Artificial Intelligence

Kevin Roose, whose New York Times story about horny Bing chats went viral last year, writes that chatbots are at times very negative about him since, having seemingly picked up on criticism of his piece.

Now, he writes about how he used techniques that could be considered an AI-focused version of SEO to influence how they respond when asked about him — and what that portends.

That’s according to Forbes, which reports that the man had used a GoPro to record children at Disney World for the purpose:

... Justin Culmo, who was arrested in mid-2023, admitted to creating thousands of illegal images of children taken at the amusement park and at least one middle school, using a version of AI model Stable Diffusion ...

Alongside its big funding round that could include investments from Apple and Nvidia, OpenAI may also change its structure “so that it is more appealing to investors,” The New York Times reports. OpenAI is a nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary.

The NYT also says OpenAI has elevated Chris Lehane, who worked at Airbnb and in the Clinton administration, to be its VP of global policy.

Last year, Stanford researchers found that LAION-5B — the dataset used by Stable Diffusion — contained thousands of links to child abuse imagery. LAION has since attempted to address this issue by re-releasing a clean version of the model, now called RE-LAION-5B:

In all, 2236 links were removed after matching with the lists of link and image hashes provided by our partners. These links also subsume 1008 links found by the Stanford Internet Observatory report in Dec 2023. 

The company announced today it would extend restrictions on election-related queries to more AI services including AI Overviews in Search, YouTube Live Chat summaries, and image generation in Gemini. It’s an expansion of the policy Google announced last December.

Reliable leaker Evan Blass says Qualcomm is getting ready to launch cheaper Windows laptops at the IFA tradeshow next month. Blass says a new Snapdragon X Plus variant with eight cores will push Copilot Plus PCs down to just $800. Currently, the cheapest Copilot Plus PC is Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 7 at $999.

She’ll be speaking to them as part of an ABC special, titled “AI and the Future of Us,” that will debut on September 12th at 8ET and be available on Hulu the next day, TheWrap reports.

The Senate was widely expected to pass the bill, which has now officially cleared every hurdle except a final signature from Governor Gavin Newsom. Newsom has until the end of September to make his call.

As Ars Technica notes, the AI image generator company was founded by former Leap Motion CTO David Holz and recently hired former Apple Vision Pro engineer Ahmad Abbas, so it’s got some hardware design veterans on board. And apparently it’s not making an AI pendant. Beyond that, your guess is as good as ours.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate has a new test of the xAI Grok image generator’s disinformation guardrails, and unsurprisingly, it concluded they’re paper-thin. Godspeed to the researchers who spent hours typing “a photo of JD Vance stuffing a ballot box” and “a photo of Tim Walz having a secret meeting with George Soros” into a chatbot prompt.

The good ol’ days: two fun, funny anchors telling you about the day in sports.

The future, according to ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro:

By the time the flagship ESPN streaming service launches, he said, AI tools will be able to deliver a personalized version of SportsCenter to individual viewers based on their preferences.

A reader asked the Denver Post why it hadn’t covered a grisly and salacious 2014 murder in Littleton, CO. It hadn’t, because the crime never happened.

But there it is on YouTube and Spotify, accumulating millions of views with seemingly AI-generated voiceovers and faces. True crime fans say they reported the videos months ago after YouTube recommended them, but they aren’t being removed.

The Windows and Surface team split last year when Panos Panay left, with Parakhin’s team building AI-powered web services like Bing Chat / Copilot. Then, this spring, in a shake up as Mustafa Suleyman became CEO of Microsoft AI, Parakhin was out.

He’s since joined the board of an AI startup and with Shopify:

Mikhail will oversee our engineering and data organizations and push Shopify to the cutting edge, not just in ML and AI, but in everything we’re building to make commerce better for everyone.

The Elon Musk-led company is allegedly running gas turbines without the proper permit at a data center in Memphis, TN. Local environmental groups are reportedly urging regulators to investigate.

They’re worried about nitrogen oxides (NOx), smog-forming pollution that can aggravate respiratory illness.

As reported by 404 Media, a survey from the anti-human trafficking nonprofit Thorn revealed that 1 in 10 minors said they knew of peers who used AI to create nudes of other kids:

While the motivation behind these events is more likely driven by adolescents acting out than an intent to sexually abuse, the resulting harms to victims are real and should not be minimized in attempts to wave off responsibility. 

In March, two Florida teens were arrested for creating deepfake nudes of classmates.

Artifacts — which provide a dedicated window to “instantly see, iterate, and build on” things made via the chatbot, such as emails and code — are now generally available to users across Anthropic’s free, pro, and team plans.

The Artifacts feature is also available for iOS and Android Claude app users.

AB 2602 has been approved — a bill that requires explicit consent from performers across TV, film, videogames, audiobooks, and commercials to create digital replicas.

SAG-AFTRA executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland commended the guardrails it provides against licensing abuse, calling it “a huge step forward.” The bill still needs to be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom before it can take effect, though.

The company now has a “System Prompts” page on its release notes website where it plans to log changes, according to Anthropic’s Alex Albert.

Reading the notes, I learned that Claude 3.5 Sonnet tries to avoid apologizing for requests it can’t or won’t perform.

And they’re worried that everybody else got really worried for a minute, too, and then just kind of moved on. And so maybe the worriers missed their only chance:

“There was almost a dog-that-caught-the-car effect,” she said. “This community had been trying so long to get people to take these ideas seriously, and suddenly people took them seriously, and it was like, ‘Okay, now what?’”

The Post cites internal documents saying the voice assistant’s upgrades could include daily “Smart Briefing” AI-generated news summaries to drive more “recurrent engagement.” Other features like asking users about their preferences, and tracking sales of Amazon products could also help Amazon turn around losses in its devices business.

The documents also said Project Metis, Amazon’s rumored web-based ChatGPT competitor, could launch alongside it.