Group items tagged

"Generative artificial-intelligence tools are unproven and expensive to operate, requiring muscular servers with expensive chips that consume lots of power. Microsoft MSFT -0.43%decrease; red down pointing triangle , Google, Adobe and other tech companies investing in AI are experimenting with an array of tactics to make, market and charge for it. Microsoft has lost money on one of its first generative AI products, said a person with knowledge of the figures. It and Google are now launching AI-backed upgrades to their software with higher price tags. Zoom Video Communications ZM 1.79%increase; green up pointing triangle has tried to mitigate costs by sometimes using a simpler AI it developed in-house. Adobe and others are putting caps on monthly usage and charging based on consumption. "A lot of the customers I've talked to are unhappy about the cost that they are seeing for running some of these models," said Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon.com's cloud division, Amazon Web Services, speaking of the industry broadly. "

"Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate. Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction - and the results were unexpectedly haunting."

"The Google owner, Alphabet, has dropped its promise not to use artificial intelligence for purposes such as developing weapons and surveillance tools. The US technology company said on Tuesday, just before it reported lower-than-forecast earnings, that it had updated its ethical guidelines around AI, and they no longer referred to not pursuing technologies that could "cause or are likely to cause overall harm". Google's AI head, Demis Hassabis, said the guidelines were being overhauled in a changing world and that AI should protect "national security"."

"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 camera never lies. Except, of course, it does - and seemingly more often with each passing day. In the age of the smartphone, digital edits on the fly to improve photos have become commonplace, from boosting colours to tweaking light levels. Now, a new breed of smartphone tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are adding to the debate about what it means to photograph reality. Google's latest smartphones released last week, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, go a step further than devices from other companies. They are using AI to help alter people's expressions in photographs. It's an experience we've all had: one person in a group shot looks away from the camera or fails to smile. Google's phones can now look through your photos to mix and match from past expressions, using machine learning to put a smile from a different photo of them into the picture. Google calls it Best Take. "

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"Google announced on Thursday that it would refine and retool its summaries of search results generated by artificial intelligence, posting a blog explaining why the feature was returning bizarre and inaccurate answers that included telling people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce. The company will reduce the scope of searches that will return an AI-written summary."

"More than 150 artificial intelligence researchers have signed an open letter calling for future research in the field to focus on maximising the social benefit of AI, rather than simply making it more capable. The signatories, which include researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, MIT and Harvard as well as staff at Google, Amazon and IBM, celebrate progress in the field, but warn that "potential pitfalls" must be avoided."

"Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world. Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies - including Elon Musk's X - are also signing on to the accord."

"Google has put a temporary block on its new artificial intelligence model producing images of people after it portrayed German second world war soldiers and Vikings as people of colour. The tech company said it would stop its Gemini model generating images of people after social media users posted examples of images generated by the tool that depicted some historical figures - including popes and the founding fathers of the US - in a variety of ethnicities and genders."

"Writing in the journal Science, Summerfield and colleagues from Google DeepMind report how they built the "Habermas Machine" - an AI system named after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The system works by taking written views of individuals within a group and using them to generate a set of group statements designed to be acceptable to all. Group members can then rate these statements, a process that not only trains the system but allows the statement with the greatest endorsement to be selected."

"The Meta boss is gearing up to unleash AI tools to allow advertisers to fully create and target campaigns on his social media sites, prompting fears of the "death of creativity" - and widespread job cuts at agencies. Last week it emerged that these tools are to be rolled out by the end of next year, with Zuckerberg describing the capability in a recent interview as a "redefinition of the category of advertising. You don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out," he said last month, in comments that appear to render much of the advertising industry obsolete."

"As Tremblay notes, a major problem for AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard is their tendency to confidently state incorrect information as fact. The systems frequently "hallucinate" - that is, make up information - because they are essentially autocomplete systems."

"A complex problem that took microbiologists a decade to get to the bottom of has been solved in just two days by a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool. Professor José R Penadés and his team at Imperial College London had spent years working out and proving why some superbugs are immune to antibiotics. He gave "co-scientist" - a tool made by Google - a short prompt asking it about the core problem he had been investigating and it reached the same conclusion in 48 hours."

"Google's goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years. Google said electricity consumption by data centres and supply chain emissions were the primary cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had risen 13% compared with the previous year, hitting 14.3m metric tons."

"The two titans leading the pack are Google and Microsoft. The first battle? A new domain in artificial intelligence called "Deep Learning.""

"Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams.8 8. April Glaser, Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,Slate (Jan. 18, 2018), https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html (explaining that major platforms have hired or have announced plans to hire thousands, in some cases more than ten thousand, new content moderators).On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process.9 9. Tom Simonite, AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, But Can It Finish?,Wired (Dec. 18, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-started-cleaning-facebook-can-it-finish/.Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don't moderate).10 10. Gohmert Press Release, supra note 7 ("Social media companies enjoy special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, protections not shared by other media. Instead of acting like the neutral platforms they claim to be in order obtain their immunity, these companies have turned Section 230 into a license to potentially defraud and defame with impunity… Since there still appears to be no sincere effort to stop this disconcerting behavior, it is time for social media companies to be liable for any biased and unethical impropriety of their employees as any other media company. If these companies want to continue to act like a biased medium and publish their own agendas to the detriment of others, they need to be held accountable."); Eric Johnson, Silicon Valley's Self-Regulating Days "Probably Should Be" Over, Nancy Pelosi Says, Vox (Apr. 11, 2019), https:/

"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically-now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred.1 1. Zachary Laub, Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons, Council on Foreign Rel. (Jun. 7, 2019), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons.Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints.2 2. Tony Romm, Republicans Accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of Bias. Democrats Called the Hearing 'Dumb.', Wash. Post (Jul. 17, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/17/republicans-accused-facebook-google-twitter-bias-democrats-called-hearing-dumb/?utm_term=.895b34499816.And that's not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect."

"A Google employee named Blake Lemoine was put on leave recently after claiming that one of Google's artificial-intelligence language models, called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications), is sentient. He went public with his concerns, sharing his text conversations with LaMDA. At one point, Lemoine asks, "What does the word 'soul' mean to you?" LaMDA answers, "To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself." "I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt," Lemoine explained, citing his religious beliefs. "Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?""

"In a paper titled "Towards Causal Representation Learning," researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila), and Google Research discuss the challenges arising from the lack of causal representations in machine learning models and provide directions for creating artificial intelligence systems that can learn causal representations."

""AI can pick up missed cues and suggest nudges to bridge the gap in emotional intelligence and communication styles. It can identify optimal ways to discuss common problems and alleviate common misunderstandings based on these different priorities and ways of viewing the world. We could be looking at a different gender dynamics in a decade.""