artificial intelligence - CybAI news

04 Sep

NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, books, digital culture, twitter

Morris, another member of NaNo’s writers board, first learned of the statement early Monday morning from a Facebook friend’s post. She immediately took action, publicly severing her ties with the organization, and even deleting her decades-old account on the NaNo site. ”I have a very hard line when it comes to these generative AI programs,” she says.In a blog post, Morris elaborated on the issues she has with the use of AI in creative work: The platforms are unethical, the tech scrapes content from published authors without paying royalties or fees, and it robs writers of the opportunity to find…

02 Sep

AI-Fakes Detection Is Failing Voters in the Global South

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, elections, machine learning

But it’s not just that models can’t recognize accents, languages, syntax, or faces less common in Western countries. “A lot of the initial deepfake detection tools were trained on high quality media,” says Gregory. But in much of the world, including Africa, cheap Chinese smartphone brands that offer stripped-down features dominate the market. The photos and videos that these phones are able to produce are much lower quality, further confusing detection models, says Ngamita.Gregory says that some models are so sensitive that even background noise in a piece of audio, or compressing a video for social media, can result in…

31 Aug

Comcast Xfinity customers can get a year of Perplexity Pro AI for free

stp2y0 CommentsNewsai, artificial intelligence, comcast, deals, free, news, Perplexity, tomorrow, Xfinity

If you have an account with Comcast Xfinity, then you also have a year-long subscription to the Perplexity Pro AI answer engine. Perplexity announced the special deal on Threads. Perplexity Pro differs from the company's free option by allowing unlimited quick answers from a choice of AI models, including GPT-4o, Claude-3 and Sonar Large. Engadget hasn’t reviewed the service, but if you’re already paying for Xfinity, free seems like a good price for you to make up your own mind on its value.All you have to do to get your free year of Perplexity is to log into your Xfinity…

29 Aug

Major Sites Are Saying No to Apple’s AI Scraping

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsapple, artificial intelligence, data, google, openai, websites

In a separate analysis conducted this week, data journalist Ben Welsh found that just over a quarter of the news websites he surveyed (294 of 1,167 primarily English-language, US-based publications) are blocking Applebot-Extended. In comparison, Welsh found that 53 percent of the news websites in his sample block OpenAI’s bot. Google introduced its own AI-specific bot, Google-Extended, last September; it’s blocked by nearly 43 percent of those sites, a sign that Applebot-Extended may still be under the radar. As Welsh tells WIRED, though, the number has been “gradually moving” upward since he started looking.Welsh has an ongoing project monitoring how…

29 Aug

Google, Apple, and Discord Let Harmful AI ‘Undress’ Websites Use Their Sign-On Systems

stp2y0 CommentsAIapple, artificial intelligence, discord, google, privacy

Major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Discord, have been enabling people to quickly sign up to harmful “undress” websites, which use AI to remove clothes from real photos to make victims appear to be “nude” without their consent. More than a dozen of these deepfake websites have been using login buttons from the tech companies for months.A WIRED analysis found 16 of the biggest so-called undress and “nudify” websites using the sign-in infrastructure from Google, Apple, Discord, Twitter, Patreon, and Line. This approach allows people to easily create accounts on the deepfake websites—offering them a veneer of credibility—before they…

28 Aug

Generative AI Transformed English Homework. Math Is Next

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIapps, artificial intelligence, ByteDance, education, fast forward, learning, math

ChatGPT has already wreaked havoc on classrooms and changed how teachers approach writing homework, since OpenAI publicly launched the generative AI chatbot in late 2022. School administrators rushed to try to detect AI-generated essays, and in turn, students scrambled to find out how to cloak their synthetic compositions. But by focusing on writing assignments, educators let another seismic shift take place in the periphery: students using AI more often to complete math homework too.Right now, high schoolers and college students around the country are experimenting with free smartphone apps that help complete their math homework using generative AI. One of…

28 Aug

This Wearable AI Notetaker Will Transcribe Your Meetings—and Someday, Your Entire Life

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, chatgpt, notes, wearables

“Most companies are innovating with AI with already digitized data on the internet,” Plaud CEO Nathan Hsu says in a press briefing ahead of the NotePin’s release. “But there is so much data in our real-life scenarios. What we say, what we hear, and what we see.”Are You Getting This Down?Transcribing your life is a noble endeavor. A decent amount of the long, tedious task of transcribing an interview or meeting notes by hand can be handed off to a good speech recognition service. But—take it from a journalist who routinely uses automated transcription services to type out interviews—those services…

23 Aug

The Apartment Rental Market Is Rigged by Algorithms, a DOJ Lawsuit Alleges

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, housing, justice department, lawsuits, Real Estate

If you’ve rented an apartment in the US in the last several years, you may have had the sense that the game was rigged: Prices creep up not only at your building but at others throughout the city, seemingly in lockstep. A new civil lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice today alleges that in many cases it’s not just in your head—and that a single company’s algorithm is to blame.That company is RealPage, a Texas-based firm that provides commercial revenue management software for landlords. In other words, it helps set the prices of apartments. But it does so,…

22 Aug

A Popular iOS Illustration App Is Saying No to Generative AI

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIapps, ars technica, art, artificial intelligence

The backlash against image and video synthesis is not solely focused on creative app developers. Hardware manufacturer Wacom and game publisher Wizards of the Coast have faced criticism and issued apologies after using AI-generated content in their marketing materials. Toys "R" Us also faced a negative reaction after debuting an AI-generated commercial. Companies are still grappling with balancing the potential benefits of generative AI with the ethical concerns it raises.Artists and Critics ReactSo far, Procreate’s anti-AI announcement has been met with a largely positive reaction in replies to its social media post. In a widely liked comment, artist Freya Holmér…

22 Aug

This Political Startup Wants to Help Progressives Win … With AI-Generated Ads

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, digital advertising, elections, politics, social media

I confess to Hutchinson that if I were a politician, I would be scared to use BattlegroundAI. Generative AI tools are known to “hallucinate,” a polite way of saying that they sometimes make things up out of whole cloth. (They bullshit, to use academic parlance.) I ask how she’s ensuring that the political content BattlegroundAI generates is accurate.“Nothing is automated,” she replies. Hutchinson notes that BattlegroundAI’s copy is a starting-off point, and that humans from campaigns are meant to review and approve it before it goes out. “You might not have a lot of time, or a huge team, but…