A programmer created an algorithmically-generated face, and then made the network slowly forget what its own face looked like.
The result, a piece of video art titled “What I saw before the darkness,” is an eerie time-lapse view of the inside of a demented AI’s mind as its artificial neurons are switched off, one by one, HAL 9000 style. Read More
Daily Archives: June 10, 2019
Will China win the military AI race on the back of commercial technology?
The earliest weapons were dual-use technologies: rocks chipped into sharp edges and bound to arrows or spears or clubs that proved as useful for hunting as they did fighting.
Modern life is millennia removed from proto-ethical debates over the dangers of collaborating on hunting technology with people who may someday turn it to violence, but dual-use tools are at the center of a major inter- and intra-national debate. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission held a hearing June 7 about China and technology, specifically the ways in which developments in the civilian sector could be exploited and weaponized by China’s military.
“China has been hyped as an AI superpower poised to overtake the U.S. in the strategic technology domain of AI,” said Jeffrey Ding, China lead for the Center for the Governance of AI, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford; D.Phil. Candidate, University of Oxford. Read More
The USA-China AI Race – 7 Weaknesses of the West
The great power nations that master the use of artificial intelligence are likely to gain a tremendous military and economic benefits from the technology.
The United States benefitted greatly from a relatively fast adoption of the internet, and many of its most powerful companies today are the global giants of the internet age.
When it comes to its technological and economic future, the US generally believes:
— The USA’s prosperity and relative technological and economic prominence is guaranteed no matter what
— The most powerful nations in the world will democracies, where free speech and elected officials will (albeit not perfectly) enact the will of the people
— Bumbling forward with the same model for academic and private-sector innovation will still be able to keep the USA ahead of competitors in technological development
I believe these to be fatal assumptions. Read More
Automated Speech Generation from UN General Assembly Statements: Mapping Risks in AI Generated Texts
Automated text generation has been applied broadly in many domains such as marketing and robotics, and used to create chatbots, product reviews and write poetry. The ability to synthesize text, however, presents many potential risks, while access to the technology required to build generative models is becoming increasingly easy. This work is aligned with the efforts of the United Nations and other civil society organisations to highlight potential political and societal risks arising through the malicious use of text generation software, and their potential impact on human rights. As a case study, we present the findings of an experiment to generate remarks in the style of political leaders by fine-tuning a pretrained AWD-LSTM model on a dataset of speeches made at the UN General Assembly. This work highlights the ease with which this can be accomplished, as well as the threats of combining these techniques with other technologies. Read More
Decentralizing Privacy: Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data
The recent increase in reported incidents of surveillance and security breaches compromising users’ privacy call into question the current model, in which third-parties collect and control massive amounts of personal data. Bitcoin has demonstrated in the financial space that trusted, auditable computing is possible using a decentralized network of peers accompanied by a public ledger. In this paper, we describe a decentralized personal data management system that ensures users own and control their data. We implement a protocol that turns a blockchain into an automated access-control manager that does not require trust in a third party. Unlike Bitcoin, transactions in our system are not strictly financial – they are used to carry instructions, such as storing, querying and sharing data. Finally, we discuss possible future extensions to blockchains that could harness them into a well-rounded solution for trusted computing problems in society. Read More
How A.I. Could Be Weaponized to Spread Disinformation
In 2017, an online disinformation campaign spread against the “White Helmets,” claiming that the group of aid volunteers was serving as an arm of Western governments to sow unrest in Syria.
This false information was convincing. But the Russian organization behind the campaign ultimately gave itself away because it repeated the same text across many different fake news sites.
Now, researchers at the world’s top artificial intelligence labs are honing technology that can mimic how humans write, which could potentially help disinformation campaigns go undetected by generating huge amounts of subtly different messages. Read More
Text-based Editing of Talking-head Video
Editing talking-head video to change the speech content or to remove filler words is challenging. We propose a novel method to edit talking-head video based on its transcript to produce a realistic output video in which the dialogue of the speaker has been modified, while maintaining a seamless audio-visual flow (i.e. no jump cuts). Our method automatically annotates an input talking-head video with phonemes, visemes, 3D face pose and geometry, reflectance, expression and scene illumination per frame. To edit a video, the user has to only edit the transcript, and an optimization strategy then chooses segments of the input corpus as base material. The annotated parameters corresponding to the selected segments are seamlessly stitched together and used to produce an intermediate video representation in which the lower half of the face is rendered with a parametric face model. Finally,a recurrent video generation network transforms this representation to a photo realistic video that matches the edited transcript. We demonstrate a large variety of edits, such as the addition, removal, and alteration of words,as well as convincing language translation and full sentence synthesis. Read More
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