668 posts tagged with ai.
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Apple Intelligence and Privacy @ WWDC '24
Yesterday at WWDC 2024 Apple announced its long-anticipated machine learning effort, a Siri overhaul dubbed "Apple Intelligence." The new system employs LLMs and diffusion model image generation while attempting to maintain a uniquely high level of privacy by splitting queries across three tiers of increasing anonymity and capability: on device, private cloud compute servers, and anonymized opt-in-only ChatGPT calls. Ars coverage on Apple Intelligence, and the ChatGPT integration. [more inside]
I Built the World's Largest Translated Cuneiform Corpus using AI
TL;DR I used a custom-trained Large Language Model (T5) to create the world’s largest online corpus of translated cuneiform texts. It’s called the AICC (AI Cuneiform Corpus) and contains 130,000 AI translated texts from the CDLI and ORACC projects. [more inside]
How AI reduces the world to stereotypes
"Bias occurs in many algorithms and AI systems — from sexist and racist search results to facial recognition systems that perform worse on Black faces. Generative AI systems are no different. In an analysis of more than 5,000 AI images, Bloomberg found that images associated with higher-paying job titles featured people with lighter skin tones, and that results for most professional roles were male-dominated. A new Rest of World analysis shows that generative AI systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when it comes to national identities, too." CW: stereotyping of peoples, nations, cuisines, and more [more inside]
At the whim of 'brain one'
given the current discussions around ai and its impact on artistry and authorship, creating a film reliant on the technology is a controversial but inevitable move. however, the software that hustwit and dawes have built may just hit the sweet spot where human meets machine; where the algorithm works to respect the material and facilitate an artistic vision. from B–1 and the first
generative feature film. [more inside]
Why is there an AI Hype?
AI is an idea that began as a subfield of computer science, until it was so distorted that it popped, detaching itself from reality. Now, this orphaned concept has grown to a life of its own, as our discussion of AI eclipses any meaningful definition of it as a real, definable thing.
Exactly how stupid was what OpenAI did to Scarlett Johansson?
Here's Alex Brundle, interviewing one of the cars
Autonomous car racing is a bit of a mess. A slightly sarcastic overview of the first ever Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League event (previously)
AI-detic Memory
Microsoft held a live event today showcasing their vision of the future of the home PC (or "Copilot+ PC"), boasting longer battery life, better-standardized ARM processors, and (predictably) a whole host of new AI features built on dedicated hardware, from real-time translation to in-system assistant prompts to custom-guided image creation. Perhaps most interesting is the new "Recall" feature that records all on-screen activity securely on-device, allowing natural-language recall of all articles read, text written, and videos seen. It's just the first foray into a new era of AI PCs -- and Apple is expected to join the push with an expected partnership with OpenAI debuting at WWDC next month. In a tech world that has lately been defined by the smartphone, can AI make the PC cool again?
Long after we are gone, our data will be what remains of us
In this sense, the archival violence inflicted by Artificial Intelligence differs from that of a typical archive because the information stored within an AI system is, for all intents and purposes, a black box. It’s an archive built for a particular purpose, but inherently never meant to be seen—it is the apotheosis of information-as-exchange-value, the final untethering of reality from sense. The opaqueness of this archive returns us to the initial question of capitalism without humans, of an archive without a reader, of form without content. When we are gone, is it this form of control that will remain our record of existence? from An Archive at the End of the World
Procedural Artificial Narrative using Gen AI for Turn-Based Video Games
"This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs)." [more inside]
"this rat borg collective ended up [performing] better than single rats"
"Well, you seem like a person, but you're just a voice in a computer"
OpenAI unveils GPT-4o, a new flagship "omnimodel" capable of processing text, audio, and video. While it delivers big improvements in speed, cost, and reasoning ability, perhaps the most impressive is its new voice mode -- while the old version was a clunky speech --> text --> speech approach with tons of latency, the new model takes in audio directly and responds in kind, enabling real-time conversations with an eerily realistic voice, one that can recognize multiple speakers and even respond with sarcasm, laughter, and other emotional content of speech. Rumor has it Apple has neared a deal with the company to revamp an aging Siri, while the advance has clear implications for customer service, translation, education, and even virtual companions (or perhaps "lovers", as the allusions to Spike Jonze's Her, the Samantha-esque demo voice, and opening the door to mature content imply). Meanwhile, the offloading of most premium ChatGPT features to the free tier suggests something bigger coming down the pike.
3...2...1.... Fight!
Chatbot vs Chatbot The Chatbot Arena will randomly load two chatbots in answer to your prompt. You mark which one gives the better answer. The Arena uses these human responses to rank the top LLM chatbots on an ongoing basis. Over 1,000,000 prompts have been submitted and scored. [more inside]
Postmodern TVbox
AI has fostered a lot of mash-ups in various styles. Some guy named demonflyingfox has been turning popular animated and live-action series into colorized versions from the fifties. I'm not really doing it justice so check out Friends, The Simpsons, and SpongBob SquarePants among many others. [more inside]
Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry
Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism, goes on a deep, deep dive into AdVon, a fine purveyor of content slurry.
In AI, it’s easy to argue about philosophical questions over-much
So please, remember: there are a very wide variety of ways to care about making sure that advanced AIs don’t kill everyone. Fundamentalist Christians can care about this; deep ecologists can care about this; solipsists can care about this; people who have no interest in philosophy at all can care about this. Indeed, in many respects, these essays aren’t centrally about AI risk in the sense of “let’s make sure that the AIs don’t kill everyone” (i.e., “AInotkilleveryoneism”) – rather, they’re about a set of broader questions about otherness and control that arise in the context of trying to ensure that the future goes well more generally. from Otherness and control in the age of AGI by Joe Carlsmith [more inside]
The rise of the job-search bots
Is the Ottawa Food Bank really a must-visit vacation destination?
Keep truth human - take this short quiz from the Canadian Journalism Foundation to find out if you recognize AI generated, false news content.
Twitter AI says
Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree. "In a bizarre turn of events, NBA star Klay Thompson has been accused of vandalizing multiple houses with bricks in Sacramento. Authorities are investigating the claims after several individuals reported their houses being damaged, with windows shattered by bricks. Klay Thompson has not yet issued a statement regarding the accusations. The incidents have left the community shaken, but no injuries were reported. The motive behind the alleged vandalism remains unclear."
Airchat: Boring as hell
On Monday, I described Facebook as a “data holding pen for advertisers to harvest,” but it’s not just Facebook and it’s not just advertisers. Every social network — Reddit, Tumblr, X/Twitter, TikTok — is now primarily an AI training pool. Though, I’ve reached the point where I don’t even really care about that anymore. The real issue with Airchat is that it’s boring as hell. Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day critiques Airchat, a new “audio-first social network.” [more inside]
The Interdimensional Jukebox
Dune the Broadway Musical [Showtunes] -
Baby On Board [Barbershop] -
Carolina-O [Indie Country] -
Sabrosito Amor [Latin] -
Rising Sun Gospel [Soul] -
Allegro Consort in C [Classical] -
You Spilt a Coffee on my Dog [R&B] -
Potion Seller [60s Folk] -
I'm Not Your Star [Screamo] -
SNES Greensleeves [Chiptune] -
Syncopated Rhythms [Jazz] -
Tavern Serenades [Fiddle] -
My Tamagotchi died in '98 [Country Pop] -
Senna Tea Blues [Bluegrass] -
Unexpected Item in Bagging Area (A Cowboy's Lament) [Americana] -
Herb's Whisper [Hip-hop] -
Metropolis Pt. 3 [Prog metal] -
F**k You Elmo [Acoustic Guitar] -
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet [Orchestral] -
ムーンライト【.】【3】【1】[Vaporwave] -
Dreaming Miku [Vocaloid] -
The Deku Tree’s Decree [Broadway] -
Website on the Internet [50s A Capella] // Meet Udio — the most realistic AI music creation tool I’ve ever tried [more inside]
Powered by Techno-Guff
Autonomous car racing is a rapidly advancing field that combines cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), fast mobility stacks, innovative sensor technologies and edge computing to create high-performance vehicles that can perceive their surroundings, make decisions, and race competitively without human intervention. [more inside]
The Shape of Scents
On mapping olfaction, neuroscientist Jason Castro writes:
Our noses may turn out to be geometers not of the world’s fixed and invariant properties, but of its evolved and Earthly processes.
Levine mostly finds this amusing
OpenAI Training Bot Crawls 'World's Lamest Content Farm' 3 Million Times in One Day “If you were wondering what they're using to train GPT-5, well, now you know,” Levine wrote in his post.
"AI-powered relationship coaching for a new generation of lonely adults"
It was clear to Nyborg that apps such as Tinder were failing their users: designed to keep them coming back, rather than to find a partner and never return. In that moment, it wasn’t fear she felt but empathy. Through letters like this one she had learnt a lot about a particular group of Tinder’s users: those who were “incredibly lonely” ... When she quit, several investors reached out to Nyborg, asking if she planned to start another dating app. Instead Nyborg took a different turn. She began researching loneliness. The new app she came up with looked very different from Tinder. from The loneliness cure [Financial Times; ungated]
Scientific American November 1986
A fascinating glimpse of what was going on in the science world 38 years ago in the November 1986 issue of Scientific American and what has changed and what has remained the same: Voyager 2's visit to Uranus cover story and how a fix had to be made from Earth • Affordable housing problems - "The Shadow Market in Housing" • Learn about the Higgs boson long before it was found (RIP Peter Higgs) • Galileo, Bruno and the Inquisition • Computer Recreations - "Star Trek emerges from the underground to a place in the home-computer arcade" • The Amateur Scientist - "... experiments on three-dimensional vision" • All the 1986 ads, including "Texas Instruments brings the practical applications of AI to your business. Now." (p 15) [more inside]
Has Uploaded Intelligence been deleted? Or is it hiding on the web?
In September 2022, the first season of animated science fiction series Pantheon debuted on AMC+. By January of the following year, the series was cancelled and wiped from the streaming service, despite the completion of a season 2. [more inside]
Getting the Most Out of Yer Humans
The fine art of human prompt engineering: How to talk to a person like ChatGPT. "To maximize the value of interactions with human language models, much like optimizing prompts for AI (prompt engineering), consciously crafting prompts to fit a particular HLM can be crucial. Here are several prompting strategies that we have found useful when interacting with humans." [more inside]
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
The Internet is and always has been full of lies
Tomorrow's World
From the BBC Archives: Schoolchildren in 1966 Predict Life in the Year 2000 [6:17]
"If something's gone wrong with their nuclear bombs, I may be sort of coming back from hunting in a cave." "I don't like the idea of sort of getting up and finding you've got a cabbage pill to eat for breakfast or something." "Computers are taking over now, computers and automation. And in the year 2000, there just won't be enough jobs to go around, and the only jobs there will be will be for people with high IQ who can work computers and such things, and other people are just not going to have jobs." "I don't think I'll still be on Earth. I think I'll be under the sea."[transcript, via Tildes] [more inside]
“I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.” (BOOOO)
Ted Gioia: "Tech leaders gathered in Austin for the South-by-Southwest conference a few days ago. There they showed a video boasting about the wonders of new AI technology. And the audience started booing." [Xitter link]
Gioia argues that users are becoming much more wary, not only about "AI," but about tech in general. [more inside]
AI futures, meet Net Zero futures
The IPCC, the world authority on climate science, advises we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than half by 2030, and get emissions down to net zero by 2050, if we want a chance of limiting average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. Actually, we've already crossed that threshhold, kind of.
Information Technology itself may contribute as much as 5% to global greenhouse gas emissions. Internationally recognised methods and standards for assessing the environmental impacts of AI don't yet exist, although they will.
Are AI revolution futures compatible with net zero futures? Are science and technology still on the same team? [more inside]
When artificial intelligence goes wrong
Well isn't this a fine kettle of fish. Is the orchestra the audience? What's in her lap?lap? Is it the latest Birkin bag, or a camera case...Queensland Orchestra said they wanted to use artificial intelligence to be "innovative".
What if generative AI, but nucular?
Tech firms and Silicon Valley billionaires have been pouring money into nuclear energy for years, pitching the sustainable power source as crucial to the green transition. Now they have another incentive to promote it: artificial intelligence.
Disabled Users vs Jakob Nielsen’s “Accessibility has failed”
Jakob Nielsen has a very long history in web UX design. His most recent post claims Accessibility Has Failed: Try Generative UI = Individualized UX. Accessibility pioneer Adrian Roselli summarizes the responses from many disabled web designers with equally long histories at Jakob Has Jumped the Shark. [more inside]
"We're at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users"
Are We Watching the Internet Die? (Edward Zitron's 'Where's Your Ed At' newsletter)
Laurie Anderson is always a few years ahead
Laurie Anderson has been working and playing with a model of her late husband for years. The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”
sure that the truest thing you know is what is getting your attention
daniel schmactenberger on the metacrisis. [slyt] "why is it that no literally no country, no company, in the world wants climate change. no nobody is like climate change is the world that I want, but we're orienting to it so fast and we can't stop and nobody can stop it because we all want stuff that requires energy that is driving that thing and nobody wants species Extinction and nobody really wants to live in a world with automated AI weapons but we're all racing to build them so what is actually driving the world to a world that literally nobody wants I think there's a deeper analysis of that and the market is a part of it" [more inside]
If It Ain't Woke, Don't Fix It
As we have seen before with other image models like DALLE-3, the AI is taking your request and then modifying it to create a prompt. Image models have a bias towards too often producing the most common versions of things and lacking diversity (of all kinds) and representation, so systems often try to fix this by randomly appending modifiers to the prompt. The problem is that Gemini’s version does a crazy amount of this and does it in ways and places where doing so is crazy. from The Gemini Incident by Zvi Mowshowitz [Part I, Part II] [more inside]
It's not even very good!
AI is already better than you. "You cannot shame this technology into disuse any more. That only works if quality is something the people with money care about. The problem with the continuing erosion of the games industry, the dehumanisation of game workers and the brutal treatment of outsourced work, is that many roles in the games industry are already treated as if they were automated. You are appealing to the better nature of money men who do not have one."
Help. Police. Murder.
Chaotic off-brand Willy Wonka pop-up exhibit ends with police intervention
Obviously, when the poor Charlie And The Chocolate Factory enthusiasts showed up at Box Hub Warehouse, the event looked nothing like what the event description suggested. Instead, they were confronted with a sad-looking, mostly empty warehouse with a bouncy house and some ramshackle decorations. Jack Proctor, a dad who took his kids to the event, told STV News that “we stepped inside to find a disorganized mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lackluster candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears.” [...] "The Oompa Loompa from the knock off Wonka land experience looks like she’s running a literal meth lab and is seriously questioning the life choices up until this point."The face behind Willy Wonka 'scam': How Billy Coull 'conned' kids by using AI generated images to sell 'immersive' experience - More shocking pictures emerge of ‘shambles’ Willy Wonka experience - Employee contracts signed with "erasable ink" - Actor hired as Willy Wonka for cancelled event called it a place 'where dreams went to die' - 'Willy Wonka' chocolate experience boss 'truly sorry' after 'chaos' - Read the ChatGPT-generated event "script" [PDF]
Eugenics Powers IQ and AI
What kind of intelligence is valued in AI? Writing for Public Books in 2021, Natasha Stovall (previously) asked us to consider whether the claim that conceptually undergirds IQ—that "human intelligence is universal, hierarchical, measurable"—is reified in the development of AI. The answer seems clear from today's perspective; we use the same terminology to talk about AI advances as we do "gifted" individuals (e.g., verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, processing speed, working memory.) More provocatively, Stovall charges that such a "reductive definition of human ability" has a coherent lineage from eugenics through the popularization of IQ and on to today's version of AI—and that all of the above are rooted in whiteness.
Image generation as fast as you can type
While the generative AI scene is transfixed by trillion-scale chipmakers and bleeding-edge text-to-video models, there's plenty of work being done on simpler, more efficient open-source projects that don't require a datacenter to run. In addition to homebrew-friendly text options like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma, the makers of image generator Stable Diffusion have also experimented recently with SDXL Turbo, a lightweight, streamlined version that can generate complex images significantly faster. Previously, this required a decent graphics card and a complicated install process, or at least registration on a paid service -- but thanks to a free public demo from fal.ai, you can now generate and share constantly updating images yourself in real time, as fast as you can type. The quality may not be quite as good as the state-of-the-art stuff, but DALL-E Mini it ain't. No word on what it's costing the company to host or how long it might last, but for now the real-time responsiveness makes it easier than ever to get an intuitive feel for how modern image diffusers interpret text and what exactly they're capable of. [more inside]
Those seams we are seduced into not seeing
Let me offer a couple examples of how the arts challenge AI. First, many have pointed out that storytelling is always needed to make meaning out of data, and that is why humanistic inquiry and AI are necessarily wed. Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles (2021: 1605) writes, interdependent though they may be, database and narrative are “different species, like bird and water buffalo.” One of the reasons, she notes, is the distinguishing example of indeterminacy. Narratives “gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable” and embrace the ambiguity, while “databases find it difficult to tolerate”. from Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI?
Google Minus Google News
"The featured filters — Images, Videos, Maps, Flights, Shopping, Perspectives, etc. — change and reorder depending on the search term, but this was different. I wasn’t seeing the News tab as an option for search after search, even if I went looking in the 'All filters' drop-down menu. I tried with 'Julian Assange,' 'public subsidies for sports stadiums,' and 'Reckon layoffs.' None showed the News filter as an option. The next day, on a different computer, my News filter was (blessedly) back. But a few other users confirmed I was not alone." Last year Google cut jobs in its news division. Where is Google putting its resources these days? Exactly where you'd expect.
The underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability
Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be the ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds. from The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance [The Atlantic; ungated]
How Google is killing independent sites like ours
Private equity firms are utilizing public trust in long-standing publications to sell every product under the sun. In a bid to replace falling ad revenue, publishing houses are selling their publications for parts to media groups that are quick to establish affiliate marketing deals. They’re buying magazines we love, closing their print operations, turning them into digital-only, laying off the actual journalists who made us trust in their content in the first place, and hiring third-party companies to run the affiliate arm of their sites. While this happens, investment firms and ‘innovative digital media companies’ are selling you bad products. These Digital Goliaths shouldn’t be able to use product recommendations as their personal piggy bank, simply flying through Google updates off the back of ‘the right signals,’ an old domain, or the echo of a reputable brand that is no longer.Indie air purifier review site HouseFresh does a deep dive into the incestuous world of top-ranking Google product search results. [more inside]
The Premonition of a Fraying
"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski] [more inside]
By any other name
What is a rose, visually? A rose comprises its intrinsics, including the distribution of geometry, texture, and material specific to its object category. With knowledge of these intrinsic properties, we may render roses of different sizes and shapes, in different poses, and under different lighting conditions. In this work, we build a generative model that learns to capture such object intrinsics from a single image, such as a photo of a bouquet. Such an image includes multiple instances of an object type. These instances all share the same intrinsics, but appear different due to a combination of variance within these intrinsics and differences in extrinsic factors, such as pose and illumination. Experiments show that our model successfully learns object intrinsics (distribution of geometry, texture, and material) for a wide range of objects, each from a single Internet image. Our method achieves superior results on multiple downstream tasks, including intrinsic image decomposition, shape and image generation, view synthesis, and relighting. from Seeing a Rose in Five Thousand Ways