The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the time.
People could now generate images from text on their own hardware!
More importantly, developers could mess around with the guts of what was going on.
The resulting explosion in innovation is still going on today. Most recently, ControlNet appears to have leapt Stable Diffusion ahead of Midjourney and DALL-E in terms of its capabilities.
It feels to me like that Stable Diffusion moment back in August kick-started the entire new wave of interest in generative AI—which was then pushed into over-drive by the release of ChatGPT at the end of November. Read More
Tag Archives: ChatBots
China’s ChatGPT Black Market Is Thriving
A booming illicit market for OpenAI’s chatbot shows the huge potential, and risks, for Chinese generative AI.
Yuxin Guo is a master’s student studying at a Beijing University. For a few months, she had been following online discussions about ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that produces almost natural-sounding language in response to text prompts. One video she found on social media platform Weibo showed how college students in the US were using the technology to write research papers. In February, she finally decided to try it out for herself.
“I got curious because so many people are talking about it,” Guo says, “although not a lot of people seem to clearly know how to access it.”
ChatGPT isn’t available in China—it’s not blocked, but OpenAI, which built the tool, hasn’t made it available there—so Guo went onto Taobao, China’s biggest ecommerce site, where hundreds of thousands of merchants offer everything from iPhone cases to foreign driver’s licenses.
ChatGPT logins have become a hot commodity on Taobao, as have foreign phone numbers—particularly virtual ones that can receive verification codes. Read More
D-ID’s new web app gives a face and voice to OpenAI’s ChatGPT
D-ID, the Israeli startup behind Deep Nostalgia, announced today that it’s launching the beta version of its new web app that allows users to talk face-to-face with photorealistic AI. The web app, called chat.D-ID, combines D-ID’s text-to-video streaming technology with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to make conversations with AI more accessible.
The startup’s CEO and co-founder, Gil Perry, told TechCrunch that D-ID believes giving ChatGPT a voice and face will allow more people to use the technology, as people who can’t read and write will now be able to converse with AI. Another goal of the chat.D-ID to make it easier for elderly people to use AI. The company believes its new web app opens up access to ChatGPT more widely.
“The app is an easier way to use the power of AI and converse with ChatGPT,” Perry said. “We are wired to communicate with faces, we understand the situation better when we do. We feel more comfortable and we can observe complex information better when we’re in what feels like a real scenario. Video is more effective than text, so the app increases the power of large language models by adding a face.” Read More
You Are Not a Parrot
And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.
Nobody likes an I-told-you-so. But before Microsoft’s Bing started cranking out creepy love letters; before Meta’s Galactica spewed racist rants; before ChatGPT began writing such perfectly decent college essays that some professors said, “Screw it, I’ll just stop grading”; and before tech reporters sprinted to claw back claims that AI was the future of search, maybe the future of everything else, too, Emily M. Bender co-wrote the octopus paper.
Bender is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. She published the paper in 2020 with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller. The goal was to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs — the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT — can and cannot do. Read More
More than you’ve asked for: A Comprehensive Analysis of Novel Prompt Injection Threats to Application-Integrated Large Language Models
We are currently witnessing dramatic advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). They are already being adopted in practice and integrated into many systems, including integrated development environments (IDEs) and search engines. The functionalities of current LLMs can be modulated via natural language prompts, while their exact internal functionality remains implicit and unassessable. This property, which makes them adaptable to even unseen tasks, might also make them susceptible to targeted adversarial prompting. Recently, several ways to misalign LLMs using Prompt Injection (PI) attacks have been introduced. In such attacks, an adversary can prompt the LLM to produce malicious content or override the original instructions and the employed filtering schemes. Recent work showed that these attacks are hard to mitigate, as state-of-the-art LLMs are instruction-following. So far, these attacks assumed that the adversary is directly prompting the LLM. In this work, we show that augmenting LLMs with retrieval and API calling capabilities (so-called Application-Integrated LLMs) induces a whole new set of attack vectors. These LLMs might process poisoned content retrieved from the Web that contains malicious prompts pre-injected and selected by adversaries. We demonstrate that an attacker can indirectly perform such PI attacks. Based on this key insight, we systematically analyze the resulting threat landscape of Application-Integrated LLMs and discuss a variety of new attack vectors. To demonstrate the practical viability of our attacks, we implemented specific demonstrations of the proposed attacks within synthetic applications. In summary, our work calls for an urgent evaluation of current mitigation techniques and an investigation of whether new techniques are needed to defend LLMs against these threats. Read More
How will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries?
Recent dramatic increases in AI language modeling capabilities has led to many questions about the effect of these technologies on the economy. In this paper we present a methodology to systematically assess the extent to which occupations, industries and geographies are exposed to advances in AI language modeling capabilities. We find that the top occupations exposed to language modeling include telemarketers and a variety of post-secondary teachers such as English language and literature, foreign language and literature, and history teachers. We find the top industries exposed to advances in language modeling are legal services and securities, commodities, and investments. Read More
Microsoft now lets you change Bing’s chatbot personality to be more entertaining
Microsoft restricted Bing AI in recent days after wild responses, but a new toggle lets the chatbot get more creative once again.
Microsoft has added a new feature to its Bing chatbot that lets you toggle between different tones for responses. There are three options for the AI-powered chatbot’s responses: creative, balanced, and precise. The creative mode includes responses that are “original and imaginative,” whereas the precise mode favors accuracy and relevancy for more factual and concise answers.
Microsoft has set the default for the Bing chatbot to the balanced mode, which it hopes will strike a balance between accuracy and creativity. These new chat modes are rolling out to all Bing AI users right now, and around 90 percent of users should be seeing them already. Read More
Inside the ChatGPT race in China
A Chinese ChatGPT alternative won’t pop up overnight—even though many companies may want you to think so.
Every once in a while, there’s one thing that gets everybody obsessed. In the Chinese tech world last week, it was ChatGPT.
Maybe it was because of the holiday season, or maybe it was because ChatGPT is not currently available in China, but it took more than two months for the natural-language-processing chatbot to finally blow up in the country. (OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, told Reuters it wasn’t operating in China because “conditions in certain countries make it difficult or impossible for us to do so in a way that is consistent with our mission.”)
But in the span of the past week, a massive competition has developed, with almost every major Chinese tech company announcing plans to introduce their own ChatGPT-like products (even some that have never been known for artificial intelligence capabilities), while the Chinese public has been frantically trying out the service. Read More
Workers’ ChatGPT Use Restricted At More Banks—Including Goldman, Citigroup
CitiGroup, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo have restricted employees’ use of ChatGPT, Bloomberg and Financial News reported Friday, joining JPMorgan Chase, as well as Amazon and multiple major public school districts to limit the use of OpenAI’s new chatbot, which has taken the internet by storm and raised concerns about sensitive information sharing. Read More
ChatGPT get-rich-quick schemes are coming for magazines, Amazon, and YouTube
One morning earlier this week, Neil Clarke, the editor of a prominent U.S.-based fantasy and science fiction magazine called Clarkesworld, was wading through the latest story submissions from authors hoping to be published. He determined that at least 50 submissions that day alone had been lazily drafted by artificial intelligence.
Of the 1,200 global submissions that Clarke received in the first 20 days of February, he deemed 500 of them to be AI-generated.
“It was picking up at a daily rate,” Clarke told Semafor. He was forced to close submissions because of the crush of ChatGPT-created content.
Clarke identified the likely culprit: Followers of online get-rich-quick scammers trying to make a quick buck, in the off-chance their AI-generated work gets published. Read More
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