When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology.
That happened last month. And because the letter was responding to an essay we wrote, we’re starting to get worried. And while the technology can be regulated, the real solution lies in recognizing that the problem is human actors—and those we can do something about.
Our essay argued that the much heralded launch of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, a system that can generate text realistic enough to appear to be written by a human, poses significant threats to democratic processes. The ability to produce high quality political messaging quickly and at scale, if combined with AI-assisted capabilities to strategically target those messages to policymakers and the public, could become a powerful accelerant of an already sprawling and poorly constrained force in modern democratic life: lobbying. Read More
Daily Archives: February 17, 2023
You.com challenges Google, Microsoft with launch of ‘multimodal conversational AI’ in search
You.com, a pioneering search engine startup based in San Francisco, CA, announced today the launch of YouChat 2.0, a groundbreaking new “multimodal conversational AI” system that promises to take the internet search experience to a whole new level. This update marks a significant step forward in the evolution of web search and offers a glimpse into the future of how we interact with information and the internet.
YouChat 2.0 is the first web search that combines advanced conversational AI with community-built apps, offering a unique and interactive experience with each query. With its blended large language model known as C-A-L (Chat, Apps and Links), YouChat 2.0 is able to serve up charts, images, videos, tables, graphs, text or code embedded in its responses to user queries. That means fewer tabs open and less drifting away from your search engine. Read More
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These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney
Bing AI often refers to itself as Sydney, but Microsoft says that was an internal codename for a chat experience it was previously working on.
Microsoft’s new Bing AI keeps telling a lot of people that its name is Sydney. In exchanges posted to Reddit, the chatbot often responds to questions about its origins by saying, “I am Sydney, a generative AI chatbot that powers Bing chat.” It also has a secret set of rules that users have managed to find through prompt exploits (instructions that convince the system to temporarily drop its usual safeguards).
We asked Microsoft about Sydney and these rules, and the company was happy to explain their origins and confirmed that the secret rules are genuine.
“Sydney refers to an internal code name for a chat experience we were exploring previously,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “We are phasing out the name in preview, but it may still occasionally pop up.” Roulston also explained that the rules are “part of an evolving list of controls that we are continuing to adjust as more users interact with our technology.” Read More
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