Letters
On Halloween, the veil lifts between the spirit and AI worlds, allowing the two to pass through one another. The resulting paranormal — or, as AI practitioners call it, paragaussian — phenomena raise questions like these...
The Batch Newsletter
On Halloween, the veil lifts between the spirit and AI worlds, allowing the two to pass through one another. The resulting paranormal — or, as AI practitioners call it, paragaussian — phenomena raise questions...
Tech & Society
Is human creativity being replaced by the synthetic equivalent? The fear: AI is cranking out increasingly sophisticated visual, musical, and literary works. AI-generated media will flood the market, squeezing out human artists and depriving the world of their creativity.
Tech & Society
What if AI-enabled monitoring isn’t just for dictators and despots?The fear: Under the pretext of maintaining law and order, even countries founded on a commitment to individual rights allow police to take advantage of smart-city infrastructure and smart-home devices.
Tech & Society
Is AI becoming inbred? The fear: The best models increasingly are fine-tuned versions of a small number of so-called foundation models that were pretrained on immense quantities of data scraped from the web.
Tech & Society
War is already bad enough. What happens when human combatants are replaced by machines?
Tech & Society
Tech companies generally try to be (or to appear to be) socially responsible. Would some rather let AI’s negative impacts slide?
Business
A new study warns that the geographic concentration of AI in the United States is making the industry too insular.What’s new: A report by the Brookings Institution documents the extent to
Machine Learning Research
A neural network can make a photo resemble a painting via neural style transfer, but it can also learn to reproduce an image by applying brush strokes. A new method taught a system this painterly skill without any training data.
Tech & Society
A startup enables people who participate in voice chat to use realistic artificial voices in real time. What’s new: Massachusetts-based Modulate offers a voice-masking tool to forestall harassment of people, particularly women and trans individuals,
Tech & Society
As governments worldwide mull their AI strategies and policies, the Biden administration called for a “bill of rights” to mitigate adverse consequences.What’s new: Top advisors to the U.S. president announced a plan to issue rules
Letters
In June, I announced the first Data-centric AI Competition. The deadline for submissions was in early September, and today I’m thrilled to announce the winners!A total of 489 individuals and teams submitted 2,458 unique datasets.