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Ai Artificial Intelligence Archive

Archives for August 2023

Google made a watermark for AI images that you can’t edit outGoogle made a watermark for AI images that you can’t edit out
OpenAI releases enterprise-grade version of ChatGPTOpenAI releases enterprise-grade version of ChatGPT
Mia Sato
Mia Sato
Gannett is pausing use of an AI sports bot after criticism.

Last week, readers noticed the generative AI tool kept describing local sporting events as “close encounter[s] of the athletic kind.” Articles with that phrasing have popped up on The Columbus Dispatch and The Indianapolis Star, among others. Some stories were also missing key information.

It’s not the first botched AI initiative: other outlets have had to make corrections, overhaul policies, and defend the use of AI tools after readers noticed errors.

Columbus Dispatch pauses AI sports writing tool following viral story

[Axios Columbus]

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Uber is reportedly working on an AI chatbot for its food delivery app.

As spotted by Bloomberg, code in the Uber Eats app suggests the service is working on an AI chatbot to provide recommendations to customers.

It’s not the only app thinking about AI and food delivery, either. Bloomberg reported last month that DoorDash is working on an AI chatbot as well. DoorDash also announced today that it’s rolling out an AI-powered voice ordering service.

Does Uber Eats Have an AI Chatbot? Code Inside App Suggests It’s On the Way

[Bloomberg]

Poe’s new desktop app lets you use all the AI chatbots in one placePoe’s new desktop app lets you use all the AI chatbots in one place
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Microsoft’s Bing Chat Enterprise is now available in the Windows Copilot preview.

First introduced to Bing.com and the Edge sidebar in July, Bing Chat Enterprise allows companies to use Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot without having to worry about their conversations being used to train its underlying model.

Now Microsoft will let companies access the chatbot in Windows Copilot as well, with the launch of it in preview for “eligible commercial customers in the Dev channel.”

Microsoft’s new Bing Chat Enterprise offers better privacy for businesses

Jon Porter
DoorDash’s voice ordering service could have AI take your carryout orderDoorDash’s voice ordering service could have AI take your carryout order
Yahoo Mail isn’t dead and adds AI capabilitiesYahoo Mail isn’t dead and adds AI capabilities
Google’s AI-powered note-taking app is the messy beginning of something greatGoogle’s AI-powered note-taking app is the messy beginning of something great
Wes Davis
Wes Davis
“I’m flying off the wing of something that’s making its own decisions. And it’s not a human brain.”

...said an Air Force pilot quoted in a story about the challenges and realities of the Air Force’s Skyborg AI wingman program in The New York Times today.

It’s not quite that fake story about an AI drone killing its handler to circumvent its directives, but this passage tells a similar story about surprising, if less problematic, AI problem-solving:

In early tests, the autonomous drones already have shown that they will act in unusual ways, with the Valkyrie in one case going into a series of rolls. At first, Major Elder thought something was off, but it turned out that the software had determined that its infrared sensors could get a clearer picture if it did continuous flips.

Wes Davis
Wes Davis
Stephen King illustrates, in his way, the difference between human writers and AI.

The famed horror author, whose body of work is weaved (in a multi-verse-before-multiverses-were-popular way) around a fantasy series about a gunslinger in a post-technological society that incorporates a sentient AI train (who is a pain), wrote for The Atlantic that he isn’t worried about AI supplanting him.

At least, not yet. This abridged passage illustrates why:

A character creeps up on another character and shoots him in the back of the head with a small revolver. When the shooter rolls the dead man over, he sees a small bulge in the man’s forehead. The bullet did not quite come out, you see. When I sat down that day, I knew the murder was going to happen, and I knew it was going to be murder by gun. I did not know about that bulge, which becomes an image that haunts the shooter going forward. That was a genuine creative moment, one that came from being in the story and seeing what the murderer was seeing. It was a complete surprise.

Could a machine create that bulge? I would argue not, but I must—reluctantly—add this qualifier: Not yet.

Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI

[The Atlantic]

Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
The law around web scraping is a chaotic mess and AI is going to make it worse.

I wrote about Google’s essential hypocrisy when it comes to the value of AI training data this week, and now Kieran McCarthy has a good blog post outlining how incoherent and inconsistent the law around web scraping really is — in large part because the same big tech companies that scrape the entire web are quick to file lawsuits when you attempt to scrape their sites.

There are few, if any, legal domains where hypocrisy is as baked into the ecosystem as it is with web scraping.

Some of the biggest companies on earth—including Meta and Microsoft—take aggressive, litigious approaches to prohibiting web scraping on their own properties, while taking liberal approaches to scraping data on other companies’ properties.

Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee

[Technology & Marketing Law Blog]

How Big Tech really feels about the EU’s crackdownHow Big Tech really feels about the EU’s crackdown
Emilia David
Emilia David
Alibaba and Naver release GPT rival models.

Chinese technology giant Alibaba announced two new generative AI models, Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat, that the company said can have complex conversations. CNBC reported that Qwen-VL deals with open-ended prompts while Qwen-VL-Chat, according to Alibaba, can compare multiple images and perform tasks like writing stories, solving math problems on a photo, and creating pictures from user-uploaded images.

South Korean company Naver also launched its own large language model HyperClovaX along with generative AI-powered search tool Cue and a chat app called Clova X.

Alibaba launches AI model that can understand images and have more complex conversations

[CNBC]

Emilia David
Emilia David
CNN, Reuters, Australia’s ABC, and other news organizations block OpenAI’s web crawler.

The New York Times was among the first to block GPTBot from accessing its data to improve AI models. Any website owner can disallow GPTBot from scraping their website through the robots.txt file. The Guardian reported that other news organizations have also blocked Common Crawl’s CCBot.

New York Times, CNN and Australia’s ABC block OpenAI’s GPTBot web crawler from accessing content

[The Guardian]

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