https://www.seattletimes.com/busine...protect-customers-from-ai-copyright-lawsuits/

Microsoft says it will defend buyers of its artificial intelligence products from copyright infringement lawsuits, an effort by the software giant to ease concerns customers might have about using its AI “Copilots” to generate content based on existing work.

The Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment will protect customers as long as they’ve “used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products,” Hossein Nowbar, Microsoft legal counsel, said in a blog post Thursday. Microsoft also pledged to pay related fines or settlements and said it has taken steps to ensure its Copilots respect copyright.

 

https://apnews.com/article/chatgpt-...on-microsoft-f551fde98083d17a7e8d904f8be822c4

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The cost of building an artificial intelligence product like ChatGPT can be hard to measure.

But one thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water, pulled from the watershed of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers in central Iowa to cool a powerful supercomputer as it helped teach its AI systems how to mimic human writing.

As they race to capitalize on a craze for generative AI, leading tech developers including Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have acknowledged that growing demand for their AI tools carries hefty costs, from expensive semiconductors to an increase in water consumption.

 

Not to mention the carbon footprint, which no one seems to be talking about.

 

WASHINGTON — Tech billionaire Elon Musk warned senators in a private gathering on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that artificial intelligence poses a “civilizational risk” to governments and societies, according to a senator in the room.

kv

 

 

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/s...i-is-fundamentally-a-surveillance-technology/

Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI? If you ask Signal president Meredith Whittaker (and I did), she’ll tell you it’s simply because “AI is a surveillance technology.”

Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Whittaker explained her perspective that AI is largely inseparable from the big data and targeting industry perpetuated by the likes of Google and Meta, as well as less consumer-focused but equally prominent enterprise and defense companies. (Her remarks lightly edited for clarity.)

“It requires the surveillance business model; it’s an exacerbation of what we’ve seen since the late ’90s and the development of surveillance advertising. AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” she said. “The Venn diagram is a circle.”

 

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/s...i-is-fundamentally-a-surveillance-technology/

good post for the "Privacy lost" thread too ...

 

https://retractionwatch.com/2023/10/06/signs-of-undeclared-chatgpt-use-in-papers-mounting/

Ostensibly authored by researchers in China, “Revitalizing our earth: unleashing the power of green energy in soil remediation for a sustainable future” includes the extraneous phrase “Regenerate response” at the end of a methods section. For those unfamiliar, “Regenerate response” is a button in OpenAI’s ChatGPT that prompts the chatbot to rework an unsatisfactory answer.
...

Regenerate response” is not the only sign of undeclared chatbot involvement Cabanac has seen. An even more egregious example is the phrase “As an AI language model, I …,” which he has found in nine papers until now.

 

https://retractionwatch.com/2023/10/06/signs-of-undeclared-chatgpt-use-in-papers-mounting/

And, he added, “How come this meaningless wording survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”

This is something that I have been commenting on literally for decades, so it's a issue that goes well beyond the current AI issues. The classic example that really highlights it was back during the First Gulf War when a retired general made a faux pax on CNN. He was sitting on a panel as a briefing was being made and, in it, they mentioned how many pounds of bombs had been dropped by the Coalition. You could see him pick up his pen and start scribbling notes. When the briefing was over and they returned to the panel, they got to him and, after responding to the question asked, picked up the paper (literally an envelope) and said that he was trying to recall figures from his days at the War College to compare to the numbers they had just heard. He gave a figure for the tons of bombs dropped during WWII, Korea, and Vietnam (I think it was those three) and was amazed at how that paled in comparison to the pounds of bombs they were just told about. As a units nazi, I immediately spotted that he was comparing the number of tons to the number of pounds, and so was off by a factor of 2000. Given that he was doing this on the fly, a pretty easy mistake to make -- and he was extremely upfront that these were literally back-of-the-envelope figures that he was recalling from memory from years before.

This was at the same time that a handful of stories in the news, some related to the war and some not, had the newsies a bit on the defensive about their lack of confirming sources and information before going to press. So there had been several stories from all of the outlets touting the same party line -- that no story gets reported unless the information from a source is verified with two other independent sources. That resolute assertion struck me as pure bull in and of itself -- many stories that are, and should be, newsworthy simply cannot be verified by two other independent sources no matter how much diligence is used, so to even make that claim instead of explaining the reality was strong evidence that they were flat out lying.

So it was in this environment that, the very next morning, the back page of the Rocky Mountain News, which had a long-standing contract that the back page was a full-page ad for May D&F, ran a full-color graphic (and color was only used in the Sunday edition at the time, and this was a weekday) showing a bunch of bombs, each drawn to scale, showing how much had been dropped during those wars. They used the exact numbers that this retired general had recalled from memory the night before. They had the correct units. But the bombs were scaled according to the number irrespective of the units.

Just thinking about all of the people involved in this process, from the person that got the idea to do it, to the people that sketched out the idea for the graphic, to the editors that approved the story, to the people that sized the pictures of the bombs, to the people that proofed the graphic, including the embedded story written in it, to the people that set up the printing equipment and proofed the output, it should have been inconceivable for that kind of mistake to have made it through and into distribution. Yet it did. Oh, and what happened to that 'no story goes to press unless it's been confirmed by at least two independent sources' claim?

For years I assumed it was a matter of extreme negligence and sloppiness at all levels involved -- each person was so focused on doing the minimum that they needed to do to get their paycheck that they had no interest in looking at whether what they were doing made sense. I'm sure there's a lot of that -- and, in fairness, it's easy to miss major things when you are focused on something else. This is how I managed to fly a pre-crashed airplane one fine morning in which not one, but two pilots (myself and an instructor pilot) missed major airframe damage that had resulted the night before.

Even so, you would think that since it takes just a single person in a long chain of operations to notice that something is amiss that it should be it almost impossible for something so glaring to go undetected.

But I have since come to realize that it almost certainly did not go undetected. There were probably a few people that spotted it and reported it -- and nothing was done about it. Accuracy in reporting is simply not important to them. Being the first out with a splashy graphic was all that mattered -- if they get called on it, fine. They'll bury a correction to the story in a few days on page 19.

I think I started realizing how pervasive this "we don't care if it's right, just run with it" attitude was was a morning I was driving to work and listening to the news and they ran this story about how we could expect a surge in violence in a few days during the upcoming solar eclipse. The "expert" they interviewed explained how full moons always cause an upsurge in violence, and so we needed to be prepared. I called in and talked to the news director and explained that a solar eclipse occurs when the moon is between the sun and the Earth, which is exactly the opposite situation that is needed for a full moon. He understood and agreed and acknowledged that it was going to be as far away from a full moon as you can get, and so whether or not there happens to actually be an increase in violence during full moons was irrelevant to what might happen over the course of the eclipse. Despite that, they continued to run that story every hour for the next two days right up until the eclipse. They simply do not care.

 

https://fortune.com/2023/10/11/google-insiders-question-bard-ai-chatbot/
Google insiders are slamming Bard for not being worth it on private chat groups: ‘What are LLMs truly useful for?’

For months, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Discord Inc. have run an invitation-only chat for heavy users of Bard, Google’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. Google product managers, designers and engineers are using the forum to openly debate the AI tool’s effectiveness and utility, with some questioning whether the enormous resources going into development are worth it.

“My rule of thumb is not to trust LLM output unless I can independently verify it,” Dominik Rabiej, a senior product manager for Bard, wrote in the Discord chat in July, referring to large language models — the AI systems trained on massive amounts of text that form the building blocks of chatbots like Bard and OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT. “Would love to get it to a point that you can, but it isn’t there yet.”

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/com...or-articles-used-to-power-chatgpt/ar-AA1iyBwX
Newspapers want payment for articles used to power ChatGPT

 

Is there any way to get Bard chatting to ChatGPT? I wonder how the conversation would go. Best of pals or pistols at dawn?

 

Is there any way to get Bard chatting to ChatGPT? I wonder how the conversation would go. Best of pals or pistols at dawn?

Dumb and dumber. Without human direction, they are useless.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/02/tech/microsoft-ai-news/index.html
How Microsoft is making a mess of the news after replacing staff with AI

Concerns and tensions about Microsoft’s use of AI in its news content boiled over on Tuesday when Britain’s The Guardian newspaper accused the company of damaging the paper’s reputation after it published an article from the outlet on its site.

To power its highly trafficked news portal, Microsoft has established licensing agreements with major news organizations around the world, including The Guardian and CNN, that allow the tech giant to republish their articles in exchange for a share of the advertising revenue.

Last week, The Guardian published an article about Lilie James, a 21-year-old woman who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney, Australia.

James’ murder led to an outpouring of grief and prompted a national conversation in Australia about violence against women.

But when MSN republished The Guardian’s story, it accompanied it with an AI-generated poll asking readers, “What do you think is the reason behind the woman’s death?” And listed three options: murder, accident, or suicide.

The poll prompted criticism from Microsoft’s readers, “This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I’ve ever seen,” one person wrote.

 

Not sure which AI thread this belongs in. Posting here.

 

Extract from "Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT" at The New York Times:

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.​

[...]​

Note, for all the seemingly sophisticated thought and language, the moral indifference born of unintelligence. Here, ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation. It summarizes the standard arguments in the literature by a kind of super-autocomplete, refuses to take a stand on anything, pleads not merely ignorance but lack of intelligence and ultimately offers a “just following orders” defense, shifting responsibility to its creators.​

 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/editorial/woty
‘Hallucinate’ chosen as Cambridge dictionary’s word of the year

 

Sam Altman, one of the most prominent figures in the world of artificial intelligence, is leaving OpenAI with the company's board saying he wasn't always "candid" and that it had lost confidence in him as a leader. Bloomberg's Rachel Metz reports.

Sam Altman was reportedly fired as OpenAI CEO after losing the confidence of the artificial intelligence firm's board of directors. Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton review Altman's role in 2023's AI hype cycle and what this news could mean for the AI landscape.



"Blink twice if GPT-5 is holding you hostage"

 

https://www.platformer.news/p/amazons-q-has-severe-hallucinations
Amazon’s Q has ‘severe hallucinations’ and leaks confidential data in public preview, employees warn

 

https://arstechnica.com/information...3-of-the-time-in-recent-turing-test-ai-study/
1960s chatbot ELIZA beat OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in a recent Turing test study

In a preprint research paper titled "Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?", two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model against human participants, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the greatest success. But along the way, the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found that human participants correctly identified other humans in only 63 percent of the interactions—and that a 1960s computer program surpassed the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT.

Further, the authors speculate about the reasons for ELIZA's relative success in the study:

"First, ELIZA’s responses tend to be conservative. While this generally leads to the impression of an uncooperative interlocutor, it prevents the system from providing explicit cues such as incorrect information or obscure knowledge. Second, ELIZA does not exhibit the kind of cues that interrogators have come to associate with assistant LLMs, such as being helpful, friendly, and verbose. Finally, some interrogators reported thinking that ELIZA was “too bad” to be a current AI model, and therefore was more likely to be a human intentionally being uncooperative."