March 2024: Musk vs. Altman, Google's Offensive AI, and the Ethical Dilemmas Shaping the Industry

In recent news, a real estate broker app has introduced "Ask Redfin," an AI-powered chatbot that assists users with property-related queries. Meanwhile, Google has unveiled its MediaPipe LLM Inference API, enabling developers to run AI models on devices with limited computing power. However, not all AI applications have been well-received, as demonstrated by the controversy surrounding Google's Gemini model, which generated offensive historical images. The music industry is also feeling the impact of AI, with songwriters expressing concerns about the technology's potential to replace human creativity.

The legal landscape surrounding AI is becoming increasingly complex, with lawsuits being filed against tech companies for alleged copyright infringement and breaches of agreements. In one notable case, Microsoft invoked the analogy of VCRs in its motion to dismiss a lawsuit that The New York Times filed. Meanwhile, legal AI is gaining traction in Australia and could disrupt the private practice legal market.

As AI advances, it's clear that the technology will have far-reaching implications across various industries and aspects of daily life. The possibilities are exciting and daunting, from enhancing job application processes to creating playable video games from scratch. As we navigate this rapidly evolving landscape, addressing the ethical concerns and potential risks associated with AI is crucial while embracing the opportunities it presents.

Select Articles from March 2024

You can now add extra security to your ChatGPT - here's how and why you should

Securing data is a significant concern when using generative AI models such as ChatGPT. To help you do so, OpenAI unveiled a new feature that adds an extra layer of security to ChatGPT and API accounts. On Thursday, OpenAI announced via an X post that users will now have the option to turn on multi-factor authentication -- aka 2FA -- thereby making it harder for unauthorized users to access their accounts. If you are on the fence about whether adding the extra layer of security is worth it, as ZDNET's Ed Bott explains, "Two-factor authentication will stop most casual attacks dead in their tracks." With the setup as simple as it is, it couldn't hurt to have the extra layer of security and peace of mind.

Florida teens arrested for creating 'deepfake' AI nude images of classmates.

Two Florida middle schoolers were arrested in December and charged with third-degree felonies for allegedly creating deepfake nudes of their classmates. They were charged with third-degree felonies under a 2022 Florida law that criminalizes the dissemination of deepfake sexually explicit images without the victim's consent. Minors creating AI-generated nudes and explicit photos of other children has become an increasingly common problem in school districts across the country. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that the Beverly Hills Police Department is currently investigating a case where students allegedly shared images that "used real faces of students atop AI-generated nude bodies." But because the state's law against "unlawful possession of obscene matter knowing it depicts a person under the age of 18 years engaging in or simulating sexual conduct" does not explicitly mention AI-generated images, the article says it's unclear whether a crime has been committed. The local school district voted on Friday to expel five students involved in the scandal, the LA Times reports.

'It's terrifying': songwriter behind Robbie Williams hits out at AI in the music industry.

Chambers, whose co-writing credits include the multi-platinum hit Angels, said: "Any person could put into an AI program something like 'I want a song 100 BPM that sounds like a cross between Abba and Arctic Monkeys'. At its launch in November, Lyor Cohen, the platform's head of music, said: "Artificial intelligence is meant to amplify human creativity, not replace it." As in the film and television industry, the potential for AI to replace or weaken the role of artists is becoming a source of increasing conflict. A list of core principles says: "People relate most deeply to works that embody the lived experience, perceptions, and attitudes of others. In the UK, the Musicians' Union has been urging its members to tell their record labels and publishers that they need to request permission for their music to be used to train AI models to generate new pieces.

Gemini 1.5 is Google's next-gen AI model and is already almost ready.

Barely two months after launching Gemini, the large language model Google hopes will bring it to the top of the AI industry, the company is already announcing its successor. Google is launching Gemini 1.5 today and making it available to developers and enterprise users ahead of a complete consumer rollout coming soon. The company has made clear that it is all in on Gemini as a business tool, a personal assistant, and everything in between, and it's pushing hard on that plan. It was made using an increasingly common technique known as "Mixture of Experts," or MoE, which means it only runs part of the overall model when you send in a query, rather than processing the whole thing the whole time. Tokens are a tricky metric to understand (here's a good breakdown), so Pichai simplifies it: "It's about 10 or 11 hours of video, tens of thousands of lines of code." The context window means you can ask the AI bot about that content simultaneously.

MIT Technology Review: Lore Machine

Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story about a man who eats luxury cat food. This process can take up to 2 minutes." The Lore Machine analyzed the text, extracted descriptions of the characters and locations mentioned, and then handed those bits of information off to an image-generation model. Modern Arts is now using Lore Machine to develop a fictional universe for a manga series based on text written by the creator of Netflix's Love, Death & Robots. Campion used the free-to-use text-to-image model Midjourney to make a comic-book version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I was disappointed that my descriptions of one character having "teeth like pinto beans" and another having "hands like slices of bleached white bread" didn't translate to their portraits.

The job applicants shut out by AI: 'The interviewer sounded like Siri.'

"After the third or fourth question, the AI just stopped after a short pause and told me that the interview was completed and someone from the team would reach out later." (Ty asked that their last name not be used because their current employer doesn't know they're looking for a job.) "I'm hearing that employers are now discounting a lot of the information they receive that's in written form and want to get to a face-to-face conversation as quickly as possible with the candidates so they can properly vet them," she explained. Michael G is the founder of Final Round AI, an "interview co-pilot" that listens to recruiters' questions and prompts personalized answers in real-time, based on the résumé and cover letter uploaded by the interviewee. You don't need to be a wildly imaginative person to consider how that might affect job-seekers – Amazon reportedly scrapped an in-house hiring algorithm, trained on data submitted by applicants, that favored men and penalized résumés that included the word "women." Pollak said that to avoid such bias, ZipRecruiter strips "any kind of identifiable information" like names and zip codes from résumés before putting them through an AI system.

Microsoft invokes VCRs in motion to dismiss The New York Times' AI lawsuit.

"Despite The Times's contentions, copyright law is no more an obstacle to large language model than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet or search engine)," reads one passage. Ian Crosby, partner at Susman Godfrey and lead counsel for the Times, tells The Verge that Microsoft did not dispute that it worked with OpenAI to copy the publication's stories. Microsoft noted other generative AI lawsuits that used the same argument as the Times had those claims dismissed, like one brought by authors including Sarah Silverman. Lawsuits like the one from the Times against OpenAI and Microsoft have the potential to rewrite how generative AI continues to grow as an industry. OpenAI has filed its own motion to dismiss, too; it claims that the Times "tricked" ChatGPT into directly reproducing copyrighted material from the publication.

MIT Technology Review: AI GENIE GAME DEV

The new model, called Genie, can take a short description, a hand-drawn sketch, or a photo and turn it into a playable video game in the style of classic 2D platformers like Super Mario Bros. "It's cool work," says Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher at the University of Alberta, who developed a similar game generator a few years ago. While Genie is an in-house research project and won't be released, Guzdial notes that the Google DeepMind team says it could one day be turned into a game-making tool—something he's working on, too. In 2021, a different DeepMind team developed a virtual playground called XLand, in which bots learned how to cooperate on simple tasks such as moving obstacles. For example, David Ha at Google Brain and Jürgen Schmidhuber at the AI lab IDSIA in Switzerland developed a tool in 2018 that trained bots in game-based virtual environments called world models.

Legal AI Is Taking Off in Australia and Could Shake Up the Private Practice Legal Market

Similarly, using the tool to Clayton Utz, Holding Redlich lawyers can prompt Lexis+ AI to create first drafts of documents, including advice to clients and other everyday items like internal emails or court filings such as statements of claim. For example, Lexis+ AI, built on Anthropic's Claude 2 and OpenAI's GPT-4, has been trained on LexisNexis' database of 1.23 million court opinions, statutes, filings, and secondary materials. Models are trained on vast troves of legal data, and techniques such as fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, and prompt engineering serve to create accurate responses. Several large, mid-tier, and boutique law firms compete for client relationships and new business in various lucrative practice areas, including corporate and mergers & acquisitions, media and telecommunications, and litigation. The integration of AI could speed up the ability of lawyers to research and analyze legislation and case law and deliver considered legal advice.

The feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman – explained.

Musk filed a suit against OpenAI in a California court last week, alleging that Altman and other executives had "breached the founding agreement" of the company by pursuing private commercial success instead of working to benefit humanity. It also adds to a growing number of lawsuits facing OpenAI, as many authors and news outlets allege that the company violated copyright laws and illegally used original works to train its AI tools. However, the suit's core revolves around Musk’Musk'sgation that OpenAI broke an initial agreement to share its technology with the public and help humanity when the company took billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft and turned it into a largely for-profit venture. It also alleges that OpenAI has partially achieved the creation of Artificial General Intelligence – broadly defined as when AI is on par with human cognitive ability – which poses “p" perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today.”"Musk pushed the group to announce that the company was launching with a $1bn funding commitment, far higher than the $100m Altman intended. It claimed he would cover whatever wasn’t according to emails OpenAI posted on their blog.

‘We definitely messed up’: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images?

Brin’s comments, at an AI “hackathon” event on March 2, follow a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US, and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of color. The pictures, as well as Gemini chatbot responses that vacillated over whether libertarians or Stalin had caused the more significant harm, led to an explosion of negative commentary from figures such as Elon Musk, who saw it as another front in the culture wars. But it follows a similar pattern to an uncovered system prompt for OpenAI’s Dall-E, which was instructed to “diversify depictions of ALL images with people to include DESCENT and GENDER for EACH person using the direct term.” Dame Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton and a member of the UN’s advisory body on AI, says Google was under pressure to respond to OpenAI’s runaway success with ChatGPT and Dall-E and simply did not test the technology thoroughly enough. Hall says Gemini’s failings will at least help focus the AI safety debate on immediate concerns, such as combating deep fakes rather than the existential threats that have been a prominent discussion feature around the technology’s potential pitfalls.

OpenAI partners with startups to create advanced AI models for humanoid robots

The plan is to use Microsoft Azure for AI infrastructure and aOpenAI'sI's investment and guidance for deploying autonomous humanoid robots for commercial purposes. "We're blown away by Figure'se's progress to date, and we look forward to working together to open up new possibilities for how robots can help in everyday life." The deal is meant to introduce tstartup'sp's humanoid robots into the automotive manufacturing process, specifically for tasks that may be difficult, unsafe, or monotonous for humans. This investment, combined with our partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft, ensures that we are well-prepared to bring embodied AI into the world to make a transformative impact on humanity"y," Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock said. Last week, the figure announced the startup had raised $675 million in Series B funding, including investments from OpenAI, Startup Fund, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Parkway Venture Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest.

APA Citations:

Artificial Intelligence (2024-03-08T22:46:46.457Z). Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence

You can now add extra security to your ChatGP. Here's how and why you should (None). Retrieved from https://www.zdnet.com/article/you-can-now-add-extra-security-to-your-chatgpt-heres-how-and-why-you-should/#ftag=RSSbaffb68

Florida teens arrested for creating ‘deep fake’ AI nude images of classmates (2024-03-08T22:07:22.614Z). Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/8/24094633/deepfake-ai-explicit-images-florida-teenagers-arrest'

It’s terrifying: songwriter behind Robbie Williams hits out at AI in the music industry (2024-01-14T13:00:27.000Z). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/09/its-terrifying-songwriter-behind-robbie-williams-hits-out-at-ai-in-the-music-industry

Gemini 1.5 Google’s next-gen AI model — it’s already almost ready (2024-02-15T15:00:00.000Z). Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/15/24073457/google-gemini-1-5-ai-model-llm

MIT Technology Review: Lore Machine (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/05/1089458/generative-ai-turn-my-story-into-comic-images-lore-machine/

The job applicants shut out by A': ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri’ (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/06/ai-interviews-job-applications

Microsoft invokes VCRs in motion to dismiss The New YoTimes'es’ AI lawsuit (2024-03-06T00:33:19.722Z). Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/5/24091719/microsoft-new-york-times-openai-motion-dismiss-copyright-lawsuit

MIT Technology Review (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/29/1089317/google-deepminds-new-generative-model-makes-super-mario-like-games-from-scratch/

Legal AI Is Taking Off in Australia and Could Shake Up the Private Practice Legal Market (March 8, 2024). Retrieved from https://www.techrepublic.com/article/australian-legal-profession-adapting-ai/

Artificial intelligence (AI) (2024-03-09). Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/artificialintelligenceai

The feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman – explained (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/09/why-is-elon-musk-suing-sam-altman-open'i

‘We definitely messed’ up: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images? (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-definitely-messed-up-why-did-google-ai-tool-make-offensive-historical-images

OpenAI partners with startups to create advanced AI models for humanoid robots (None). Retrieved from https://www.zdnet.com/article/openai-partners-with-startup-to-create-advanced-ai-models-for-humanoid-robots/#ftag=RSSbaffb68

Artificial Intelligence | TechRepublic (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.techrepublic.com/rssfeeds/topic/artificial-intelligence/

List of Titles:

Artificial Intelligence

You can now add extra security to your ChatGPThere'se's how and why you should

Florida teens arrested for creating ‘creating’ deep fake images of classmate. 

'It's terrifying behind Robbie Williams hits out at AI in the music industry.

Gemini 1.5 Google’s next-gen AI model — it’s already almost ready

MIT Technology Review

The job applicants were shut out by AI: ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri.’

Microsoft invokes VCRs in motion to dismiss The New YoTimes'es’ AI lawsuit

Build your own newsfeed

MIT Technology Review

Legal AI Is Taking Off in Australia and Could Shake Up the Private Practice Legal Market

Artificial intelligence (AI)

The feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman – explained

‘We definitely messed’ up: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images?

OpenAI partners with startups to create advanced AI models for humanoid robots

Artificial Intelligence | TechRepublic