This new tool could give artists an edge over AI

But artists are the canary in the coal mine. Their fight belongs to anyone who has ever posted anything they care about online. Our personal data, social media posts, song lyrics, news articles, fiction, even our faces—anything that is freely available online could end up in an AI model forever without our knowing about it. 

Tools like Nightshade could be a first step in tipping the power balance back to us. 

Deeper Learning

How Meta and AI companies recruited striking actors to train AI

Earlier this year, a company called Realeyes ran an “emotion study.” It recruited actors and then captured audio and video data of their voices, faces, and movements, which it fed into an AI database. That database is being used to help train virtual avatars for Meta. The project coincided with Hollywood’s historic strikes. With the industry at a standstill, the larger-than-usual number of out-of-work actors may have been a boon for Meta and Realeyes: here was a new pool of “trainers”—and data points—perfectly suited to teaching their AI to appear more human. 

Who owns your face: Many actors across the industry worry that AI—much like the models described in the emotion study—could be used to replace them, whether or not their exact faces are copied. Read more from Eileen Guo here.

Bits and Bytes

How China plans to judge generative AI safety
The Chinese government has a new draft document that proposes detailed rules for how to determine whether a generative AI model is problematic. Our China tech writer Zeyi Yang unpacks it for us. (MIT Technology Review) 

AI chatbots can guess your personal information from what you type
New research has found that large language models are excellent at guessing people’s private information from chats. This could be used to supercharge profiling for advertisements, for example. (Wired) 

OpenAI claims its new tool can detect images by DALL-E with 99% accuracy
OpenAI executives say the company is developing the tool after leading AI companies made a voluntary pledge to the White House to develop watermarks and other detection mechanisms for AI-generated content. Google announced its watermarking tool in August. (Bloomberg)

AI models fail miserably in transparency
When Stanford University tested how transparent large language models are, it found that the top-scoring model, Meta’s LLaMA 2, only scored 54 out of 100. Growing opacity is a worrying trend in AI. AI models are going to have huge societal influence, and we need more visibility into them to be able to hold them accountable. (Stanford) 

A college student built an AI system to read 2,000-year-old Roman scrolls
How fun! A 21-year-old computer science major developed an AI program to decipher ancient Roman scrolls that were damaged by a volcanic eruption in the year 79. The program was able to detect about a dozen letters, which experts translated into the word “porphyras”—ancient Greek for purple.  (The Washington Post)