Digital Dialectic

Exploring the creative, cultural, and legal impacts of AI from an artists perspective.

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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

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 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

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

US, Britain, other countries ink agreement 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

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
Haight Street Beat
Haight Street Beat
Linda Kelly: Haight Street Voice
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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
Haight Street Beat
Haight Street Beat
Magic Mike: Psychedelic SF Art Gallery
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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

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

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
Haight Street Beat
Haight Street Beat
Danielle Negrin: Psychedelic Society of San Francisco
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