"Now, as more people use AI to produce and publish content, an obvious question arises: What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content?
A group of researchers from the UK and Canada have looked into this very problem and recently published a paper on their work in the open access journal arXiv. What they found is worrisome for current generative AI technology and its future: "We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models.""
"Needless to say, AI-generated accidents and AI-generated artworks are viewed differently under the law. As far as art goes, be it a video, an image, a script, a song, or any medium that the AI can work with, the (US) law is pretty straightforward - According to copyright law, only humans can be granted copyrights. If it's created by AI, nobody can claim ownership of it or copyright it."
"Researchers involved in a recent study trained an artificial intelligence (AI) model to diagnose type 2 diabetes in patients after six to 10 seconds of listening to their voice.
Canadian medical researchers trained the machine-learning AI to recognise 14 vocal differences in the voice of someone with type 2 diabetes compared to someone without diabetes.
The auditory features that the AI focussed on included slight changes in pitch and intensity, which human ears cannot distinguish. This was then paired with basic health data gathered by the researchers, such as age, sex, height and weight.
Researchers believe that the AI model will drastically lower the cost for people with diabetes to be diagnosed."
"Word of the layoffs comes over a year after the company made a big hiring push, doubling its size to over 500 people. Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom that has stuffed chatbots into every corner of the tech industry, including coding. That presents clear challenges for a personal coding help forum, as developers get comfortable with AI coding assistance and the very tools that do that are blended into products they use.
AI-generated coding answers have also posed problems for the company over the past year. The company issued a temporary ban on users generating answers with the help of an AI chatbot in December last year, but its alleged under-enforcement led to a months-long strike among moderators that was resolved in August; the ban is still in place today. Stack Overflow also announced it would start charging AI companies to train on its site. "
"The researchers found that "increasing machine and AI readership … motivates firms to prepare filings that are more friendly to machine parsing and processing". So far, so predictable. But there's more: "firms with high expected machine downloads manage textual sentiment and audio emotion in ways catered to machine and AI readers""
"At Imperial College London, Murray Shanahan and colleagues are working on a way around this problem using an old, unfashionable technique called symbolic AI. "Basically this meant an engineer labelled everything for the AI," says Shanahan. His idea is to combine this with modern machine learning.
Symbolic AI never took off, because manually describing everything quickly proved overwhelming. Modern AI has overcome that problem by using neural networks, which learn their own representations of the world around them. "They decide what is salient," says Marta Garnelo, also at Imperial College."
"Seeing an opportunity, Franklin decided to take advantage. On 9 July, the company said that it would begin to support digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like any other employee.
"Today Lattice is making AI history," Franklin pronounced. "We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access and even a manager. Just as any person would be."
The pushback was swift - and, in many cases, brutal, particularly on LinkedIn, which is generally not known for its savage engagement like X (formerly known as Twitter).
"This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company," said Sawyer Middeleer, an executive at a firm that uses AI to help with sales research, on LinkedIn. "Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it implies that you view humans simply as 'resources' to be optimized and measured against machines. It's the exact opposite of a work environment designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.""
"This is the broad goal of a new field known as embodied AI, and Li's not the only one embracing it. It overlaps with robotics, since robots can be the physical equivalent of embodied AI agents in the real world, and reinforcement learning - which has always trained an interactive agent to learn using long-term rewards as incentive. But Li and others think embodied AI could power a major shift from machines learning straightforward abilities, like recognizing images, to learning how to perform complex humanlike tasks with multiple steps, such as making an omelet."
"A boarding prep school in West Sussex, Cottesmore School, has made history by appointing an AI robot, Abigail Bailey, as its "principal headteacher". Created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence developer, the robot is designed to support the school's headmaster, Tom Rogerson, by providing advice on various issues such as supporting staff members and helping pupils with ADHD. Abigail Bailey functions similarly to the AI service ChatGPT, where users ask questions and receive answers from the chatbot's algorithms.
The AI principal has been developed with extensive knowledge in machine learning and educational management, allowing it to analyze vast amounts of data. According to Mr. Rogerson, having the AI robot to assist him is calming and reassuring. He considers the role of a school leader to be lonely and believes that having an entity to rely on is invaluable. He also intends to make the publicly-available online robot accessible to state school headteachers."
"He's right to be annoyed - these tracks are a violation of an artist's creativity and personhood - and the fakes are noticeably more sophisticated than those from a few years ago, when Jay-Z was made to rap Shakespeare (this is the kind of humour beloved of AI dorks). The tech will continue to improve to the point where the differences become indistinguishable. Perhaps lazy artists will soon use AI to generate their latest album, not so much phoning it in as texting it. AI composes its music by regurgitating things it's been trained to listen to in vast song databases, and that's not so different than the way human-composed pop music is recombined from prior influences. Producers, engineers, lyricists and all the other people who work behind a star could be usurped or at least have their value driven down by cheap AI tools."
"Over the years critics have pointed out their many shortcomings as well. Perhaps the biggest flaw of all is that the laws are vague. If machines become so human that we find it difficult to tell them and us apart, how will a machine tell the difference? Where does humanity end and artificial intelligence begin? And even if an AI can distinguish itself from a human being, we also cannot know what loopholes and reprogramming a robot is capable of. Surely an AI more clever than us could plan a way to access its core and bypass any of its existing limitations."
"Kellin Pelrine, an American player who is one level below the top amateur ranking, beat the machine by taking advantage of a previously unknown flaw that had been identified by another computer. But the head-to-head confrontation in which he won 14 of 15 games was undertaken without direct computer support.
The triumph, which has not previously been reported, highlighted a weakness in the best Go computer programs that is shared by most of today's widely used AI systems, including the ChatGPT chatbot created by San Francisco-based OpenAI.
The tactics that put a human back on top on the Go board were suggested by a computer program that had probed the AI systems looking for weaknesses. The suggested plan was then ruthlessly delivered by Pelrine."
"The company has called for Australian policymakers to promote "copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems".
The call for a fair use exception for AI systems is a view the company has expressed to the Australian government in the past, but the notion of an opt-out option for publishers is a new argument from Google."
"The president of Baidu, Ya-Qin Zhang, said in a statement: "As AI technology keeps advancing and the application of AI expands, we recognise the importance of joining the global discussion around the future of AI. Ensuring AI's safety, fairness and transparency should not be an afterthought but rather highly considered at the onset of every project or system we build.""
"The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as - or better than - the real thing.
Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. "
"
AI has better 'bedside manner' than some doctors, study finds
ChatGPT rated higher in quality and empathy of written advice, raising possibility of medical assistance role
Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
@hannahdev
Fri 28 Apr 2023 16.01 BST
ChatGPT appears to have a better 'bedside manner' than some doctors - at least when their written advice is rated for quality and empathy, a study has shown.
The findings highlight the potential for AI assistants to play a role in medicine, according to the authors of the work, who suggest such agents could help draft doctors' communications with patients. "The opportunities for improving healthcare with AI are massive," said Dr John Ayers, of the University of California San Diego."
"Most AI programs function like a "black box." "We know exactly what a model does but not why it has now specifically recognized that a picture shows a cat," said computer scientist Kristian Kersting of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany to the German-language newspaper Handelsblatt. That dilemma prompted Kersting-along with computer scientists Patrick Schramowski of the Technical University of Darmstadt and Björn Deiseroth, Mayukh Deb and Samuel Weinbach, all at the Heidelberg, Germany-based AI company Aleph Alpha-to introduce an algorithm called AtMan earlier this year. AtMan allows large AI systems such as ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney to finally explain their outputs."
"I have been working with generative AI and, even though I have been warning that these tools are improving rapidly, I did not expect them to really be improving that rapidly. On every dimension, Bing's AI, which does not actually represent a technological leap over ChatGPT, far outpaces the earlier AI - which is less than three months old! There are many larger, more capable models on their way in the coming months, and we are not really ready."
"A Belgian man recently died by suicide after chatting with an AI chatbot on an app called Chai, Belgian outlet La Libre reported.
The incident raises the issue of how businesses and governments can better regulate and mitigate the risks of AI, especially when it comes to mental health. The app's chatbot encouraged the user to kill himself, according to statements by the man's widow and chat logs she supplied to the outlet. When Motherboard tried the app, which runs on a bespoke AI language model based on an open-source GPT-4 alternative that was fine-tuned by Chai, it provided us with different methods of suicide with very little prompting. "
"AI is already here. This isn't some future, theoretical technology we are working on. AI machines are already among us. Take for example Microsoft's recent security robot demonstration. Called the K5, these autonomous machines stand 5 feet tall, weigh 300 pounds, and are equipped with HD cameras, sensors, alarms, Wi-Fi and - you guessed it - artificial intelligence. These machines have been programmed to recognize if something is out of place, like an injured employee or a potential trespasser. And as technology improves, the K5 will become more capable of recognizing even smaller discrepancies than humans can."