FanDuel deepfakes young Charles Barkley into new spot

  • Sports betting platform FanDuel is using deepfake technology to bring a former NBA player back to his prime in anticipation of the NBA playoffs, according to a press release.
  • The “Think Like a Player” campaign features a deepfake-generated version of Charles Barkley from the 1990s, when he was at the height of his ability. “Young Chuck” will encourage FanDuel customers to “think like a player” when placing their bets.
  • The spots will air during the play-in tournament and throughout the conference finals, with the final ad going live during finals, and accompany a special sign-up offer to encourage betting during the playoffs.
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#fake

Enhancing Vision-language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models

The recent GPT-4 has demonstrated extraordinary multi-modal abilities, such as directly generating websites from handwritten text and identifying humorous elements within images. These features are rarely observed in previous vision language models. We believe the primary reason for GPT-4’s advanced multi-modal generation capabilities lies in the utilization of a more advanced large language model (LLM). To examine this phenomenon, we present MiniGPT-4, which aligns a frozen visual encoder with a frozen LLM, Vicuna, using just one projection layer. Our findings reveal that MiniGPT-4 possesses many capabilities similar to those exhibited by GPT-4 like detailed image description generation and website creation from hand-written drafts. Furthermore, we also observe other emerging capabilities in MiniGPT-4, including writing stories and poems inspired by given images, providing solutions to problems shown in images, teaching users how to cook based on food photos, etc. In our experiment, we found that only performing the pretraining on raw image-text pairs could produce unnatural language outputs that lack coherency including repetition and fragmented sentences. To address this problem, we curate a high-quality, well-aligned dataset in the second stage to finetune our model using a conversational template. This step proved crucial for augmenting the model’s generation reliability and overall usability. Notably, our model is highly computationally efficient, as we only train a projection layer utilizing approximately 5 million aligned image-text pairs. Our code, pre-trained model, and collected dataset are available at https://minigpt-4.github.io/. Read More

Paper

demo links here: Link1Link2Link3Link4Link5Link6

#chatbots, #image-recognition

AI-Generated Music Is About to Flood Streaming Platforms

There are already countless songs on Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. And as tunes become easier to create, anyone can add to the copyright din.

IT STARTS WITH a familiar intro, unmistakably the Weeknd’s 2017 hit “Die for You.” But as the first verse of the song begins, a different vocalist is heard: Michael Jackson. Or, at least, a machine simulation of the late pop star’s voice.

It’s just one example of how artificial intelligence is seeping into the music industry. Surf YouTube or TikTok and you’ll find many convincing AI-made covers. The software covers.ai has a waiting list for new users. But there are also tools that can generate instrumentals from text, give people a starting beat or inspiration, and help them to edit tunes. Read More

#audio

AI, NIL, and Zero Trust Authenticity

… A better solution is Zero Trust Information. [Y]oung people are by-and-large appropriately skeptical of what they read online; what they need are trusted resources that do their best to get things right and, critically, take accountability and explain themselves when they change their mind. That is the only way to harvest the massive benefits of the “information superhighway” that is the Internet while avoiding roads to nowhere, or worse.

A similar principle is the way forward for content as well: one can make the case that most of the Internet, given the zero marginal cost of distribution, ought already be considered fake; once content creation itself is a zero marginal cost activity almost all of it will be. The solution isn’t to try to eliminate that content, but rather to find ways to verify that which is still authentic. As I noted above I expect Spotify to do just that with regards to music: now the value of the service won’t simply be convenience, but also the knowledge that if a song on Spotify is labeled “Drake” it will in fact be by Drake (or licensed by him!). Read More

#fake

A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America

As the U.S. deals with a nationwide swatting wave, Motherboard has traced much of the activity to a particular swatting-as-a-service account on Telegram. Torswats uses synthesized voices to pressure law enforcement to specific locations.

“Hello, I just committed a crime and I want to confess,” a panicked sounding man said in a call to a police department in February. “I’ve placed explosives inside a local school,’ the man continued.

… The bombs weren’t real. But, crucially, neither was the man’s voice. The panicked man’s lines sound artificially generated, according to recordings of the swatting calls reviewed by Motherboard.  Read More

#fake

Sony World Photography Award 2023: Winner refuses award after revealing AI creation

The winner of a major photography award has refused his prize after revealing his work was in fact an AI creation.

German artist Boris Eldagsen’s entry, entitled Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, won the creative open category at last week’s Sony World Photography Award.

He said he used the picture to test the competition and to create a discussion about the future of photography. Read More

#fake, #image-recognition