AI

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Ex-OpenAI star Sutskever shoots for superintelligent AI with new company

AI, Biz & IT, Illya Sutskever, machine learning, sam altman, SSI / /

Not Strategic Simulations —

Safe Superintelligence, Inc. seeks to safely build AI far beyond human capability.

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Illya Sutskever physically gestures as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman looks on at Tel Aviv University on June 5, 2023.

Enlarge / Ilya Sutskever physically gestures as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman looks on at Tel Aviv University on June 5, 2023.

On Wednesday, former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announced he is forming a new company called Safe Superintelligence, Inc. (SSI) with the goal of safely building “superintelligence,” which is a hypothetical form of artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, possibly in the extreme.

“We will pursue safe superintelligence in a straight shot, with one focus, one goal, and one product,” wrote Sutskever on X. “We will do it through revolutionary breakthroughs produced by a small cracked team.“

Sutskever was a founding member of OpenAI and formerly served as the company’s chief scientist. Two others are joining Sutskever at SSI initially: Daniel Levy, who formerly headed the Optimization Team at OpenAI, and Daniel Gross, an AI investor who worked on machine learning projects at Apple between 2013 and 2017. The trio posted a statement on the company’s new website.

A screen capture of Safe Superintelligence's initial formation announcement captured on June 20, 2024.

Enlarge / A screen capture of Safe Superintelligence’s initial formation announcement captured on June 20, 2024.

Sutskever and several of his co-workers resigned from OpenAI in May, six months after Sutskever played a key role in ousting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who later returned. While Sutskever did not publicly complain about OpenAI after his departure—and OpenAI executives such as Altman wished him well on his new adventures—another resigning member of OpenAI’s Superalignment team, Jan Leike, publicly complained that “over the past years, safety culture and processes [had] taken a backseat to shiny products” at OpenAI. Leike joined OpenAI competitor Anthropic later in May.

A nebulous concept

OpenAI is currently seeking to create AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which would hypothetically match human intelligence at performing a wide variety of tasks without specific training. Sutskever hopes to jump beyond that in a straight moonshot attempt, with no distractions along the way.

“This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then,” said Sutskever in an interview with Bloomberg. “It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race.”

During his former job at OpenAI, Sutskever was part of the “Superalignment” team studying how to “align” (shape the behavior of) this hypothetical form of AI, sometimes called “ASI” for “artificial super intelligence,” to be beneficial to humanity.

As you can imagine, it’s difficult to align something that does not exist, so Sutskever’s quest has met skepticism at times. On X, University of Washington computer science professor (and frequent OpenAI critic) Pedro Domingos wrote, “Ilya Sutskever’s new company is guaranteed to succeed, because superintelligence that is never achieved is guaranteed to be safe.“

Much like AGI, superintelligence is a nebulous term. Since the mechanics of human intelligence are still poorly understood—and since human intelligence is difficult to quantify or define because there is no one set type of human intelligence—identifying superintelligence when it arrives may be tricky.

Already, computers far surpass humans in many forms of information processing (such as basic math), but are they superintelligent? Many proponents of superintelligence imagine a sci-fi scenario of an “alien intelligence” with a form of sentience that operates independently of humans, and that is more or less what Sutskever hopes to achieve and control safely.

“You’re talking about a giant super data center that’s autonomously developing technology,” he told Bloomberg. “That’s crazy, right? It’s the safety of that that we want to contribute to.”

Ex-OpenAI star Sutskever shoots for superintelligent AI with new company Read More »

runway’s-latest-ai-video-generator-brings-giant-cotton-candy-monsters-to-life

Runway’s latest AI video generator brings giant cotton candy monsters to life

AI, AI-generated video, Biz & IT, Deepfakes, filmmaking, films, Gen-2, Gen-3, Gen-3 Alpha, giant cotton-candy monster, Google, machine learning, Meta, openai, Runway, Sora, Special Effects, video synthesis / /
Screen capture of a Runway Gen-3 Alpha video generated with the prompt

Enlarge / Screen capture of a Runway Gen-3 Alpha video generated with the prompt “A giant humanoid, made of fluffy blue cotton candy, stomping on the ground, and roaring to the sky, clear blue sky behind them.”

On Sunday, Runway announced a new AI video synthesis model called Gen-3 Alpha that’s still under development, but it appears to create video of similar quality to OpenAI’s Sora, which debuted earlier this year (and has also not yet been released). It can generate novel, high-definition video from text prompts that range from realistic humans to surrealistic monsters stomping the countryside.

Unlike Runway’s previous best model from June 2023, which could only create two-second-long clips, Gen-3 Alpha can reportedly create 10-second-long video segments of people, places, and things that have a consistency and coherency that easily surpasses Gen-2. If 10 seconds sounds short compared to Sora’s full minute of video, consider that the company is working with a shoestring budget of compute compared to more lavishly funded OpenAI—and actually has a history of shipping video generation capability to commercial users.

Gen-3 Alpha does not generate audio to accompany the video clips, and it’s highly likely that temporally coherent generations (those that keep a character consistent over time) are dependent on similar high-quality training material. But Runway’s improvement in visual fidelity over the past year is difficult to ignore.

AI video heats up

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for AI video synthesis in the AI research community, including the launch of the Chinese model Kling, created by Beijing-based Kuaishou Technology (sometimes called “Kwai”). Kling can generate two minutes of 1080p HD video at 30 frames per second with a level of detail and coherency that reportedly matches Sora.

Gen-3 Alpha prompt: “Subtle reflections of a woman on the window of a train moving at hyper-speed in a Japanese city.”

Not long after Kling debuted, people on social media began creating surreal AI videos using Luma AI’s Luma Dream Machine. These videos were novel and weird but generally lacked coherency; we tested out Dream Machine and were not impressed by anything we saw.

Meanwhile, one of the original text-to-video pioneers, New York City-based Runway—founded in 2018—recently found itself the butt of memes that showed its Gen-2 tech falling out of favor compared to newer video synthesis models. That may have spurred the announcement of Gen-3 Alpha.

Gen-3 Alpha prompt: “An astronaut running through an alley in Rio de Janeiro.”

Generating realistic humans has always been tricky for video synthesis models, so Runway specifically shows off Gen-3 Alpha’s ability to create what its developers call “expressive” human characters with a range of actions, gestures, and emotions. However, the company’s provided examples weren’t particularly expressive—mostly people just slowly staring and blinking—but they do look realistic.

Provided human examples include generated videos of a woman on a train, an astronaut running through a street, a man with his face lit by the glow of a TV set, a woman driving a car, and a woman running, among others.

Gen-3 Alpha prompt: “A close-up shot of a young woman driving a car, looking thoughtful, blurred green forest visible through the rainy car window.”

The generated demo videos also include more surreal video synthesis examples, including a giant creature walking in a rundown city, a man made of rocks walking in a forest, and the giant cotton candy monster seen below, which is probably the best video on the entire page.

Gen-3 Alpha prompt: “A giant humanoid, made of fluffy blue cotton candy, stomping on the ground, and roaring to the sky, clear blue sky behind them.”

Gen-3 will power various Runway AI editing tools (one of the company’s most notable claims to fame), including Multi Motion Brush, Advanced Camera Controls, and Director Mode. It can create videos from text or image prompts.

Runway says that Gen-3 Alpha is the first in a series of models trained on a new infrastructure designed for large-scale multimodal training, taking a step toward the development of what it calls “General World Models,” which are hypothetical AI systems that build internal representations of environments and use them to simulate future events within those environments.

Runway’s latest AI video generator brings giant cotton candy monsters to life Read More »

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Windows 11 24H2 is released to the public but only on Copilot+ PCs (for now)

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24h2 for some —

The rest of the Windows 11 ecosystem will get the new update this fall.

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Windows 11 24H2 is released to the public but only on Copilot+ PCs (for now)

Microsoft

For the vast majority of compatible PCs, Microsoft’s Windows 11 24H2 update still isn’t officially available as anything other than a preview (a revised version of the update is available to Windows Insiders again after briefly being pulled early last week). But Microsoft and most of the other big PC companies are releasing their first wave of Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X-series chips in them today, and those PCs are all shipping with the 24H2 update already installed.

For now, this means a bifurcated Windows 11 install base: one (the vast majority) that’s still mostly on version 23H2 and one (a tiny, Arm-powered minority) that’s running 24H2.

Although Microsoft hasn’t been specific about its release plans for Windows 11 24H2 to the wider user base, most PCs should still start getting the update later this fall. The Copilot+ parts won’t run on those current PCs, but they’ll still get new features and benefit from Microsoft’s work on the operating system’s underpinnings.

The wider 24H2 update rollout will also likely enable the Copilot+ PC features on Intel and AMD PCs that meet the hardware requirements. That hardware will supposedly be available starting in July—at least, if AMD can hit its planned ship date for Ryzen AI chips—but neither Intel nor AMD seems to know exactly when the Copilot+ features will be enabled in software. Right now, the x86 version of Windows doesn’t even have hidden Copilot+ features that can be enabled with the right settings; they only seem to be included at all in the Arm version of the update.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Copilot+ PC program (and, to a lesser extent, the 24H2 update) has become mostly synonymous with the Recall screen recording feature. Microsoft revealed this feature to the public without first sending it through its normal Windows Insider testing program. As soon as security researchers and testers were able to dig into it, they immediately found security holes and privacy risks that could expose a user’s entire Recall database plus detailed screenshots of all their activity to anyone with access to the PC.

Microsoft initially announced that it would release a preview of Recall as scheduled on June 18 with additional security and privacy measures in place. Microsoft would also make the feature off-by-default instead of on-by-default. Shortly after that, the company delayed Recall altogether and committed to testing it publicly in Windows Insider builds like any other Windows feature. Microsoft says that Recall will return, at least to Copilot+ PCs, at some point “in the coming weeks.”

Aside from the Copilot+ generative AI features, which require extra RAM and storage and a PC with a sufficiently fast neural processing unit (NPU), the main Windows 11 system requirements aren’t changing for the 24H2 update. However, there are older unsupported PCs that could run previous Windows 11 versions that will no longer be able to boot 24H2 since it requires a slightly newer CPU to boot.

Windows 11 24H2 is released to the public but only on Copilot+ PCs (for now) Read More »

softbank-plans-to-cancel-out-angry-customer-voices-using-ai

Softbank plans to cancel out angry customer voices using AI

AI, Biz & IT, call center, customer service, emotion cancelling, machine learning, SoftBank, The Asahi Shimbun, Toshiyuki Nakatani / /

our fake future —

Real-time voice modification tech seeks to reduce stress in call center staff.

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A man is angry and screaming while talking on a smartphone.

Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank recently announced that it has been developing “emotion-canceling” technology powered by AI that will alter the voices of angry customers to sound calmer during phone calls with customer service representatives. The project aims to reduce the psychological burden on operators suffering from harassment and has been in development for three years. Softbank plans to launch it by March 2026, but the idea is receiving mixed reactions online.

According to a report from the Japanese news site The Asahi Shimbun, SoftBank’s project relies on an AI model to alter the tone and pitch of a customer’s voice in real-time during a phone call. SoftBank’s developers, led by employee Toshiyuki Nakatani, trained the system using a dataset of over 10,000 voice samples, which were performed by 10 Japanese actors expressing more than 100 phrases with various emotions, including yelling and accusatory tones.

Voice cloning and synthesis technology has made massive strides in the past three years. We’ve previously covered technology from Microsoft that can clone a voice with a three-second audio sample and audio-processing technology from Adobe that cleans up audio by re-synthesizing a person’s voice, so SoftBank’s technology is well within the realm of plausibility.

By analyzing the voice samples, SoftBank’s AI model has reportedly learned to recognize and modify the vocal characteristics associated with anger and hostility. When a customer speaks to a call center operator, the model processes the incoming audio and adjusts the pitch and inflection of the customer’s voice to make it sound calmer and less threatening.

For example, a high-pitched, resonant voice may be lowered in tone, while a deep male voice may be raised to a higher pitch. The technology reportedly does not alter the content or wording of the customer’s speech, and it retains a slight element of audible anger to ensure that the operator can still gauge the customer’s emotional state. The AI model also monitors the length and content of the conversation, sending a warning message if it determines that the interaction is too long or abusive.

The tech has been developed through SoftBank’s in-house program called “SoftBank Innoventure” in conjunction with The Institute for AI and Beyond, which is a joint AI research institute established by The University of Tokyo.

Harassment a persistent problem

According to SoftBank, Japan’s service sector is grappling with the issue of “kasu-hara,” or customer harassment, where workers face aggressive behavior or unreasonable requests from customers. In response, the Japanese government and businesses are reportedly exploring ways to protect employees from the abuse.

The problem isn’t unique to Japan. In a Reddit thread on Softbank’s AI plans, call center operators from other regions related many stories about the stress of dealing with customer harassment. “I’ve worked in a call center for a long time. People need to realize that screaming at call center agents will get you nowhere,” wrote one person.

A 2021 ProPublica report tells horror stories from call center operators who are trained not to hang up no matter how abusive or emotionally degrading a call gets. The publication quoted Skype customer service contractor Christine Stewart as saying, “One person called me the C-word. I’d call my supervisor. They’d say, ‘Calm them down.’ … They’d always try to push me to stay on the call and calm the customer down myself. I wasn’t getting paid enough to do that. When you have a customer sitting there and saying you’re worthless… you’re supposed to ‘de-escalate.'”

But verbally de-escalating an angry customer is difficult, according to Reddit poster BenCelotil, who wrote, “As someone who has worked in several call centers, let me just point out that there is no way faster to escalate a call than to try and calm the person down. If the angry person on the other end of the call thinks you’re just trying to placate and push them off somewhere else, they’re only getting more pissed.”

Ignoring reality using AI

Harassment of call center workers is a very real problem, but given the introduction of AI as a possible solution, some people wonder whether it’s a good idea to essentially filter emotional reality on demand through voice synthesis. Perhaps this technology is a case of treating the symptom instead of the root cause of the anger, as some social media commenters note.

“This is like the worst possible solution to the problem,” wrote one Redditor in the thread mentioned above. “Reminds me of when all the workers at Apple’s China factory started jumping out of windows due to working conditions, so the ‘solution’ was to put nets around the building.”

SoftBank expects to introduce its emotion-canceling solution within fiscal year 2025, which ends on March 31, 2026. By reducing the psychological burden on call center operators, SoftBank says it hopes to create a safer work environment that enables employees to provide even better services to customers.

Even so, ignoring customer anger could backfire in the long run when the anger is sometimes a legitimate response to poor business practices. As one Redditor wrote, “If you have so many angry customers that it is affecting the mental health of your call center operators, then maybe address the reasons you have so many irate customers instead of just pretending that they’re not angry.”

Softbank plans to cancel out angry customer voices using AI Read More »

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Microsoft delays Recall again, won’t debut it with new Copilot+ PCs after all

AI, copilot, copilot+ PC, microsoft, microsoft recall, recall, Tech, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2, windows recall / /

another setback —

Recall will go through Windows Insider pipeline like any other Windows feature.

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Recall is part of Microsoft's Copilot+ PC program.

Enlarge / Recall is part of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC program.

Microsoft

Microsoft will be delaying its controversial Recall feature again, according to an updated blog post by Windows and Devices VP Pavan Davuluri. And when the feature does return “in the coming weeks,” Davuluri writes, it will be as a preview available to PCs in the Windows Insider Program, the same public testing and validation pipeline that all other Windows features usually go through before being released to the general populace.

Recall is a new Windows 11 AI feature that will be available on PCs that meet the company’s requirements for its “Copilot+ PC” program. Copilot+ PCs need at least 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS). The first (and for a few months, only) PCs that will meet this requirement are all using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite Arm chips, with compatible Intel and AMD processors following later this year. Copilot+ PCs ship with other generative AI features, too, but Recall’s widely publicized security problems have sucked most of the oxygen out of the room so far.

The Windows Insider preview of Recall will still require a PC that meets the Copilot+ requirements, though third-party scripts may be able to turn on Recall for PCs without the necessary hardware. We’ll know more when Recall makes its reappearance.

Why Recall was recalled

Recall works by periodically capturing screenshots of your PC and saving them to disk, and scanning those screenshots with OCR to make a big searchable text database that can help you find anything you had previously viewed on your PC.

The main problem, as we confirmed with our own testing, was that all of this was saved to disk with no additional encryption or other protection and was easily viewable and copyable by pretty much any user (or attacker) with access to the PC. Recall was also going to be enabled by default on Copilot+ PCs despite being a “preview,” meaning that users who didn’t touch the default settings were going to have all of this data recorded by default.

This was the version of Recall that was initially meant to ship out to reviewers this week on the first wave of Copilot+ PCs from Microsoft and other PC companies. After security researcher Kevin Beaumont publicized these security holes in that version of Recall, the company promised to add additional encryption and authentication protections and to disable Recall by default. These tweaks would have gone out as an update to the first shipments of Copilot+ PCs on June 18 (reviewers also wouldn’t get systems before June 18, a sign of how much Microsoft was rushing behind the scenes to implement these changes). Now Recall is being pushed back again.

A report from Windows Central claims that Recall was developed “in secret” and that it wasn’t even distributed widely within Microsoft before it was announced, which could explain why these security issues weren’t flagged and fixed before the feature showed up in a publicly available version of Windows.

Microsoft’s Recall delay follows Microsoft President Brad Smith’s testimony to Congress during a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing about the company’s “cascade of security failures” in recent months. Among other things, Smith said that Microsoft would commit to prioritizing security issues over new AI-powered features as part of the company’s recently announced Secure Future Initiative (SFI). Microsoft has also hired additional security personnel and tied executive pay to meeting security goals.

“If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security,” wrote Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an internal memo about the SFI announcement. “In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems.”

Recall has managed to tie together all the big Windows and Microsoft stories from the last year or two: the company’s all-consuming push to quickly release generative AI features, its security failures and subsequent promises to do better, and the general degradation of the Windows 11 user interface with unwanted apps, ads, reminders, account sign-in requirements, and other cruft.

Microsoft delays Recall again, won’t debut it with new Copilot+ PCs after all Read More »

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This photo got 3rd in an AI art contest—then its human photographer came forward

AI, art, photography / /

Say cheese —

Humans pretending to be machines isn’t exactly a victory for the creative spirit.

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To be fair, I wouldn't put it past an AI model to forget the flamingo's head.

Enlarge / To be fair, I wouldn’t put it past an AI model to forget the flamingo’s head.

A juried photography contest has disqualified one of the images that was originally picked as a top three finisher in its new AI art category. The reason for the disqualification? The photo was actually taken by a human and not generated by an AI model.

The 1839 Awards launched last year as a way to “honor photography as an art form,” with a panel of experienced judges who work with photos at The New York Times, Christie’s, and Getty Images, among others. The contest rules sought to segregate AI images into their own category as a way to separate out the work of increasingly impressive image generators from “those who use the camera as their artistic medium,” as the 1839 Awards site puts it.

For the non-AI categories, the 1839 Awards rules note that they “reserve the right to request proof of the image not being generated by AI as well as for proof of ownership of the original files.” Apparently, though, the awards did not request any corresponding proof that submissions in the AI category were generated by AI.

The 1839 Awards winners page for the

Enlarge / The 1839 Awards winners page for the “AI” category, before Astray’s photo was disqualified.

Because of this, the photographer, who goes by the pen name Miles Astray, was able to enter his photo “F L A M I N G O N E” into that AI-generated category, where it was shortlisted and then picked for third place over plenty of other entries that were not made by a human holding a camera. The photo also won the People’s Choice Award for the AI category after Astray publicly lobbied his social media followers to vote for it multiple times.

Making a statement

On his website, Astray tells the story of a 5 am photo shoot in Aruba where he captured the photo of a flamingo that appears to have lost its head. Astray said he entered the photo in the AI category “to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits.”

That’s not a completely baseless concern. Last year, German artist Boris Eldagsen made headlines after his AI-generated picture “The Electrician” won first prize in the Creative category of the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography Award. Eldagsen ended up refusing the prize, writing that he had entered “as a cheeky monkey, to find out if the competitions are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not.”

In a statement provided to press outlets after Astray revealed his deception, the 1839 Awards organizers noted that Astray’s entry was disqualified because it “did not meet the requirements for the AI-generated image category. We understand that was the point, but we don’t want to prevent other artists from their shot at winning in the AI category. We hope this will bring awareness (and a message of hope) to other photographers worried about AI.”

For his part, Astray says his disqualification from the 1839 Awards was “a completely justified and right decision that I expected and support fully.” But he also writes that the work’s initial success at the awards “was not just a win for me but for many creatives out there.”

Even a mediocre human-written comedy special might seem impressive if you thought an AI wrote it.

Enlarge / Even a mediocre human-written comedy special might seem impressive if you thought an AI wrote it.

I’m not sure I buy that interpretation, though. Art isn’t like chess, where the brute force of machine-learning efficiency has made even the best human players relatively helpless. Instead, as conceptual artist Danielle Baskin told Ars when talking about the DALL-E image generator, “all modern AI art has converged on kind of looking like a similar style, [so] my optimistic speculation is that people are hiring way more human artists now.”

The whole situation brings to mind the ostensibly AI-generated George Carlin-style comedy special released earlier this year, which the creators later admitted was written entirely by a human. At the time, I noted how our views of works of art are immediately colored as soon as the “AI generated” label is applied. Maybe you grade the work on a bit of a curve (“Well, it’s not bad for a machine“), or maybe you judge it more harshly for its artificial creation (“It obviously doesn’t have the human touch“).

In any case, reactions to AI artwork are “a reflection of all the fear and promise inherent in computers continuing to encroach on areas we recently thought were exclusively ‘human,’ as well as the economic and philosophical impacts of that trend,” as I wrote when talking about the fake AI Carlin. And those human-centric biases mean we can’t help but use a different eye to judge works of art presented as AI creations.

Entering a human photograph into an AI-generated photo contest says more about how we can exploit those biases than it does about the inherent superiority of man or machine in a field as subjective as art. This isn’t John Henry bravely standing up to a steam engine; it’s Homer Simpson winning a nuclear plant design contest that was not intended for him.

This photo got 3rd in an AI art contest—then its human photographer came forward Read More »

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Report: Apple isn’t paying OpenAI for ChatGPT integration into OSes

AI, AI assitants, Apple, apple intelligence, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, GPT-4, iOS, ios 18, iPadOS, iPadOS 18, IPhone, large language models, machine learning, macOS, macos sequoia, openai, sam altman / /

in the pocket —

Apple thinks pushing OpenAI’s brand to hundreds of millions is worth more than money.

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The OpenAI and Apple logos together.

OpenAI / Apple / Benj Edwards

On Monday, Apple announced it would be integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant into upcoming versions of its iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems. It paves the way for future third-party AI model integrations, but given Google’s multi-billion-dollar deal with Apple for preferential web search, the OpenAI announcement inspired speculation about who is paying whom. According to a Bloomberg report published Wednesday, Apple considers ChatGPT’s placement on its devices as compensation enough.

“Apple isn’t paying OpenAI as part of the partnership,” writes Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, citing people familiar with the matter who wish to remain anonymous. “Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments.”

The Bloomberg report states that neither company expects the agreement to generate meaningful revenue in the short term, and in fact, the partnership could burn extra money for OpenAI, because it pays Microsoft to host ChatGPT’s capabilities on its Azure cloud. However, OpenAI could benefit by converting free users to paid subscriptions, and Apple potentially benefits by providing easy, built-in access to ChatGPT during a time when its own in-house LLMs are still catching up.

And there’s another angle at play. Currently, OpenAI offers subscriptions (ChatGPT Plus, Enterprise, Team) that unlock additional features. If users subscribe to OpenAI through the ChatGPT app on an Apple device, the process will reportedly use Apple’s payment platform, which may give Apple a significant cut of the revenue. According to the report, Apple hopes to negotiate additional revenue-sharing deals with AI vendors in the future.

Why OpenAI

The rise of ChatGPT in the public eye over the past 18 months has made OpenAI a power player in the tech industry, allowing it to strike deals with publishers for AI training content—and ensure continued support from Microsoft in the form of investments that trade vital funding and compute for access to OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) technology like GPT-4.

Still, Apple’s choice of ChatGPT as Apple’s first external AI integration has led to widespread misunderstanding, especially since Apple buried the lede about its own in-house LLM technology that powers its new “Apple Intelligence” platform.

On Apple’s part, CEO Tim Cook told The Washington Post that it chose OpenAI as its first third-party AI partner because he thinks the company controls the leading LLM technology at the moment: “I think they’re a pioneer in the area, and today they have the best model,” he said. “We’re integrating with other people as well. But they’re first, and I think today it’s because they’re best.”

Apple’s choice also brings risk. OpenAI’s record isn’t spotless, racking up a string of public controversies over the past month that include an accusation from actress Scarlett Johansson that the company intentionally imitated her voice, resignations from a key scientist and safety personnel, the revelation of a restrictive NDA for ex-employees that prevented public criticism, and accusations against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of “psychological abuse” related by a former member of the OpenAI board.

Meanwhile, critics of privacy issues related to gathering data for training AI models—including OpenAI foe Elon Musk, who took to X on Monday to spread misconceptions about how the ChatGPT integration might work—also worried that the Apple-OpenAI deal might expose personal data to the AI company, although both companies strongly deny that will be the case.

Looking ahead, Apple’s deal with OpenAI is not exclusive, and the company is already in talks to offer Google’s Gemini chatbot as an additional option later this year. Apple has also reportedly held talks with Anthropic (maker of Claude 3) as a potential chatbot partner, signaling its intention to provide users with a range of AI services, much like how the company offers various search engine options in Safari.

Report: Apple isn’t paying OpenAI for ChatGPT integration into OSes Read More »

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Wyoming mayoral candidate wants to govern by AI bot

AI, chatgpt, Politics, syndication / /
Digital chatbot icon on future tech background. Productivity of AI bots evolution. Futuristic chatbot icon and abstract chart in world of technological progress and innovation. CGI 3D render

Victor Miller is running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with an unusual campaign promise: If elected, he will not be calling the shots—an AI bot will. VIC, the Virtual Integrated Citizen, is a ChatGPT-based chatbot that Miller created. And Miller says the bot has better ideas—and a better grasp of the law—than many people currently serving in government.

“I realized that this entity is way smarter than me, and more importantly, way better than some of the outward-facing public servants I see,” he says. According to Miller, VIC will make the decisions, and Miller will be its “meat puppet,” attending meetings, signing documents, and otherwise doing the corporeal job of running the city.

But whether VIC—and Victor—will be allowed to run at all is still an open question.

Because it’s not legal for a bot to run for office, Miller says he is technically the one on the ballot, at least on the candidate paperwork filed with the state.

When Miller went to register his candidacy at the county clerk’s office, he says, he “wanted to use Vic without my last name. And so I had read the statute, so it merely said that you have to print what you are generally referred to as. So you know, most people call me Vic. My name is Victor Miller. So on the ballot Vic is short for Victor Miller, the human.”

When Miller came home from filing, he told the then nameless chatbot about it and says it “actually came up with the name Virtual Integrated Citizen.”

In a statement to WIRED, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray said, “We are monitoring this very closely to ensure uniform application of the Election Code.” Gray said that anyone running for office must be a “qualified elector,” “which necessitates being a real person. Therefore, an AI bot is not a qualified elector.” Gray also sent a letter to the county clerk raising concerns about VIC and suggesting that the clerk reject Miller’s application for candidacy.

Wyoming mayoral candidate wants to govern by AI bot Read More »

turkish-student-creates-custom-ai-device-for-cheating-university-exam,-gets-arrested

Turkish student creates custom AI device for cheating university exam, gets arrested

AI, Biz & IT, machine learning, Reuters, The Daily Mail, Turkey, TYT / /

spy hard —

Elaborate scheme involved hidden camera and an earpiece to hear answers.

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A photo illustration of what a shirt-button camera <em>could</em> look like. ” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/shirt-button-camera-800×450.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / A photo illustration of what a shirt-button camera could look like.

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

On Saturday, Turkish police arrested and detained a prospective university student who is accused of developing an elaborate scheme to use AI and hidden devices to help him cheat on an important entrance exam, reports Reuters and The Daily Mail.

The unnamed student is reportedly jailed pending trial after the incident, which took place in the southwestern province of Isparta, where the student was caught behaving suspiciously during the TYT. The TYT is a nationally held university aptitude exam that determines a person’s eligibility to attend a university in Turkey—and cheating on the high-stakes exam is a serious offense.

According to police reports, the student used a camera disguised as a shirt button, connected to AI software via a “router” (possibly a mistranslation of a cellular modem) hidden in the sole of their shoe. The system worked by scanning the exam questions using the button camera, which then relayed the information to an unnamed AI model. The software generated the correct answers and recited them to the student through an earpiece.

A video released by the Isparta police demonstrated how the cheating system functioned. In the video, a police officer scans a question, and the AI software provides the correct answer through the earpiece.

In addition to the student, Turkish police detained another individual for assisting the student during the exam. The police discovered a mobile phone that could allegedly relay spoken sounds to the other person, allowing for two-way communication.

A history of calling on computers for help

The recent arrest recalls other attempts to cheat using wireless communications and computers, such as the famous case of the Eudaemons in the late 1970s. The Eudaemons were a group of physics graduate students from the University of California, Santa Cruz, who developed a wearable computer device designed to predict the outcome of roulette spins in casinos.

The Eudaemons’ device consisted of a shoe with a computer built into it, connected to a timing device operated by the wearer’s big toe. The wearer would click the timer when the ball and the spinning roulette wheel were in a specific position, and the computer would calculate the most likely section of the wheel where the ball would land. This prediction would be transmitted to an earpiece worn by another team member, who would quickly place bets on the predicted section.

While the Eudaemons’ plan didn’t involve a university exam, it shows that the urge to call upon remote computational powers greater than oneself is apparently timeless.

Turkish student creates custom AI device for cheating university exam, gets arrested Read More »

ridiculed-stable-diffusion-3-release-excels-at-ai-generated-body-horror

Ridiculed Stable Diffusion 3 release excels at AI-generated body horror

AI, AI image generator, Biz & IT, body horror, image synthesis, machine learning, Stability AI, Stable Diffusion, Stable Diffusion 3 / /

unstable diffusion —

Users react to mangled SD3 generations and ask, “Is this release supposed to be a joke?”

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An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass.

On Wednesday, Stability AI released weights for Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, an AI image-synthesis model that turns text prompts into AI-generated images. Its arrival has been ridiculed online, however, because it generates images of humans in a way that seems like a step backward from other state-of-the-art image-synthesis models like Midjourney or DALL-E 3. As a result, it can churn out wild anatomically incorrect visual abominations with ease.

A thread on Reddit, titled, “Is this release supposed to be a joke? [SD3-2B],” details the spectacular failures of SD3 Medium at rendering humans, especially human limbs like hands and feet. Another thread, titled, “Why is SD3 so bad at generating girls lying on the grass?” shows similar issues, but for entire human bodies.

Hands have traditionally been a challenge for AI image generators due to lack of good examples in early training data sets, but more recently, several image-synthesis models seemed to have overcome the issue. In that sense, SD3 appears to be a huge step backward for the image-synthesis enthusiasts that gather on Reddit—especially compared to recent Stability releases like SD XL Turbo in November.

“It wasn’t too long ago that StableDiffusion was competing with Midjourney, now it just looks like a joke in comparison. At least our datasets are safe and ethical!” wrote one Reddit user.

  • An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 Medium.

  • An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass.

  • An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 that shows mangled hands.

  • An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 of a girl lying in the grass.

  • An AI-generated image created using Stable Diffusion 3 that shows mangled hands.

  • An AI-generated SD3 Medium image a Reddit user made with the prompt “woman wearing a dress on the beach.”

  • An AI-generated SD3 Medium image a Reddit user made with the prompt “photograph of a person napping in a living room.”

AI image fans are so far blaming the Stable Diffusion 3’s anatomy fails on Stability’s insistence on filtering out adult content (often called “NSFW” content) from the SD3 training data that teaches the model how to generate images. “Believe it or not, heavily censoring a model also gets rid of human anatomy, so… that’s what happened,” wrote one Reddit user in the thread.

Basically, any time a user prompt homes in on a concept that isn’t represented well in the AI model’s training dataset, the image-synthesis model will confabulate its best interpretation of what the user is asking for. And sometimes that can be completely terrifying.

The release of Stable Diffusion 2.0 in 2022 suffered from similar problems in depicting humans well, and AI researchers soon discovered that censoring adult content that contains nudity can severely hamper an AI model’s ability to generate accurate human anatomy. At the time, Stability AI reversed course with SD 2.1 and SD XL, regaining some abilities lost by strongly filtering NSFW content.

Another issue that can occur during model pre-training is that sometimes the NSFW filter researchers use remove adult images from the dataset is too picky, accidentally removing images that might not be offensive and depriving the model of depictions of humans in certain situations. “[SD3] works fine as long as there are no humans in the picture, I think their improved nsfw filter for filtering training data decided anything humanoid is nsfw,” wrote one Redditor on the topic.

Using a free online demo of SD3 on Hugging Face, we ran prompts and saw similar results to those being reported by others. For example, the prompt “a man showing his hands” returned an image of a man holding up two giant-sized backward hands, although each hand at least had five fingers.

  • A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “A woman lying on the beach.”

  • A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “A man showing his hands.”

    Stability AI

  • A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “A woman showing her hands.”

    Stability AI

  • A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “a muscular barbarian with weapons beside a CRT television set, cinematic, 8K, studio lighting.”

  • A SD3 Medium example we generated with the prompt “A cat in a car holding a can of beer.”

Stability first announced Stable Diffusion 3 in February, and the company has planned to make it available in a variety of different model sizes. Today’s release is for the “Medium” version, which is a 2 billion-parameter model. In addition to the weights being available on Hugging Face, they are also available for experimentation through the company’s Stability Platform. The weights are available for download and use for free under a non-commercial license only.

Soon after its February announcement, delays in releasing the SD3 model weights inspired rumors that the release was being held back due to technical issues or mismanagement. Stability AI as a company fell into a tailspin recently with the resignation of its founder and CEO, Emad Mostaque, in March and then a series of layoffs. Just prior to that, three key engineers—Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz—left the company. And its troubles go back even farther, with news of the company’s dire financial position lingering since 2023.

To some Stable Diffusion fans, the failures with Stable Diffusion 3 Medium are a visual manifestation of the company’s mismanagement—and an obvious sign of things falling apart. Although the company has not filed for bankruptcy, some users made dark jokes about the possibility after seeing SD3 Medium:

“I guess now they can go bankrupt in a safe and ethically [sic] way, after all.”

Ridiculed Stable Diffusion 3 release excels at AI-generated body horror Read More »

apple-and-openai-currently-have-the-most-misunderstood-partnership-in-tech

Apple and OpenAI currently have the most misunderstood partnership in tech

AI, Apple, apple intelligence, Biz & IT, chatgtp, elon musk, Google, GPT-4, IPhone, large language models, machine learning, openai, Siri, tim cook, wwdc, WWDC 2024 / /
A man talks into a smartphone.

Enlarge / He isn’t using an iPhone, but some people talk to Siri like this.

On Monday, Apple premiered “Apple Intelligence” during a wide-ranging presentation at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California. However, the heart of its new tech, an array of Apple-developed AI models, was overshadowed by the announcement of ChatGPT integration into its device operating systems.

Since rumors of the partnership first emerged, we’ve seen confusion on social media about why Apple didn’t develop a cutting-edge GPT-4-like chatbot internally. Despite Apple’s year-long development of its own large language models (LLMs), many perceived the integration of ChatGPT (and opening the door for others, like Google Gemini) as a sign of Apple’s lack of innovation.

“This is really strange. Surely Apple could train a very good competing LLM if they wanted? They’ve had a year,” wrote AI developer Benjamin De Kraker on X. Elon Musk has also been grumbling about the OpenAI deal—and spreading misinformation about it—saying things like, “It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy!”

While Apple has developed many technologies internally, it has also never been shy about integrating outside tech when necessary in various ways, from acquisitions to built-in clients—in fact, Siri was initially developed by an outside company. But by making a deal with a company like OpenAI, which has been the source of a string of tech controversies recently, it’s understandable that some people don’t understand why Apple made the call—and what it might entail for the privacy of their on-device data.

“Our customers want something with world knowledge some of the time”

While Apple Intelligence largely utilizes its own Apple-developed LLMs, Apple also realized that there may be times when some users want to use what the company considers the current “best” existing LLM—OpenAI’s GPT-4 family. In an interview with The Washington Post, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained the decision to integrate OpenAI first:

“I think they’re a pioneer in the area, and today they have the best model,” he said. “And I think our customers want something with world knowledge some of the time. So we considered everything and everyone. And obviously we’re not stuck on one person forever or something. We’re integrating with other people as well. But they’re first, and I think today it’s because they’re best.”

The proposed benefit of Apple integrating ChatGPT into various experiences within iOS, iPadOS, and macOS is that it allows AI users to access ChatGPT’s capabilities without the need to switch between different apps—either through the Siri interface or through Apple’s integrated “Writing Tools.” Users will also have the option to connect their paid ChatGPT account to access extra features.

As an answer to privacy concerns, Apple says that before any data is sent to ChatGPT, the OS asks for the user’s permission, and the entire ChatGPT experience is optional. According to Apple, requests are not stored by OpenAI, and users’ IP addresses are hidden. Apparently, communication with OpenAI servers happens through API calls similar to using the ChatGPT app on iOS, and there is reportedly no deeper OS integration that might expose user data to OpenAI without the user’s permission.

We can only take Apple’s word for it at the moment, of course, and solid details about Apple’s AI privacy efforts will emerge once security experts get their hands on the new features later this year.

Apple’s history of tech integration

So you’ve seen why Apple chose OpenAI. But why look to outside companies for tech? In some ways, Apple building an external LLM client into its operating systems isn’t too different from what it has previously done with streaming video (the YouTube app on the original iPhone), Internet search (Google search integration), and social media (integrated Twitter and Facebook sharing).

The press has positioned Apple’s recent AI moves as Apple “catching up” with competitors like Google and Microsoft in terms of chatbots and generative AI. But playing it slow and cool has long been part of Apple’s M.O.—not necessarily introducing the bleeding edge of technology but improving existing tech through refinement and giving it a better user interface.

Apple and OpenAI currently have the most misunderstood partnership in tech Read More »

ai-trained-on-photos-from-kids’-entire-childhood-without-their-consent

AI trained on photos from kids’ entire childhood without their consent

AI, ai dataset, ai deepfakes, Artificial Intelligence, children's online privacy, generative ai, LAION, LAION-5b, online child safety, openai, Policy / /
AI trained on photos from kids’ entire childhood without their consent

Photos of Brazilian kids—sometimes spanning their entire childhood—have been used without their consent to power AI tools, including popular image generators like Stable Diffusion, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned on Monday.

This act poses urgent privacy risks to kids and seems to increase risks of non-consensual AI-generated images bearing their likenesses, HRW’s report said.

An HRW researcher, Hye Jung Han, helped expose the problem. She analyzed “less than 0.0001 percent” of LAION-5B, a dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. The dataset does not contain the actual photos but includes image-text pairs derived from 5.85 billion images and captions posted online since 2008.

Among those images linked in the dataset, Han found 170 photos of children from at least 10 Brazilian states. These were mostly family photos uploaded to personal and parenting blogs most Internet surfers wouldn’t easily stumble upon, “as well as stills from YouTube videos with small view counts, seemingly uploaded to be shared with family and friends,” Wired reported.

LAION, the German nonprofit that created the dataset, has worked with HRW to remove the links to the children’s images in the dataset.

That may not completely resolve the problem, though. HRW’s report warned that the removed links are “likely to be a significant undercount of the total amount of children’s personal data that exists in LAION-5B.” Han told Wired that she fears that the dataset may still be referencing personal photos of kids “from all over the world.”

Removing the links also does not remove the images from the public web, where they can still be referenced and used in other AI datasets, particularly those relying on Common Crawl, LAION’s spokesperson, Nate Tyler, told Ars.

“This is a larger and very concerning issue, and as a nonprofit, volunteer organization, we will do our part to help,” Tyler told Ars.

Han told Ars that “Common Crawl should stop scraping children’s personal data, given the privacy risks involved and the potential for new forms of misuse.”

According to HRW’s analysis, many of the Brazilian children’s identities were “easily traceable,” due to children’s names and locations being included in image captions that were processed when building the LAION dataset.

And at a time when middle and high school-aged students are at greater risk of being targeted by bullies or bad actors turning “innocuous photos” into explicit imagery, it’s possible that AI tools may be better equipped to generate AI clones of kids whose images are referenced in AI datasets, HRW suggested.

“The photos reviewed span the entirety of childhood,” HRW’s report said. “They capture intimate moments of babies being born into the gloved hands of doctors, young children blowing out candles on their birthday cake or dancing in their underwear at home, students giving a presentation at school, and teenagers posing for photos at their high school’s carnival.”

There is less risk that the Brazilian kids’ photos are currently powering AI tools since “all publicly available versions of LAION-5B were taken down” in December, Tyler told Ars. That decision came out of an “abundance of caution” after a Stanford University report “found links in the dataset pointing to illegal content on the public web,” Tyler said, including 3,226 suspected instances of child sexual abuse material.

Han told Ars that “the version of the dataset that we examined pre-dates LAION’s temporary removal of its dataset in December 2023.” The dataset will not be available again until LAION determines that all flagged illegal content has been removed.

“LAION is currently working with the Internet Watch Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, Stanford, and Human Rights Watch to remove all known references to illegal content from LAION-5B,” Tyler told Ars. “We are grateful for their support and hope to republish a revised LAION-5B soon.”

In Brazil, “at least 85 girls” have reported classmates harassing them by using AI tools to “create sexually explicit deepfakes of the girls based on photos taken from their social media profiles,” HRW reported. Once these explicit deepfakes are posted online, they can inflict “lasting harm,” HRW warned, potentially remaining online for their entire lives.

“Children should not have to live in fear that their photos might be stolen and weaponized against them,” Han said. “The government should urgently adopt policies to protect children’s data from AI-fueled misuse.”

Ars could not immediately reach Stable Diffusion maker Stability AI for comment.

AI trained on photos from kids’ entire childhood without their consent Read More »