artificial intelligence

AI Is Your Coworker Now. Can You Trust It?

AI Is Your Coworker Now. Can You Trust It?

Yet “it doesn’t seem very long before this technology could be used for monitoring employees,” says Elcock.Self-CensorshipGenerative AI does pose several potential risks, but there are steps businesses and individual employees can take to improve privacy and security. First, do not put confidential information into a prompt for a publicly available tool such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, says Lisa Avvocato, vice president of marketing and community at data firm Sama.When crafting a prompt, be generic to avoid sharing too much. “Ask, ‘Write a proposal template for budget expenditure,’ not ‘Here is my budget, write a proposal for expenditure on…
Read More
The Uncanny Rise of the World’s First AI Beauty Pageant

The Uncanny Rise of the World’s First AI Beauty Pageant

What makes an AI pageant different, Friedman asserts, is that Fanvue’s contestants are products of their creators. “They’re drawing on all these stereotypes that we have about what a ‘beautiful woman’ is,” she says, “and people who tend to use AI might have a different idea of what an attractive woman might be. She might have pink hair, but she’ll still be within the realm of traditional beauty, with a thin body or not a lot of moles on her face.”The creators of AI model Aitana Lopez (above) are serving as judges for the World AI Creator Awards beauty pageant.…
Read More
The Big-Tech Clean Energy Crunch Is Here

The Big-Tech Clean Energy Crunch Is Here

Big Tech’s appetite for energy is just about visible from the east coast of Scotland. Some 12 miles out to sea sits a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades roughly the length of an American football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project had promised the site would be capable of generating enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes once completed. That was before Amazon stepped in.In January, Amazon announced it had struck a deal to claim more than half the site’s 880 megawatts of output, part of its ongoing attempt to slake…
Read More
Google’s AI Overviews Will Always Be Broken. That’s How AI Works

Google’s AI Overviews Will Always Be Broken. That’s How AI Works

A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google’s aggressive drive to commercialize generative AI—and also the treacherous and fundamental limitations of that technology.Google’s AI Overviews feature draws on Gemini, a large language model like the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to generate written answers to some search queries by summarizing information found online. The current AI boom is built around LLMs’ impressive fluency with text, but the software can also…
Read More
It’s the AI Election Year

It’s the AI Election Year

Leah Feiger: Sometimes you are able to link it back to specific companies-Vittoria Elliott: Yes.Leah Feiger: That are doing the generative AI itself.Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, totally. For instance, there was a deep fake made of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, whose been in jail under corruption charges. His party was disqualified for running in the general election earlier this year. He was able to make campaign speeches using generative AI.Leah Feiger: Wild.Vittoria Elliott: To do that, they used ElevenLabs, which is the same company that was used for the fake Joe Biden robocall earlier this year. Sometimes…
Read More
Google Admits Its AI Overviews Search Feature Screwed Up

Google Admits Its AI Overviews Search Feature Screwed Up

When bizarre and misleading answers to search queries generated by Google’s new AI Overview feature went viral on social media last week, the company issued statements that generally downplayed the notion the technology had problems. Late Thursday, the company’s head of search Liz Reid admitted the flubs had highlighted areas that needed improvement, writing that “we wanted to explain what happened and the steps we’ve taken.”Reid’s post directly referenced two of the most viral, and wildly incorrect, AI Overview results. One saw Google's algorithms endorse eating rocks because doing so “can be good for you,” and the other suggested using…
Read More
Foreign Influence Campaigns Don’t Know How to Use AI Yet Either

Foreign Influence Campaigns Don’t Know How to Use AI Yet Either

Today, OpenAI released its first threat report, detailing how actors from Russia, Iran, China, and Israel have attempted to use its technology for foreign influence operations across the globe. The report named five different networks that OpenAI identified and shut down between 2023 and 2024. In the report, OpenAI reveals that established networks like Russia’s Doppleganger and China’s Spamoflauge are experimenting with how to use generative AI to automate their operations. They're also not very good at it.And while it’s a modest relief that these actors haven’t mastered generative AI to become unstoppable forces for disinformation, it’s clear that they’re…
Read More
AI Agents Are Coming for Mundane—but Valuable—Office Tasks

AI Agents Are Coming for Mundane—but Valuable—Office Tasks

For all the bluster about generative artificial intelligence upending the world, the technology has yet to meaningfully transform white-collar work. Workers are dabbling with chatbots for tasks such as drafting emails, and companies are launching countless experiments, but office work hasn’t undergone a major AI reboot.Perhaps that’s only because we haven’t given chatbots like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT the right tools for the job yet; they’re generally restricted to taking in and spitting out text via a chat interface. Things might get more interesting in business settings as AI companies start deploying so-called “AI agents,” which can take action…
Read More
How AI Is Impacting the 2024 Elections

How AI Is Impacting the 2024 Elections

In India and Indonesia, dead leaders are rising to throw their support behind their political successors; rapper Eminem is endorsing opposition parties in South Africa; and in the United States, President Biden is telling voters in New Hampshire to stay home. All of these things “happened”–but none of them are real. The generative AI revolution is here, and it's coming for your elections. Welcome to the future, welcome to 2024.For the very first time, the widespread availability of generative AI is going to clash head-on with political campaigns and elections. 2024 is already an unprecedented year for democracy: More than…
Read More
It’s Chromebook’s Turn for an AI Injection

It’s Chromebook’s Turn for an AI Injection

The first notable feature is Help Me Write, which works in any text box. Select text in any text box and right-click—you'll see a box next to the standard right-click context menu. You can ask Google's AI to rewrite the selected text, rephrase it in a specific way, or change the tone. I tried to use it on a few sentences in this story but did not like any of the suggestions it gave me, so your mileage may vary. Or maybe I'm a better writer than Google's AI. Who knows?Google's bringing the same generative AI wallpaper system you'll find…
Read More
No widgets found. Go to Widget page and add the widget in Offcanvas Sidebar Widget Area.