Moves to ban live “Big Brother” real time facial recognition technology from being deployed across the streets of the EU or by border officials will be tested in a key vote at the European parliament on Thursday.
The amendment is part of a package of proposals for the world’s first artificial intelligence laws, which could result in firms being fined up to €10m (£8.7m) or removed from trading within the EU for breaches of the rules.
You’ve probably heard by now that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is on strike. According to the labor union and its affiliates — representing just fewer than 12,000 writers across traditional and digital media — the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the group representing corporate studios and streaming services, would not grant union writers “a new contract with fair pay that reflects the value of our contribution to company success.”
One of the primary motives behind the ongoing Hollywood writer’s strike is a concern over artificial intelligence (AI) replacing writers.
For the first time in 15 years, some 11,000 Writers Guild of America (WGA) members have walked off the job, which stops anything in the entertainment business having to do with writing. No guild member can write anything. Even if a WGA member is directing a movie or TV show and wants to change dialogue, he can’t. Everything has stopped, especially the late-night shows that can’t survive without up-to-the-minute comedy bits.
There is nothing particularly novel about thinking to yourself, “You know, my job used to be pretty decent. Now, I’m working harder and the money is getting scarcer. What happened?” You might think this, in 2023, as a college professor or a cab driver or a journalist or a factory worker. This is America – our entire economy is built on making millions of jobs worse, in order to make a few people very rich.
What would be remarkable is if – when you realized that your once-good job was being made worse in order to satisfy the profit hunger of some faraway investment banker – you were able to actually do something about it. That, in our nation, would be news. That would be something for everyone to cheer for. The plain old workers standing up against enormous companies to stop the process that is turning their careers into execrable “gigs”. Is it a fairy tale? No, my friends. Welcome to the Great Writers Strike of 2023.
Win for the robots I’m betting.
The first thing Geoffrey Hinton says when we start talking, and the last thing he repeats before I turn off my recorder, is that he left Google, his employer of the past decade, on good terms. “I have no objection to what Google has done or is doing, but obviously the media would love to spin me as ‘a disgruntled Google employee’. It’s not like that.”
It’s an important clarification to make, because it’s easy to conclude the opposite. After all, when most people calmly describe their former employer as being one of a small group of companies charting a course that is alarmingly likely to wipe out humanity itself, they do so with a sense of opprobrium. But to listen to Hinton, we’re about to sleepwalk towards an existential threat to civilisation without anyone involved acting maliciously at all.
War grips the world and the most powerful nations on earth go to battle once more. This time, however, it is machines that do the killing, operating free from all human oversight and accountability.
It’s a grim picture of future conflicts, but one that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is nevertheless working to make a reality.
The CCP is investing in artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled platforms that it hopes will one day conduct lethal missions in wartime, wholly without human input or control.
U.S. national security officials are warning about the potential for the new technology to upend war, cyber conflict and — in the most extreme case — the use of nuclear weapons.
When President Biden announced sharp restrictions in October on selling the most advanced computer chips to China, he sold it in part as a way of giving American industry a chance to restore its competitiveness.
But at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, there was a second agenda: arms control.
If the Chinese military cannot get the chips, the theory goes, it may slow its effort to develop weapons driven by artificial intelligence. That would give the White House, and the world, time to figure out some rules for the use of artificial intelligence in sensors, missiles and cyberweapons, and ultimately to guard against some of the nightmares conjured by Hollywood — autonomous killer robots and computers that lock out their human creators.
The White House has unveiled its plan to crack down on the AI race amid growing concerns it could upend life as we know it.
The Biden Administration said the technology was ‘one of the most powerful’ of our time, adding: ‘But in order to seize the opportunities it presents, we must first mitigate its risks.’
The plan is to launch 25 research institutes across the US that will seek assurance from four companies, including Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, that they will ‘participate in a public evaluation.’
Like it or not, arms technology will shape the future
Geoffrey Hinton has been described as the “Godfather of AI”. And so, when he warned the world about the dangers of artificial intelligence this week, the world listened.
His interview with Cade Metz for the New York Times is worth reading in full, but the key passage reveals Hinton’s surprise at the speed of recent developments
The only question is: will we learn how to live in moving history?
ChatGPT has been around for about two seconds and it’s already changing how people work, how they write, how they research, how they cheat on tests, how they profess their love, and what they make for dinner.
We didn’t have to talk about theoretical “use cases,” as people still do with cryptocurrency. ChatGPT, which 100 million people use every day, showed us its uses right away.
That is really exciting. And also really unnerving.
Hollywood writers are on strike – and late-night TV is on hiatus. Could AI be a substitute?
For the first time in 15 years, TV and film writers are putting down their proverbial pen in protest, after union negotiations between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and major studios broke down over concerns about not just wages, but also the use of artificial intelligence to write scripts.
The WGA likened the use of AI in screenwriting to plagiarism and said it was fighting to regulate the technology because it “undermines writers’ working standards including compensation.”
The world could soon see the first religion that attracts devotees with sacred texts created by artificial intelligence, the historian Yuval Noah Harari has said.
The Israeli scholar, known for his bestselling book Sapiens, told a science conference that AI systems such as ChatGPT had breached a new threshold because they are capable of using language to shape human culture.
Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.
On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
By now, many are familiar with ChatGPT. Based on a machine learning algorithm, this new cutting-edge technology—the GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer—is a language model trained to understand and generate human language. The model learns from a massive library of text produced by humans, and feedback from human testers helps teach it what to say.
The good news about AI Joanna: She never loses her voice, she has outstanding posture and not even a convertible driving 120 mph through a tornado could mess up her hair.
The bad news: She can fool my family and trick my bank.
