philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How augmented reality will resolve the prison guard shortage crisis

... AR to train prison guards for "what they will see, hear, smell, and experience once they enter the actual prisons." To be "ready for the assaults from the prisoners that have become more common. " ...

See the full story here: https://www.verdict.co.uk/prison-staffing-shortage-ar/https://www.verdict.co.uk/prison-staffing-shortage-ar/

Character AI Raises $150M at $1B Valuation for Conversational Generative AI Platform

... Character AI hosts a conversational generative AI hub with chatbots mimicking a wide variety of real and fictional personalities as famous or personal as the designer chooses. The LLM filtered through that personality can then help users with specific services or general assistance depending on their choices. ...

See the full story here: https://voicebot.ai/2023/04/26/character-ai-raises-150m-at-1b-valuation-for-conversational-generative-ai-platform/

OpenAI Previews ChatGPT Business, Unveils Privacy Controls

... ChatGPT data settings can be adjusted by logging in to your account and “selecting the three dots next to your email address in the bottom-left corner of the screen. From there, click Settings > Show and toggle off the Chat History & Training setting to turn off conversation history,” The Verge explains. You can also select the new Export data option using the three-dot menu.

“Once you’ve disabled your chat history, you’ll notice that none of your new conversations save to your history bar on the left side of the screen,” writes The Verge, adding that “you can quickly turn the option back on again by hitting the green Enable chat history button that appears in the column.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/openai-previews-chatgpt-business-unveils-privacy-controls/

The Politics of Language Models

... Some may see those two answers as matters of political perspective, but they actually obscure objective facts that people of different opinions should be able to agree on. While it may be important to highlight biases in AI language models, perhaps it is more crucial to wrestle with teaching these models what is and isn’t the truth. ...

See the full story here: https://link.wired.com/view/5cc9e2393f92a477a0e9b299imuhc.154u/952e3409

WEIRD AI: Understanding what nations include in their artificial intelligence plans (Brookings Inst.)

... we warned that China is already in the lead on the achievement of its national AI goals and predicted that it would continue to surpass the U.S. and other countries. News has now come that China is planning on doubling its investment in AI by 2026, and that the majority of the investment will be in new hardware solutions. The U.S. State Departmentalso is now reporting that China leads the U.S. in 37 out of 44 key areas of AI.  In short, China has expanded its lead in most AI areas, while the U.S. is falling further and further behind. ...

In this blog, the countries that are part of our study include 34 nations that have produced public AI policies, as identified in our previous blog posts: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, UAE, UK, Uruguay, and USA. ...

For each, we examine six key elements in these national AI plans—data management, algorithmic management, AI governance, research and development (R&D) capacity development, education capacity development, and public service reform capacity development—as they provide insight into how individual countries approach AI deployment. In doing so, we examine commonalities between culturally similar nations which can lead to both higher and lower levels of investment in each area. ...

We do this by exploring similarities and differences through what is commonly referred to as the WEIRD framework, a typology of countries based on how Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic they are. In 2010, the concept of WEIRD-ness originated with Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.  ...

See the full article here: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2023/04/25/weird-ai-understanding-what-nations-include-in-their-artificial-intelligence-plans/

Opinion The next level of AI is approaching. Our democracy isn’t ready.

... we need to strengthen the tools of democracy itself. A pause in further training of generative AI could give our democracy the chance both to govern technology and to experiment with using some of these new tools to improve governance. The Commerce Department recently solicited input on potential regulation for the new AI models; what if we used some of the tools the AI field is generating to make that public comment process even more robust and meaningful?

We need to govern these emerging technologies and also deploy them for next-generation governance. But thinking through the challenges of how to make sure these technologies are good for democracy requires time we haven’t yet had. And this is thinking even GPT-4 can’t do for us.

See the full editorial here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/26/artificial-intelligence-democracy-danielle-allen/

Amnesty Int’l: EU: European Union must protect human rights in upcoming AI Act vote

Ahead of the European Parliament’s vote on the AI Act in May, the European Union (EU) has a significant opportunity to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in order to protect and promote human rights, said Amnesty International in an open letter to Members of Parliament’s leading committees. 

“The AI Act offers EU lawmakers an opportunity to put an end to the use of discriminatory and rights-violating artificial intelligence (AI) systems,” said Mher Hakobyan, Advocacy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence Regulation at Amnesty International. 

“The EU must ban the use of discriminatory AI systems which disproportionately affect people from marginalized communities, including migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Such technologies profile people and communities, claiming to ‘predict’ crimes, or ‘identify’ people who supposedly pose a security risk, even leading to them being denied the right to asylum. EU lawmakers must not miss this opportunity to prohibit the use of certain AI-based practices and protect the rights of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers against harmful aspects of AI. ...

“The AI Act should also address the development of European technologies that are exported to third countries. Firstly, AI systems that are prohibited in Europe should not be allowed to be exported abroad. Secondly, permitted high-risk technologies that are exported must meet the same regulatory requirements as high-risk technologies sold in the EU.”  ...

Key dates:

11 May: Planned committee vote on the AI Act 

See the full story here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/04/eu-european-union-must-protect-human-rights-in-upcoming-ai-act-vote/

Berkeley Talks: ChatGPT developer John Schulman on making AI more truthful

... part of the reason for generating untruthful content, which he calls “hallucinations,” is because the model doesn’t know that it’s allowed to say “I don’t know” or express uncertainty. If you tell a chatbot that it’s allowed to do that, he says, that partially fixes the problem. ...

“And then, another set of hallucinations, you could say, is that it’s just guessing wrong. ...

... reinforcement learning is part of the solution. ...

See the full story here: https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/04/24/berkeley-talks-chatgpt-developer-john-schulman/

Joe Russo & ‘Fortnite’s Donald Mustard Weigh In on the Future of Storytelling, Gaming & Entertainment [Exclusive]

... “I’m on the board of a few AI companies,” Russo told Collider. “I’m gonna speak from my experience of being on the board of those companies, [so] there are AI companies that are developing AI to protect you from AI. And unfortunately, we’re in that world, and you will need an AI in your life because whether we want to see it developed or not, people who are not friendly to us may develop it anyways. So, we’re going to be in that future. The question is, then, how we protect ourselves in that future?” ...

When asked in “how many years” AI will be able to “actually create” a movie, Russo predicted: “Two years.” The director also theorized on how advanced AI will eventually give moviegoers the chance to create different movies on the spot. ...

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2023/film/news/joe-russo-artificial-intelligence-create-movies-two-years-1235593319/

and see another interview by Russo here: https://collider.com/joe-russo-donald-mustard-gaming-storytelling-fortnight-interview/

AI ART SITES CENSOR PROMPTS ABOUT ABORTION

... The AI developers devising this censorship are “just playing whack-a-mole” with the word prompts they’re prohibiting, said University of Washington AI researcher Bill Howe. They aren’t deliberately censoring information about female reproductive health. They know that AI mirrors our culture’s worst and most virulent biases, including sexism. They say they want to protect people from hurtful images that their programs scrape from the internet. So far, they haven’t been able to do that, because their efforts are hopelessly superficial: Instead of putting intensive resources into fixing the models that generate the offensive material, the AI firms attempted to cut out the bias through censoring the prompts. ...

Midjourney rationalizes bans by explaining that it limits its content to the Hollywood equivalent of PG-13. DALL-E 2 uses PG. ...

See the full story here: https://theintercept.com/2023/04/22/ai-art-abortion-censorship/