Tech workers should shine a light on the industry’s secretive work with the military (www.technologyreview.com)
Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business (www.technologyreview.com)
People are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away.
An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary (www.technologyreview.com)
Thanks to rapid advancements in generative AI and a glut of training data created by human actors that has been fed into its AI model, Synthesia has been able to produce avatars that are indeed more humanlike and more expressive than their predecessors. The digital clones are better able to match their reactions and intonation...
Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed (www.technologyreview.com)
Dozens of people have now had their memories turned into images in this way via Synthetic Memories, a project run by Domestic Data Streamers. The studio uses generative image models, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E, to bring people’s memories to life. Since 2022, the studio, which has received funding from the UN and Google, has...
Why Threads is suddenly popular in Taiwan (www.technologyreview.com)
Apparently, Twitter was quite niche and the launch of Threads coincided with a surge of interest in presidential elections, for which one party's supporters rallied on Threads which also pulled in their friends....
European Parliament votes to approve the AI Act (www.technologyreview.com)
After three years, the AI Act, the EU’s new sweeping AI law, jumped through its final bureaucratic hoop last week when the European Parliament voted to approve it.
Brazil is fighting dengue with bacteria-infected mosquitos (www.technologyreview.com)
From the article --...
Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media (www.technologyreview.com)
From the article: "In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung....
The Download: tiny TikTok-style soap operas, and how algorithms change us. (www.technologyreview.com)
People are worried that AI will take everyone’s jobs. We’ve been here before. (www.technologyreview.com)
In a 1938 article, MIT’s president argued that technical progress didn’t mean fewer jobs. He’s still right....
When the race for fusion ground to a halt (www.technologyreview.com)
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem (www.technologyreview.com)
The researchers started by sketching out the problem they wanted to solve in Python, a popular programming language. But they left out the lines in the program that would specify how to solve it. That is where FunSearch comes in. It gets Codey to fill in the blanks—in effect, to suggest code that will solve the problem....
This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI (www.technologyreview.com)
A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways....
How to fix the internet (www.technologyreview.com)
We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change.
Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads (www.technologyreview.com)
Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads::More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites —and the problem is growing fast.
