AI Secrets is your new weekly update on how AI is changing our everyday lives. Our experts will keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we are focussing on regulating the apocalypse.Share this with anyone you want to keep up to date.
Are we too late to avert disaster? ⌚ 🧯
Two months ago, a group of prominent tech figures published an open letter calling for a six-month pause in AI development to guard against existential threats to the human race. More than 30,000 people have signed the letter to date, but the pause button remains unpressed, so last week AI’s brightest stars tried a more focused approach, issuing a joint statement that is short enough to reproduce here in full: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The cynical response to this gambit has not changed: Silicon Valley wants you to believe their (currently non-existent) future products are incredibly powerful, but would also prefer you not to focus on the harms their products are causing right now. Prominent cynics include Yann LeCun, one of the three 'Godfathers of AI', but he is now outvoted. Fellow Godfather Geoffrey Hinton famously quit Google last month “in order to freely speak out about the risks of AI", and his name sits alongside the third Don, Yoshua Bengio, on the latest warning of existential doom.
Another interesting new signatory is Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, who has been on a grand tour of European lawmakers this week, hoping to persuade them not to follow Italy’s lead by banning ChatGPT. Calling for future regulation while lobbying against current restrictions seems like a tricky balancing act, but it’s also not likely to get any easier as nations fight to defend their own interests in the AI gold rush. Take Japan, where legislators have confirmed that they will not be enforcing copyrights on data used in AI training. The debate around copyright law in Japan is especially heated thanks to their thriving anime and videogames markets, and many feel they are not the ones profiting from the West’s copyright protections. Meanwhile, more nations are arriving at the party; developers affiliated with the UAE have just launched Falcons.AI, a powerful open-source LLM that’s key to the country’s strategy of establishing itself as an AI leader by 2031.
Sam Altman may struggle to persuade nations to abandon their medium-term goals for what he insists is the greater good, but he does at least have a head start on the competition. His chatbot goes from strength to strength, with Bing “search grounding” and third-party plugins now available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Both are huge upgrades to the ChatGPT experience, and we’ve compiled a list of 10 of the best ChatGPT plugins to get you started!
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A simulated military exercise using AI-powered drones went horribly wrong after the AI disagreed with its operator’s orders. The USAF denies the drones killed the virtual operator and then attacked its own side’s comm towers...
A New York lawyer took OpenAI’s boasts about ChatGPT’s legal acumen at face value and asked the bot for help with his actual court filings, with predictably disastrous consequences.
AI 'Godfather' Yoshua Bengio has given an interview to the BBC in which he says he “feels lost” over his life’s work, and outlines his concerns about what “bad actors” may attempt with AI.
The National Eating Disorders Association fired their helpline staff and replaced them with a chatbot called Tessa, which promptly began offering the worst imaginable advice to users. Tessa has now also been fired.
A viral Twitter thread claiming to show what lies beyond the frames of famous paintings has been met with equal parts fury and derision, leading The Verge to offer sage advice to AI’s social media cheerleaders.
A Dutch designer has created Paragraphica, a lensless camera that uses text-to-image prompting and location data to generate its 'photographs'. Could this be the most peculiar/pointless AI application to date?
