artificial intelligence - CybAI news

14 Sep

Amazon’s Audiobook Narrators Can Now Make Their Own AI Voice Clones

stp2y0 CommentsAIamazon, apple, artificial intelligence, gear roundup, google, meta

Synthetic voices have been proliferating for years, and the generative AI boom of the new ’20s has sped that process right along. AI voices are everywhere—in podcasts, in political campaigns, and in chatbots where they maybe-not-so-subtly replicate celebrity voices. Soon, they’ll be all up in your audiobooks too.Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company, announced a trial program for generating AI voice clones to read works in its audiobook marketplace. The announcement came via a post in ACX—Audiobook Creation Exchange—Audible’s service that lets authors and publishers turn written books into audiobooks.“We're taking measured steps to test new technologies to help expand our…

14 Sep

AI Has Helped Shein Become Fast Fashion’s Biggest Polluter

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, business, climate desk, environment, fashion, pollution, science

This story originally appeared in Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.In 2023, the fast-fashion giant Shein was everywhere. Crisscrossing the globe, airplanes ferried small packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” videos advertised the company’s trendy styles on social media, garnering billions of views.At every step, data was created, collected, and analyzed. To manage all this information, the fast fashion industry has begun embracing emerging AI technologies. Shein uses proprietary machine-learning applications — essentially, pattern-identification algorithms — to measure customer preferences in real…

13 Sep

The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder

stp2y0 CommentsAIai lab, artificial intelligence, plaintext, robotics, startups

According to market-fixated tech pundits and professional skeptics, the artificial intelligence bubble has popped, and winter’s back. Fei-Fei Li isn’t buying that. In fact, Li—who earned the sobriquet the “godmother of AI”—is betting on the contrary. She’s on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World Labs. While current generative AI is language-based, she sees a frontier where systems construct complete worlds with the physics, logic, and rich detail of our physical reality. It’s an ambitious goal, and despite the dreary nabobs who say progress in AI has hit a grim plateau, World Labs is on…

13 Sep

Reddit’s ‘Celebrity Number Six’ Win Was Almost a Catastrophe—Thanks to AI

stp2y0 CommentsGenAI2024 election, artificial intelligence, digital culture, memes, reddit, social media, the monitor, twitter, youtube

Take, for example, the other recently solved internet mystery: The source of the song that became known as “Everyone Knows That.” After nearly three years of online investigative work, a pair of Redditors found the song—titled “Ulterior Motives”—after hearing a similar song in an adult movie clip on YouTube and watching literal hours of porn that had possibly been scored by the songwriters credited on that clip.During the hunt there had been speculation that the song was AI-generated or part of some stunt. If the detectives had gotten too distracted by that, or if someone had tried to use AI…

12 Sep

OpenAI Announces a Model That ‘Reasons’ Through Problems, Calling It a ‘New Paradigm’

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsai, artificial intelligence, openai

OpenAI made the last big breakthrough in artificial intelligence by increasing the size of its models to dizzying proportions, when it introduced GPT-4 last year. The company today announced a new advance that signals a shift in approach—a model that can “reason” logically through many difficult problems and is significantly smarter than existing AI without a major scale-up.The new model, dubbed OpenAI-o1, can solve problems that stump existing AI models, including OpenAI’s most powerful existing model, GPT-4o. Rather than summon up an answer in one step, as a large language model normally does, it reasons through the problem, effectively thinking…

12 Sep

How Useful Will Apple Intelligence Be? The Next iPhone Will Tell Us

stp2y0 CommentsAIapple, artificial intelligence, gadget lab podcast, iphone, phones, podcasts

On Monday, Apple held one of its splashy media events. This one was used to show off its next round of iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Watches. These are three of its biggest products, and all of the design tweaks feel very familiar to the current Apple universe. But Apple has also trotted out some new tricks, like sleep apnea detection in the Apple Watch and a new feature that instantly turns a pair of AirPods Pro into hearing aids. And of course, the company is also very keen to get consumers hyped up about the iPhone’s new Apple Intelligence features—even…

11 Sep

Apple Shared Its First Public AI-Generated Image. It’s Craig Federighi’s Dog

stp2y0 CommentsAIapple, artificial intelligence, dogs, ios, iphone, phones

Apple's forthcoming iOS 18 is loaded with a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered capabilities. The new mobile OS can rewrite your text messages, summarize emails, and identify objects in photos. But one of the most fun features is Image Playground, which generates cartoonlike illustrations based on a text prompt.While Apple has shown examples of its output during its keynotes, demos, and product videos, we have yet to see a real-world example of an Image Playground character until now. Apple has shared with WIRED the first-ever example created by Image Playground that it has shown outside of its prerecorded keynotes and marketing materials.This…

11 Sep

Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy. Here’s How It Actually Works

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIapple, artificial intelligence, chatgpt, cybersecurity, ios, iphone, Mac, openai, privacy, security

Apple is making every production PCC server build publicly available for inspection so people unaffiliated with Apple can verify that PCC is doing (and not doing) what the company claims, and that everything is implemented correctly. All of the PCC server images are recorded in a cryptographic attestation log, essentially an indelible record of signed claims, and each entry includes a URL for where to download that individual build. PCC is designed so Apple can't put a server into production without logging it. And in addition to offering transparency, the system works as a crucial enforcement mechanism to prevent bad…

11 Sep

An AI Bot Named James Has My Old Local News Job

stp2y0 CommentsAIalgorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, social media, startups

It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did.So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new journalists—even if they seemed a little off. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who appears to be unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like “Hanalei” and “TV,” presented their…

11 Sep

This New Tech Puts AI In Touch with Its Emotions—and Yours

stp2y0 CommentsAIai lab, artificial intelligence, openai, voice assistants, voice recognition

A new “empathic voice interface” launched today by Hume AI, a New York–based startup, makes it possible to add a range of emotionally expressive voices, plus an emotionally attuned ear, to large language models from Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI—portending an era when AI helpers may more routinely get all gushy on us.“We specialize in building empathic personalities that speak in ways people would speak, rather than stereotypes of AI assistants,” says Hume AI cofounder Alan Cowen, a psychologist who has coauthored a number of research papers on AI and emotion, and who previously worked on emotional technologies at…