Last week, I published a story about new tools developed by researchers at AI startup Hugging Face and the University of Leipzig that let people see for themselves what kinds of inherent biases AI models have about different genders and ethnicities. Although I’ve written a lot about how our biases are reflected in AI models, it still felt […]
Immaculate AI images of Pope Francis trick the masses
Enlarge / An AI-generated photo of Pope Francis wearing a puffy white coat that went viral on social media. reader comments 65 with Share this story Over the weekend, an AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing a puffy white coat went viral on Twitter, and apparently many people believed it was a real image. Since […]
Biden’s executive order limits government’s use of commercial spyware
Getty Images reader comments 20 with Share this story President Joe Biden on Monday signed an executive order barring many uses by the federal government of commercial spyware, which has been increasingly used by other countries in recent years to surveil dissidents, journalists, and politicians. The signing of the executive order came as administration officials […]
Retro Chatbot: ChatGPT comes to MS-DOS with new AI client
Enlarge / A photo of an IBM PC 5155 portable computer running a ChatGPT client written by Yeo Kheng Meng. reader comments 6 with Share this story On Sunday, Singapore-based retrocomputing enthusiast Yeo Kheng Meng released a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS that can run on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981, providing a unique […]
Twitter source code was leaked on GitHub shortly after Musk’s layoff spree
Getty Images | Future Publishing reader comments 112 with Share this story Portions of Twitter’s source code recently appeared on GitHub, and Twitter is trying to force GitHub to identify the user or users who posted the code. GitHub disabled the repository on Friday shortly after Twitter filed a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown […]
Microplastics are messing with the microbiomes of seabirds
To find out if the microbes being introduced might be “good” or “bad,” Fackelmann and her colleagues analyzed the microbiomes and looked up individual types of microbes in databases to learn what they do. They found that with more plastic, there were more microbes that are known to break down plastic. There were also more […]
Android app from China executed 0-day exploit on millions of devices
Getty Images reader comments 11 with Share this story Android apps digitally signed by China’s third-biggest e-commerce company exploited a zero-day vulnerability that allowed them to surreptitiously take control of millions of end-user devices to steal personal data and install malicious apps, researchers from security firm Lookout have confirmed. The malicious versions of the Pinduoduo […]
The Download: AI’s gold rush, and how to regulate generative models
Whether it’s based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, a gold rush has started over the last several months to make money from generative AI models like ChatGPT. You can practically hear the shrieks from corner offices around the world: “What is our ChatGPT play? How do we make money off this?” But while companies and […]
An early guide to policymaking on generative AI
She wanted to know if I had any suggestions, and asked what I thought all the new advances meant for lawmakers. I’ve spent a few days thinking, reading, and chatting with the experts about this, and my answer morphed into this newsletter. So here goes! Though GPT-4 is the standard bearer, it’s just one of […]
ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.
Power struggle When Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, got access to the new generation of large language models such as ChatGPT, he did what a lot of us did: he began playing around with them to see how they might help his work. He […]