There’s an arms race on campus, and professors are losing.
One-hundred percent ai. That’s what the software concluded about a student’s paper. One of the professors in the academic program I direct had come across this finding and asked me what to do with it. Then another one saw the same result—100 percent AI—for a different paper by that student, and also wondered: What does this mean? I did not know. I still don’t.
The problem breaks down into more problems: whether it’s possible to know for certain that a student used AI, what it even means to “use” AI for writing papers, and when that use amounts to cheating. The software that had flagged our student’s papers was also multilayered: Canvas, our courseware system, was running Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service, which had recently installed a new AI-detection algorithm. The alleged evidence of cheating had emerged from a nesting doll of ed-tech black boxes. Read More
Monthly Archives: May 2023
Apple’s new ‘Personal Voice’ feature can create a voice that sounds like you or a loved one in just 15 minutes
As part of its preview of iOS 17 accessibility updates coming this year, Apple has announced a pair of new features called Live Speech and Personal Voice. Live Speech allows users to type what they want to say and have it be spoken out.
Personal Voice, on the other hand, is a way for people who are at risk of losing their ability to speak to create and save a voice that sounds like them. Apple says it’s designed for people at risk of losing their ability to speak, such as those with a recent diagnosis of ALS. Read More
ChatGPT Plugins Mega Guide
The open-source AI boom is built on Big Tech’s handouts. How long will it last?
Last week a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech’s grip on AI.
New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers and app developers can study, build on, and modify—are dropping like candy from a piñata. These are smaller, cheaper versions of the best-in-class AI models created by the big firms that (almost) match them in performance—and they’re shared for free. — Read More
DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet
Recent research has suggested that there are clear differences in the language used in the Dark Web compared to that of the Surface Web. As studies on the Dark Web commonly require textual analysis of the domain, language models specific to the Dark Web may provide valuable insights to researchers. In this work, we introduce DarkBERT, a language model pretrained on Dark Web data. We describe the steps taken to filter and compile the text data used to train DarkBERT to combat the extreme lexical and structural diversity of the Dark Web that may be detrimental to building a proper representation of the domain. We evaluate DarkBERT and its vanilla counterpart along with other widely used language models to validate the benefits that a Dark Web domain specific model offers in various use cases. Our evaluations show that DarkBERT outperforms current language models and may serve as a valuable resource for future research on the Dark Web. — Read More
Open-Source AI Is Gaining on Google and ChatGPT
In February, Meta Platforms set off an explosion of artificial intelligence development when it gave academics access to sophisticated machine-learning models that can understand conversational language. Within weeks, the academics turned those models into open-source software that powered free alternatives to ChatGPT and other proprietary AI software.
Free AI models are now “reasonably close” in performance to proprietary models from Google and ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and most software developers will eventually opt to use the free ones, said Ion Stoica, a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley, who helped develop a key open-source AI model using Meta’s technology. — Read More
Privacy or safety? U.S. brings ‘surveillance city to the suburbs’
The spread of Fusus, a police technology platform that merges public and private cameras with predictive policing and other surveillance tools, is sparking debates in towns across the U.S.
Officer Mike Martinez has a mental map of all the security cameras in the small Californian town of Rialto.
… “This is not about Big Brother watching you,” he told Context from behind the wheel of his black and white SUV police cruiser. “This is about public safety.” — Read More
Stability AI releases an open source text-to-animation tool
You’ve heard of text-to-image, but have you heard of text-to-animation?
From anime to childhood classics, animations have brought stories to life by combining still images. Now, with just a text prompt, you can generate your own animations using AI.
On Thursday, Stability AI, the AI company that created Stable Diffusion, unveiled a text-to-animation tool that allows developers and artists to use Stable Diffusion models to generate animations. — Read More
Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft
AI is one of the deepest platform shifts ever, says Google’s CEO, and he’s not worried about being first.
Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We spoke the day after Google I/O, the company’s big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the company’s products.
It’s an important moment for Google, which invented a lot of the core technology behind the current AI moment. The company is very quick to point out that the “T” in ChatGPT stands for transformer, the large language model technology first invented at Google, but OpenAI and others have been first to market with generative AI products, and OpenAI has partnered with Microsoft on a new version of Bing that feels like the first real competitor to Google Search in a long time. I wanted to know what Sundar thinks of this moment and, in particular, what he thinks of the future of Search, which is the heart of Google’s business. — Read More
ChatGPT vs. Bard: A realistic comparison
Let’s see how Bard does vs. ChatGPT, without preconceptions or hype. One person’s totally unscientific, anecdotal, but realistic field experiment.
… This is not a scientific study, clearly. Once upon a time, I enjoyed doing controlled, in-depth, technical comparisons of ML models, but those days are past. In this post, I’m going to take about an hour to explore a few use cases, make a decision, and move on to the rest of my long to-do list. — Read More
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