Steganography is the practice of encoding secret information into innocuous content in such a manner that an adversarial third party would not realize that there is hidden meaning. While this problem has classically been studied in security literature, recent advances in generative models have led to a shared interest among security and machine learning researchers in developing scalable steganography techniques. In this work, we show that a steganography procedure is perfectly secure under Cachin (1998)’s information theoretic-model of steganography if and only if it is induced by a coupling. Furthermore, we show that, among perfectly secure procedures, a procedure is maximally efficient if and only if it is induced by a minimum entropy coupling. These insights yield what are, to the best of our knowledge, the first steganography algorithms to achieve perfect security guarantees with non-trivial efficiency; additionally, these algorithms are highly scalable. To provide empirical validation, we compare a minimum entropy coupling-based approach to three modern baselines — arithmetic coding, Meteor, and adaptive dynamic grouping — using GPT-2, WaveRNN, and Image Transformer as communication channels. We find that the minimum entropy coupling-based approach achieves superior encoding efficiency, despite its stronger security constraints. In aggregate, these results suggest that it may be natural to view information-theoretic steganography through the lens of minimum entropy coupling. — Read More
Monthly Archives: June 2023
Meta’s Open-Source ‘MusicGen’ AI Is Like ChatGPT for Tunes
Meta has released another open-source AI model trained on hundreds of thousands of music tracks online.
AI has managed to intrude on most artistic endeavors, and now it’s fully come for the music industry. Meta has now announced the release of the open source version of its music generation AI model that uses simple prompts to generate music like ChatGPT or other large language model-based AI generate text.
… [T]he model uses an EnCodec audio tokenizer based on a transformer language model. Users can demo MusicGen through Hugging Face’s API, though, generating some music could take some time depending on how many users are using it at once. You can use the Hugging Face site to create your own instance of the model for much faster outputs. Otherwise, you can download the code and run it yourself if you have the know-how and the rig to support it. — Read More
People Are Pirating GPT-4 By Scraping Exposed API Keys
Why pay for $150,000 worth of OpenAI access when you could just steal it?
People on the Discord for the r/ChatGPT subreddit are advertising stolen OpenAI API tokens that have been scraped from other peoples’ code, according to chat logs, screenshots and interviews. People using the stolen API keys can then implement GPT-4 while racking up usage charges to the stolen OpenAI account. — Read More
The Rise and Rise of Voice AI
I was wondering about the relative frequency of certain topics that intrigue me in regard to contemporary, technology-oriented sound studies. For a quick glimpse, first I charted “machine listening” in Google Trends, then adding “audio surveillance” and, for a broader swath, “audio deepfake.” The three terms were almost identical in the narrow band of popularity they populated for the past few years. I sought to expand the subject matter with a fourth item, something related to artificial intelligence.
Needless to say, we’re in the midst of AI Summer. These days “AI + [anything]” — following the rise in chatter around DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, DeepMind, Bard, and OpenAI, among other projects — is going to be more popular now than it was even six or seven months ago. — Read More
Hundreds attend church service generated by ChatGPT
The artificial intelligence chatbot asked the believers in the fully packed St. Paul’s church in the Bavarian town of Fuerth to rise from the pews and praise the Lord.
The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by an avatar of a bearded Black man on a huge screen above the altar, then began preaching to the more than 300 people who had shown up on Friday morning for an experimental Lutheran church service almost entirely generated by AI. — Read More
Allen Institute teams up with AWS to build first-ever map of the brain
Just as the periodic table is foundational to chemistry and the Human Genome Project revolutionized modern genetics, researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have teamed up with Amazon Web Services to create what could become a “transformative” new resource for the field of neuroscience.
AWS on Wednesday announced its technology will support the Allen Institute as it builds a map of the human brain, called the Brain Knowledge Platform. This platform, the first of its kind, is designed to be a complete reference of individual cells in the brain, and should eventually serve as the world’s largest open-source brain cell database. — Read More
Introducing Google’s Secure AI Framework
The potential of AI, especially generative AI, is immense. However, in the pursuit of progress within these new frontiers of innovation, there needs to be clear industry security standards for building and deploying this technology in a responsible manner. That’s why today we are excited to introduce the Secure AI Framework (SAIF), a conceptual framework for secure AI systems.
SAIF is inspired by the security best practices — like reviewing, testing and controlling the supply chain — that we’ve applied to software development, while incorporating our understanding of security mega-trends and risks specific to AI systems. — Read More
Leveraging FastAPI, OpenAI, and SQLAlchemy for Natural Language SQL Queries
SQL (Structured Query Language) is the standard language for managing and manipulating relational databases. What if we could interact with databases using natural language queries?
In this post we show how you can use SQL to load a dataframe to a database, write a prompt to query it, and connect this to a FastAPI application for deployment and enabling users to interact with the database. — Read More
How open-source LLMs are challenging OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft
In the past few years, it seemed that wealthy tech companies would be able to monopolize the growing market for large language models (LLM). And recent earnings calls from big tech companies suggested they are in control. Microsoft’s announcements, in particular, show that the company has created a billion-dollar business from its AI services, including through Azure OpenAI Services and the workloads OpenAI runs on its cloud infrastructure.
However, a recently leaked internal document from Google indicates that the market share of big tech is not as secure as it seems thanks to advances in open-source LLMs. In short, the document says “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI.” The dynamics of the market are gradually shifting from “bigger is better” to “cheaper is better,” “more efficient is better,” and “customizable is better.” And while there will always be a market for cloud-based LLM and generative AI products, customers now have open-source options to explore as well. — Read More
Google DeepMind’s game-playing AI just found another way to make code faster
The AI-generated algorithms are already being used by millions of developers.
DeepMind’s run of discoveries in fundamental computer science continues. Last year the company used a version of its game-playing AI AlphaZero to find new ways to speed up the calculation of a crucial piece of math at the heart of many different kinds of code, beating a 50-year-old record.
Now it has pulled the same trick again—twice. Using a new version of AlphaZero called AlphaDev, the UK-based firm (recently renamed Google DeepMind after a merge with its sister company’s AI lab in April) has discovered a way to sort items in a list up to 70% faster than the best existing method.
It has also found a way to speed up a key algorithm used in cryptography by 30%. These algorithms are among the most common building blocks in software. Small speed-ups can make a huge difference, cutting costs and saving energy. — Read More
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