own beliefs” and “become radicalized” and that AI could accelerate such dynamics. But he says, society also needs to agree on a base level of conduct — on general guidelines common to all systems. It needs a new constitution, he says, with AI in mind.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/9/23716746/ai-startup-anthropic-constitutional-ai-safety?mc_cid=5f64fee337&mc_eid=f55a714a2f
In global rush to regulate AI, Europe Union rules set to be trailblazer
...
It’s possible that industry will push for more time by arguing that the AI Act’s final version goes farther than the original proposal, said Frederico Oliveira Da Silva, senior legal officer at European consumer group BEUC.
...
He noted that ChatGPT only launched six months ago, and it has already thrown up a host of problems and benefits in that time.
If the AI Act doesn’t fully take effect for years, “what will happen in these four years?” Da Silva said. “That’s really our concern, and that’s why we’re asking authorities to be on top of it, just to really focus on this technology.”
See the full story here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/in-global-rush-to-regulate-ai-europe-union-rules-set-to-be-trailblazer
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