philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Actor’s experience of AI gone wrong 

... When international media reports exposed the ‘fake news’ his avatar was peddling for a Venezuelan propaganda campaign, Dan found himself exposed, violated and with few protections. He turned to Equity for help. ...

See the full story here: https://www.ier.org.uk/news/actors-experience-of-ai-gone-wrong/

Paramount+ Launches New Generative AI-Curated Themed Kids Collections

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The project is centered on a key customer insight — oftentimes kids and family audiences are drawn to certain themes within shows — according to the service. In a series of research studies, service representatives spoke directly to kids and parents and identified the most resonant themes, such as “Space Exploration,” “Goofy Stuff,” “Daring Stunts,” “Treasure Hunting,” “Secret Worlds” and “Exploring Nature.”

The service employed generative AI to create new curations of its content library around those themes.

Throughout the process, Paramount+ employs curation teams to validate the AI-generated elements, according to the service.

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See the full story here: https://www.mediaplaynews.com/paramount-launches-new-generative-ai-curated-themed-kids-collections/

AI-generated images have become a new form of propaganda this election season

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People watching online platforms and the election closely say that these images are a way to spread partisan narratives with facts often being irrelevant.

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But even after the image’s synthetic provenance was revealed, others doubled down. "I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter." wrote Amy Kremer, a Republican National Committee member representing Georgia, on X. ...

Truth versus facts in images

In the same post defending her decision to keep the synthetic image up, Kremer also wrote: "it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through."

The separation between facts and the idea of a deeper truth has its echoes in Western philosophy, says Matthew Barnidge, a professor who researches online news deserts and political communication at the University of Alabama. "When you go back and dig through the works of Kant and Kierkegaard and Hegel, [there’s] this notion that there is some type of deeper truth which often gets associated with something along the lines of freedom or the sublime, or some concepts like that". ...

To be clear, when individual fact checks pile up against politicians, research suggests it can change how voters feel about them. One study showed that fact checks did change how Australians feel about their politicians. But another study showed that fact checks of Trump did not change Americans’ views about him even as they changed their beliefs about individual facts. ...

Hyper-realistic, often uncanny AI-generated images may live in a gray space between fact and fiction for viewers. While a photorealistic image of pop star Taylor Swift endorsing Trump was clearly not Swift on closer inspection, the passing resemblance had an impact on people who saw it, said New York University art historian Ara Merjian. "it wouldn't have been a scandal if someone had drawn Taylor Swift in a comic endorsing Trump." ...

Hyper-realistic, often uncanny AI-generated images may live in a gray space between fact and fiction for viewers. While a photorealistic image of pop star Taylor Swift endorsing Trump was clearly not Swift on closer inspection, the passing resemblance had an impact on people who saw it, said New York University art historian Ara Merjian. "it wouldn't have been a scandal if someone had drawn Taylor Swift in a comic endorsing Trump." ...

An investigation by 404 Media found that people in developing countries are teaching others to make trending posts using AI-generated images so Facebook will pay them for creating popular content. Payouts can be higher than typical local monthly income. ...

Dangers to the election

One of the more striking AI-generated images related to politics was boosted by X’s owner Elon Musk. It portrayed someone resembling Harris wearing a red uniform with a hammer and sickle on her hat.

Eddie Perez, a former Twitter employee who focuses on confidence in elections at nonpartisan nonprofit OSET Institute, said the image is meant to portray Harris as un-American. ...

Images like these are fanning political polarization, which Perez said could undermine people’s trust in election results. ...

See the full story here: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/18/nx-s1-5153741/ai-images-hurricanes-disasters-propaganda

‘EU AI Act Checker’ Holds Big AI Accountable for Compliance

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Available at compl-ai.org, the release “includes the first technical interpretation of the EU AI Act, mapping regulatory requirements to technical ones,” and provides tools to evaluate the extent of compliance,  together with tools “to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) under this mapping,” the group says.

Reuters calls the framework an “EU AI Act checker,” explaining that the test group offers insight into areas where AI models appear at risk of falling short of the law. For example, “discriminatory output” has been a problematic area when it comes to the development of generative AI models, which often reflect human biases around gender and race, among other areas.

“When testing for discriminatory output, LatticeFlow’s LLM Checker gave OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo a relatively low score of 0.46,” Reuters writes, noting that in the same category, “Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen1.5-72B-Chat model received only a 0.37.”

Tests for “prompt hijacking,” a form of cyberattack in which malicious prompts are disguised as legitimate in order to obtain sensitive information, resulted in Meta’s Llama 2 13B Chat model getting a 0.42 score from the LLM Checker, with Mistral’s 8x7B Instruct model receiving a 0.38, Reuters says.

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See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/eu-ai-act-checker-holds-big-ai-accountable-for-compliance/

Financial Firms Need to Focus on Cyber Risks Posed by AI, New York Regulator Says

... The New York State Department of Financial Services on Wednesday issued a new guidance document that advises the entities it regulates to monitor and assess risks from AI-enabled tools, as part of the agency’s existing cybersecurity regulation. The department said financial-services firms need to better understand AI-related risks, including from social engineering, cyberattacks and the theft of nonpublic information.

The state regulator said the 11-page guidance document didn’t impose new requirements but was just the latest installment in the department’s efforts to rein in the risks from AI tools. The department also recently adopted new guidance targeting discrimination by insurers through the use of AI. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/financial-firms-need-to-focus-on-cyber-risks-posed-by-ai-new-york-regulator-says-61c1203d

Why Surgeons Are Wearing The Apple Vision Pro In Operating Rooms

Twenty-four years ago, the surgeon Santiago Horgan performed the first robotically assisted gastric-bypass surgery in the world, a major medical breakthrough. Now Horgan is working with a new tool that he argues could be even more transformative in operating rooms: the Apple Vision Pro. 

Over the last month, Horgan and other surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing Apple’s mixed-reality headsets. Apple released the headsets to the public in February, and they’ve largely been a commercial flop. But practitioners in some industries, including architecture and medicine, have been testing how they might serve particular needs. ...

In laparoscopic surgery, doctors send a tiny camera through a small incision in a patient’s body, and the camera’s view is projected onto a monitor. Doctors must then operate on a patient while looking up at the screen, a tricky feat of hand-eye coordination, while processing other visual variables ...

In laparoscopic surgery, doctors send a tiny camera through a small incision in a patient’s body, and the camera’s view is projected onto a monitor. Doctors must then operate on a patient while looking up at the screen, a tricky feat of hand-eye coordination, while processing other visual variables...

Doctors, assistants, and nurses all don headsets during the procedures. No patients have yet opted out of the experiment, Horgan says. ...

Another company, Vuzix, offers headsets that are significantly lighter than the Vision Pro, and allow a surgeon anywhere in the world to view an operating surgeon’s viewpoint and give them advice. ...

See the full story here: https://time.com/7093536/surgeons-apple-vision-pro/

Kraft Heinz’s Delimex amplifies loud chewing in quesadilla campaign

• Kraft Heinz’s Delimex brand of frozen taquitos is expanding into quesadillas with a multichannel campaign centered on loud chewing, per details shared with Marketing Dive. 
• Ads depict people’s extreme reactions to hearing the sounds of chowing down, such as storming out of an office. Delimex is also investing heavily in “sound-driven” marketing for the first time with custom ads on iHeart Media, an auditory Snapchat augmented reality filter, a mobile game and sound-on TikTok content.
• Packaging for Delimex Crispy Quesadillas displays cheeky labels warning of the crunchy quality found within. This is the second Kraft Heinz brand to apply the company’s 360Crisp technology that aims to innovate in the frozen food category. 

Read the full story here: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/Kraft-Heinz-Delimex-chewing-ASMR-CPG-food-innovation/729854/

Emteq Labs Unveils World’s First Emotion-Sensing Eyewear

... Now, Emteq Labs has developed Sense: a patented, AI-powered eyewear platform that provides lab-quality insights in real life and in real time. This includes comprehensive measurement and analysis of the wearer’s facial expressions, dietary habits, mood, posture, attention levels, physical activity, and additional health-related metrics. ...

Emteq’s Sense glasses are equipped with contactless OCO sensors that detect high-resolution facial activations at key muscle locations, as well as a downward-facing camera for instantly logging food consumption. Data collected is analyzed using proprietary AI/ML algorithms, and securely transferred to the Sense app and cloud platform. The user has full control over the data and can choose to share it with researchers, trainers, coaches, or clinicians upon consent. ...

See the full story here: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/10/15/2963261/0/en/Emteq-Labs-Unveils-World-s-First-Emotion-Sensing-Eyewear.html

I Paid for a 90-Minute AI MasterClass Course and Haven’t Stopped Using AI Since

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For me, what was most fascinating was how overwhelmed I've been by AI's amazing abilities and where that's taking us. As a reporter and consumer, I have so much more to learn. 

According to Mollick, AI's growth is doubling or tripling the pace of Moore's Law, the observation that the power of computers doubles every two years. In short: AI is moving faster than our brain's ability to respond. But not forever: At some point, he says, AI will settle into a more graspable pace of evolution. 

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Should you watch MasterClass's GenAI series?

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A MasterClass subscription costs between $120 and $240 per year, but there is a 30-day money-back guarantee included with membership. If another monthly bill doesn't seem economical, two-week guest passes pop up in chat threads, which can give you more opportunities to try the learning and education platform without commitment. 

So hear me out: While you may consider yourself adept at all things tech, I'd advocate spending 90 minutes of your day on this series, if for no other reason than for a brushup on artificial intelligence-specific definitions and metaphors. 

At the most, an increase in awareness for how something with such rampant growth operates as a system, collaborator — and in some scenarios, a mentor, personal trainer and twin. ...

See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/i-paid-for-a-90-minute-ai-master-class-and-havent-stopped-using-ai-since/

Apple won a Wild patent for an Augmented Reality Light System that projects AR content onto tables, walls+ without a Headset

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Embodiments of the AR light system may provide both room illumination, as per conventional room lighting (e.g., light fixtures or light bulbs), as well as projecting both high and low resolution AR and VR imagery onto surfaces in the room. The imagery may, for example, be projected onto the floor, walls, and ceiling of a room. However, the AR light system may also intelligently augment particular objects found within the room.

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See the full story here: https://www.patentlyapple.com/2024/10/apple-won-a-wild-patent-for-an-augmented-reality-light-system-that-projects-ar-content-onto-tables-walls-without-a-headset.html