Simon Willison’s Weblog

Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen, AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real. Excellent investigative piece by Jason Koebler digging into the concerning trend of Facebook engagement farming accounts who take popular aspirational images and use generative AI to recreate hundreds of variants of them, which then gather hundreds of comments from people who have no idea that the images are fake. # 19th December 2023, 2:01 am

Meta/Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue Meeting yesterday. Johannes Ernst reports from a recent meeting hosted by Meta aimed at bringing together staff from Meta’s Threads social media platform with representatives from the Fediverse.

Meta have previously announced an intention for Threads to join the Fediverse. It sounds like they’re being extremely thoughtful about how to go about this.

Two points that stood out for me:

“Rolling out a large node – like Threads will be – in a complex, distributed system that’s as decentralized and heterogeneous as the Fediverse is not something anybody really has done before.”

And:

“When we think of privacy risks when Meta connects to the Fediverse, we usually think of what happens to data that moves from today’s Fediverse into Meta. I didn’t realize the opposite is also quite a challenge (personal data posted to Threads, making its way into the Fediverse) for an organization as heavily monitored by regulators around the world as is Meta.” # 12th December 2023, 1:05 am

Announcing Purple Llama: Towards open trust and safety in the new world of generative AI (via) New from Meta AI, Purple Llama is “an umbrella project featuring open trust and safety tools and evaluations meant to level the playing field for developers to responsibly deploy generative AI models and experiences”.

There are three components: a 27 page “Responsible Use Guide”, a new open model called Llama Guard and CyberSec Eval, “a set of cybersecurity safety evaluations benchmarks for LLMs”.

Disappointingly, despite this being an initiative around trustworthy LLM development,prompt injection is mentioned exactly once, in the Responsible Use Guide, with an incorrect description describing it as involving “attempts to circumvent content restrictions”!

The Llama Guard model is interesting: it’s a fine-tune of Llama 2 7B designed to help spot “toxic” content in input or output from a model, effectively an openly released alternative to OpenAI’s moderation API endpoint.

The CyberSec Eval benchmarks focus on two concepts: generation of insecure code, and preventing models from assisting attackers from generating new attacks. I don’t think either of those are anywhere near as important as prompt injection mitigation.

My hunch is that the reason prompt injection didn’t get much coverage in this is that, like the rest of us, Meta’s AI research teams have no idea how to fix it yet! # 8th December 2023, 6:36 am

Seamless Communication (via) A new “family of AI research models” from Meta AI for speech and text translation. The live demo is particularly worth trying—you can record a short webcam video of yourself speaking and get back the same video with your speech translated into another language.

The key to it is the new SeamlessM4T v2 model, which supports 101 languages for speech input, 96 Languages for text input/output and 35 languages for speech output. SeamlessM4T-Large v2 is a 9GB file, available on Hugging Face.

Also in this release: SeamlessExpressive, which “captures certain underexplored aspects of prosody such as speech rate and pauses”—effectively maintaining things like expressed enthusiasm across languages.

Plus SeamlessStreaming, “a model that can deliver speech and text translations with around two seconds of latency”. # 1st December 2023, 5:01 pm