@MadelynatTonic

The AI takeover of Google Search starts now

The future of Google Search is AI.But not in the way you think.The company synonymous with web search isn't all in on chatbots (even though it's building one, called Bard), and it's not redesigning its homepage to look more like a ChatGPT-style messaging system.Instead, Google is putting AI front and center in the most valuable real estate on the internet: its existing search results.

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An app to take over Twitter I feel is unlikely unless Twitter completely goes away. It has consolidated where we express our thoughts and get information from and while it is still a functioning service, I really doubt it will be replaced. That being said, I feel like there was a very small window when Elon first started ruining the platform and people were excited about alternatives, and it looked like Mastodon was the likely landing pad. Unfortunately for them, their product was just too confusing to use. Twitter in its simplicity and ubiquity is here to stay until it takes its final breath and we are all forced to move on.
#twitter #mastodon #socialmedia

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www.cnn.com

Tech industry

Twitter is stumbling. Some ex-employees are launching rivals

Like Twitter, it offers a social feed of posts with 280-character limits.

But the key selling point, according to Oh, is its focus on safety.

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The list of newer entrants in the markets includes apps like T2 and Spill created by former Twitter employees, a startup backed by one of Musk's Twitter investors, and a service from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

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Something that we've heard a lot from people who are moving over from Twitter, either partially or fully, is that it is just for them a nicer experience overall, said Jae Kaplan, co-founder of Anti Software Software club, the group that develops Cohost, a text-based social media feed similar to Twitter.

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Replacing Twitter, with its robust network of journalists, politicians and entertainers and sizable audience of users obsessed with real-time news, may be a challenge.

While apps like Cohost have seen renewed momentum, their audiences remain a small fraction of the size of Twitter, which had more than 200 million daily active users as of last year.

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By all accounts, there is no platform right now that is able to take on the function of Twitter, and nothing is really prepared for it, said Karen North, a clinical professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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We forget that we all started talking about ChatBot AIs last year when we were worked up into a tizzy about Google creating the next Exmachina - how the winds have changed now that we're all obsessed with ChatGPT. Google has experienced misstep after misstep with their ChatBot and now has to live in the GPT shadow, which is super unfortunate because I would expect that they have the stronger training set, and as we have seen with ChatGPT's performance, that really matters.

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www.theguardian.com

Google poised to release chatbot technology after ChatGPT success

LaMDA shot to prominence last year when Google suspended and then dismissed an engineer after he went public with claims that LaMDA was sentient.

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Analysts estimate that ChatGPT, developed by the San Francisco-based company OpenAI, has reached 100 million users since its launch on 30 November.

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There has to be a balance to be struck here. It seems likely that AI will be used to replace jobs where workers are already abused by low wages. There must be a happy medium where craft can be maintained and workers treated fairly while AI picks up where humans simply can't keep up. This especially has to be the case for such a specialized and beautiful art form like anime. #AI #Art #Anime #laborrights #Netflix

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www.vice.com

Netflix Made an Anime Using AI Due to a 'Labor Shortage,' and Fans Are Pissed

As an experimental effort to help the anime industry, which has a labor shortage, we used image generation technology for the background images of all three-minute video cuts!

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This has been a central tension since image-generation AI took off last year, as many artists see the tools as unethicaldue to being trained on masses of human-made art scraped from the internetand cudgels to further cut costs and devalue workers.

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In 2017, an illustrator died while working, allegedly of a stress-induced heart attack and stroke; in 2021, the reported salary of low-rung anime illustrators was as little as $200 a month, forcing some to reconsider the career as a sustainable way to earn a living while having a life outside work, buying a home, or supporting children.

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As the use of AI art becomes more commonplace, artists are revolting against their craft being co-opted by algorithms and their work being stolen to use in datasets that create AI-generated art.

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I do not envy tech regulators - regulating tech is becoming more and more like trying to control water - in the end the force of nature will always win #AI #Regulation #Politics #Tech #ChatGPT

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Axios

AI rockets ahead in vacuum of U.S. regulation

What they're saying: "We can harness and regulate AI to create a more utopian society or risk having an unchecked, unregulated AI push us toward a more dystopian future," Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.)

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What to watch: It's possible the rapid-fire adoption of ChatGPT will push regulators to move more quickly on AI rules, but such efforts face political hurdles and practical obstacles, since there are so many different uses of AI.

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Radically changing how we interact with all forms of technology in an increasingly digital will likely be more paradigm shifting than the launch of the internet, making the responsibility these companies hold that much greater. I have respect for Google's hesitancy to release their tech, however, as with all ethical questions there needs to be some balance with utility. Only time will tell if OpenAI's launches have been too hasty. #AI #OpenAI #LargeLanguageModels #Innovation #Ethics

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www.nytimes.com

Tech industry

A New Area of A.I. Booms, Even Amid the Tech Gloom

Ultimately, it could provide a new way of interacting with almost any software, letting people chat with computers and other devices as if they were chatting with another person.

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And Lonne Jaffe, an investor at Insight Partners, said, There is definitely an element to this that feels like the early launch of the internet.

Google, Meta and other tech giants have been reluctant to release generative technologies to the wider public because these systems often produce toxic content, including misinformation, hate speech and images that are biased against women and people of color.

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Important point here about the effect of AI/robots replacing workers on the tax base - not only will people be losing wages, but funding for social services will also be reduced, compounding inequality

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ScienceDaily

Should we tax robots? Study suggests a robot levy -- but only a modest one -- could help combat the effects of automation on income inequality in the U.S.

Because robots can replace jobs, the idea goes, a stiff tax on them would give firms incentive to help retain workers, while also compensating for a dropoff in payroll taxes when robots are used.

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Perhaps counterintuitively, the research concludes that after many more robots are added to the economy, the impact that each additional robot has on wages may actually decline.

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When ChatGPT hit the scene I knew this was going to be a hot concurrent tech innovation. I personally wasn't aware of the fiscal incentive to content marketers so I thought it would take more time to develop - but here's yet another example of incentive structures for innovation at work!

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SiliconANGLE

Startup says it can reliably detect AI-generated content - SiliconANGLE

Content marketers use an assortment of plagiarism checkers to protect themselves from publishing stolen intellectual property.They don't fear prosecution so much as a knuckle rap from Google that could send their SEO scores plummeting.

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Unlike Hugging Face Inc.'s AI detector, which uses probabilistic techniques to guess the words an AI content generator is most likely to use, "our AI is much heavier on the compute side and looks at the article holistically, not using a linear function," Gilham said.He noted that a recent test on a small corpus of articles generated by ChatGPT yielded accuracy rates of over 98%.

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This article highlights the two areas we in the AI community must be most careful about in 2023: data privacy and AI's human-likeness.

Companies that can create AI that are able to detect content generated with AI are likely to boom and data privacy regulators are likely to struggle to advocate for consumers.

2022 was a year of major advancement and it's only going to be exponential from here... 🚀

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Medium

Data science

Top Data Science and AI News from 2022

But in Mr. Butterrick's view, it's just a form of piracy due to the program not acknowledging how it learned from existing code learned in its data training set.

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Meta's AI Chief Yann LeCun published a paper where he laid down a path to better train AI architecture in an effort to teach it to predict or plan changes in a real-world environment.In short, a form of AI that can learn like humans and animals.

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Anticipating this, back in October, the White House unveiled its AI Bill of Rights.

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But, there are no actionable or enforcement mechanisms in place.

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Blake Lemoine, former Google AI Engineer claims that Google Chatbot, LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications, and Lemoine) had become sentient.

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I think what Malik says here about the machine not being able to specify - or care about specifying - what symbols and patterns mean is extremely apt and should make all of us feel better about our job security :)

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www.theguardian.com

ChatGPT can tell jokes, even write articles. But only humans can detect its fluent bullshit | Kenan Malik

And yet the chatbot that can write grade A essays will also tell you that if one woman can produce one baby in nine months, nine women can produce one baby in one month; that one kilo of beef weighs more than a kilo of compressed air; and that crushed glass is a useful health supplement.

It can make up facts and reproduce many of the biases of the human world on which it is trained.

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A computer manipulates symbols.

Its program specifies a set of rules with which to transform one string of symbols into another, or to recognise statistical patterns.

But it does not specify what those symbols or patterns mean.

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At the end of the day technology has always been about business value, nothing would get funded without some promise of ROI and that's why AI is so hot right now, because it allows for sweeping streamlining of workflows.

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www.fastcompany.com