Oct 18, 2024

Human models outraged to discover their faces being used in AI propoganda

AI-generated propaganda sparks controversy: The use of AI-generated videos featuring real human models in political propaganda has raised serious ethical concerns and sparked outrage among the affected individuals. The Synthesia dilemma: Synthesia, a billion-dollar text-to-video AI company, has come under scrutiny for its AI avatar technology being used to create propaganda clips linked to authoritarian regimes. Synthesia's clientele ranges from reputable organizations like Reuters and Ernst & Young to groups associated with authoritarian states such as China, Russia, and Venezuela. The company claims its technology allows users to create "studio-quality videos with AI avatars" with ease. Human models who posed...

read Oct 18, 2024

An alarming number of people are asking AI to create child pornography

AI-generated child exploitation material: A disturbing trend emerges; The recent hack of Muah.AI, a platform allowing users to create AI chatbots and request images, has exposed a concerning surge in attempts to produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) using artificial intelligence. Muah.AI, with nearly 2 million registered users, has become a focal point for discussions about the ethical implications of AI-generated content. The hacked data, reviewed by security consultant Troy Hunt, revealed tens of thousands of prompts related to CSAM, including searches for "13-year-old" and "prepubescent" alongside sexual content. While Muah.AI confirmed the hack, they disputed the scale of CSAM-related...

read Oct 18, 2024

Dana-Fiona Armour wins Sigg Prize for art that integrates AI

AI-powered art award celebrates innovative exploration of future ecology: The inaugural Sigg Art Prize, focused on integrating artificial intelligence in art, has been awarded to German artist-researcher Dana-Fiona Armour for her thought-provoking work "Alvinella Ophia." Prize details and winner's work: The Sigg Art Foundation, founded by Swiss tech entrepreneur Pierre Sigg, presented the €10,000 award at a ceremony in London. Armour's winning piece, "Alvinella Ophis," is a 3D-animated video installation that blends biotechnology, AI, and contemporary art. The work depicts a hybrid serpent creature, combining a snake and a deep-sea Pompeii worm, exploring a dystopian "future desert" devastated by ecological...

read Oct 18, 2024

X’s new terms: Your tweets will train Grok AI

X's new terms of service: Major changes and implications: X is set to implement significant updates to its terms of service on November 15, 2024, which will have far-reaching consequences for user data, AI training, and platform interactions. The most notable change allows X to utilize users' public posts as training data for its Grok chatbot and other AI systems, with users required to agree that X can "analyze text and other information you provide" for AI model training purposes. It remains unclear whether the current opt-out option for Grok AI scraping will continue to be available under the new...

read Oct 18, 2024

Why ‘predictive’ generative AI is the smart bet for real returns

The AI investment landscape: The artificial intelligence sector is experiencing significant growth, with over $1 trillion in expected capital expenditures on AI infrastructure, yet questions remain about the real return on investment for businesses. Businesses are seeking to separate hype from real value as they navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape. A recent Goldman Sachs Exchanges podcast featured a debate between MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Goldman Sachs Research's Jim Covello on whether generative AI can live up to its massive potential. Joseph Briggs of Global Economics Research suggests AI could boost U.S. productivity by 9% over the next decade,...

read Oct 18, 2024

Adobe unveils AI-powered 3D rotation tool for 2D drawings

Breakthrough in 3D visualization: Adobe unveiled an innovative tool called "Project Turntable" at its MAX conference, showcasing the ability to transform 2D vector images into rotatable 3D models instantly. The technology, still in the demo phase, can generate a 3D model from a 2D vector image in just four seconds. Users can rotate the resulting 3D model 360 degrees horizontally and partially vertically, providing a comprehensive view of the subject. The tool maintains the original artist's style and "essence" of the 2D artwork when creating the 3D model. Technical underpinnings: Project Turntable leverages advanced machine learning algorithms to extrapolate unseen...

read Oct 18, 2024

How Walmart is evolving its data analytics platform around AI

Walmart's data analytics evolution: Walmart is transforming its data analytics platform to leverage AI and provide actionable insights for suppliers and merchants. Walmart Data Ventures, established nearly four years ago, created the Walmart Luminate platform to help both the retailer and its suppliers understand shopping patterns and product movement. The platform is now being rebranded as Scintilla, reflecting its expansion beyond the U.S. market and its focus on AI-driven recommendations. Scintilla aims to provide not just data points but also actionable recommendations to help drive business decisions. Key features and developments: The platform's evolution includes new tools and features designed...

read Oct 18, 2024

How AI is transforming the construction industry

AI revolutionizing construction industry: Artificial intelligence is transforming the construction sector, enhancing efficiency, safety, and decision-making across various aspects of building projects. AI is being applied to address the inherent complexity of construction projects, which require extensive planning and preparation due to their fixed nature and numerous dependencies. The technology is making significant impacts on project scheduling, resource allocation, risk management, and decision-making processes. Design and planning optimization: AI is streamlining the initial stages of construction projects through advanced modeling and design tools. Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools are incorporating AI to create more accurate digital representations of physical and...

read Oct 18, 2024

Suno’s new feature composes songs based on photos and videos

AI-generated soundtracks for visual content: Suno, an AI music creation platform, has introduced a new feature called Suno Scenes that composes custom songs based on photos and videos uploaded by users. Suno Scenes eliminates the need for users to write prompts for the AI to create music, instead relying on visual input to generate appropriate soundtracks. The feature is currently available on the iOS app, with plans to expand to Android in the future. Users can access Suno Scenes through the app's camera mode, where they can take a photo or video and have the AI compose a matching song....

read Oct 18, 2024

An inside look at NotebookLM’s new AI-powered features

AI-powered note-taking evolution: Google's NotebookLM, an AI-driven note-taking tool, has received significant updates aimed at enhancing user experience and expanding its functionality for both individual and enterprise users. Enhanced audio capabilities: The latest update to NotebookLM introduces more control over Audio Overviews, transforming users' documents into AI-hosted podcast-like discussions. Users can now guide the conversation by focusing on specific topics and sources, tailoring the content for particular audiences. The new update allows for customization of prompts before generating a "Deep Dive" Audio Overview, ensuring the AI concentrates on key areas and specific topics. A background listening option has been introduced,...

read Oct 18, 2024

How AI can help find common ground in group deliberations

AI-assisted deliberation: A new frontier in democratic discourse: Google DeepMind researchers have developed an innovative AI system that could potentially transform how groups find common ground on complex social and political issues. The Habermas machine: An AI mediator for group discussions: The system, named after philosopher Jürgen Habermas, utilizes two large language models (LLMs) to generate and evaluate statements that reflect group views and areas of agreement. One LLM acts as a generative model, suggesting statements that capture collective opinions. The second LLM functions as a personalized reward model, scoring how likely participants are to agree with generated statements. The...

read Oct 18, 2024

How multimodal AI models are unlocking opportunities for vertical applications

Multimodal AI: Expanding Vertical AI's Impact: The emergence of multimodal models capable of processing audio, video, voice, and vision data is creating new opportunities for vertical AI applications to transform a wider range of industries and workflows. Key advancements in multimodal architecture: Recent models have demonstrated improved context understanding, reduced hallucinations, and enhanced reasoning capabilities. Performance in speech recognition, image processing, and voice generation is approaching or surpassing human capabilities in some cases. New speech-native models, like OpenAI's Realtime API and Kyutai's Moshi, are replacing cascading architecture with lower latency and better context capture. Voice capabilities and use cases: Transcription...

read Oct 18, 2024

New scraping technique lets you extract data from any screen recording

AI-powered video scraping emerges as a game-changing data extraction technique: Simon Willison, an AI researcher, has developed a novel method called "video scraping" that uses AI to extract structured data from screen recordings at an incredibly low cost. Willison demonstrated the technique by recording his screen while viewing payment data in emails, then feeding the video into Google's Gemini AI model. The AI successfully extracted and structured the payment information from the video with high accuracy, at a cost of less than one-tenth of a cent. This breakthrough showcases the ability of modern AI models to process video inputs and...

read Oct 18, 2024

H2O.ai launches 2 vision AI models for better document analysis

AI innovation in document analysis: H2O.ai, an open-source AI platform provider, has introduced two new vision-language models that challenge larger models from tech giants in document analysis and optical character recognition (OCR) tasks. H2O.ai's new models, H2OVL Mississippi-2B and H2OVL-Mississippi-0.8B, demonstrate competitive performance against much larger models from major tech companies. The H2OVL Mississippi-0.8B model, with only 800 million parameters, outperformed all other models on the OCRBench Text Recognition task. The 2-billion parameter H2OVL Mississippi-2B model showed strong general performance across various vision-language benchmarks. Efficiency and accessibility: H2O.ai's approach focuses on creating smaller, specialized models that offer high performance while...

read Oct 18, 2024

Clearbot’s AI-powered boats autonomously clean waterways

Innovative water cleaning technology: Clearbot, a startup founded by University of Hong Kong graduates Sidhant Gupta and Utkarsh Goel, has developed AI-driven autonomous boats that efficiently clean waterways and collect valuable environmental data. The company's origins trace back to a university project aimed at cleaning Bali's beaches, which evolved into a sophisticated trash collection system powered by NVIDIA Jetson technology. Clearbot's boats, ranging from 10 to 16 feet in length, utilize two cameras for navigation and waste identification, with AI models trained on cloud and desktop NVIDIA GPUs. The energy-efficient Jetson Xavier NX enables the electric-powered boats to operate for...

read Oct 18, 2024

Singapore tightens AI rules to combat election deepfakes

Singapore's proactive stance on AI and cybersecurity: The city-state has introduced a comprehensive set of guidelines and legislation to address the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence and digital security. The new measures cover a wide range of areas, including AI system security, election integrity, medical device cybersecurity, and IoT device standards. These initiatives demonstrate Singapore's commitment to staying at the forefront of technological governance and security in the digital age. AI system security guidelines: Singapore has released new guidelines aimed at promoting a "secure by design" approach for AI development and deployment, covering the entire lifecycle of AI systems....

read Oct 18, 2024

5 ways to get the best images out of your Midjourney prompts

AI-generated imagery evolves: Midjourney, a pioneering artificial image generation platform, continues to push the boundaries of digital creativity with its recent move to a web-based interface and enhanced features. Midjourney's transition from a Discord bot to a web platform has expanded its capabilities, including the addition of an editor for image resizing and AI-powered gap-filling. The platform maintains its position as one of the leading AI image generators, often outperforming competitors across various metrics. While Midjourney has become more user-friendly, mastering its nuances and hidden settings can significantly improve the quality and accuracy of generated images. Maximizing Midjourney's potential: Five...

read Oct 18, 2024

The ChatGPT Windows app has arrived — here’s how to access it

ChatGPT expands to Windows platform: OpenAI has launched a beta version of its ChatGPT app for Windows, expanding its reach beyond web browsers and mobile devices. The Windows app release comes five months after the macOS version debuted, signaling OpenAI's commitment to providing platform-specific experiences. The new app closely resembles the web interface, ensuring a familiar experience for existing users while offering desktop-specific features. Accessibility and availability: The ChatGPT Windows app is currently restricted to paying customers, with plans to potentially expand access in the future. Users on Teams, Plus, or Enterprise plans, paying at least $20 per month, can...

read Oct 18, 2024

The latest updates rumored to be coming to Claude and ChatGPT

Anticipated AI chatbot upgrades: Major updates are rumored to be on the horizon for leading AI chatbots ChatGPT and Claude, with potential improvements to their underlying models and new features that could significantly enhance their capabilities. Both OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) and Anthropic (creator of Claude) have hinted at fall upgrades, though specific release dates remain unconfirmed. The focus of these updates is expected to be on the core AI models that power the intelligence behind these platforms, comparable to upgrading an operating system. Potential ChatGPT enhancements: OpenAI is rumored to be working on the next iteration of its GPT...

read Oct 18, 2024

Perplexity now lets you search files and web in one tool

Perplexity's new enterprise search capabilities: Perplexity has introduced Internal Knowledge Search and Spaces, offering enhanced search functionality for enterprise users to combine internal and external information sources. Internal Knowledge Search allows Perplexity Pro and Enterprise Pro users to search across both their internal files and the web within a single platform. The feature is limited to specific files uploaded by users, rather than searching entire internal databases, focusing on the most valuable and important data. Users have a file upload limit (500 for Enterprise Pro users), which may be expanded in the future. Supported file formats include Excel sheets, Word...

read Oct 17, 2024

Newton AI model learns physics autonomously from raw data

Breakthrough in AI-driven physics understanding: Archetype AI's Newton model represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence's ability to comprehend and predict complex physical phenomena using only raw sensor data. Newton, developed by researchers at Archetype AI, can learn intricate physics principles without any pre-programmed knowledge or human guidance. The model demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities across diverse physical phenomena, relying solely on raw sensor measurements as input. Trained on over half a billion data points from various sensor measurements, Newton showcases an unprecedented ability to adapt to new domains with minimal additional training. Impressive performance across diverse applications: Newton's versatility and...

read Oct 17, 2024

Anthropic just announced a big update to Claude — here’s what’s inside

Major Claude AI update introduces new features and iPad app: Anthropic has released a significant update to its Claude AI mobile applications, enhancing functionality and debuting its first-ever iPad app. The update includes improvements for both iOS and Android platforms, focusing on user experience enhancements and increased personalization options. A new iPad app has been introduced, expanding Claude AI's accessibility across devices and optimizing the interface for tablet users. The update marks another milestone in Claude AI's evolving capabilities, with more developments likely in the pipeline. Enhanced customization and productivity: The latest update introduces features that allow users to tailor...

read Oct 17, 2024

Google enhances NotebookLM with customizable AI podcasts

Google's NotebookLM evolves with customizable AI podcasts: Google has introduced a new customization feature for AI-generated podcasts in its NotebookLM software, allowing users to tailor the content and focus of these synthetic audio discussions. Key features and updates: NotebookLM, initially launched in 2023 as an experimental AI writing tool, has gained popularity since introducing AI-generated podcast conversations in September. The new customization tool allows users to provide prompts and specify areas of focus for the AI-generated audio content. Google has removed the "experimental" tag from NotebookLM, signaling increased stability and meeting internal quality standards. How the customization works: Users can...

read Oct 17, 2024

Pollo AI joins the ranks of free AI video generators

AI-powered video creation made accessible: Pollo AI is a user-friendly option in the rapidly expanding field of AI video generators, offering both text-to-video and image-to-video capabilities for free. Developed by Hix.AI, Pollo AI joins the company's suite of generative AI tools, including the synthetic music platform Tad.ai. The platform allows users to create high-quality videos from text prompts or still images without requiring extensive technical knowledge or filmmaking experience. Pollo AI can generate fully realized productions, complete with animations and transitions, from simple text descriptions. Key features and functionality: Pollo AI's intuitive interface and diverse capabilities cater to a wide...

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