philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces

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But the most critical ingredient has been the companies’ growing photo collections of kids in the real world. Sottil, the Incode executive, said the company had paid a contractor to get kids’ facial photos with their parents’ permission across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, sometimes in exchange for Amazon gift cards.

Yoti, which collected face data in Nairobi years before “Share to Protect,” had hoped the South Africa project would be well received by parents because of its stated focus on keeping kids safe. “People share photos of their children all the time,” Dawson, the chief policy officer, said at the time.

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But as Riaan van der Bergh remembered it, many parents refused to sign up because of their “fear of the unknown.” The offer of money for each photo backfired, he added, making it all seem uncomfortably transactional. ...

See the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/07/face-scanning-kids-online-privacy/

Quantum internet on the horizon after hybrid network success

Researchers have designed a new kind of transmitter-receiver which could send entangled photons over an optical fibre.

The concept could see a future “quantum internet” merged with current telecommunications technologies.

Quantum internet could see the strange effect of quantum entanglement be used to make uncrackable encryption. Not even quantum computers – themselves still in the development phase – would be able to crack the security of a quantum internet. ...

This technique combines a mixture of photon frequencies (colours) with the entangled information to be unmixed at the other end.

But the authors of the new study say, “more resource-efficient approaches are required”. ...

“We can change the colour of a laser pulse with a high-speed electrical signal so that it matches the colour of the entangled photons,” explains first author Philip Rübeling, also from the Leibniz University Hannover. “This effect enables us to combine laser pulses and entangled photons of the same colour in an optical fibre and separate them again.”

This method could see today’s internet merged with the quantum internet. ...

See the full story here: https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/internet/quantum-internet-transmitter-optical-fibre

Atlanta museums turn to AI to enhance visitor experience

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“Our early research has shown that having this mixed-reality platform improves children’s learning by 5 times compared to equivalent tablet or computer games that are only on a screen, while also improving their enjoyment,” said Dr. Nesra Yannier, the creator of NoRILLA, in an interview with CMA in 2021.

Historically, the role of museums was to preserve humanity’s collective heritage, culture, history and art for future generations. In the digital age, however, museums are increasingly adopting tools such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) — which rely on AI technology — to engage visitors beyond traditional exhibition layouts. Additionally, robots and AI chatbots haven seen a rise in activity across notable museums in Europe and the Americas. ...

See the full story here: https://capitalanalyticsassociates.com/atlanta-museums-turn-to-ai-to-enhance-visitor-experience/

This Professor Has a Path Toward Human-Level AI. It Isn’t Through Language.

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The Gist

• Real-world learning. Deepak Pathak emphasizes the need for AI to understand and interact with the physical world to build true intelligence.
• Sensory-motor base. AI must develop sensory-motor common sense through real-world experiences before achieving language-based intelligence.
• Adaptive robots. Using adaptive reinforcement learning, robots learn to navigate new environments and perform complex tasks by imitating human actions.

See the full story here: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-experience/this-professor-has-a-path-toward-human-level-ai-it-isnt-through-language/

Warren Buffett Doesn’t Understand Artificial Intelligence (AI). But It Could Soon Make Him a Boatload of Money.

... Buffett mentioned that someone showed him a video that featured a deepfake of himself. He warned that AI "could become the growth industry of all time" for scammers. Buffett added, "As someone who doesn't understand a damn thing about it, it has enormous potential for good and enormous potential for harm and I just don't know how that plays out." ...

However, arguably, the most important thing Apple Intelligence will do is boost iPhone sales. The new AI functionality will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and newer models. Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan thinks Apple Intelligence will create strong demand for iPhones. Morgan Stanley believes Apple's new AI capabilities will provide a "clear catalyst for a multi-year product upgrade cycle." 

iPhones make up roughly 55% of Apple's total sales. The smartphone also drives additional revenue through accessory products and services. If AI fuels a major upgrade cycle for iPhones, Apple's revenue and profits will likely increase significantly. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/warren-buffett-doesnt-understand-artificial-intelligence-ai-it-could-soon-make-him

Meta courts celebs like Awkwafina to voice AI assistants ahead of Meta Connect

Judi Dench, Keegan-Michael Key, and Awkwafina are among multiple “actors and influencers” whose voices could become part of Meta’s AI offering, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The company is apparently working to wrap up deals quickly so it can develop and show off the new voices at its Meta Connect conference in September.

Specifically, at least one tool will be “a digital assistant product called MetaAI,” according to multiple unnamed sources in a New York Timesreport. Meta is negotiating with all of the top talent agencies in Hollywood to secure the voices, the Times writes. And it may pay the actors who sign on “millions of dollars.” Meta doled out similarly fat stacks to the celebrities represented by the recently-discontinued Meta AI chatbots from last year’s Connect. ...

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/3/24212580/meta-ai-voice-assistant-celebrity-voices-judi-dench-awkwafina-keegan-michael-key

AI music startup Suno admits to using copyrighted music, but says it’s ‘fair use’

AI music startup Suno has admitted that its AI model is trained on copyrighted music, but insists it's legally protected by the fair use doctrine. ...

"We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet," said Suno CEO Mikey Schulman in a blog postaccompanying the legal filing. "Much of the open internet indeed contains copyrighted materials, and some of it is owned by major record labels."

In response, RIAA posted a statement on X, saying "[Suno's] industrial scale infringement does not qualify as 'fair use.' There's nothing fair about stealing an artist's life's work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals." ...

See the full story here: https://mashable.com/article/ai-music-startup-suno-admits-using-copyrighted-music-says-its-fair-use

European Artificial Intelligence Act comes into force

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The AI Act introduces a forward-looking definition of AI, based on a product safety and risk-based approach in the EU:

• Minimal risk: Most AI systems, such as AI-enabled recommender systems and spam filters, fall into this category. These systems face no obligations under the AI Act due to their minimal risk to citizens' rights and safety. Companies can voluntarily adopt additional codes of conduct.
• Specific transparency risk: AI systems like chatbots must clearly disclose to users that they are interacting with a machine. Certain AI-generated content, including deep fakes, must be labelled as such, and users need to be informed when biometric categorisation or emotion recognition systems are being used. In addition, providers will have to design systems in a way that synthetic audio, video, text and images content is marked in a machine-readable format, and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.
• High risk: AI systems identified as high-risk will be required to comply with strict requirements, including risk-mitigation systems, high quality of data sets, logging of activity, detailed documentation, clear user information, human oversight, and a high level of robustness, accuracy, and cybersecurity. Regulatory sandboxes will facilitate responsible innovation and the development of compliant AI systems. Such high-risk AI systems include for example AI systems used for recruitment, or to assess whether somebody is entitled to get a loan, or to run autonomous robots.
• Unacceptable risk: AI systems considered a clear threat to the fundamental rights of people will be banned. This includes AI systems or applications that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent users' free will, such as toys using voice assistance encouraging dangerous behaviour of minors, systems that allow ‘social scoring' by governments or companies, and certain applications of predictive policing. In addition, some uses of biometric systems will be prohibited, for example emotion recognition systems used at the workplace and some systems for categorising people or real time remote biometric identification for law enforcement purposes in publicly accessible spaces (with narrow exceptions).

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See the full press release here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_4123

Entertainment Industry Backs Bill to Outlaw AI Deepfakes

... A bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, introduced a revised version Wednesday of the No Fakes Act, which would make it illegal to create an AI replica of someone without their consent.

The bill has the support of SAG-AFTRA, Disney, the Motion Picture Association — which represents six major studios — as well as the Recording Industry Association of America, the Recording Academy, and the major music labels and talent agencies. ...

Even some in the tech industry have accepted the idea of outlawing unauthorized likenesses, which they see as an abuse that gives AI a bad name. OpenAI and IBM each endorsed the revised legislation. ...

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2024/politics/news/ai-bill-outlaw-no-fakes-sag-aftra-1236091652/

Who is more polarized about AI—the tech community or the general public?

Researchers from the University of Rochester led by Jiebo Luo, a professor of computer science and the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering, used ChatGPT and natural language processing techniques to analyze the themes and sentiments of 33,912 comments in 388 unique subreddits in the roughly six months following the generative AI tool’s launch in November 2022. ...

“The tech community’s opinions were either strongly positive or strongly negative, more so than the non-tech community” says Luo. “I think the polarization is due to the commenters’ personal knowledge of the issues. You see that play out among some of the tech celebrities as well, with people like Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of deep learning, being very pessimistic, and others like Sam Altman [the CEO of OpenAI] being far more optimistic.” ...

See the findings here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0736585324000625?via%3Dihub

See the full story here; https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/artificial-intelligence-ai-reddit-technology-614602/