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""ChatGPT may have better syntax than humans, but it's shallow on research and critical thinking," said Lauren Goodlad, a professor of English and comparative literature at Rutgers University and the chair of its Critical Artificial Intelligence initiative. She said she understands where concern about the tool is coming from but that - at least at the college level - the type and caliber of written tasks that ChatGPT can offer does not replace critical thinking and human creativity. "These are statistical models," she said. "And so they favor probability, as in they are trained on data, and the only reason they work as well as they do is that they are looking for probable responses to a prompt.""

"The intriguing echo of Eliza in thinking about ChatGPT is that people regard it as magical even though they know how it works - as a "stochastic parrot" (in the words of Timnit Gebru, a well-known researcher) or as a machine for "hi-tech plagiarism" (Noam Chomsky). But actually we do not know the half of it yet - not the CO2 emissions incurred in training its underlying language model or the carbon footprint of all those delighted interactions people are having with it. Or, pace Chomsky, that the technology only exists because of its unauthorised appropriation of the creative work of millions of people that just happened to be lying around on the web? What's the business model behind these tools? And so on. Answer: we don't know."

""We believe the government should introduce legislation that ensures commercial images are labelled with a logo where any part of the body, including its proportions and skin tone, are digitally altered," its report says. Meanwhile, it says dermal fillers should be made prescription-only substances, in line with Botox, and there should be minimum training standards for providers."

"There's a similar problem in artificial intelligence: The people who develop AI are increasingly having problems explaining how it works and determining why it has the outputs it has. Deep neural networks (DNN)-made up of layers and layers of processing systems trained on human-created data to mimic the neural networks of our brains-often seem to mirror not just human intelligence but also human inexplicability."

"KataGo's world-class AI learned Go by playing millions of games against itself. But that still isn't enough experience to cover every possible scenario, which leaves room for vulnerabilities from unexpected behavior. "KataGo generalizes well to many novel strategies, but it does get weaker the further away it gets from the games it saw during training," says Gleave. "Our adversary has discovered one such 'off-distribution' strategy that KataGo is particularly vulnerable to, but there are likely many others.""

"Getty points to images produced by Stable Diffusion which contain its copyright watermark, suggesting that Stable Diffusion has ingested and is reproducing copyrighted material without permission (Stability AI has not yet commented publicly on the lawsuit). The same level of evidence is harder to come by when examining ChatGPT's text output, but there is no doubt that it has been trained on copyrighted material. OpenAI will be hoping that its text generation is covered by "fair use", a provision in copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material for "transformative" purposes. That idea will probably one day be tested in court."

"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 promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy amongst professional designers following claims that it was at least partially created using generative AI. Illustrator Katria Raden flagged the image on X (formerly Twitter) last week, claiming that the image of the spiraling clock in the background "is giving all the AI telltale signs, like things randomly turning into meaningless squiggles" - a reference to the artifacts sometimes left behind by AI-image generators. The creative community is concerned that AI image generators are being trained on their work without consent and could be used to replace human artists. Disney previously received backlash regarding its use of generative AI in another Marvel series, Secret Invasion, despite the studio insisting that using AI tools didn't reduce roles for real designers on the project."

"Sixty years after her death, Édith Piaf's voice will be re-created using AI to narrate her biopic. As reported by Variety, Warner Music Group (WMG) has partnered with the Piaf estate to produce the feature-length film Edith. Artificial intelligence has been trained to replicate Piaf's voice by feeding it hundreds of voice clips, with WMG promising the resultant re-creation will "further enhance the authenticity and emotional impact of her story"."

"The lawsuit accused Anthropic of infringing the publishers' copyrights by copying their lyrics without permission as part of the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet to train Claude to respond to human prompts. The publishers also say that Claude illegally reproduces the lyrics by request, and in response to "a whole range of prompts that do not seek Publishers' lyrics", including "requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter"."

"Green Light uses machine learning systems to comb through Maps data to calculate the amount of traffic congestion present at a given light, as well as the average wait times of vehicles stopped there. That information is then used to train AI models that can autonomously optimize the traffic timing at that intersection, reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there. It's all part of Google's goal to help its partners collectively reduce their carbon emissions by a gigaton by 2030."

"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. "

"ow, legal redress is all very well, but it's usually beyond the resources of working artists. And lawsuits are almost always retrospective, after the damage has been done. It's sometimes better, as in rugby, to "get your retaliation in first". Which is why the most interesting news of the week was that a team of researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a tool to enable artists to fight back against permissionless appropriation of their work by corporations. Appropriately, it's called Nightshade and it "lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways" - dogs become cats, cars become cows, and who knows what else? (Boris Johnson becoming piglet, with added grease perhaps?) It's a new kind of magic. And the good news is that corporations might find it black. Or even deadly."

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."

"After "social engineering" efforts using personal details to target staff were uncovered, badges no longer carry last names, clean-desk policies are far more strictly enforced and the processing and communication of sensitive information is now subject to higher bars of regular mandatory training."

"Given that, isn't it interesting that the one thing nobody talks about at the moment is the environmental impact of the vast amount of computing needed to train and operate LLMs? A world that is dependent on them might be good for business but it would certainly be bad for the planet. Maybe that's what Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the outfit that created ChatGPT, had in mind when he observed that "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies"."

"Ege Gürdeniz: There are two components to Artificial Intelligence (AI) bias. The first is an AI application making biased decisions regarding certain groups of people. This could be ethnicity, religion, gender, and so on. To understand that we first need to understand how AI works and how it's trained to complete specific tasks."

""The face jumped out at me as being fake," said DiResta, a veteran researcher who has studied Russian disinformation campaigns and anti-vaccine conspiracies. To her trained eye, these anomalies were red flags that Ramsey's photo had likely been created by artificial intelligence."

"This new paper asked professionals to write realistic memos, strategy documents and policies. The ones who were given ChatGPT completed tasks 37% faster, and their average writing quality increased as well. All of this is without added training or extensive experience using ChatGPT (which I found makes a huge difference)."

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."