Group items tagged

"According to tweets from DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, however, this time AlphaGo really did make mistakes. The AI "thought it was doing well, but got confused on move 87," Hassabis said, later clarifying that it made a mistake on move 79 but only realized its error by 87. AlphaGo adjusts its playing style based on its evaluation of how the game is progressing."

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans will be forced to work, play, and learn from home for the foreseeable future. Such a massive shift will lean not only on shaky and expensive U.S. broadband networks, but popular teleconferencing programs that often don't quite work as advertised. Zoom in particular has seen a flood of new users, and the company's stock has jumped roughly 20 percent since the COVID-19 outbreak began. But as new users flock to the platform for work, they should be aware of a few things: namely, the company's data collection, its shaky privacy policy, and the fact your boss knows when you're not giving them your undivided attention."

"They still have far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it - making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing. But the basic existence of that technology is years old, at this point. And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal - not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it."

"Parents tell Guardian Australia that "playing" on Omegle is something kids do at parties, at sleepovers. It just takes one of the group to have a screen with internet access and before long they are chatting to strangers all over the world."

"Racists on the notorious troll site 4chan are using a powerful new and free AI-powered image generator service offered by Microsoft to create antisemitic propaganda, according to posts reviewed by Bellingcat. Users of 4chan, which has frequently hosted hate speech and played home to posts by mass shooters, tasked Bing Image Creator to create photo-realistic antisemitic caricatures of Jews and, in recent days, shared images created by the platform depicting Orthodox men preparing to eat a baby, carrying migrants across the US border (the latter a nod to the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory), and committing the 9/11 attacks."

"Data is sometimes compared to oil, but a better analogy might be coal. Coal was the fuel that powered the steam engine. It propelled the capitalist reorganisation of manufacturing from an artisanal to an industrial basis, from the workshop to the factory, in the 19th century. Data has played a comparable role. It has propelled the capitalist reorganisation of the internet, banishing the remnants of the research network and perfecting the profit engine."

"To find out, we searched Hansard for parliamentary speeches made by Australian MPs in 2020 and asked ChatGPT to opine on the same subjects - ranging from the role the arts play in society to the government's obligation to provide good dental care."

"On Tuesday, security firm Cleafy reported that TeaBot was back. This time, the trojan spread through a malicious app called QR Code & Barcode Scanner, which as the name suggests, allowed users to interact with QR codes and barcodes. The app had more than 10,000 installations before Cleafy researchers notified Google of the fraudulent activity and Google removed it."

"The collapse of SVB was the second-largest bank failure in the history of the United States. The largest, Washington Mutual in 2008, took place over the course of eight months. SVB's collapse played out in barely two days. Anxious Twitter posts and WhatsApp exchanges, coupled with the ease of access that online banking provides, are seen by analysts as a serious catalyst for the current crisis. Experts suggest that in the social media age, the psychological behaviour behind a bank run - mass fear from depositors of losing their savings - may be amplified and go viral quicker than bank officers and regulators can successfully respond."

"The fact that flow is not only rare, but draining; and that taking a break to scroll a different screen or play a game on your phone can be restorative, is proof of the need for nuance. The moralising over productivity and screentime is unhelpful when it comes to finding solutions - but highly profitable as the boom in (useless) blue-light glasses and "distraction-free" tech goes to show."

"And Israeli company Optimove is helping. It normally gathers customer data to create targeted online ads, but as a service to gambling companies it has trained its AI to flag the online players who are most at risk.  It analyzes the behavior patterns characteristic of gambling addicts, which include the hours of the day and night when they place bets, the time they spend on the betting site, and how much they keep on playing to 'chase their losses'."

"Cory blames the gang who trafficked her daughter for destroying her life. She also blames Instagram, which she believes played a critical role in her daughter's sex trafficking. "If Instagram didn't exist, this wouldn't have happened to my daughter," she says. "Instagram is why it was so easy [for these people] to do this.""

"That's why the best systems may come from a combination of AI and human work; we can play to the machine's strengths, Ilievski says. But when we want to compare AI and the human mind, it's important to remember "there is no conclusive research providing evidence that humans and machines approach puzzles in a similar vein", he says. In other words, understanding AI may not give us any direct insight into the mind, or vice versa."

"As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI's benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we'll run out of things to do (even if they don't look like "real jobs" to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games. Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable."

"Exposure to false and inflammatory content is remarkably low, with just 1% of Twitter users accounting for 80% of exposure to dubious websites during the 2016 U.S. election. This is heavily concentrated among a small fringe of users actively seeking it out. Examples: 6.3% of YouTube users were responsible for 79.8% of exposure to extremist channels from July to December 2020, 85% of vaccine-sceptical content was consumed by less than 1% of US citizens in the 2016-2019 period. Conventional wisdom blames platform algorithms for spreading misinformation. However, evidence suggests user preferences play an outsized role. For instance, a mere 0.04% of YouTube's algorithmic recommendations directed users to extremist content. It's tempting to draw a straight line between social media usage and societal ills. But studies rigorously designed to untangle cause and effect often come up short. "

"Roblox to give parents more control over children's activity after warnings over grooming Parents will be able to see who children interact with and ensure they cannot play games with graphic violence as report accuses company of lax safety controls"

"The mother of a teenager who killed himself after becoming obsessed with an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot now accuses its maker of complicity in his death. Megan Garcia filed a civil suit against Character.ai, which makes a customizable chatbot for role-playing, in Florida federal court on Wednesday, alleging negligence, wrongful death and deceptive trade practices. Her son Sewell Setzer III, 14, died in Orlando, Florida, in February. In the months leading up to his death, Setzer used the chatbot day and night, according to Garcia."

"First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the "10%" expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI's are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach "a country of geniuses in a datacenter"."

"Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a "dad's joke" on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. "The kids had a very good laugh," he says. "And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don't talk to others. "Scamming the scammers, if you like." The next day he called his team from the university's Cyber Security Hub in. There must be a better way than his "dad joke" method, he thought. And there had to be something smarter than a popular existing piece of technology - the Lennybot. Before Malcolm and Ibrahim, there was Lenny. Lenny is a doddery, old Australian man, keen for a rambling chat. He's achatbot, designed to troll telemarketers. With a thready voice, tinged with a slight whistle, Lenny repeats various phrases on loop. Each phrase kicks in after 1.5 seconds of silence, to mimic the rhythm of a conversation."

In today's interconnected digital world, AI plays a pivotal role in both spreading and combating misinformation. It is revolutionizing the way information is created and disseminated, particularly in discussions about migration. On one side, generative AI (genAI) technologies can be weaponized to produce and spread disinformation rapidly. False statistics, sensational narratives and deep-seated stereotypes can take root in public discourse, influencing perceptions and policies.