Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I’m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. “The girls call me Marmalade,” she says, inviting me to use her prison …
Read More »Senators Want ChatGPT-Level AI to Require a Government License
The US government should create a new body to regulate artificial intelligence—and restrict work on language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to companies granted licenses to do so. That’s the recommendation of a bipartisan duo of senators, Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Josh Hawley, who launched a legislative framework yesterday to …
Read More »Do Not Fear the Robot Uprising. Join It
it’s become a veritable meme subgenre at this point: a photo of Linda Hamilton as The Terminator’s Sarah Connor, glaring into the camera, steely eyed, with some variant of the caption “Sarah Connor seeing you become friends with ChatGPT.” Our society has interpreted the sudden, dizzying rise of this new …
Read More »The Generative AI Boom Could Fuel a New International Arms Race
Governments around the world are rushing to embrace the algorithms that breathed some semblance of intelligence into ChatGPT, apparently enthralled by the enormous economic payoff expected from the technology. Two new reports out this week show that nation-states are also likely rushing to adapt the same technology into weapons of …
Read More »Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted
An award-winning piece of AI art cannot be copyrighted, the US Copyright Office has ruled. The artwork, Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, was created by Matthew Allen and came first in last year's Colorado State Fair. Since then, the piece has been embroiled in a precedent-affirming copyright dispute. Now, the government agency …
Read More »Generative AI’s Biggest Security Flaw Is Not Easy to Fix
It's easy to trick the large language models powering chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. In one experiment in February, security researchers forced Microsoft’s Bing chatbot to behave like a scammer. Hidden instructions on a web page the researchers created told the chatbot to ask the person using it …
Read More »AI Can Be an Extraordinary Force for Good—if It’s Contained
In a quaint Regency-era office overlooking London’s Russell Square, I cofounded a company called DeepMind with two friends, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, in the summer of 2010. Our goal, one that still feels as ambitious and crazy and hopeful as it did back then, was to replicate the very …
Read More »What OpenAI Really Wants
The air crackles with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star and his entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They’ve just ducked out of one event and are headed to another, then another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As they careen through the streets of London—the short hop from …
Read More »The Battle Over Books3 Could Change AI Forever
After OpenAI released GPT-3 in July 2020, independent artificial intelligence researcher Shawn Presser and a few of his fellow machine-learning enthusiasts set a challenge for themselves: Could they recreate it? “We were like, OK, there’s actually not that much standing in the way of us doing this ourselves,” Presser says. …
Read More »The Inventor Behind a Rush of AI Copyright Suits Is Trying to Show His Bot Is Sentient
“A Recent Entrance to Paradise” is a pixelated pastoral scene of train tracks running under a moss-flecked bridge. It was, according to its creator’s creator, drawn and named in 2012 by an artificial intelligence called DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). But earlier this month, a federal …
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