AI & Society Articles - The Batch

Tech & Society

OpenAI’s Next Act?: OpenAI sets its sights on autonomous digital assistants.

OpenAI is focusing on autonomous agents that take action on a user’s behalf. The maker of ChatGPT is developing applications designed to automate common digital tasks by controlling apps and devices, The Information reported.

Tech & Society

Context Is Everything: Gemini 1.5 Pro, a leap in multimodal AI amid controversy over v1.0

An update of Google’s flagship multimodal model keeps track of colossal inputs, while an earlier version generated some questionable outputs.

Tech & Society

Gymnastics Judge’s Helper: AI system measures performances in Olympic-level gymnastics competitions.

Judges in competitive gymnastics are using an AI system to double-check their decisions.

Tech & Society

Generated Video Gets Real(er): OpenAI’s Sora, a new player in text-to-video generation

OpenAI’s new video generator raises the bar for detail and realism in generated videos — but the company released few details about how it built the system.

Letters

How to Think About the Privacy of Cloud-Based AI: How private is your data on cloud-based AI platforms? Here's a framework for evaluating risks.

The rise of cloud-hosted AI software has brought much discussion about the privacy implications of using it. But I find that users, including both consumers and developers building on such software

Hardware

GPU Data Centers Strain Grid Power: AI's electricity demands spur an expansion of power sources.

The AI boom is taxing power grids and pushing builders of data centers to rethink their sources of electricity.

Tech & Society

U.S. Restricts AI Robocalls: U.S. cracks down on AI-generated voice robocalls to combat election interference.

The United States outlawed unsolicited phone calls that use AI-generated voices.

Tech & Society

Ancient Scrolls Recovered: Researchers decipher scrolls charred by Mount Vesuvius using AI

Three researchers decoded scrolls that had gone unread since they were turned into charcoal by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.

Tech & Society

GPT-4 Biothreat Risk is Low: Study finds GPT-4 no more risky than online search in aiding bioweapon development.

GPT-4 poses negligible additional risk that a malefactor could build a biological weapon, according to a new study. OpenAI compared the ability of GPT-4 and web search to contribute to the creation of a dangerous virus or bacterium. The large language model was barely more helpful than the web.

Tech & Society

New Leaderboards Rank Safety, More: Hugging Face introduces leaderboards to evaluate model performance and trustworthiness.

Hugging Face introduced four leaderboards to rank the performance and trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs). The open source AI repository now ranks performance on tests of workplace utility, trust and safety, tendency to generate falsehoods, and reasoning.

Tech & Society

Nude Deepfakes Spur Legislators: Taylor Swift deepfake outrage prompts U.S. lawmakers to propose anti-AI pornography laws.

Sexually explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift galvanized public demand for laws against nonconsensual, AI-enabled pornography.

Letters

The World Needs More Intelligence: Human intelligence is expensive, artificial intelligence is cheap. To solve big problems like climate change, it makes sense to double down on AI.

Last year, a number of large businesses and individuals went to the media and governments and pushed the message that AI is scary, impossible to control, and might even lead to human extinction. Unfortunately they succeeded: Now many people think AI is scary.