Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"A POPULAR news outlet has been publishing articles written by AI since November, keeping it on the down low. Tech media site CNET has been publishing the articles since November, and lots of readers don't seem to have noticed."

"Similarly to how voice cloning raises fears about the consequences of its potential misuse, increasingly many people worry that the proliferation of AI technology will put professionals' livelihoods at risk. At Eleven, we see a future in which voice actors are able to license their voices to train speech models for specific use, in exchange for fees. Clients and studios will still gladly feature professional voice talent in their projects and using AI will simply contribute to faster turnaround times and greater freedom to experiment and establish direction in early development. The technology will change how spoken audio is designed and recorded but the fact that voice actors no longer need to be physically present for every session really gives them the freedom to be involved in more projects at any one time, as well as to truly immortalize their voices."

"The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing "content creators," and algorithmically manipulated junk. It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life - all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators."

"Yet despite much of the content appearing to break TikTok's rules, which explicitly ban misogyny and copycat accounts, the platform appears to have done little to limit Tate's spread or ban the accounts responsible. Instead, it has propelled him into the mainstream - allowing clips of him to proliferate, and actively promoting them to young users."

"The brochure also advertised "Optional Demographic Profiling Facial analysis algorithms", including "gender, race/ethnicity, age" profiling. A second, Italian-based, company was also cited on Hikvision's website as offering racial profiling. The company removed both claims from its website following an inquiry from the Guardian, and said the technology had never been sold in the UK. The document, it said, detailed the "potential application of our cameras, with technology built independently by FaiceTech and other partners"."

"The role of AI writing systems as drafting buddies is a big departure from how writers typically get help, yet so far it is their biggest selling point and use case. Most writing tools available today will do some drafting for you, either by continuing where you left off or responding to a more specific instruction. SudoWrite, a popular AI writing tool for novelists, does all of these, with options to "write" where you left off, "describe" a highlighted noun, or "brainstorm" ideas based on a situation you describe. Systems like Jasper.ai or Lex will complete your paragraph or draft copy based on instructions, and Laika is similar but more focused on fiction and drama. "

"Growth, then, is the animating ideal behind the platforms these companies build, and 'persuasive technology' is the means of achieving this. The research this technology is built on draws on everything from dopamine studies to behavioural psychology and addiction analysis. Features galore have emerged to keep our attention, from the endless scroll to dark patterns, but one is more important than all others, according to Fisher: recommendation algorithms."

"TikTok's algorithm is famously effective, yet hard to study. As part of the Guardian's special series on the platform's explosive rise, we tested how the algorithm treats different users. We wondered what would happen if three people - with varying ages, backgrounds, and familiarity with the platform - created new accounts and recorded what they saw."

"Tristan Harris presents on 1) why humans as a species are vulnerable to technology, 2) why it's so hard to solve the issues of social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and exponential tech, and 3) what it will take to come together to avoid these existential threats."

"The main rationale for increasing state surveillance was to tackle the pandemic effectively to save people's lives. Yet, states are not enthusiastic about abandoning these digital tools, even though the pandemic is winding down. Instead, they are determined to preserve their surveillance capacities under the pretext of national security or preparation for future pandemics. In the face of increasing state surveillance, however, we should thoroughly discuss the risk of digital authoritarianism and the possible use of surveillance technologies to violate privacy, silence political opposition, and oppress minorities. For example, South Korea's sophisticated contact tracing technology that involves surveillance camera footage, cell-phone location data, and credit card purchases has disclosed patients' personal information, such as nationality. It raised privacy concerns, particularly for ethnic minorities, and underlined the risk of technology-enabled ethnic mapping and discrimination."

"People have been censored or blocked from the platform because their names sounded too fake. Ads for clothing disabled people we removed buy algorithms that believed they were breaking the rules and promoting medical devices. The Vienna Tourist Board had to move to adult content friendly site OnlyFans to share works of art from their museum after Facebook removed photos of paintings. Words that have rude popular meanings but other more specific definitions in certain circles - like "hoe" amongst gardeners, or "cock" amongst chicken farmers or gun enthusiasts - can land people in the so-called "Facebook jail" for days or even weeks."

"But by far the most immediate danger is the role that AI data analysis and generation plays in spreading disinformation and extremism on social media. This technology powers bots and amplification algorithms. These have played a direct role in fomenting conflict in many countries. They are helping to intensify racism, conspiracy theories, political extremism and a plethora of violent, irrationalist movements."

"Twitter has admitted it amplifies more tweets from rightwing politicians and news outlets than content from leftwing sources. The social media platform examined tweets from elected officials in seven countries - the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan. It also studied whether political content from news organisations was amplified on Twitter, focusing primarily on US news sources such as Fox News, the New York Times and BuzzFeed."

"The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) unveiled a 30-point draft proposal for "algorithm recommendation management regulations" that would directly affect companies including ByteDance, Tencent Holdings and Kuaishou Technology. The rules would forbid practices that "encourage addiction or high consumption", as well as any activities that endanger national security or disrupt social and economic order."

"Twitter's image cropping algorithm prefers younger, slimmer faces with lighter skin, an investigation into algorithmic bias at the company has found. The finding, while embarrassing for the company, which had previously apologised to users after reports of bias, marks the successful conclusion of Twitter's first ever "algorithmic bug bounty"."

"In the last year, Facebook adjusted some of the most fundamental rules about what gets posted on its platform, halting algorithmic recommendations of political groups, banning lies about vaccines and removing a number of high-profile figures for spreading misinformation and hate - including Donald Trump. But researchers say the social media platform is not enforcing those policies as effectively when it comes to misinformation in Spanish - a blind spot that may prove deadly as health lies spread through the most vulnerable populations during the global vaccine effort."

"Bitcoin mining - the process in which a bitcoin is awarded to a computer that solves a complex series of algorithms - is a deeply energy-intensive process. "Mining" bitcoin involves solving complex math problems in order to create new bitcoins. Miners are rewarded in bitcoin. Earlier in bitcoin's relatively short history - the currency was created in 2009 - one could mine bitcoin on an average computer. But the way bitcoin mining has been set up by its creator (or creators - no one really knows for sure who created it) is that there is a finite number of bitcoins that can be mined: 21m. The more bitcoin that is mined, the harder the algorithms that must be solved to get a bitcoin become."

"My job was to use technology to make the low-level content moderators' work more efficient. For example, we created a tool that allowed them to throw a video clip into our database and search for similar content. When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn't understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don't understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin."

"The point of creating this vast portfolio of digital gun art is to feed an algorithm made to detect a firearm as soon as a security camera catches it being drawn by synthetically creating tens of thousands of ways each gun may appear. Arcarithm is one of several companies developing automated active shooter detection technology in the hopes of selling it to schools, hotels, entertainment venues and the owners of any location that could be the site of one of America's 15,000 annual gun murders and 29,000 gun injuries."

"The paper, co-authored by researchers inside and outside Google, contended that technology companies could do more to ensure AI systems aimed at mimicking human writing and speech do not exacerbate historical gender biases and use of offensive language, according to a draft copy seen by Reuters."