Formal sciences

On Thursday morning, news broke that someone was going around selling student data from the University of Michigan to tech workers that build AI chatbot tech. An employee at Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research hub, said they’d gotten an offer for recordings of lectures, student discussions, and office hours, as well as essays written by seniors and grad students all available for a paltry licensing fee. Now, the University says it was all a misunderstanding, that students gave their consent, and there’s nothing to…

The new Samsung Galaxy S24 is all in on AI, so much so that the phone maker made a big deal about how its new AI watermark is meant to dissuade users from spreading AI-altered or purely faked images online. The problem is that the S24 boasts so many AI capabilities that a simple Magic Eraser-like tool can remove that same watermark with little fuss.Like It or Not, Your Doctor Will Use AI | AI UnlockedAt its Galaxy Unpacked event last Wednesday, Samsung declared that any image that used the company’s generative…

Photo: Amir Sajjad (Shutterstock)Maybe AI-Written Scripts are a Bad Idea?For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally outfitted theaters. But black box is also an important term in the world of artificial intelligence.AI black boxes refer to AI systems with internal workings that are invisible to the user. You can feed them input and get output, but you cannot examine the…

Photo: Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun (AP)Maybe AI-Written Scripts are a Bad Idea?The past few years have seen an explosion of progress in large language model artificial intelligence systems that can do things like write poetry, conduct humanlike conversations and pass medical school exams. This progress has yielded models like ChatGPT that could have major social and economic ramifications ranging from job displacements and increased misinformation to massive productivity boosts.Despite their impressive abilities, large…

Illustration: Phonlamai Photo (Shutterstock)The prominent model of information access and retrieval before search engines became the norm – librarians and subject or search experts providing relevant information – was interactive, personalized, transparent and authoritative. Search engines are the primary way most people access information today, but entering a few keywords and getting a list of results ranked by some unknown function is not ideal.A new generation of artificial intelligence-based information access…

Screenshot: DeepMindHumans are quickly running out of board games we can still play without being utterly clobbered by AI. In the past, researchers demonstrated AI’s ability to best humans at chess, Go, and, recently, Diplomacy. Now, you can now add the strategy game Stratego to that ever-growing list. Researchers from Alphabet-owned DeepMind, according to new research shared with Gizmodo, say they’ve created a new AI agent capable of playing Stratego at a “human expert level.” The AI, called DeepNash, won nearly all of…

A photo of a computer screen running “Real Time Face Detector” software shows visitors’ expressions analyzed and explained in real-time at the stand of the Fraunhofer Institute at the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover on March 6, 2008. The Real Time Face Detector is a software module that can be used for fast face detection in video streams and single pictures.Photo: John MacDougal (Getty Images)The head of the United Kingdom’s independent privacy watchdog worries highly hyped efforts to use AI to detect people’s emotional…

Meta’s Hokkien translator is the first speech-to-speech translator, but the AI can only translate one sentence at a time. Screenshot: MetaMeta is chugging along on their Universal Speech Translator, which hopesto train an artificial intelligence to translate hundreds of languages in real time. Today, the tech giant claims to have generated the first artificial intelligence to translate Hokkien, which is a language primarily spoken and not written.Hokkien is a language that is spoken by approximately 49 million people in…