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Items tagged ai, ethics

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Don’t trust AI to talk accurately about itself: Bard wasn’t trained on Gmail

Earlier this month I wrote about how ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can. Consider this part two in the series. Here’s another common and non-intuitive mistake people make when interacting with large language model AI systems: asking them questions about themselves.

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The Age of AI has begun. Bill Gates calls GPT-class large language models “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface”. His essay here focuses on the philanthropy angle, mostly from the point of view of AI applications in healthcare, education and concerns about keeping access to these new technologies as equitable as possible. # 21st March 2023, 9:14 pm

Adobe made an AI image generator — and says it didn’t steal artists’ work to do it. Adobe Firefly is a brand new text-to-image model which Adobe claim was trained entirely on fully licensed imagery—either out of copyright, specially licensed or part of the existing Adobe Stock library. I’m sure they have the license, but I still wouldn’t be surprised to hear complaints from artists who licensed their content to Adobe Stock who didn’t anticipate it being used for model training. # 21st March 2023, 5:08 pm

Not By AI: Your AI-free Content Deserves a Badge (via) A badge for non-AI generated content. Interesting to note that they set the cutoff at 90%: “Use this badge if your article, including blog posts, essays, research, letters, and other text-based content, contains less than 10% of AI output.” # 16th March 2023, 4:05 pm

We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms. Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.

Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Shmargaret Shmitchell # 15th March 2023, 3:30 pm

ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can

A really common misconception about ChatGPT is that it can access URLs. I’ve seen many different examples of people pasting in a URL and asking for a summary, or asking it to make use of the content on that page in some way.

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Thoughts and impressions of AI-assisted search from Bing

It’s been a wild couple of weeks.

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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do all of the other fun things that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been demonstrating over the past few months: the ability to generate poetry, and jokes, and do creative writing, and so much more.

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Exploring MusicCaps, the evaluation data released to accompany Google’s MusicLM text-to-music model

Google Research just released MusicLM: Generating Music From Text. It’s a new generative AI model that takes a descriptive prompt and produces a “high-fidelity” music track. Here’s the paper (and a more readable version using arXiv Vanity).

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Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why. Sumana Harihareswara’s in-depth review of Whisper, the shockingly effective open source text-to-speech transcription model release by OpenAI a few months ago. Includes an extremely thoughtful section considering the ethics of using this model—some of the most insightful short-form writing I’ve seen on AI model ethics generally. # 22nd December 2022, 9:49 pm

Is the AI spell-casting metaphor harmful or helpful?

For a few weeks now I’ve been promoting spell-casting as a metaphor for prompt design against generative AI systems such as GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion.

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Exploring 10m scraped Shutterstock videos used to train Meta’s Make-A-Video text-to-video model

Make-A-Video is a new “state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text” from Meta AI. It looks incredible—it really is DALL-E / Stable Diffusion for video. And it appears to have been trained on 10m video preview clips scraped from Shutterstock.

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Feeding AI systems on the world’s beauty, ugliness, and cruelty, but expecting it to reflect only the beauty is a fantasy

Ruha Benjamin # 5th September 2022, 9:42 pm

Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion

Two weeks ago, the Stable Diffusion image generation model was released to the public. I wrote about this last week, in Stable Diffusion is a really big deal—a post which has since become one of the top ten results for “stable diffusion” on Google and shown up in all sorts of different places online.

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For these reasons, I don’t think I’ll be using Midjourney or any similar tool to illustrate my newsletter going forward (an exception would be if I were writing about the technology at a later date and wanted to show examples). Even though the job wouldn’t go to a different, deserving, human artist, I think the optics are shitty, and I do worry about having any role in helping to set any kind of precedent in this direction.

Charlie Warzel # 4th September 2022, 9:06 pm

Stable Diffusion is a really big deal

If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on with Stable Diffusion, you really should be.

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