Digital Dialectic – Virtual Recordings

40,000 AI-narrated audiobooks flood Audible, dividing authors and listeners

Since announcing a beta tool last year allowing self-published authors to generate AI "virtual voice" narrations for their ebooks, over 40,000 AI-narrated titles have flooded onto Audible, Amazon's audiobook platform which has many authors celebrating but is also raising red flags for human narrators. Converting an ebook to audio using the AI narration tool took just 52 minutes, bypassing the expensive studio recording route.

TECHSPOT

5/6/24

Does AI Threaten the Value of Human Labor?

Shedding the fear of AI allows a clearer exploration of our intrinsic value. Consider the skills of prediction and judgement, both of which we use to survive as humans in everyday life. We hone and utilize these skills in professional settings and contribute to other skills in strategy, creativity, and originality. Despite AI’s advancements in simulating human understanding, as David Ferrucci notes, originating meaningful insights remains a distinctly human domain.

VERTICO LABS

5/3/24

TikTok and Universal Music Group Sign New Agreement

Universal Music Group has inked a “multi-dimensional” deal with TikTok. Notably, the deal will address concerns that UMG and its artists have with generative AI. “TikTok and UMG will work together to ensure AI development across the music industry will protect human artistry and the economics that flow to those artists and songwriters,” reads a press release announcing the deal. “TikTok is also committed to working with UMG to remove unauthorized AI-generated music from the platform, as well as tools to improve artist and songwriter attribution.”

THE VERGE

5/1/24

Writers Guild of Canada Overwhelmingly Votes to Authorize Strike Over AI, Fair Pay

The Writers Guild of Canada revealed 96.5 percent of eligible members voted to authorize a strike if a new deal with the Canadian Media Producers Association cannot be reached. “This strike authorization vote, a first in the guild’s 33-year history, represents a pivotal moment for Canadian screenwriters,” WGC executive director Victoria Shen said in a statement on Thursday. The results of the WGC membership vote do not ensure a work stoppage will occur, but offers the Canadian union the opportunity to strike if ongoing negotiations with local film and TV producers over a new Independent Production Agreement do not reach a settlement.

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

4/25/24

Author granted copyright over book with AI-generated text - with a twist

The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This means no one can copy the book without permission, but the actual sentences and paragraphs themselves are not copyrighted and could theoretically be rearranged and republished as a different book.

ARS TECHNICA

4/18/24

Speed of AI Development is Outpacing Risk Assessment

The increasing power of the latest artificial intelligence systems is stretching traditional evaluation methods to the breaking point, posing a challenge to businesses and public bodies over how best to work with the fast-evolving technology. Flaws in the evaluation criteria commonly used to gauge performance, accuracy, and safety are being exposed as more models come to market, according to people who build, test, and invest in AI tools. The traditional tools are easy to manipulate and too narrow for the complexity of the latest models, they said.

ARS TECHNICA

4/12/24

Artificial Intelligence May Not Immediately Disrupt The Legal Profession

In many contexts, artificial intelligence is not that helpful with document review and other automated legal tasks. AI will frequently suggest deal terms that clearly would be rejected by the other side, and the tool has no sense of what would be acceptable and what would be rejected by an adversary.

ABOVE THE LAW

4/12/24

New Bill will Compel AI Companies to Reveal Use of Copyrighted Art

The Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, would require AI companies to submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users’ prompts. The bill would require companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty.

THE GUARDIAN

4/10/24

Spatial Personas turn Apple Vision Pros into a Telepresence Machine

Apple made a small but very important change to the way its Personas, its word for avatars, look and interact on the Vision Pro headset. Spatial Personas, a feature that's now available to test in developer beta mode, frees Apple's ghostly scanned likenesses of friends and colleagues from their windowed confines, allowing them to seem to like they're floating directly in your space, pointing and even interacting with the things you're using in mixed reality.

CNET

4/3/24

How Musicians can Leverage Generative AI

Generative AI has musicians concerned for their livelihood, and in some cases, for the future of music itself. A recent study by Goldmedia—a European consultancy and research group focused on the media and entertainment industries—found that 64 percent of music creators believe that the risks of AI use outweigh its potential opportunities.

BERKLEE SCHOOL OF MUSIC

3/26/24

How to Define Artificial General Intelligence?

The idea of machines outsmarting humans has long been the subject of science fiction. Rapid improvements in artificial-intelligence (ai) programs over the past decade have led some experts to conclude that science fiction could soon become fact. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, believes would constitute agi: a program that can do 8% better than most people at certain tests, such as bar exams for lawyers or logic quizzes.

THE ECONOMIST

3/28/24

Tennessee Governor Signs ELVIS ACT for Artist Protections from AI

Tennessee became the first state to enact voice, image and likeness protections for its residents against misuses of artificial intelligence through a new bill, the ELVIS Act. The ELVIS Act, short for the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act - HB 2091, advocates on behalf of the state's music creators by enacting voice protections. The bill arrives in the midst of AI advances where deepfakes and unauthorized uses of artists' voices and likenesses.

THE TENNESSEAN

3/21/24

How AI Could Disrupt Hollywood

New platforms and tools may allow a person to create a feature-length film from their living room. But can they really compete with the studios?

VANITY FAIR

3/4/24

Does generative artificial intelligence infringe copyright?

Generative artificial intelligence (ai) will transform the workplace. The International Monetary Fund reckons that ai tools, which includes ones that produce text or images from written prompts, will eventually affect 40% of jobs. Goldman Sachs, a bank, says that the technology could replace 300m jobs worldwide. Skeptics say those estimates exaggerate. But some industries seem to be feeling the effects already.

THE ECONOMIST

3/2/24

Adobe launches AI assistant that can summarize PDFs

Adobe's AI assistant will help users digest information from long PDF documents by generating brief overviews of their contents, and can also answer questions about the information in a document through a “conversational interface.” It can also generate citations that allow users to verify the source of the tool’s answers, and can produce text for various formats such as emails, presentations and reports.

CNBC

2/21/24

OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model

Sora is capable of creating “complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” according to OpenAI’s introductory blog post. The company also notes that the model can understand how objects “exist in the physical world,” as well as “accurately interpret props and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions.”

THE VERGE

2/15/24

USPTO says AI models can’t hold patents

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published guidance on inventorship for AI-assisted inventions, clarifying that while AI systems can play a role in the creative process, only natural persons (human beings) who make significant contributions to the conception of an invention can be named as inventors. It also rules out using AI models to churn out patent ideas without significant human input.

ARS TECHNICA

2/14/24

London Underground Tests Real-Time AI Surveillance Tools to Spot Crime

Transport for London (TfL), which operates the city's Tube and bus network, tested 11 computer vision algorithms to monitor people passing through Willesden Green Tube station, in the northwest of the city. The proof of concept trial is the first time the transport body has combined AI and live video footage to generate alerts that are sent to frontline staff.

WIRED

2/9/24

What's in the Biden Administrations updated AI Executive Order?

The updated EO uses the Defense Production Act to compel companies developing powerful AI systems to report specific information on their training data and safety test results to the Department of Commerce (DOC). The EO proposes a rule that would require cloud companies to report foreign use of their services to train AI models and verify the identities of foreign customers.

JDSUPRA.com

2/6/24

Generative AI is hot, but predictive AI remains the workhorse

Predictive AI: This technology is forward-looking, analyzing past data to unearth predictive patterns and then using current data to provide accurate forecasts of what will happen in the future. “We work with a lot of chief data and artificial intelligence officers (CAIOs),” said Thomas Robinson, COO at Domino, “and, at most, they see generative AI accounting for 15% of use cases and models. Predictive AI is still the workhorse in model-driven businesses, and future models are likely to combine predictive and generative AI.”

CIO.com

2/5/24

What happens to war when AI takes over?

War is a fearsome accelerant of arms races and self-guided aircraft are what’s truly changing the nature of combat. The idea of allowing computer algorithms control lethal weapons unsettles many people. Programming machines to decide when to fire on which targets could have horrifying consequences for noncombatants. It should prompt intense moral debate.

THE ATLANTIC

2/1/24

FCC to declare AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal under existing law

The Federal Communications Commission plans to vote on making the use of AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposed Declaratory Ruling would rule that calls made with AI-generated voices are 'artificial' voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which would make voice cloning technology used in common robocalls scams targeting consumers illegal.

ARS TECHNICA

2/1/24

Germany to approve the European Union's AI Act

Germany will approve the EU's pioneering AI Act after the minister responsible for digital issues said a compromise had been reached. The European Union reached a provisional deal in December for artificial intelligence rules to establish a regulatory framework for the development of AI, but it has to be agreed by members and the European Parliament.

REUTERS

1/30/24

Digital Dialectic

Inside the European Union's AI ACT of 2023

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Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments

The industry is facing yet another revolution, but what sort isn’t yet clear. Is A.I. a format change in the way music is consumed, like the transition from records and cassettes to CDs, or is it a threat to the business model, as were free downloading and file-sharing? Is generative A.I. a new kind of digital workstation for making music, or is it the new radio—a platform for promoting acts and engaging with fans?

NEW YORKER

1/29/24

Google’s LUMIERE: An AI Revolution in Video Generation

Imagine describing a scene with words and watching it come to life. LUMIERE turns this into reality. Users provide text inputs or upload an image, prompting the AI to produce a dynamic video. This capability opens doors to numerous content creation tasks, from image-to-video transformations to stylized video generation. Its 5-second capacity generates 80 frames at 16 frames per second.

DESK INVESTOR

1/26/24

California Lawmakers Push for Watermarks on AI-Produced Photos and Videos

At least five lawmakers are considering proposals that would require AI companies to implement some type of verification that a video, photo, or written work was made by the technology. The activity comes as advanced AI has rapidly evolved to create realistic images or audio on an unprecedented level. Lawmakers acknowledged the competing approaches would likely be resolved later in the legislative process.

BLOOMBERG LAW

1/26/24

George Carlin's Estate Sues Creators of AI-Generated Comedy Special

The complaint seeks a court order for immediate removal of the special, as well as unspecified damages. It’s among the first legal actions taken by the estate of a deceased celebrity for unlicensed use of their work and likeness to manufacture a new, AI-generated creation and was filed as Hollywood is sounding the alarm over utilization of AI to impersonate people without consent or compensation.

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

1/26/24

Thousands of Artists Allege Midjourney Used Their Work to Train AI Software

A listing of 16,000 artists forms Exhibit J in a class action brought by 10 American artists in California against Midjourney, Stability AI, Runway AI and DeviantArt. The promise of AI is that it will generate the image in your imagination if you can describe it. Yet this promise is limited by whether or not someone else has already created part of the image you imagined. Artists have discovered that Midjourney will generate an image that is very similar to their original works, which they believe amounts to copying. And Midjourney allows – and encourages, according to the lawsuit – its users to specify an artist’s style.

THE GUARDIAN

1/21/24

Musicians' Union Threatens Strike Over AI and Streaming Media

The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), a union representing musicians across the entertainment industry, will begin negotiations on a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and is seeking a deal to better reflect the current state of streaming media. The AFM is also seeking AI protection, increased wages, health care improvements, improved working conditions and residual payments for streaming content. According to the AFM, musicians who record on soundtracks make 75% less on streaming content due to less residual income.

CNN

1/20/24

Many AI researchers think fakes will become undetectable

Detection software relies on the idea that ai models will leave a trace. Either they will fail to reproduce some aspect of real images and video, or of human-generated text, or they will add something superfluous—and will do so often enough to let other software spot the error. Detection software is prone to both false positives - wrongly flagging human content as generated by AI - and false negatives by allowing machine-generated materials to pass undetected.

THE ECONOMIST

1/19/24

AI Enhanced Binoculars Identify Birds and Mammals in Realtime

Swarovski Optik's new binoculars can identify over 9,000 species of birds and mammals. It takes 5 seconds to process an image before the animals name displays on the built-in HUD thanks to data provided by the Merlin Bird ID project, which was created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

SAWAROVSKI OPTIK

1/17/24

Meta's multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model

"We’re developing AI to eliminate language barriers. It can perform speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for up to 100 languages. And depending on the task, without having to first convert to text behind the scenes."

MINDPLEX MAGAZINE

1/15/24

Authors Guild Explores Blanket Licenses for AI Companies

The Authors Guild is exploring an opt-in model for its members to offer blanket licenses to artificial intelligence companies. Early discussions involve a fee to use works in training models and a prohibition on outputs that borrow too heavily from existing material.

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

1/11/24

Push for Federal Protections for Voice and Likeness in the 'No AI Fraud Act'

An artists’ voice, image or likeness may be covered by “right of publicity” laws which protect them from commercial exploitation without authorization, but this is a right that varies state by state. The No AI FRAUD Act aims to establish a harmonized baseline of protection.

BILLBOARD

1/10/24

AI-powered misinformation seen as the world’s biggest short-term threat

The Global Risks Report issued at the World Economic Forum cites false and misleading information supercharged with cutting-edge artificial intelligence that threatens to erode democracy and polarize society, as the top immediate risk to the global economy.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

1/10/24

The 'Elvis Act' Protects Voices from Unauthorized Replication

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee unveiled legislation designed to protect songwriters, performers and other music industry professionals. "Tennessee will be the first state in the country to protect artists' voices with this legislation, and we hope it will be a blueprint for the country."

USA TODAY

1/10/24

Haight Street Beat

How 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco' Became an Icon

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San Francisco Creates AI Usage Rules for City Employees

San Francisco released its first guidelines on how city employees should use artificial intelligence at work. The guidelines direct city employees to always fact check AI-generated content and to disclose when they use the technology. SF's AI plan encourages city employees to experiment with the technology, but also warned that AI programs can reflect the biases inherent in their training data, and should be used with caution.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

1/9/24

SAG-AFTRA Signs Deal with Voiceover Studio for AI's use in Video Games

SAG-AFTRA signed a deal with Replica Studios with terms that include informed consent for the use of AI to create digital voice replicas, as well as requirements for the safe storage of digital assets. The deal pertains only to “digital replicas” — using AI to re-create the voice of a real performer. It does not apply to AI training to create synthetic performances.

VARIETY

1/9/24

OpenAI says it's ‘Impossible’ to create tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material

OpenAI said it would be impossible to create tools like ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, as pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products. Chatbots and image generators like Stable Diffusion are “trained” on a vast trove of data taken from the internet, with much of it covered by copyright – a legal protection against someone’s work being used without permission.

THE GUARDIAN

1/8/24

The Battle for Biometric Privacy

Biometric surveillance encompasses a collection of methods for tracking individuals using physical or biological characteristics, ranging from fingerprint and DNA collection to gait recognition and heartbeat tracking. These methods rely heavily on algorithms to identify certain characteristics from a sample, like the image of a face or the sound of a voice, and match it to one other particular sample or a group of samples. The pushback against ubiquitous surveillance and targeted deep-faking has begun, but regulation may fail to keep up with AI advances. In 2024 we will have growing numbers of “excoded” communities and people - those whose life opportunities have been negatively altered by AI systems.

WIRED NEWS OP-ED

1/8/24

Generative AI's Visual Plagiarism Problem

Recent empirical work has shown that LLMs are capable of reproducing, or reproducing with minor changes, substantial chunks of text that appear in their training sets. We call such near-verbatim outputs “plagiaristic outputs,” because prima facie if a human created them we would call them instances of plagiarism. We leave it to lawyers to reflect on how such materials might be treated in a legal context.

IEEE SPECTRUM

1/5/24

What Generative AI Reveals About the Human Mind

I’m a philosopher and cognitive scientist who has spent their entire career trying to understand how the human mind works. Drawing on research spanning psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, my search has drawn me towards a picture of how natural minds work that is both interestingly similar to, yet also deeply different from, the core operating principles of the generative AIs. Examining this contrast may help us better understand them both.

TIME MAGAZINE

1/5/24

California's 'AI Accountability Act' to regulate state agencies use of AI

The California AI Accountability Act, introduced as Senate Bill 896, would create a roadmap and regulations for use of the emerging technology by state agencies, including requiring notice to the public when they are interacting with artificial intelligence. "By now we all recognize the tremendous capability of artificial intelligence to improve our lives and the functioning of government," Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) said. "But we also see its potential downsides -- specifically, the threat to consumer privacy, transparency and fairness. My proposal will help identify the risks of these emerging systems and develop appropriate guidelines to protect our state and the public."

CBS BAY AREA

1/5/24

Safeguarding Elections From AI-Powered Misinformation and Cyberattacks

Generative artificial intelligence—AI that can create new text, images, and other media out of existing data—is one of the most disruptive technologies in centuries. With this technology now more available and powerful than ever, its malicious use is poised to test the security of the United States’ electoral process by giving nefarious actors intent on undermining American democracy the ability to supercharge their tactics. Specifically, generative AI will amplify cybersecurity risks and make it easier, faster, and cheaper to flood the country with fake content.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

1/3/24

US Supreme Court's Annual Report focuses on AI’s dangers

Chief Justice John Roberts warned that courts will need to consider the proper use of AI, portraying it as a new frontier for change. “I predict that human judges will be around for a while, but with equal confidence I predict that judicial work — particularly at the trial level — will be significantly affected by AI. Those changes will involve not only how judges go about doing their job, but also how they understand the role that AI plays in the cases that come before them.”

US SUPREME COURT.GOV

12/31/23

Writer's don’t despair - AI can’t replicate our imaginations

The publishing world is experimenting in how AI performs, not only with regard to “writing,” but at marketing, distribution and the production of audiobooks with synthetic voices. Most writers I know feel anxiety about losing potential streams of income.

LOS ANGELES TIMES OP-ED

12/31/23

Digital Dialectic

ABBA Avatars & Pophouse Entertainment

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The Rise of AI Influencers

Instagram analysis of an H&M advert featuring virtual influencer Kuki found that it reached 11 times more people and resulted in a 91 percent decrease in cost per person remembering the advert, compared with a traditional ad.

ARS TECHNICA

12/29/23

NY Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for Copyright infringement

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies’ artificial intelligence technology illegally copied millions of Times articles to train ChatGPT and other services to provide people with instant access to information — technology that now competes with the Times.

CNN

12/27/23

The AI Foundation Model Transparency Act

Companies that make foundation models will be required to report sources of training data and how the data is retained during the inference process, describe the limitations or risks of the model, how the model aligns with NIST’s planned AI Risk Management Framework and any other federal standards might be established, and provide information on the computational power used to train and run the model.

THE VERGE

12/22/23

Haight Street Beat

Patrick San Francisco - Apocrypha

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AI Confirms 'Proof of Place' in Wine

A team of scientists used machine learning and gas chromatography to successfully analyze 80 wines and identify which seven Bordeaux châteaus produced them. Even more astonishing, when they mapped the wines’ chemical signatures as XY coordinates on a map, the wines clustered correctly according to their Left and Right Bank origins. This breakthrough research validates the concept of terroir and has far-reaching implications.

WINE SPECTATOR

12/19/23

Meta Bans using their Ads Manager tool for AI-Powered Political Ads

Meta says its generative artificial intelligence (AI) advertising tools cannot be used to power political campaigns anywhere globally, with access blocked for ads targeting specific services and issues. The social media giant said earlier this month that advertisers will be barred from using generative AI tools in its Ads Manager tool to produce ads for politics, elections, housing, employment, credit, or social issues. Ads related to health, pharmaceuticals, and financial services also are not allowed access to the generative AI features. This policy will apply globally, as Meta continues to test its generative AI ads creation tools, confirmed Dan Neary, Meta's Asia-Pacific vice president.

ZD NET

12/1/23

Haight Street Beat

Linda Kelly: Haight Street Voice

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Defending Your Voice Against Deepfakes

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have spurred developments in realistic speech synthesis. While this technology has the potential to improve lives through personalized voice assistants and accessibility-enhancing communication tools, it also has led to the emergence of deepfakes, in which synthesized speech can be misused to deceive humans and machines for nefarious purposes. In response to this evolving threat, Ning Zhang, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has developed a tool called AntiFake, a novel defense mechanism designed to thwart unauthorized speech synthesis before it happens.

TECH EXPLORE

11/28/23

AI 'Swarm' Initiatives Speed Pace of Hard Decisions on Autonomous Weapons

The Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to "galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many," Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said

ASSOCIATED PRESS

11/27/23

AI Threatens Wages More Than Jobs - So Far

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence could reduce wages, but so far is creating, not destroying jobs, especially for the young and highly-skilled, research published by the European Central Bank. Firms have invested heavily in artificial intelligence, or AI, leaving economists striving to understand the impact on the labor market and driving fears among the wider public for the future of their jobs. At the same time, employers are struggling to find qualified workers, despite a recession that would normally ease labor market pressures.

REUTERS

11/28/23

US, Britain, and several other countries agree to make AI 'secure by design'

The United States, Britain and more than a dozen other countries on Sunday unveiled what a senior U.S. official described as the first detailed international agreement on how to keep artificial intelligence safe from rogue actors, pushing for companies to create AI systems that are "secure by design." In a 20-page document the 18 countries agreed that companies designing and using AI need to develop and deploy it in a way that keeps customers and the wider public safe from misuse.

REUTERS

11/27/23

Google's AI Chatbot Analyzes YouTube Video Content For You

Google's AI chatbot has a new YouTube extension that can handle complex queries about specific video content, like recipe quantities and instruction summaries - without ever pressing play. By having Bard spit out the recipe for me, I’ve just skipped the step where I press play, watch a preroll add, and see the channel’s other recommended videos at the end. That’s great for me, but probably less good for the publisher of the video.

THE VERGE

11/22/23

Sarah Sliverman's Core Claim of AI Copyright Infringement against Meta Survives Legal Challenge

A federal judge has dismissed 'most' of Sarah Silverman‘s lawsuit against Meta over the unauthorized use of authors’ copyrighted books to train its generative artificial intelligence model, marking the second ruling from a court siding with AI firms on novel intellectual property questions presented in the legal battle. Notably, Meta didn’t move to dismiss the allegation that the copying of books for purposes of training its AI model rises to the level of copyright infringement.

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

11/21/23

Germany, France and Italy reach agreement on future AI regulation

France, Germany and Italy have reached an agreement on how artificial intelligence should be regulated, which is expected to accelerate negotiations at the European level. The three governments support "mandatory self-regulation through codes of conduct" for so-called foundation models of AI, which are designed to produce a broad range of outputs. "Together we underline that the AI Act regulates the application of AI and not the technology as such. The inherent risks lie in the application of AI systems rather than in the technology itself."

REUTERS

11/20/23

Peter Blake says possibilities of AI are endless for art

While artists are among those who fear the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on their creativity and copyright, pop artist Sir Peter Blake has been inspired by the technology to create a new series of portraits. At the age of 91, Blake has been collaborating with a robot powered by AI and is excited by the artistic possibilities of this “kind of magic”. He has been working with technicians in directing a robot to convert photographic portraits of people into painted portraits of them within minutes.

THE GUARDIAN

11/5/23

Haight Street Beat

Magic Mike: Psychedelic SF Art Gallery

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Global adversaries and allies reach first agreement on containing AI risks

At a time when countries and regions are pushing through varying regulations on AI, the negotiated statement — known as the Bletchley Declaration — saw global adversaries U.S. and China hash out a series of guiding principles with the European Union, Britain and 24 other nations. Countries jointly called for policies across borders to prevent risk, ranging from disinformation to the potential for “catastrophic harm either deliberate or unintentional.”

WASHINGTON POST

11/1/23

Artists Lose Copyright Infringement Case Against AI Art Generators

U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Monday found that copyright infringement claims cannot move forward against Midjourney and DeviantArt, concluding the accusations are “defective in numerous respects.” Among the issues are whether the AI systems they run on actually contain copies of copyrighted images that were used to create infringing works and if the artists can substantiate infringement in the absence of identical material created by the AI tools.

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

10/30/23

The world wants to regulate AI, but does not quite know how

Efforts to rein in AI abound. Negotiations in Brussels entered a pivotal stage on October 25th as officials grappled to finalize the European Union’s ambitious ai act by the end of the year. In the days leading up to Britain’s summit or shortly thereafter, the White House is expected to issue an executive order on ai. The G7 club of rich democracies will this autumn start drafting a code of conduct for ai firms. China, for its part, on October 18th unveiled a “Global AI Governance Initiative”. The momentum stems from an unusual political economy. Incentives to act, and act together, are strong. For starters, AI is truly a global technology.

THE ECONOMIST

10/24/23

How generative AI could radically reshape gaming

Generative AI – artificial intelligence that creates text, images and audio in response to a prompt – is set to shake up one of the signature components of video games: non-playable characters, known as NPCs. These characters typically have a set pattern of behavior, and their mannerisms and speech are often stilted and unnatural.

CNN

10/24/23

Nightshade helps artists fight back against AI

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth.

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

10/24/23

YouTube Is Developing an AI Tool to Help Creators Sound Like Famous Musicians

YouTube is planning to roll out a new artificial intelligence tool that will allow creators to make videos using the voices of popular recording artists — but inking deals with record companies to launch the beta version is taking longer than expected, sources tell Billboard. The new AI tool, which YouTube had hoped to debut at its Made On YouTube event in September, will in beta let a select pool of artists to give permission to a select group of creators to use their voices in videos on the platform.

BILLBOARD MAGAZINE

10/18/23

Generative AI Needs A New Device

You can be dismissive of smart glasses. They have been hyped before. But lending Meta credibility this time is the fact that the same week Openai, the generative-ai pioneer, announced that its hit chatbot, Chatgpt, can now see, hear and speak, besides conversing by text. Moreover, it emerged that Openai was in talks with Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s former designer, to create a new gadget for the ai era. What form it will take is still unclear. But if the idea is to build a new consumer-electronics device better suited to the back-and-forth of seeing, talking and listening ais, there is a fair chance it will no longer be reliant on the touchscreen.

THE ECONOMIST

10/5/23

AI is causing panic for authors and now the courts are involved

When novelist Douglas Preston first started messing around with ChatGPT, he gave the AI software a challenge: Could it write an original poem based on a character from some of his books? “It came out with this terrific poem written in iambic pentameter,” Preston recalled. The result was impressive — and concerning. “What really surprised me was how much it knew about this character; way more than it possibly could have gleaned from the internet,” Preston said.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

10/20/23

AI company Anthropic sued over copyright claims by music publishers

San Francisco’s Anthropic, the multibillion dollar AI company known for its Claude chatbot, is facing a federal lawsuit from a group of music publishers who say the company used huge amounts of copyrighted song lyrics to train its product. Chatbots like Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT interface are fed an enormous number of language examples from across the internet, and their programming allows them to base answers to user prompts off of what they have “read.”

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

10/20/23

Inside Apple’s Big Plan to Bring Generative AI to All Its Devices

One debate going on internally is how to deploy generative AI: as a completely on-device experience, a cloud-based setup or something in between. An on-device approach would work faster and help safeguard privacy, but deploying Apple’s LLMs via the cloud would allow for more advanced operations. The on-device strategy also makes it harder for Apple to update its technology and adapt to a fast-changing industry.

BLOOMBERG

10/22/23

Haight Street Beat

Danielle Negrin: Psychedelic Society of San Francisco

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The 'No Fakes Act' protects actors and singers from unauthorized AI replicas

The No Fakes Act essentially federalizes likeness laws, which vary from state to state. It prevents the “production of a digital replica without consent of the applicable individual or rights holder” unless part of a news, public affairs, sports broadcast, documentary, or biographical work.

THE VERGE

8/12/23

As actors and writers push back on automation, Hollywood is in the midst of an AI hiring boom

Getting paid $900,000 a year to manage artificial intelligence projects for Netflix would’ve been an eye-popping sum even before two of Hollywood’s major unions went on strike. But now that the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA are both picketing outside Netflix’s headquarters in protest of low streaming pay and ascendant automation, such a job listing seems acutely emblematic of where the entertainment industry currently stands — and where it’s going.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

8/2/23