Monthly Archives: December 2022
Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone?
No one knew how popular OpenAI’s DALL-E would be in 2022, and no one knows where its rise will leave us
It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with an idea at the company’s San Francisco office. They’d built a new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps, or a corgi made of pizza. Now they just had to figure out what to do with it.
“Almost always, we build something and then we all have to use it for a while,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s cofounder and CEO, tells MIT Technology Review. “We try to figure out what it’s going to be, what it’s going to be used for.”
Not this time. As they tinkered with the model, everyone involved realized this was something special. “It was very clear that this was it—this was the product,” says Altman. “There was no debate. We never even had a meeting about it.” Read More
AI-generated fake faces have become a hallmark of online influence operationsAI-generated fake faces have become a hallmark of online influence operations
Fake accounts on social media are increasingly likely to sport fake faces.
Facebook parent company Meta says more than two-thirds of the influence operations it found and took down this year used profile pictures that were generated by a computer.
As the artificial intelligence behind these fakes has become more widely available and better at creating life-like faces, bad actors are adapting them for their attempts to manipulate social media networks. Read More
A brain-computer startup beat Elon Musk’s Neuralink to implanting its first device in a US patient
A Tech Worker Is Selling A Children’s Book He Made Using AI. Professional Illustrators Are Pissed.
Ammaar Reshi told BuzzFeed News that he has received death threats and messages encouraging self-harm on social media.
Ammaar Reshi, 28, has been fascinated by technology since he was a child. “I was always curious, and my dad let me play with his computer when I was 5 years old,” he said. He grew up in Pakistan before his family moved to the UK, where Reshi studied computer science in London. A job at Palantir Technologies led Reshi to Palo Alto, California, and since 2020 he’s worked at fintech company Brex, where he’s now a design manager.
When a raft of generative AI tools started to hit the market over the last few months, Reshi began tinkering with them. Earlier this month, he had the idea to make a book for his best friends’ kid, who was born this year, using AI. “I said I was going to take a weekend to try to put this out there,” he recalled. Read More
Google execs warn company’s reputation could suffer if it moves too fast on AI-chat technology
- Google employees asked executives at an all-hands meeting whether the AI chatbot that’s going viral represents a “missed opportunity” for the company.
- Google’s Jeff Dean said the company has much more “reputational risk” in providing wrong information and thus is moving “more conservatively than a small startup.”
- CEO Sundar Pichai suggested that the company has chat products underway for 2023.
#nlp
OpenAI’s attempts to watermark AI text hit limits
It’s proving tough to reign in systems like ChatGPTOpenAI’s attempts to watermark AI text hit limits
It’s proving tough to reign in systems like ChatGPTIt’s proving tough to reign in systems like ChatGPT
Did a human write that, or ChatGPT? It can be hard to tell — perhaps too hard, its creator OpenAI thinks, which is why it is working on a way to “watermark” AI-generated content.
In a lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, computer science professor Scott Aaronson, currently a guest researcher at OpenAI, revealed that OpenAI is developing a tool for “statistically watermarking the outputs of a text [AI system].” Whenever a system — say, ChatGPT — generates text, the tool would embed an “unnoticeable secret signal” indicating where the text came from. Read More
The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent
My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.
When I tried the new viral AI avatar app Lensa, I was hoping to get results similar to some of my colleagues at MIT Technology Review. The digital retouching app was first launched in 2018 but has recently become wildly popular thanks to the addition of Magic Avatars, an AI-powered feature which generates digital portraits of people based on their selfies.
But while Lensa generated realistic yet flattering avatars for them—think astronauts, fierce warriors, and cool cover photos for electronic music albums— I got tons of nudes. Out of 100 avatars I generated, 16 were topless, and in another 14 it had put me in extremely skimpy clothes and overtly sexualized poses. Read More
‘Magic’ AI Avatars Are Already Losing Their Charm
When Lensa, a four-year-old photo-editing app, introduced a new AI-portrait generator in November, the internet was enthralled. But concerns have mounted, particularly among women
Last week, after seeing artsy portraits popping up all over her social media feeds, Christal Luster signed up for a free trial of a photo-editing app called Lensa. She uploaded 10 of her headshots to it and paid $5.99 for 100 new images based on her inputs, which an artificial-intelligence tool produced in under an hour.
Ms. Luster, an actress in Chicago, said the images opened her eyes to the types of characters she could portray. “There was one of them where I was like, ‘Oh I could totally see myself playing in ‘Bridgerton.’ I could learn to speak with a British accent. I could do period pieces,” she said. Others made her look like a superhero, she said: “I could be in the next ‘Black Panther.’” She shared some of the portraits in a video on TikTok, where she has more than 480,000 followers. Read More
Toastmasters adopts AI-powered speech analytics technology from Seattle startup Yoodli
Can artificial intelligence strengthen human connections by improving public speaking?
That’s the ambition of a new partnership between Toastmasters International and Yoodli. Toastmasters this week rolled out the Seattle startup’s AI-powered communication coach as a free benefit for its more than 280,000 members.
Toastmasters members will have access to a customized version of Yoodli, based on Toastmasters’ grading criteria, which differ from those used in the public version of the Yoodli technology. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 