More from From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
A man was booking an Air Canada flight and asked for a reduced rate because of bereavement. The chatbot assured him this was possible — the reduced fare would be a rebate. When he went to submit the rebate, the airline refused to refund him.
In February of 2023, Moffatt sent the airline a screenshot of his conversation with the chatbot and received a response in which Air Canada “admitted the chatbot had provided ‘misleading words.’”
He took the airline to court and won.
And for good reason — this, and several other nonsensical AI-generated images were openly credited to Midjourney in a peer-reviewed science paper published by the Frontiers Journal this week. The gibberish annotations and grotesquely inaccurate images it included are one example of the risks that generative AI poses to the accuracy of academic research.
Frontiers has responded and removed the offending paper:
Our investigation revealed that one of the reviewers raised valid concerns about the figures and requested author revisions. The authors failed to respond to these requests. We are investigating how our processes failed to act on the lack of author compliance with the reviewers’ requirements.
OpenAI’s still-in-limited-testing new text-to-video generation model, Sora, is very impressive, especially compared to widely available AI video generators like Runway Gen-2 and Google’s Imagen.
As you can see in the clips, though, there are issues — basketballs go through the sides of metal hoops, dogs pass through each other while walking, and hands are.... not always hands.
AI used to be weird. Now ‘sounds like a bot’ is just shorthand for boring.
It’s not easy to calculate the watts and joules that go into a single Balenciaga pope. But we’re not completely in the dark about the true energy cost of AI.
Thanks to AI, rote tasks are ripe for automation. But is that really a good thing?
Large language models can do a lot of things. But can they write like an 18th-century fur trader?
A source for The Information says OpenAI is working on web search (partially powered by Bing) that would more directly compete with Google. It’s unclear if it would be standalone, or a part of ChatGPT.
This comes one year after Microsoft CEO (and OpenAI backer) Satya Nadella targeted Google by adding Copilot AI tools to Bing, saying on Decoder, “I want people to know that we made them dance.”
Between Google’s Bard / Gemini, Copilot, and newcomers like Perplexity, the dance floor is filling up quickly.
Google recently updated its privacy policy for Gemini — the chatbot it previously called Bard. It details just how long the company will keep conversations that are “reviewed or annotated” by human reviewers, despite whether you’ve deleted your app activity or not:
Conversations that have been reviewed or annotated by human reviewers (and related data like your language, device type, location info, or feedback) are not deleted when you delete your Gemini Apps activity because they are kept separately and are not connected to your Google Account. Instead, they are retained for up to three years.
To compare, ChatGPT lets you permanently delete conversations every 30 days.
That’s according to a new Bloomberg report, detailing how Adobe concentrated its efforts to build Firefly, the company’s own “commercially safe” generative AI model used in tools like Photoshop, following the success of rival tools like Midjourney.
Analysts now anticipate that Adobe may be one of the first big tech companies to actually profit from AI. Meanwhile, Adobe Stock contributors who helped train Firefly, potentially unknowingly, receive annual payouts that are as low as $70.
AI-generated obituaries litter search results, turning the deaths of private individuals into clunky, repetitive content.
The AI-generated stand-in voice for imprisoned Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan claimed victory on behalf of his party in Pakistan’s parliamentary elections on Saturday, according to The New York Times.
The party has used an AI version of his voice this way for months. As the Times writes, the use highlights both the usefulness and the danger of generative AI in elections.
Now, the chatbot formerly known as Bard will respond to your queries when you stop talking, regardless of how you summoned it. Before, that only worked when you invoked Google’s chatbot with the phrase “Hey Google.”
The rumors are true, even Notepad is getting a generative AI boost. A new update called “Explain with Copilot” will help users decipher any text, code segments, or log files they select within the text editor as Microsoft’s AI add-on enters its second year.
Microsoft announced the feature is in beta testing, available to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels.
Hugging Face tech lead Philipp Schmid posted yesterday that users can now create custom chatbots in “two clicks” using Hugging Chat Assistant. Users’ creations are then publicly available.
Schmid directly compares the feature to OpenAI’s GPTs feature, and adds they can use “any available open LLM, like Llama2 or Mixtral.”
When Microsoft started its big AI push last year, it launched Copilot tools for Sales and Service to summarize meetings, manage customer lists, and find info for customer service agents, and now they’re more widely available.
Microsoft isn’t the only one applying AI to these tasks — AWS announced a slew of generative AI services for contact centers in December, including transcriptions of audio calls and Q for Amazon Connect, which lets users ask questions about their data.
[Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog]
