I suppose it was inevitable, really. After high-profile examples of AI-generated images winning photography competitions, a real photograph has been rejected from a competition over suspicions it was AI-generated.
“We can’t know for sure it is or isn’t, but on the basis we’re suspicious we can’t allow it in,” the owner of Charing Cross Photo, who runs the competition, told The Guardian.
The complaint alleges that Google “has been secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans” and using this data to train its AI products, such as its chatbot Bard. The complaint also claims Google has taken “virtually the entirety of our digital footprint,” including “creative and copywritten works” to build its AI products.
Google recently updated its privacy policy to say that it uses publicly available information from the web to train products like Bard.
The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka tried out an AI model fine-tuned and trained on his work:
No matter how many times I asked it to describe how I felt about being replaced, Robot Kyle always came to the conclusion that I would ultimately be happier as a result of my A.I. self. The program’s output reminded me of the fragility of language and original thought. As writers, we are all prone to falling into lazy patterns; avoiding them requires active effort. Robot Kyle is no different.
One hilarious possible outcome is that AI glurge makes real writers more expensive — but only, of course, if you care about quality. One more unsettling outcome is that you can train an AI to produce glurge in the style of a writer, ruining their reputation by mindlessly vomiting forth their prose tics.
[The New Yorker]
I enjoyed this story about Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, who is the personification of the boring business bro who doesn’t care if a movie is good as long as it is profitable and predictable. But the phenomenon David Roth identifies here isn’t limited to Zaslav and could apply equally the AI cheerleaders, serving us glurge because these dead-eyed losers have no idea what is worthwhile about other people.
[defector.com]
Google invented a lot of core AI technology, and now the company’s turning to Demis to get back in front of the AI race for AI breakthroughs.
James Whitbrook, io9’s top editor, was almost completely blindsided by the story, which — spoiler alert — claimed to be a chronological list of Star Wars films but was not even in chronological order.
When CNET pulled this crap, its entire newsroom unionized. io9 owner G/O Media is already unionized, though — and its union is asking that you don’t click the story, or any other story with a byline ending in “Bot”.
However, as James Vincent noted previously:
According to OpenAI’s critics, this talk of regulating superintelligence, otherwise known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a rhetorical feint — a way for Altman to pull attention away from the current harms of AI systems and keep lawmakers and the public distracted with sci-fi scenarios.
Also today, CNBC reported SensorTower data shows ChatGPT and Bing app installs dropped 38 percent in June, while SimilarWeb data shows worldwide traffic to its website dropped 9.7 percent in June, along with a similar decline in minutes spent on the site.
Is it because kids are out of school and don’t need the bot to do their homework, or has the AI trend already found a peak for now?
The “Gizmodo Bot” produced a list of Star Wars films and TV shows in order, its first article since G/O Media announced it would experiment with AI tools.
I haven’t seen Star Wars (don’t yell at me), but even I know something is off about this chronology.
