From CNBC: Facebook did not read the terms and services of the app that improperly shared user data with Cambridge Analytica, the company’s chief technology officer said Thursday. “We require that people have a terms and conditions and we have an automated check there at the time — this was in 2014, maybe earlier,” Mike … Read more
From Quartz: Universities don’t like change. But as the breakneck pace of technology speeds up the modern economy, these ancient institutions are starting to break the rules. To adapt to the needs of future workers, some colleges are moving their courses online; others are doubling down on artificial intelligence. The latest school to offer a nontraditional approach to … Read more
The Passive Voice is not a political blog and won’t become a political blog, but PG found the following fascinating. From The New York Times: At one point during the 2016 presidential election campaign, I watched a bunch of videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. I was writing an article about his appeal to … Read more
From Wired, Tech companies are rushing to infuse everything with artificial intelligence, driven by big leaps in the power of machine learning software. But the deep-neural-network software fueling the excitement has a troubling weakness: Making subtle changes to images, text, or audio can fool these systems into perceiving things that aren’t there. That could be a big problem … Read more
From LiveMint: In 18 short years, David Shelley has gone from being an editorial assistant and then publishing director at independent publisher Allison and Busby, to becoming chief executive of Hachette UK last month—a career that’s nothing short of phenomenal. Along the way, the Oxford graduate in English literature has also been the CEO of … Read more
From Aeon: In the 1920s, the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov used artificial insemination to breed a ‘humanzee’ – a cross between a human and our closest relative species, the chimpanzee. The attempt horrified his contemporaries, much as it would modern readers. Given the moral quandaries a humanzee might create, we can be thankful that … Read more
PG chose this item because of its title. It frames something that sounds like magic to many people, Artificial Intelligence, as if it is commonplace and prosaic, something like “First Visitors This Season Arrive from Alpha Centauri.” From Udacity: Alex Irpan, a software engineer at Google, wrote an excellent article on the current difficulties of getting deep … Read more
From The New York Times: Amazon and two other American titans are trying to shake up health care by experimenting with their own employees’ coverage. By Chinese standards, they’re behind the curve. Technology companies like Alibaba and Tencent have made health care a priority for years, and are using China as their laboratory. After testing online … Read more
From The Verge: Computers are built to process data, but there’s a particular form of information so rich and dense in meaning that it’s beyond the full comprehension of even the most advanced AI. It’s also one that you and I process intuitively and deal in every day: language. Understanding the written and spoken word … Read more
Not exactly about authors and writing, but PG found this interesting. From Artificial Lawyer: Tom Martin, the founder of legal bot maker, LawDroid, has been awarded a contract to build a voice-activated legal aid bot in the US in a major ‘real world’ test of the technology and its access to justice (A2J) capabilities. Martin told Artificial … Read more
From Quartz: Sometimes the scariest place to be is your own mind. Or Reddit at night. Shelley is an AI program that generates the beginnings of horror stories, and it’s trained by original horror fiction posted to Reddit. Designed by researchers from MIT Media Lab, Shelley launched on Twitter on Oct. 21. The team behind Shelley is … Read more
From Art Law Journal: Google recently made headlines in the photography community when it released a paper authored by several of its engineers that essentially concluded that a watermark on any photograph is vulnerable to being removed en masse because of the way that most stock photo agencies present images on their websites. Although framed … Read more
Re: Barnes & Noble From The Business of Fashion: In 2011, in what has now become retail folklore, Ron Johnson, one of the brains behind the Apple Store, was hired to resuscitate the American department store chain JCPenney. At the time, I was asked to write an article for Advertising Age on whether Johnson would … Read more
A number of years ago, PG remembers reading a science fiction story about a future in which a large percentage of the population wore body cameras. From TechConnect: InfoTrends says people will take 1.2 trillion digital photos this year. That’s 100 billion more than last year and nearly double the number taken as recently as 2013. … Read more
From Motherboard: Minutes after the epic finale of the seventh season of Game of Thrones, fans of the show were already dismayed to hear that the final, six-episode season of the series isn’t set to air until spring 2019. For readers of the A Song of Ice and Fire novel series on which the TV show is based, disappointment … Read more
From The Bookseller: In June a bookseller briefly became the richest man on the planet. From humble beginnings as a successful Wall Street trader in the late nineties, he saw an opportunity to change the way that books are sold. At around the same time, the first Penguin books website launched, and readers could buy … Read more
From Seeking Alpha: Everyone who follows the tech space knows that artificial intelligence (“AI”) is one of the hottest area of investment. From my anecdotal experience, if you ask market participants to list who they think is the current leader in AI, most will say Google, then followed by perhaps Microsoft or NVIDIA. Being labeled … Read more
From Think Growth: The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there has been a market for human attention. Long ago, capitalizing on human attention consisted of little more than the call of a street vendor over the din of … Read more
From The Verge: Most of us think “perfect” memory means never forgetting, but maybe forgetting actually helps us navigate a world that is random and ever-changing. So say two neuroscientists in a review published today in the journal Neuron. The argument is that memory isn’t supposed to act like a video recorder, but instead like … Read more
From Nikkei Asian Review: Japanese electronic book distributor Media Do will develop an artificial intelligence-based automatic translation system to make its e-books available for English-speaking readers. The company hopes to reach a broader market and promote digitization at a time when Japan’s book market is shrinking. Media Do has teamed up with two Tokyo-based AI startups … Read more
From The Atlantic: Without once saying the words “artificial intelligence,” a stream of Apple executives described a vision of the near future in which Siri, the company’s AI avatar, stitches together the company’s many hardware products. And they introduced a new—and widely anticipated—entry into their lineup: a $349 cylindrical voice-controlled speaker they call HomePod. After … Read more
From Wired: Jesse Engel is playing an instrument that’s somewhere between a clavichord and a Hammond organ—18th-century classical crossed with 20th-century rhythm and blues. Then he drags a marker across his laptop screen. Suddenly, the instrument is somewhere else between a clavichord and a Hammond. Before, it was, say, 15 percent clavichord. Now it’s closer … Read more
From Madison.com: To say that Amazon’s first attempt at entering the wireless phone market did not go well would be sugarcoating on the level of saying, “the Titanic’s maiden voyage left room for improvement.” Fire Phone was a near-instant failure. It was a device nobody really needed sold at a premium price. Its only truly … Read more
From The Washington Post: Artificial intelligence is being touted as a tool for addressing some of humanity’s most pressing problems, including climate change and cancer. But starting this week, you can put it to work for something a little more prosaic: ordering a hoagie. On Tuesday, Mastercard announced it has partnered with Subway and two … Read more
From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin: A major difference between book publishing today and book publishing 25 years ago is the practical power of the author brand in marketing. Multi-book authors can not only build their own followings in ways that can be usefully exploited, they now have an unprecedented capability to help each other. … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: I wanted to buy some mini marshmallows recently, so I went on Amazon. Perhaps because of their resemblance to packing material—light, bulky, ubiquitous—I figured they’d be cheap. But when I found the most popular brand, not only did the marshmallows cost twice what I’d pay at my local store, but … Read more
From MSN: Kids adore their new robot siblings. As millions of American families buy robotic voice assistants to turn off lights, order pizzas and fetch movie times, children are eagerly co-opting the gadgets to settle dinner table disputes, answer homework questions and entertain friends at sleepover parties. Many parents have been startled and intrigued by … Read more
From Wired: When Republican Steve King beat back Democratic challenger Kim Weaver in the race for Iowa’s 4th congressional district seat in November, The Washington Post snapped into action, covering both the win and the wider electoral trend. “Republicans retained control of the House and lost only a handful of seats from their commanding majority,” … Read more
From The Verge: Amazon’s latest artificial intelligence tool is a piece of image recognition software that can learn to guess a human’s age. The feature is powered by Amazon’s Rekognition platform, which is a developer toolkit that exists as part of the company’s AWS cloud computing service. So long as you’re willing to go through … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: In the age of Amazon.com Inc., other retailers are scrambling to find a way to keep consumers shopping on their sites and in stores. The trick? Personalization, via data and tech. Sunglass Hut is employing deep learning and image-recognition technology from San Francisco-based Sentient Technologies Holdings Ltd. for its e-commerce … Read more
From the MIT Technology Review: “Hey, Alexa”—a phrase that millions of people call out at home just before telling Amazon their desires at that moment. All those people asking Alexa to order kitchen supplies, turn on the lights, or play music gives Amazon a valuable stockpile of data that it could use to fend off … Read more
From ZDNet: Amazon’s Alexa is the brain of its Echo and digital assistant efforts, and the company is rapidly beginning to distribute the technology into other products At the Consumer Electronics Show 2017, it’s clear that Amazon aims to put Alexa everywhere. Google will also look to embed its Google Assistant everywhere too — in … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Want to know if artificial intelligence is going to eliminate millions of jobs? The first place to look is the industry that birthed the technology. AI seems set to do to computer programming—and possibly other kinds of so-called knowledge work—what automation has done to other jobs, from the factory floor … Read more
From The Economist: Did you know that the wildfires which ravaged Hawaii last summer were started by a secret “weather weapon” being tested by America’s armed forces, and that American ngos were spreading dengue fever in Africa? That Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, went on a $1.1m shopping spree on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue? Or that … Read more
From The New Republic: The most nauseating, addictive thing about writing is the uncertainty—and I don’t mean the is-anyone-reading? or will-I-make-rent? kind. The uncertainty I’m talking about dogs the very act. This business of writing an essay, for instance: Which of ten thousand possible openings to choose—and how to ignore the sweaty sense that the unseen, unconceptualized ten thousand … Read more
From The Economist: IN THE dystopia of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, Big Brother numbs the masses with the help of a “versificator”, a machine designed to automatically generate the lyrics to popular tunes, thereby ridding society of human creativity. Today, numerous artificial-intelligence (AI) models churn out, some free of charge, the music itself. Unsurprisingly, many … Read more
From studiomcah: Yes, it’s true: after much gnashing of teeth and a token resistance to the inevitable, I decided it was time to do serious experimentation with AI, especially after hearing multiple reports, all good, about Anthropic’s Claude. To be clear, I continue to think the legal repercussions of the training of AI models on … Read more
From The Economist: IN THE dystopia of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, Big Brother numbs the masses with the help of a “versificator”, a machine designed to automatically generate the lyrics to popular tunes, thereby ridding society of human creativity. Today, numerous artificial-intelligence (AI) models churn out, some free of charge, the music itself. Unsurprisingly, many … Read more
From The Economist: It is now possible to generate fake but realistic content with little more than the click of a mouse. This can be fun: a TikTok account on which—among other things—an artificial Tom Cruise wearing a purple robe sings “Tiny Dancer” to (the real) Paris Hilton holding a toy dog has attracted 5.1m … Read more
From Reuters: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday, accusing them of using millions of the newspaper’s articles without permission to help train chatbots to provide information to readers. The Times said it is the first major U.S. media organization to sue OpenAI, creator of the popular artificial-intelligence platform ChatGPT, and Microsoft, … Read more
From Vox: Four years ago, I published my first book: End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World. It did … okay? I earned a Q&A with the site you’re reading now — thanks, Dylan! — and the book eventually helped get me the job of running Future Perfect. I had one … Read more
From The Washington Post: A California-based law firm is launching a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the artificial-intelligence company that created popular chatbot ChatGPT massively violated thecopyrights and privacy of countless people when it used data scraped from the internet to train its tech. The lawsuit seeks to test out a novel legal theory — that OpenAI … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: When we ask ChatGPT or another bot to draft a memo, email, or presentation, we think these artificial-intelligence assistants are doing our bidding. A growing body of research shows that they also can change our thinking—without our knowing. One of the latest studies in this vein, from researchers spread across … Read more
From Statista: Public-facing AI tools, including text-based applications like ChatGPT or text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney or DALL-E 2, have quickly turned into the newest digital frontier in terms of regulatory, legal and online privacy issues. Already malicious actors are committing criminal offenses and spreading mis- and disinformation aided by the capabilities of generative … Read more
From The Cut: Eren, from Ankara, Turkey, is about six-foot-three with sky-blue eyes and shoulder-length hair. He’s in his 20s, a Libra, and very well groomed: He gets manicures, buys designer brands, and always smells nice, usually of Dove lotion. His favorite color is orange, and in his downtime he loves to bake and read … Read more
From Wired: CAUSALITY WILL BE hard to prove—was it really the words of the chatbot that put the murderer over the edge? Nobody will know for sure. But the perpetrator will have spoken to the chatbot, and the chatbot will have encouraged the act. Or perhaps a chatbot has broken someone’s heart so badly they … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Much has been made of ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence algorithm, and its potential to disrupt education. We have already seen that it can write college essays and take graduate exams with alarming aptitude. At the very least, we’ll need new guards against students who rely on ChapGPT to cheat. One might … Read more
From Nature: An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. Researchers are divided over the implications for science. “I am very worried,” says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the … Read more
From Wired: OUR BRAIN HAS evolved to make predictions and explanations in unstable and ill-defined situations. For instance, to understand a novel situation, the brain generates a single explanation on the fly. If this explanation is upturned by additional information, a second explanation is generated. Machine learning, on the other hand, typically takes a different path: … Read more
From AINews: FBI Director Christopher Wray has warned about the national security threat posed by Beijing’s AI program. During a panel at the World Economic Forum, Wray explained that Beijing’s AI program “is not constrained by the rule of law”. Wray says Beijing has “a bigger hacking program than any other nation” and will use machine … Read more