Researchers Call for “Child-Safe AI” After Alexa Tells Little Girl to Stick Penny in Wall Socket

Researchers Call for “Child-Safe AI” After Alexa Tells Little Girl to Stick Penny in Wall Socket

"No, Alexa, no!"Chatbot ShockerResearchers are urging tech companies and regulators to come up with new rules to protect children from AI chatbots that lack any kind of emotional intelligence.This "empathy gap," as detailed in a new paper authored by University of Cambridge sociology PhD Nomisha Kurian, could put young users at risk, prompting the need for "child-safe AI."In her paper, Kurian detailed a number of interactions between children and AI chatbots that led to potentially dangerous situations.In one incident cited by Kurian, a ten-year-old girl in the US was told by Amazon's Alexa assistant to touch a live electrical plug…
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US financial watchdog urged to investigate NDAs at OpenAI

US financial watchdog urged to investigate NDAs at OpenAI

OpenAI whistleblowers have urged the US financial watchdog to investigate non-disclosure agreements at the startup after claiming the contracts included restrictions such as requiring employees to seek permission before contacting regulators.Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) typically bar an employee from sharing company information with outside parties but a group of whistleblowers are arguing that OpenAI’s agreements could have led to workers being punished for raising concerns about the company to federal authorities.San Francisco-based OpenAI is the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot and a key player in the artificial intelligence boom, which has been accompanied by expressions of concern from experts about the…
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Training AI requires more data than we have — generating synthetic data could help solve this challenge

Training AI requires more data than we have — generating synthetic data could help solve this challenge

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence like OpenAI’s GPT-4 has brought remarkable advancements, but it also presents significant risks. One of the most pressing issues is model collapse, a phenomenon where AI models trained on largely AI-generated content tend to degrade over time. This degradation occurs as AI models lose information about their true underlying data distribution, resulting in increasingly similar and less diverse outputs full of biases and errors. As the internet becomes flooded with real-time AI-generated content, the scarcity of new, human-generated or natural data further exacerbates this problem. Without a steady influx of diverse, high-quality data,…
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Everything You See Is a Computational Process, If You Know How to Look

Everything You See Is a Computational Process, If You Know How to Look

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.In the movie Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr challenges the physicist early in his career:Bohr: Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn’t “can you read music?” It’s “can you hear it?” Can you hear the music, Robert?Oppenheimer: Yes, I can.I can’t hear the algebra, but I feel the machine.I felt the machine even before I touched a computer. In the 1970s I awaited the arrival of my first one, a Radio Shack TRS-80, imagining how it would function. I wrote some simple programs on paper and could feel the machine I didn’t yet…
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The Metaverse Was Supposed to Be Your New Office. You’re Still on Zoom

The Metaverse Was Supposed to Be Your New Office. You’re Still on Zoom

When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, he estimated the metaverse could reach a billion people over a decade. Not long after, Bill Gates predicted that within two or three years “most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me—to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.”In fall 2022, Microsoft announced a partnership with Meta that would bring Mesh, a platform for collaboration in mixed reality, and its set of Microsoft 365 applications to Meta’s Quest products. Meta has launched Horizon Workrooms for…
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James Webb telescope marks second anniversary with an image of the Penguin and the Egg galaxies

James Webb telescope marks second anniversary with an image of the Penguin and the Egg galaxies

NASA and its partners, the European and Canadian space agencies, are celebrating the second year since the James Webb Telescope started sending back photos of the universe by releasing an image of the Penguin and the Egg galaxies. These are interacting galaxies collectively known as Arp 142 located 326 million light-years from Earth, captured by the James Webb in interactive light.The galaxies first interacted between 25 and 75 million years ago, causing new star formation. Based on previous research, 100 to 200 stars have formed per year in the Penguin — yes, that is the galaxy at the center of…
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VentureBeat’s Transform 2024 Innovation Showcase: Instabase gets most likely to succeed

VentureBeat’s Transform 2024 Innovation Showcase: Instabase gets most likely to succeed

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Instabase was voted most likely to succeed at the Innovation Showcase for VentureBeat’s Transform 2024 event this week. The AI company is focused on helping accelerate decision making in enterprises by unlocking unstructured data like voice, video, images text messages and more. Clemens Mewald, head of product at Instabase, said in a presentation that the company’s AI Hub is being used by the world’s largest enterprises across banking, insurance, consumer products and transportation on their most critical business processes. Mewald said…
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I got married at 18 to my boyfriend of 6 months to help pay for college. It was the worst decision I ever made.

I got married at 18 to my boyfriend of 6 months to help pay for college. It was the worst decision I ever made.

I was married at 18 for financial stability. I had just finished my first semester as a full-time college student while working full-time hours. I had no time to go to the gym or hang out with friends. I was also struggling to pay for my next semester's tuition.Because of my parents' income — ironic because they worked blue-collar jobs — I hadn't qualified for financial aid and was forced to borrow a small loan from my grandpa to cover the first semester. I dreaded the possibility of having to ask my grandpa for the same loan I had just…
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Creating a Smooth Transitioning Dialog Component in React (Part 1/4)

Creating a Smooth Transitioning Dialog Component in React (Part 1/4)

Part 1: Setting Up the Basic Dialog Component with Minimize/Expand Functionality Welcome to the first part of my four-part series on creating a responsive dialog component in React. In this series, I'll explore different approaches to achieve smooth animation transitions while maintaining the dialog's fluid dimensions. In this initial part, I'll set up the basic dialog component with minimise and expand functionality. Please note that accessibility and responsive design are not included as part of the considerations in this series. The primary focus is on creating a reusable dialog component with smooth animation transitions. This series is part of a…
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