While some workers were excited about Meta’s pivot, others questioned whether the company was hurtling into a new product without fixing issues such as misinformation and extremism on its social platforms. Workers were expected to adopt a positive attitude toward innovation or leave, one employee said, and some who disagreed with the new mission have departed. ...
Facebook’s pivot to the metaverse started in its top ranks. In September, Mike Schroepfer, the long-serving chief technology officer, said he would step down by the end of 2022. In his place, Mr. Zuckerberg appointed Andrew Bosworth, known as “Boz,” who has for the past few years led development on products like the Oculus headsets and Ray Ban Stories smart glasses. ...
The two had met at Harvard in an artificial intelligence class, when Mr. Zuckerberg was a student and Mr. Bosworth was a teacher’s assistant.
Earlier this month, Meta announced it is working on a set of ethical guidelines for “virtual influencers” – animated, typically computer-generated, characters designed to attract attention on social media. ...
A competitive industry specialising in the production, management and promotion of virtual influencers has already sprung up, although it remains largely unregulated. ...
So far, India is the only country to address virtual influencers in national advertising standards, requiring brands “disclose to consumers that they are not interacting with a real human being” when posting sponsored content. ...
Indeed, despite their short lifespan, virtual influencers already have a history of overt racialisation and misrepresentation, raising ethical questions for producers who create digital characters with different demographic characteristics from their own.
But it’s far from clear whether Meta’s proposed guidelines will adequately address these questions. ...
Becky Owen, head of creator innovation and solutions at Meta Creative Shop, said the planned ethical framework “will help our brand partners and VI creators explore what’s possible, likely and desirable, and what’s not”.
This seeming emphasis on technological possibilities and brand partners’ desires leads to an inevitable impression that Meta is once again conflating commercial potential with ethical practice. ...
Artificial intelligence goes far beyond just music or clothing recommendations which poses unforeseen risks for all of us. In his new book “The Loop”, NBC News Technology correspondent Jacob Ward warns AI is eroding our ability to make decisions on our own. He tells Ali Velshi that companies are “deploying these pattern recognition systems to figure out what you and I are going to do next…the capacity for manipulation and even predatory tactics is enormous.” He adds “AI offers unscrupulous businesses the opportunity to make incredible money off us by just playing to our worst instincts”.
The core argument against the House and Senate bills known as the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, respectively (SOPA/PIPA), was that blocking piracy websites would undermine the Internet’s technical foundations. But it was a canard. ...
Not all content on the Internet deserves to exist and be protected by law. Many countries have shown it is possible to take reasonable, targeted measures against illegal material without undermining their commitment to “a free and open Internet.”
It is a false binary to suggest the Internet can only be completely free or closed. What matters is what and how some things are blocked, where the lines are drawn, and how they are overseen by courts.
Courts in Australia, the European Union, and elsewhere have demonstrated that website blocking is a fair, effective, and proportionate tool to target major piracy sites and that it does not undermine human rights, free speech, or net neutrality.
Enklu, the leading metaversal creation platform, is thrilled to announce the first in-person augmented reality NFT gallery and unique immersive experience that is set to blow your mind. VERSE: The Art of the Future is a visionary and collaborative augmented reality NFT exhibition combining art, entertainment and technology, set to launch on February 3 at The San Francisco Mint, a Non Plus Ultra venue. ...
Using the Microsoft HoloLens 2 headset, attendees will visualize the metaverse as the gallery and striking augmented reality art within it come to life alongside their fellow guests. Guests can expect to see the heaviest hitters in the space including pieces from Bored Ape Yacht Club, Scott Musgrove, BlockBar and more. As an accessible space, Verse will also be partnering with a “good for humanity” collective in each curation, leading with AvaTree, a dynamically growing NFT collection that sequesters carbon IRL. ...
Doors open for VERSE: Immersive NFT Exhibit on February 3, 2022. Ticket sales are selling quickly with some dates already sold out. Tickets can be purchased here starting at $15. All ages are welcome. ...
... Emerge Wave-1, a tabletop device about the size of a 13-inch laptop that works by emitting “sculpted ultrasonic waves that allow users to feel and interact via touch in the virtual world,” the company said in a press release Friday. ...
Emerge said it closed $13 million in new funding to finance the product’s launch, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $31 million. ...
Come for the gimmick, stay for the poignance of Joe Hunting’s We Met in Virtual Reality, a documentary that starts out odd and ends up oddly sweet.
It’s a documentary that may shift your perceptions of the state of virtual reality in 2022, ...
Instead, he follows a small group of users and their evolving avatars through their chosen worlds. Our heroes include a pair of virtual couples — DustBunny & Toaster and DragonHeart & IsYourBoi — determined to extend their commitments into the physical world, as well as pink-haired Jenny, who teaches ASL in the Helping Hands community, intended for deaf or hard of hearing users, or those wishing to learn. ...
It’s all presented as extremely enriching and positive, so much so that even the virtual strip club is darn near sweet. The closest We Met in Virtual Reality comes to exposing whatever dark underbelly VRChat might have is attending a virtual improv comedy show, which definitely felt like a nightmare to me. ...
The term refers to the difficulty of making sure that an A.I. system does what humans want it to do. In traditional software, alignment wasn’t much of an issue, ...
With A.I., alignment is harder. While humans might specify the goal, the software itself now learns how best to achieve it. Often, the logic behind the software’s decision in any particular case is opaque, even to the person who created the software. And this problem becomes more challenging the more capable an A.I. system becomes. ...
OpenAI now says that it has made progress towards solving these alignment problems by creating a new version of GPT, which it calls InstructGPT. InstructGPT starts out a bit like GPT-3 in basic design and training. ...
After its initial training, InstructGPT is then fine-tuned with two additional steps. First, it is supplied with what Leike says were “a few tens of thousands of examples” of text humans wrote in response to the same sort of prompts that OpenAI’s customers use to try to get GPT-3 to do something. The system has to learn to imitate these human-written responses. Next, the system is further honed by asking it to generate two different responses to a prompt and having human reviewers pick the one they think is best. This information is then used to create an internal reward mechanism where InstructGPT itself has to guess which of the responses it has generated is most likely to be preferred by a human, and that becomes its output. ...
Leike tells me that InstructGPT has not completely cracked The Alignment Problem. “It will still sometimes ignore an instruction or say something toxic,” he says. ...
It’s not clear we’re very close to achieving AGI. But it’s good to know that companies like OpenAI are at least thinking hard about The Alignment Problem—and making some progress towards solving it. ...
US-based camera company Snap has added new features which augment the shopping experience for brands and consumers.
The augmented reality (AR) experience has become available. Users will be able to see prices, descriptions and given URLs to purchase. It also gives the ability to ‘try on’ products with new Lens Product Cards.
The company also gives an opportunity for brands to sell more product as well as track trends. The new lenses are ‘catalogue-supported’, meaning it links directly to the item. This gives users the ability to purchase in the app and provides the brands with real time analytics.
Being able to watch analytics live can help the brand to track consumer trends and product engagement. These insights will allow marketers to make informed decisions. Marketers can also leverage Snapchat’s AR try-on as an early indication on which products the users are engaging with.
Karpathy suggested that applicants watch the Tesla AI Day presentation to get an idea of what Tesla is trying to accomplish with AI. Furthermore, in Karpathy’s words about the AI development platform is stated, “There is no other organization that vertically integrates, develops, and deploys cutting-edge robotics AI at this scale. Our goal is to improve the safety and comfort of driving along the way to automating transportation with Full Self-Driving. We are also applying everything we’ve learned to our humanoid robot “Tesla Bot”, which I believe is on track to become the most powerful AI development platform.”
