philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

21Mar/24Off

UN General Assembly to address AI’s potential risks, rewards

The UN General Assembly will turn its attention to artificial intelligence on Thursday, weighing a resolution that lays out the potentially transformational technology's pros and cons while calling for the establishment of international standards.

The text, co-sponsored by dozens of countries, emphasizes the necessity of guidelines "to promote safe, secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems," while excluding military AI from its purview.

On the whole, the resolution focuses more on the technology's positive potential ...

The draft resolution, which is the first on the issue, was brought forth by the United States and will be submitted for approval by the assembly on Thursday. ...

See the full story here: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240321-un-general-assembly-to-address-ai-s-potential-risks-rewards

20Mar/24Off

Indiana University – 24-foot LED immersive soundstage for virtual productions to anchor new extended reality labIndiana University –

A new extended reality lab at Indiana University Bloomington will feature “The Wall,” a 24-foot LED immersive soundstage that will enable faculty and graduate students to use virtual and augmented reality in research and creative projects across disciplines, including public art, science, health and education. ...

With its interdisciplinary nature, the KIX Lab’s potential applications are vast. For example, filmmakers can use the facility as an adaptable film set; public health researchers can create spatial experiences to study mental illnesses such as addiction; and optometrists can develop assistive devices and rehabilitation for people with visual impairments. The lab can serve as a venue for live performances using immersive visual projections and for screenings of experimental films.

But the KIX Lab’s impact will reach beyond campus. Collaborating with local communities, faculty will use the lab to create interactive public art, science, health and education projects. And the facility will create connections with industry, with the soundstage available to rent for local commercial productions. ...

See the full story here: https://news.iu.edu/live/news/35427-24-foot-led-immersive-soundstage-for-virtual

19Mar/24Off

A Tale of Two SXSWs: An AI Divide So Wide You Could Drive a Film Industry Through It

... But discuss it we did at the SXSW Conferences, where AI was the topic dominating hundreds of panels, workshops, talks, and meet-up-sessions spread over 24 different tracks. The overwhelming message coming out the film track was AI is a tool — a powerful one, poised to upend the entertainment industry, but with the potential (if properly implemented) to enhance human creativity. ...

Meanwhile, the community at the SXSW Film Festival had a healthy skepticism of the conference’s tech innovation-speak. As one colleague, and a long time SXSW attendee, said: “Every year they tell us this new thing will change everything and ‘democratize filmmaking.’”  ...

Over the last three decades, VFX artists have been forced to reinvent their workflow multiple times to incorporate new innovations, making them far more open to the potential of AI. The most recent seismic evolution was the introduction of real-time game engines that further break down the wall between visual effects and the other filmmaking crafts, a trend that will only accelerate in the coming years. ...

Over the last three decades, VFX artists have been forced to reinvent their workflow multiple times to incorporate new innovations, making them far more open to the potential of AI. The most recent seismic evolution was the introduction of real-time game engines that further break down the wall between visual effects and the other filmmaking crafts, a trend that will only accelerate in the coming years. ...

There’s plenty to be skeptical about with AI, along with good reason to mistrust how Hollywood and corporations will use it to create “content,” but that’s also why we must educate ourselves rather than keep our collective heads in the sand. If we don’t understand how technology is being adapted as a filmmaking tool, we leave ourselves helpless to shape the conversation around what we collectively hold dear: the creation of motion pictures through eyes and heart of imperfect human beings. ...

See the full story here: https://www.indiewire.com/features/commentary/sxsw-2024-hollywood-ai-1234964964/

19Mar/24Off

MrBeast strikes Amazon deal for biggest competition series in TV history

... Known for outrageous stunts such as burying himself alive or re-creating the show “Squid Game” as a reality TV-style competition, Donaldson also has a reputation for combining his internet shows with a charitable aspect, such as rescuing 1,000 abandoned dogs or building 100 wells in Africa. Until now, however, his entertainment has not extended beyond the internet. ...

“Beast Games” will consist of 1,000 contestants competing for a $5 million cash prize, the largest single prize that’s ever been offered on television or streaming. Donaldson will host and executive produce the show, which will be available in 240 countries and territories. ...

See the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/18/mrbeast-mgm-amazon-game-show-creator/

19Mar/24Off

The most innovative augmented and virtual reality companies of 2024

...

6. JIGSPACE

For helping people show, not tell ...

8. AMAZEVR

For making virtual reality concerts the real deal

9. BILT

For demystifying home, auto, and bike repair with interactive walk-throughs

10. JOURNEE

For bridging the gap between augmented reality and the web

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91033867/augmented-reality-virtual-reality-most-innovative-companies-2024

18Mar/24Off

Why Are Large AI Models Being Red Teamed? 

Intelligent systems demand more than just repurposed cybersecurity tools

In February, OpenAI announced the arrival of Sora, a stunning “text-to-video” tool. Simply enter a prompt, and Sora generates a realistic video within seconds. But it wasn’t immediately available to the public. Some of the delay is because OpenAI reportedly has a set of experts called a red team who, the company has said, will probe the model to understand its capacity for deepfake videos, misinformation, bias, and hateful content.

Red teaming, while having proved useful for cybersecurity applications, is a military tool that was never intended for widespread adoption by the private sector. 

“Done well, red teaming can identify and help address vulnerabilities in AI,” says Brian Chen, director of policy from the New York–based think tank Data & Society. “What it does not do is address the structural gap in regulating the technology in the public interest.” ...

 The purpose of red-teaming exercises is to play the role of the adversary (the red team) and find hidden vulnerabilities in the defenses of the blue team (the defenders) who then think creatively about how to fix the gaps. ...

Zenko also reveals a glaring mismatch between red teaming and the pace of AI advancement. The whole point, he says, is to identify existing vulnerabilities and then fix them. “If the system being tested isn’t sufficiently static,” he says, “then we’re just chasing the past.” ...

Dan Hendrycks, executive and research director of the San Francisco–based Center for AI Safety, says red teaming shouldn’t be treated as a turnkey solution either. “The technique is certainly useful,” he says. “But it represents only one line of defense against the potential risks of AI, and a broader ecosystem of policies and methods is essential.”

NIST’s new AI Safety Institute now has an opportunity to change the way red teaming is used in AI. The Institute’sconsortium of more than 200 organizations has already reportedly begun developing standards for AI red teaming. Tech developers have also begun exploring best practices on their own. For example, Anthropic, GoogleMicrosoft, and OpenAI have established the Frontier Model Forum (FMF) to develop standards for AI safety and share best practices across the industry.

See the full story here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/red-team-ai-llms

18Mar/24Off

AI is keeping GitHub chief legal officer Shelley McKinley busy

TechCrunch chats with GitHub's legal beagle about the EU's AI Act and developer concerns around Copilot and ownership

... GitHub, which Microsoft bought for $7.5 billion in 2018, has emerged as one of the most vocal naysayers around one very specific element of the regulations: muddy wording on how the rules might create legal liability for open source software developers. ...,

For the unfamiliar, GitHub is a platform that enables collaborative software development, allowing users to host, manage, and share code “repositories” (a location where project-specific files are kept) with anyone, anywhere in the world. Companies can pay to make their repositories private for internal projects, but GitHub’s success and scale has been driven by open source software development carried out collaboratively in a public setting. ...

As well-meaning as Europe’s incoming AI regulations might be, critics argued that they would have significant unintended consequences for the open source community, which in turn could hamper the progress of AI. This argument has been central to GitHub’s lobbying efforts.

“Regulators, policymakers, lawyers… are not technologists,” McKinley said. “And one of the most important things that I’ve personally been involved with over the past year, is going out and helping to educate people on how the products work. People just need a better understanding of what’s going on, so that they can think about these issues and come to the right conclusions in terms of how to implement regulation.”

At the heart of the concerns was that the regulations would create legal liability for open source “general purpose AI systems,” which are built on models capable of handling a multitude of different tasks. If open source AI developers were to be held liable for issues arising further down-stream (i.e. at the application level), they might be less inclined to contribute — and in the process, more power and control would be bestowed upon the big tech firms developing proprietary systems. ...

But those intricacies aside, McKinley reckons that their hard lobbying work has mostly paid off, with regulators placing less focus on software “componentry” (the individual elements of a system that open-source developers are more likely to create), and more on what’s happening at the compiled application level.

“That is a direct result of the work that we’ve been doing to help educate policymakers on these topics,” McKinley said. ...

Copilot ultimately raises key questions around who authored a piece of software — if it’s merely regurgitating code written by another developer, then shouldn’t that developer get credit for it? Software Freedom Conservancy’s Bradley M. Kuhn wrote a substantial piece precisely on that matter, called: “If Software is My Copilot, Who Programmed My Software?

There’s a misconception that “open source” software is a free-for-all — that anyone can simply take code produced under an open source license and do as they please with it. But while different open source licenses have different restrictions, they all pretty much have one notable stipulation: developers reappropriating code written by someone else need to include the correct attribution. It’s difficult to do that if you don’t know who (if anyone) wrote the code that Copilot is serving you. ...

“I would say the EU AI Act is a ‘fundamental rights base,’ as you would expect in Europe,” McKinley said. “And the U.S. side is very cybersecurity, deep-fakes — that kind of lens. But in many ways, they come together to focus on what are risky scenarios — and I think taking a risk-based approach is something that we are in favour of — it’s the right way to think about it.”

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/16/ai-is-keeping-github-chief-legal-officer-shelley-mckinley-busy/

18Mar/24Off

Looking for Gen Z shoppers? They’re on Facebook

... We all know that Facebook has fallen from grace. Once atop the social media hierarchy as the place to be, it’s become a relic of the past where estranged relatives post annually for your birthday.

The numbers back it up: Teen usership of Facebook dropped from 71% in 2014 to 33% in 2023, according to a Pew Research Center survey. In its place, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat reign supreme.

But Facebook has one feature that keeps young users from deleting their accounts: Marketplace, which Gen Zers are using regularly to shop, per The New York Times.

  • Facebook Marketplace, which launched in 2016, has 1B+ monthly active users and ~40% of Facebook’s 3B+ users shop on Marketplace.
  • An estimated 491m users log into Facebook just to use Marketplace.
  • In 2022, the number of Marketplace users increased 3.6% YoY.

Now, Marketplace ranks just behind eBay as the second most popular site for secondhand shopping in the US.

...

See the full story here: https://thehustle.co/news/looking-for-gen-z-shoppers-they-re-on-facebook?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

18Mar/24Off

ChatGPT’s ancestor GPT-2 jammed into 1.25GB Excel sheet — LLM runs inside a spreadsheet that you can download from GitHub

[PhilNote: This 10 minute video, embedded in this story, gives a VERY CLEAR explanation, using spreadsheets, of how ChatGPT works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyeN5tXMnJ8&t=587s ]

Software developer and self-confessed spreadsheet addict Ishan Anand has jammed GPT-2 into Microsoft Excel. More astonishingly, it works – providing insight into how large language models (LLMs) work, and how the underlying Transformer architecture goes about its smart next-token prediction. "If you can understand a spreadsheet, then you can understand AI," boasts Anand. The 1.25GB spreadsheet has been made available on GitHub for anyone to download and play with.

Naturally, this spreadsheet implementation of GPT-2 is somewhat behind the LLMs available in 2024, but GPT-2 was state-of-the-art and grabbed plenty of headlines in 2019. It is important to remember that GPT-2 is not something to chat with, as it comes from before the 'chat' era.  ...

... it is still good for a demo and Anand claims that his "low-code introduction" is ideal as an LLM grounding for the likes of tech execs, marketers, product managers, AI policymakers, ethicists, as well as for developers and scientists who are new to AI. Anand asserts that this same Transformer architecture remains "the foundation for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Bard/Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and many other LLMs." ...

See the full story with explanatory 10 minute video here: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpts-ancestor-gpt-2-jammed-into-125gb-excel-sheet-llm-runs-inside-a-spreadsheet-that-you-can-download-from-github?ref=trailyn.com

15Mar/24Off

AI image-generator Midjourney blocks images of Biden and Trump as election looms

... Declaring that “this moderation stuff is kind of hard,” Holz didn’t outline exactly what policy changes were being made but described the clampdown as a temporary measure to make it harder for people to abuse the tool. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Attempts by AP journalists to test Midjourney’s new policy on Wednesday by asking it to make an image of “Trump and Biden shaking hands at the beach” led to a “Banned Prompt Detected” warning. A second attempt escalated the warning to: “You have triggered an abuse alert.”

The tiny company — which has just 11 employees, according to its website — has largely kept silent in the public debate over how generative AI tools could fuel election misinformation around the world. ...

“Anybody who’s scared about fake images in 2024 is going to have a hard 2028,” Holz said Wednesday. “It will be a very different world at that point. Like, obviously you’re still going to have humans running for president in 2028, but they won’t be purely human anymore.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ai-image-generator-midjourney-blocks-images-of-biden-and-trump-as-election-looms?ref=platformer.news&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email