philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

AI is making robots smarter. They’ll need boundaries.

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Where AI meets the physical world — and creates the potential for conflicts — is in manufacturing and logistics. Robots are already roaming factory, and warehouse floors and AI will make them smarter and more agile.

As is usually the case with new technology, the military is prodding innovation. This marriage of AI and robots will require special rules to keep them constrained by humans, especially as these mobile machines move beyond the confines of a factory and become more prevalent in the service economy.

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It may be too late for that debate. Fully autonomous aerial drones are already killing people in Ukraine. The effort by a small group of activists and diplomats failed in an attempt to ban killer robots because the machines are too useful, said Peter Singer, a senior fellow at New America in an April 14 article. ...

Who’s in charge? Should there be a kill switch? Can just anyone pull it? These questions should be addressed now because robots are dangerous if not handled properly. A Bell employee was killed by a robot in 2022 while lubricating the rollers on a conveyor belt that formed part of an automated palletizer. The motion of the can of WD-40 over the conveyor triggered the system’s camera and a robotic arm was activated, crushing the 54-year-old worker, according to a report from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. ...

See the full story here: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/07/23/world/ai-smarter-robots/

A.I. Can Write Poetry, but It Struggles With Math

... Chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT can write poetry, summarize books and answer questions, often with human-level fluency. These systems can do math, based on what they have learned, but the results can vary and be wrong. They are fine-tuned for determining probabilities, not doing rules-based calculations. Likelihood is not accuracy, and language is more flexible, and forgiving, than math. ...

Traditionally, computers have been programmed to follow step-by-step rules and retrieve information in structured databases. They were powerful but brittle. So past efforts at A.I. hit a wall.

Yet more than a decade ago, a different approach broke throughand began to deliver striking gains. The underlying technology, called a neural network, is loosely modeled on the human brain.

This kind of A.I. is not programmed with rigid rules, but learns by analyzing vast amounts of data. It generates language, based on all the information it has absorbed, by predicting what word or phrase is most likely to come next — much as humans do. ...

A few months ago, Khan Academy made a significant change to its A.I.-powered tutor, called Khanmigo. It sends many numerical problems to a calculator program instead of asking the A.I. to solve the math. While waiting for the calculator program to finish, students see the words “doing math” on their screens and a Khanmigo icon bobbing its head. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/technology/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-math.html

Will.i.am on vulnerability, AI, and the future of music

... The 49-year-old hitmaker emphasised that it was down to musicians to shape its use proactively, but insisted that no amount of AI in the industry would take away from the vulnerability required to make good music. ...

See the full story here: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/william-ai-black-eyed-peas-exit-festival-b2582668.html

The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast

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Yacine Jernite, a machine learning researcher at Hugging Face, a company that provides tools and data to A.I. developers, characterized the consent crisis as a natural response to the A.I. industry’s aggressive data-gathering practices.

“Unsurprisingly, we’re seeing blowback from data creators after the text, images and videos they’ve shared online are used to develop commercial systems that sometimes directly threaten their livelihoods,” he said.

But he cautioned that if all A.I. training data needed to be obtained through licensing deals, it would exclude “researchers and civil society from participating in the governance of the technology.”

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A.I. companies have claimed that their use of public web data is legally protected under fair use. But gathering new data has gotten trickier. Some A.I. executives I’ve spoken to worry about hitting the “data wall” — their term for the point at which all of the training data on the public internet has been exhausted, and the rest has been hidden behind paywalls, blocked by robots.txt or locked up in exclusive deals. ...

But there’s also a lesson here for big A.I. companies, who have treated the internet as an all-you-can-eat data buffet for years, without giving the owners of that data much of value in return. Eventually, if you take advantage of the web, the web will start shutting its doors. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/technology/ai-data-restrictions.html

Why Olympic venues are using digital twins

See the 4 minute video here: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0jbsxq6/why-olympic-venues-are-using-digital-twins

Hacker group says it leaked Disney data over the company’s ‘approach to AI’

A group of hackers says it recently leaked internal communications at Walt Disney Co. over the company’s handling of “artist contracts, its approach to AI, and its pretty blatant disregard for the consumer.” ...

California lawmakers are also trying to regulate AI through legislation, and tech companies have responded by urging caution against overregulation. ...

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2024-07-16/disney-leak-hack-nullbulge-ai-artificial-intelligence

These IATSE Artists Are Voting ‘No’ on Their Next Contract, and AI Is to Blame

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While actors “were able to maintain the rights to their own images and identities and to choose to be replicated or not,” the memo read, “in the new contract language, we have not been given any protections relating to our individual processes when designing, building models, illustrating or creating documents.” ...

Zach Berger, the lead creature designer of the in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” also published a social media thread outlining why he was voting against the contract. Berger explained he was part of the AI task force for the ADG that constructed “proposals that both acknowledged AI’s proliferation, but attempted to protect members’ jobs.”

To his dismay, he did not find any trace of the proposals the task force had assembled in the tentative agreement. ...

“If a producer wants to effectively pre-design the movie for themselves before it even gets to an art department…they want to have the power to do that,” Saunders said. “It’s a huge, huge, huge cost savings. I don’t believe for a second that it’s an accident that stuff was left out.” ...

“We can’t say, ‘Well, this work would normally have taken 10 illustrators three months, and now you’re having two illustrators do it in three weeks,’ Saunders said. “The displacement doesn’t come from the prompts. The selling point of these AI systems is that it means fewer people need to be hired to start with, and that will lead to the credits lists getting shorter on films.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/iatse-artists-voting-no-next-132200635.html

IT’S THE CREATOR ECONOMY

... By Hollywood standards, Dax Shepard is not a huge star. He started this podcast, in his attic on a lark, on his own, after a recent movie, CHiPS, failed. I don’t italicize “on his own” because starting a podcast is either hard or brave. Five million available podcasts is proof that starting a podcast is neither of those. I use italics because podcasting is the perfect example of a large and influential Media segment that almost no one thinks is part of the Creator Economy. And that proves the core thesis of this piece: The Creator Economy is both very different and much bigger than most people think. ...

Yes, Joe Rogan is a millionaire. But he wasn’t when he started his podcast - now the biggest in the world - and he was making $30 million per year on that indie podcast long before Spotify came along. Which is precisely why Spotify wanted him so badly, and why so many huge Media companies are clamoring to do enormous deals with similar Creators like the Smartless guys. They know something I’ve been professing for a while: Increasingly, Creators are generating audiences just as large, and far more engaged, as gatekeeper-led content. ...

See the full story here: https://eshap.substack.com/p/its-the-creator-economy

Here’s how OpenAI will determine how powerful its AI systems are

OpenAI has created an internal scale to track the progress its large language models are making toward artificial general intelligence, or AI with human-like intelligence, a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Today’s chatbots, like ChatGPT, are at Level 1. OpenAI claims it is nearing Level 2, defined as a system that can solve basic problems at the level of a person with a PhD. Level 3 refers to AI agents capable of taking actions on a user’s behalf. Level 4 involves AI that can create new innovations. Level 5, the final step to achieving AGI, is AI that can perform the work of entire organizations of people. ...

In May, OpenAI dissolved its safety team after the group’s leader, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, left the company. Jan Leike, a key OpenAI researcher, resigned shortly after claiming in a post that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” at the company. While OpenAI denied that was the case, some are concerned about what this means if the company does in fact reach AGI. ...

See the full story here; https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/11/24196746/heres-how-openai-will-determine-how-powerful-its-ai-systems-are

The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal

PhilNote: I like that it appears to have teeth, but there is a good chance that, as a slow-moving NIST process, by the time it is developed and deployed industry will say the market is too big to implement it and it is unenforceable anyway. Oh yeah, also it will "stifle innovation."

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.

The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.

Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes. ...

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/11/24196769/copied-act-cantwell-blackburn-heinrich-ai-journalists-artists?mc_cid=442e730f2e&mc_eid=3ce5196977