Artificial intelligence was the dominant topic at the United Nations Security Council this week.
In his opening remarks at the session, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “AI will have an impact on every area of our lives” and advocated for the creation of a “new United Nations entity to support collective efforts to govern this extraordinary technology.”
Guterres said “the need for global standards and approaches makes the United Nations the ideal place for this to happen” and urged a joining of forces to “build trust for peace and security.”
“We need a race to develop AI for good,” Guterres said. “And that is a race that is possible and achievable.” ...
Yi Zeng, a professor at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, shared a similar sentiment.
“AI should never pretend to be human,” he said. “We should use generative AI to assist but never trust them to replace human decision-making.” ...
Britain’s Cleverly noted that since no country will be untouched by AI, “we must involve and engage the widest coalition of international actors from all sectors.”
... Three years later, the digital dollar—even though it doesn’t exist and the Fed says it has no plans to issue one—has become political red meat. Tapping into voters’ widespread opposition to government surveillance, a group of anti-CBDC politicians has emerged with the message that the digital dollar is something to fear. ...
Project Hamilton’s goal was to build and test a prototype of just one component of a potential system: a way to securely and resiliently handle the same quantity of transactions that the major payment card networks process. ...
...consumers are simply choosing to use less cash. That’s in part out of convenience, but there’s another big reason: you can’t use cash to buy things on the internet.
In the US, cash payments represented just 18% of all payments in 2022—down from 31% in 2016, according to research by the San Francisco Fed. ...
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that in 2021, 5.9 million US households were “unbanked.” ...
Last year, Grey helped author a US House bill called the Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act (ECASH). The legislation, which was introduced by Representative Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, would have directed the Department of Treasury to create a digital dollar that could be used both online and offline and have cash-like features, “including anonymity, privacy, and minimal generation of data from transaction.” It didn’t make it out of the Financial Services Committee, but Grey says there are plans to reintroduce it this year. ...
According to MIT’s Narula, the collaboration with the Boston Fed “reached a natural end.” But the Digital Currency Initiative has continued working on the research project formerly known as Hamilton and still hopes to publish some of that work.
“The only way to really truly understand these types of systems is to build and test them,” she says.
44 projects from 25 countries. 24 worlds in the Worlds Gallery. Members of the International Jury include: Singing Chen (President), German Heller, and Pedro Harres. ...
The selection of projects for Venice Immersive, the XR - Extended Reality section of the 80th Venice International Film Festival (30th August - 9th September 2023) of La Biennale di Venezia, is now complete. The official program will take place on the Venice Immersive Island (island of Lazzaretto Vecchio), a short distance from the Lido di Venezia, on the following dates:
29th August (afternoon): press preview 30th August: open exclusively to Press and Industry accreditation 31st August - 9th September: open to the public and all accredited visitors
Venice Immersive is entirely devoted to immersive media and includes all XR means of creative expression: 360° videos and XR works of any length, including installations and virtual worlds.
The Venice Immersive section of the 80th Venice International Film Festival will be held with the support of HTC Vive and VRChat. ...
PhilNote: the research report, from 2,000 subjects, has very good graphics to highlight the data.
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There is general awareness of the ethical issues around AI and art, but less clarity about what to do about it. For example, most people think artists should get compensated when an AI tool clones their style, but a majority also don’t want these capabilities to be limited. Indeed, almost half of respondents said they’d tested the system by generating art in the style or voice of a writer, artist or other well known figure. ...
XR Today: What were some reasons you selected HTC VIVE as an official headset provider? Why did their VIVE Flow headsets stand out as optimal hardware for the holoride platform?
Nils Wollny: Unlike many others, the HTC VIVE Flow offers a light, comfortable headset that people can use without a battery on the back of the head. This allows passengers to lean comfortably against the headrest when wearing the goggles.
The VIVE Flow’s lightweight and well-shaped form factor makes it an ideal mobile headset for transporting and using in different places. With our goal to become hardware-agnostic, we also aim to enable further XR headsets with our holoride platform. ...
... This spring, I spoke to around 20 entertainment professionals, in fields ranging from production design to pornography, and asked them about what they believed could revolutionize culture most. They talked about studios applying the “move fast and break things” model to over a century of profitable filmmaking and how it resulted in a consolidation of power that Hollywood’s Golden Age producers could only dream of.
WITH THE FALL of the Paramount Consent Decrees in 2020, any US studio with the right capital could once again open its own movie house and have control over what’s played in it. As negotiations between Hollywood studios and SAG heated up in July, the use of AI in filmmaking became one of the most divisive issues; one SAG member told Deadline “actors see Black Mirror’s ‘Joan Is Awful’ as a documentary of the future, with their likenesses sold off and used any way producers and studios want.” ...
It’s not much better for the indies. Decades of being permanently online has yielded a crop of self-taught, self-motivated sole proprietors—many of them underage, working without the basic protections afforded tochild performers. Unlike members of the Screen Actors Guild, streamers and influencers have no health coverage, no collective agreement, and no recourse when a platform like YouTube suddenly demonetizesthem, or if they’re targeted for harassment. ...
What became clear as I spoke to sources was this: The unbundling of the American storytelling machine has become the unbundling of the American story. What was once a roaring engine of commerce and a siren of soft power is now as fractured as the audience consuming its products. And it’s left the entire country, and the world that consumes its wares, vulnerable. ...
Fable, a San Francisco startup running a big project dubbed The Simulation, has released Showrunner AI technology, dubbed SHOW-1, which can generate new episodes of TV shows with you as the star.
It’s another big step for generative AI, which has been on a tear for the last six months. And the timing is interesting, considering both writers and actors are on strike in Hollywood. ...
“Essentially, what the AI Showrunner does is create episodes of South Park for you. All of this is created by the AI Showrunner,” said Fable CEO Edward Saatchi, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Not just the dialogue. It animates, it does the voices, it does the editing. For the TV episodes, AI Showrunner can just generate episodes, or the user can create a prompt and create TV episodes based on a two-sentence prompt. People said AI can’t tell a story. Well, it can.” ...
Later in the year, Saatchi said the company will release the tools for The Simulation, the 3D world. People will be able to enter The Simulation, create simulations, and then Fable can create episodes automatically based on what has happened in the 3D world.
“What it does is solve a key problem for simulations, which is an infinite story,” Saatchi said. “We thought about Joseph Campbell and archetypes, trying to abstract some kind of baseline of what a story is. And I didn’t think that worked. So we kind of we figured out that TV is the best example of an infinite story.”
China’s regulatory requirements shine a bright light on one of the most interesting issues facing AI regulators: the alignment problem, which refers to the challenge of ensuring that AI systems (especially those that operate autonomously) act in a manner that aligns with human values, intentions, and objectives. Which raises the question: Whose human values?
A core aspect of the alignment problem is that it’s not always straightforward to specify what we want an AI system to do, and it’s even harder to specify what we want in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation. If a machine learning system is given a goal without the proper context or constraints, it may find solutions that technically meet the goal but violate the spirit of what was intended.
... The five-point message instructs members of the Harvard community to “protect confidential data” — defined as all information that is not already public — and informs them that they are “responsible” for any content they produce that includes AI-generated material, as AI models can violate copyright laws and spread misinformation.
“Review your AI-generated content before publication,” the email urged.
While the administrators wrote that the guidelines are not new but instead “leverage existing University policies,” there is currently no policy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on AI’s impact on academic integrity.
In a recent faculty survey, almost half of surveyed FAS faculty believed AI would have a negative impact on higher education, while almost 57 percent said they did not have an explicit or written policy on AI usage in the classroom.
The use of AI platforms has already begun making its way into Harvard’s classrooms. ...
In China, the use of AI-driven facial recognition helps the regime repress dissent while enhancing the technology, researchers report. ...
In China, the research finds, the government has increasingly deployed AI-driven facial-recognition technology to surpress dissent; has been successful at limiting protest; and in the process, has spurred the development of better AI-based facial-recognition tools and other forms of software. ...
What follows, as the paper notes, is that “AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation.” ...
The open-access paper, also called “AI-tocracy,” appears in the August issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. ...
Such data — from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology — also indicates that AI-driven tools are not necessarily “crowding out” other kinds of high-tech innovation. ...
“This is an excellent and important paper that improves our understanding of the interaction between technology, economic success, and political power,” says Avi Goldfarb, the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. “The paper documents a positive feedback loop between the use of AI facial-recognition technology to monitor suppress local unrest in China and the development and training of AI models. This paper is pioneering research in AI and political economy. As AI diffuses, I expect this research area to grow in importance.” ...
