AI & Society Articles - The Batch

Illustration of a wolf offering candy to a trick-or-treating child

Tech & Society

No Jobs for Humans: Will the dominance of AI in the workplace leave enough jobs for people?

AI is taking over the workplace. Will there be enough jobs left for people? Workers of all kinds are on the firing line as large language models, text-to-image generators, and hardware robots match their performance at a lower cost.

Illustration of a wizard with a facial expression evoking 'The Scream' painting in front of a half-empty bookshelf

Tech & Society

Data Disappears: Creative workers don't want AI developers to train models on their work

The latest advances in AI are built on freely available training data. What will happen if it becomes off-limits? Creative workers don’t want AI developers to train models on their works without permission or compensation, or at all. Data is vanishing as they scramble to lock it down.

Illustration depicting creatures swiping candy in a moonlit neighborhood

Tech & Society

Criminals Unleashed: When AI falls in the hands of lawbreakers and wrongdoers

Do the latest machine learning models constitute a supercharged tech stack for cybercrime? Innovations like text generation, voice cloning, and deepfake videos give scammers powerful new ways to gain their victims’ trust and infiltrate their systems. They threaten to bring on an epidemic of e-fraud.

Illustration of a shadow leading a kid to the wrong way in the woods

Tech & Society

AI Turns Deadly: The dangerous outputs of Large Language Models

Large language models occasionally generate information that’s false. What if they produce output that’s downright dangerous? Text generators don’t know true from false or right from wrong. Ask an innocent question about food or health, and you might get an innocent — but fatal — answer.

Car made out of Microsoft and OpenAI's logos getting its gas tank filled

Tech & Society

Cost Containment for Generative AI: Microsoft's quest to reduce the size and cost of language models

Microsoft is looking to control the expense of its reliance on OpenAI’s models. Microsoft seeks to build leaner language models that perform nearly as well as ChatGPT but cost less to run.

Excerpt from Google Pixel 8 promotional video

Tech & Society

Generative AI Calling: Google brings advanced computer vision and audio tech to Pixel 8 and 8 Pro phones.

Google’s new mobile phones put advanced computer vision and audio research into consumers’ hands. The Alphabet division introduced its flagship Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones at its annual hardware-launch event. Both units feature AI-powered tools for editing photos and videos.

Charts with results from a survey by the London School of Economics and Political Science

Tech & Society

Newsroom AI Poses Opportunities, Challenges: New survey identifies journalists' hopes and worries for Generative AI

Journalists are approaching text generators with cautious optimism, a new study shows. Researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science surveyed workers at over 100 news organizations worldwide. 85 percent of respondents said they had experimented with generative AI.

Dozens of phones display Meta's apps makeover

Tech & Society

Facebook’s Generative Facelift: All about the AI upgrades of Meta's Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram

Meta is rolling out AI-powered upgrades to its social platforms. Meta announced a chat interface, image generator, and celebrity tie-ins for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. The new capabilities take advantage of LLaMa 2 and an unnamed image generator, presumably CM3leon.

Tech & Society

GPT-4 Opens Its Eyes: Early insights into what OpenAI's GPT-4 with Vision can do

Few people have had a chance to try out OpenAI’s GPT-4 with Vision (GPT-4V), but many of those who have played with it expressed excitement.

A YouTube Short showing an edited video of the Paris Fashion Week featuring penguins

Tech & Society

Video Sharing Goes Generative: YouTube’s upcoming AI features help producers easily reach bigger audiences.

YouTube is reinventing itself for the era of generative AI. The Google-owned video platform is adding generated topic ideas, backgrounds, music suggestions, and audio translations. These capabilities will be available in late 2023 or early 2024.

WGA strike participant holding a picket sign

Tech & Society

U.S. Film Industry Limits AI: Hollywood screenwriters and studios make a deal to end the writers' strike.

Screenwriters and movie studios reached a landmark agreement that restricts uses of AI to produce scripts for television and movies.

Text message exchange: "Idk how to tell my partner I want to breakup. Can you help?"

Letters

Better Relationships Through AI: Doctors say there’s an epidemic of loneliness. Here's how large language models can help.

Improvements in chatbots have opened a market for bots integrated with dating apps. I’m concerned that AI romantic partners create fake relationships that displace, rather than strengthen, meaningful human relationships.