Nobody cares about "AI" (Chatbot: I disagree.)

[Noodles]

Interesting. It looks correct, but incorporates one bad practice (if a touch changes state, you should do it touch_end not touch_start).

Does it do anything though? The state change doesn't actually happen. You can't just put a script in a door and tell it to "open", it needs some sort of rotation or movement in there.

 

[Erich Templar]

Does it do anything though? The state change doesn't actually happen. You can't just put a script in a door and tell it to "open", it needs some sort of rotation or movement in there.

Yeah, good point. In fact, looking over it again, it seems to have only done the easy bit.

 

[Free]

Multiple Chat GPT instances combine to figure out chemistry

Coscientist" AI checks references, reads hardware manuals, and sets up reactions.

arstechnica.com

Despite rapid advances in artificial intelligence, AIs are nowhere close to being ready to replace humans for doing science. But that doesn't mean that they can't help automate some of the drudgery out of the daily grind of scientific experimentation. For example, a few years back, researchers put an AI in control of automated lab equipment and taught it to exhaustively catalog all the reactions that can occur among a set of starting materials.

While useful, that still required a lot of researcher intervention to train the system in the first place. A group at Carnegie Mellon University has now figured out how to get an AI system to teach itself to do chemistry. The system requires a set of three AI instances, each specialized for different operations. But, once set up and supplied with raw materials, you just have to tell it what type of reaction you want done, and it'll figure it out.

 

[Free]

Child sex abuse images found in dataset training image generators, report says

Stable Diffusion 1.5 reportedly “tainted” by more than 1,000 child abuse images.

arstechnica.com

 

[Free]

Google might already be replacing some Ad sales jobs with AI

When AI can make assets and text for ads, you don't need humans to do it anymore.

arstechnica.com

Google is wrapping its head around the idea of being a generative AI company. The "code red" called in response to ChatGPT has had Googlers scrambling to come up with AI features and ideas. Once all the dust settles on that work, Google might turn inward and try to "optimize" the company with some of its new AI capabilities. With artificial intelligence being the hot new thing, how much of Google's, uh, natural intelligence needs to be there?

A report at The Information says that AI might already be taking people's jobs at Google. The report cites people briefed on the plans and says Google intends to "consolidate staff, including through possible layoffs, by reassigning employees at its large customer sales unit who oversee relationships with major advertisers." According to the report, the jobs are being vacated because Google's new AI tools have automated them. The report says a future restructuring was apparently already announced at a department-wide Google Ads meeting last week.

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Free]

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

The lawsuit says ChatGPT “recites Times content verbatim.”

www.theverge.com

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the two companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with its content as a result.

As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.” This “undermine and damage” the Times’ relationship with readers, the outlet alleges, while also depriving it of “subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.”

The complaint also argues that these AI models “threaten high-quality journalism” by hurting the ability of news outlets to protect and monetize content. “Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” the lawsuit states.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Josh Susser (@joshsusser@neurodifferent.me)

The Devil's greatest trick was getting everyone to call LLMs "Generative AI" when the only thing they can do is cobble together derivative works. That's like calling a battery a generator.

neurodifferent.me

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Google might already be replacing some Ad sales jobs with AI

When AI can make assets and text for ads, you don't need humans to do it anymore.

arstechnica.com

IMHO Google has two major problems:

1. the balkanisation of the world wide web. The times when Google found all important stuff in a whiffy are long gone, because sites like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and so on are like the Hotel California: you check in, but never check out. Visibility on the normal internet without being logged in is abysmal at best, so the Google bot does not see much. Nowadays often specific Subreddits lead better to certain answers than Google does.
2. ChatGPT happened unexpected for Google. Suddenly AI chat bots became the next big thing, and Google had none such thing. Now Google is playing here the catching up game, trying to achieve in months what OpenAI did probably in years. So of course Google's AI Bard sucks.

 

[Kokoro Fasching]

Josh Susser (@joshsusser@neurodifferent.me)

The Devil's greatest trick was getting everyone to call LLMs "Generative AI" when the only thing they can do is cobble together derivative works. That's like calling a battery a generator.

neurodifferent.me

Amazon.com

 

[Noodles]

Amazon.com

Not one this large (or expensive), but Inhave been considering getting something like this to run Christmas lights, because we have only one outside outlet, out back.

 

[Kalel]

The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

The lawsuit says ChatGPT “recites Times content verbatim.”

www.theverge.com

This is pretty big.. alot of these aI models are built from datamining the internet. if newyork times wins any sort of publications, news, articles of opinions could be wiped and they would need to builda new model around it... that would allow for subscriptions and licenses that can be removed....

if people use ai to generate content and ask questions it will formulate a response based on one set of information that is allowed at the time... this is dangerous.

all because someone wants to get paid for their work. which they should.

it's a difficult question.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

In case you were interested - maybe not, the filing linked in Free's article already gives several examples - but here is a link to Exhibit J of the Times' lawsuit, giving over 100 examples of ChatGPT/Copilot just reproducing substantial portions of Times articles upon demand.

A few weeks ago there was a big case brought against OpenAI by several authors whose books were used to train ChatGPT, and their case failed in large part because they couldn't provide proof of ChatGPT reciting their works word-for-word to users. If that was the only thing that held them back, the Times' lawsuit has that base extremely covered in its own lawsuit.

 

[Essence Lumin]

In case you were interested - maybe not, the filing linked in Free's article already gives several examples - but here is a link to Exhibit J of the Times' lawsuit, giving over 100 examples of ChatGPT/Copilot just reproducing substantial portions of Times articles upon demand.

Yeah, that seems to pretty blatantly violate copyright law, but of course IANAL.

Here is an article about the legal concept of fair use and four elements that come into play.

Research Guides: Copyright: Applying Fair Use

A guide to copyright law as it relates to academic research, teaching, and publication. Understanding and Applying Fair Use

guides.nyu.edu

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

There's also a kind of - I don't think you can call it "fraud", but definitely dishonesty on the part of OpenAI on how it got the NYT materials to train ChatGPT with. From the sound of it they never had an arrangement with the Times, or even a subscription that would let them access articles like a customer. Instead they took advantage of the way news sites like the Times expose themselves to search engines - search engine bots tend to have free access to the entirety of even paywalled news articles so that when someone does a search, the article can be found to be relevant and appear on the list of search results. The idea is that a link to the article shows up along with a sentence or two so that a user can see the context, and then if the user decides it's relevant they click the link to go to the news website and actually read the article. At least, that's the way the whole thing is intended to work.

It sounds like OpenAI created a scraper bot to gather training material from sites like the NYT and disguised it as a search engine bot so that it would have free access, and then instead of just collecting a snippet they just downloaded the entire article and added it to the training data. It's not illegal, but it's shady. And then on top of it it sounds like OpenAI deliberately stripped copyright and TOC statements and notices from the articles it scraped before adding them to the pool, which...IANAL either, but that seems to show a conscious and willful effort to thwart copyright restrictions doesn't it?

 

[Free]

AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans

Brands are turning to hyper-realistic, AI-generated influencers for promotions.

arstechnica.com

Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.

Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media—despite the fact that she is entirely fictional.

Aitana is a “virtual influencer” created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy.

Their emergence has led to worry from human influencers their income is being cannibalized and under threat from digital rivals. That concern is shared by people in more established professions that their livelihoods are under threat from generative AI—technology that can spew out humanlike text, images and code in seconds.

But those behind the hyper-realistic AI creations argue they are merely disrupting an overinflated market.

All you real influencers cost too much!

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Michael Cohen Says He Gave Fake Cases to His Lawyers Thanks to AI

The bogus citations landed him in hot water when they were used in a motion to a Manhattan federal judge.

www.thedailybeast.com

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

FTC offers $25,000 prize for detecting AI-enabled voice cloning

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has started accepting submissions for its Voice Cloning Challenge, a public competition with a $25,000 top prize for ideas that protect consumers from the danger of AI-enabled voice cloning for fraudulent activity.

www.bleepingcomputer.com

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has started accepting submissions for its Voice Cloning Challenge, a public competition with a $25,000 top prize for ideas that protect consumers from the danger of AI-enabled voice cloning for fraudulent activity.

The Challenge was announced in mid-November in an effort to find ways to counter the misuse of voice cloning technology as it becomes more sophisticated due to the improvement of text-to-speech with the help of artificial intelligence.

AI can be used to clone someone's voice by analyzing an audio clip of the target speaking to extract unique vocal characteristics and then using the training data to generate new speech.

 

[Noodles]

Clone the FTC President's voice.

Fake a call to every number at FTC where the FTC President says "we are cancelling the AI Voice Challenge thing."

Win win. Or something.