#openai CLIP

[shamnadt]

5 things about AI you may have missed today: OpenAI's CLIP is biased, AI reunites family after 25 years, more

Study finds OpenAI’s CLIP is biased in favour of wealth and underrepresents poor nations; Retail giants harness AI to cut online clothing returns and enhance the customer experience; Northwell Health implements AI-driven device for rapid seizure detection; White House concerns grow over UAE’s rising influence in global AI race- this and more in our daily roundup. Let us take a look. 1. Study…

[reachartwork]

I see you've gotten your hands on Dalle2! What are your initial thoughts on it, and how does it compare to other AIs you've worked with?

i don't like it, it's very limited in specific cases and i particularly don't like the limitations imposed on it artificially by openai such as what i am and am not allowed to create - i would love to create some horror output but it continually stonewalls me whenever i try to make anything scarier than a creepy hallway.

its domain knowledge of particular things that other, older ais are better at, such as knowing who "tsutomu nihei" is, is particularly limited: it's very small-minded and i am unsure if that is an intentional design decision OR some unknown problem with its encoder/decoder system OR they just used a shittier database. in fact, most foreign artists i tried without an english(/european) name it just straight up does not understand and mashes them into one "vaguely foreign" blob.

what it IS really good at is inter-image coherence, which is exceptionally impressive. it's also better (but not great, still) at composition than most other ais i see, but given that most of those things are not a thing i care about too much it's functionally just an amusing curiosity to me, and not an actual development.

i'll be using it to create images to feed into Looking Glass or Guided Diffusion, I expect, and not on its own merits.

tl;dr: better artist but with much less world knowledge and it has strict mormon parents so it's less useful and fun overall

[gamesatwork]

e397 — Chatty Bad AI

Not a bot, but a human augmented bot. Behind the scenes @gamesatwork_biz@botsin.space, people who support chatbots, generative AI for still images & audio and top tech for 2022.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash Andy, the continuity cohost, is joined this week by Michael R.  After reflecting on the BCS behind the scenes webinar on the podcast, the cohosts get things started with a few games, notably Star Wars Galaxies.  Then, continuing on the ChatGPT theme from last week, Andy introduces an article where the subject is a bot, supported by people, who step in…

[mariacallous]

Last week OpenAI revealed a new conversational interface for ChatGPT with an expressive, synthetic voice strikingly similar to that of the AI assistant played by Scarlett Johansson in the sci-fi movie Her—only to suddenly disable the new voice over the weekend.

On Monday, Johansson issued a statement claiming to have forced that reversal, after her lawyers demanded OpenAI clarify how the new voice was created.

Johansson’s statement, relayed to WIRED by her publicist, claims that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asked her last September to provide ChatGPT’s new voice but that she declined. She describes being astounded to see the company demo a new voice for ChatGPT last week that sounded like her anyway.

“When I heard the release demo I was shocked, angered, and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference,” the statement reads. It notes that Altman appeared to encourage the world to connect the demo with Johansson’s performance by tweeting out “her,” in reference to the movie, on May 13.

Johansson’s statement says her agent was contacted by Altman two days before last week’s demo asking that she reconsider her decision not to work with OpenAI. After seeing the demo, she says she hired legal counsel to write to OpenAI asking for details of how it made the new voice.

The statement claims that this led to OpenAI’s announcement Sunday in a post on X that it had decided to “pause the use of Sky,” the company’s name for the synthetic voice. The company also posted a blog post outlining the process used to create the voice. “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice,” the post said.

Sky is one of several synthetic voices that OpenAI gave ChatGPT last September, but at last week’s event it displayed a much more lifelike intonation with emotional cues. The demo saw a version of ChatGPT powered by a new AI model called GPT-4o appear to flirt with an OpenAI engineer in a way that many viewers found reminiscent of Johansson’s performance in Her.

“The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson's, and it was never intended to resemble hers,” Sam Altman said in a statement provided by OpenAI. He claimed the voice actor behind Sky's voice was hired before the company contact Johannsson. “Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”

The conflict with Johansson adds to OpenAI’s existing battles with artists, writers, and other creatives. The company is already defending a number of lawsuits alleging it inappropriately used copyrighted content to train its algorithms, including suits from The New York Times and authors including George R.R. Martin.

Generative AI has made it much easier to create realistic synthetic voices, creating new opportunities and threats. In January, voters in New Hampshire were bombarded with robocalls featuring a deepfaked voice message from Joe Biden. In March, OpenAI said that it had developed a technology that could clone someone’s voice from a 15-second clip, but the company said it would not release the technology because of how it might be misused.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

They've done it again. How do they keep doing this? If these examples are representative they've now done the same thing for the short video/clip landscape that Dall-e did for images a while back.

OpenAI are on another level, clearly, but it is also funny and sort of wearying how every new model they release is like an AI-critical guy's worst nightmare

[reasonsforhope]

"Major technology companies signed a pact on Friday to voluntarily adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world.

Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. 

Twelve other companies - including Elon Musk's X - are also signing on to the accord...

The accord is largely symbolic, but targets increasingly realistic AI-generated images, audio, and video "that deceptively fake or alter the appearance, voice, or actions of political candidates, election officials, and other key stakeholders in a democratic election, or that provide false information to voters about when, where, and how they can lawfully vote".

The companies aren't committing to ban or remove deepfakes. Instead, the accord outlines methods they will use to try to detect and label deceptive AI content when it is created or distributed on their platforms. 

It notes the companies will share best practices and provide "swift and proportionate responses" when that content starts to spread.

Lack of binding requirements

The vagueness of the commitments and lack of any binding requirements likely helped win over a diverse swath of companies, but disappointed advocates were looking for stronger assurances.

"The language isn't quite as strong as one might have expected," said Rachel Orey, senior associate director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. 

"I think we should give credit where credit is due, and acknowledge that the companies do have a vested interest in their tools not being used to undermine free and fair elections. That said, it is voluntary, and we'll be keeping an eye on whether they follow through." ...

Several political leaders from Europe and the US also joined Friday’s announcement. European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said while such an agreement can’t be comprehensive, "it contains very impactful and positive elements".  ...

[The Accord and Where We're At]

The accord calls on platforms to "pay attention to context and in particular to safeguarding educational, documentary, artistic, satirical, and political expression".

It said the companies will focus on transparency to users about their policies and work to educate the public about how they can avoid falling for AI fakes.

Most companies have previously said they’re putting safeguards on their own generative AI tools that can manipulate images and sound, while also working to identify and label AI-generated content so that social media users know if what they’re seeing is real. But most of those proposed solutions haven't yet rolled out and the companies have faced pressure to do more.

That pressure is heightened in the US, where Congress has yet to pass laws regulating AI in politics, leaving companies to largely govern themselves.

The Federal Communications Commission recently confirmed AI-generated audio clips in robocalls are against the law [in the US], but that doesn't cover audio deepfakes when they circulate on social media or in campaign advertisements.

Many social media companies already have policies in place to deter deceptive posts about electoral processes - AI-generated or not... 

[Signatories Include]

In addition to the companies that helped broker Friday's agreement, other signatories include chatbot developers Anthropic and Inflection AI; voice-clone startup ElevenLabs; chip designer Arm Holdings; security companies McAfee and TrendMicro; and Stability AI, known for making the image-generator Stable Diffusion.

Notably absent is another popular AI image-generator, Midjourney. The San Francisco-based startup didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The inclusion of X - not mentioned in an earlier announcement about the pending accord - was one of the surprises of Friday's agreement."

-via EuroNews, February 17, 2024

--

Note: No idea whether this will actually do much of anything (would love to hear from people with experience in this area on significant this is), but I'll definitely take it. Some of these companies may even mean it! (X/Twitter almost definitely doesn't, though).

Still, like I said, I'll take it. Any significant move toward tech companies self-regulating AI is a good sign, as far as I'm concerned, especially a large-scale and international effort. Even if it's a "mostly symbolic" accord, the scale and prominence of this accord is encouraging, and it sets a precedent for further regulation to build on.

[mckitterick]

OpenAI previews voice generator that produces natural-sounding speech based on a 15-second voice sample

The company has yet to decide how to deploy the technology, and it acknowledges election risks, but is going ahead with developing and testing with "limited partners" anyway.

Not only is such a technology a risk during election time (see the fake robocalls this year when an AI-generated, fake Joe Biden voice told people not to vote in the primary), but imagine how faked voices of important people - combined with AI-generated fake news plus AI-generated fake photos and videos - could con people out of money, literally destroy political careers and parties, and even collapse entire governments or nations themselves.

By faking a news story using accurate (but faked) video clips of (real) respected and elected officials supporting the fake story - then creating a billion SEO-optimized fake news and research websites full of fake evidence to back up their lies - a bad actor or cyberwarfare agent could take down an enemy government, create a revolution, turn nations against one another, even cause world war.

This kind of apocalyptic scenario has always felt like a science-fiction idea that could only exist in a possible dystopian future, not something we'd actually see coming true in our time, now.

How in the world are we ever again going to trust what we read, hear, or watch? If LLM-barf clogs the internet, and lies pollute the news, and people with bad intentions can provide all the evidence they need to fool anyone into believing anything, and there's no way to guarantee the veracity of anything anymore, what's left?

Whatever comes next, I guarantee it'll be weirder than we imagine.

Here's hoping it's not also worse than the typical cyberpunk tale.

PS: NEVER ANSWER CALLS FROM UNKNOWN NUMBERS EVER AGAIN

...or at least don't speak to the caller. From now on, assume it's a con-bot or politi-bot or some other bot seeking to cause you and others harm. If they hear your voice, they can fake it saying anything they want. If it sounds like someone you know, it's probably not if it's not their number saved in your contacts. If it's about something important, hang up and call the official or saved number for the supposed caller.

[nightpool]

Well, sure, but that is a fight about AI safety. It’s just a metaphorical fight about AI safety. I am sorry, I have made this joke before, but events keep sharpening it. The OpenAI board looked at Sam Altman and thought “this guy is smarter than us, he can outmaneuver us in a pinch, and it makes us nervous. He’s done nothing wrong so far, but we can’t be sure what he’ll do next as his capabilities expand. We do not fully trust him, we cannot fully control him, and we do not have a model of how his mind works that we fully understand. Therefore we have to shut him down before he grows too powerful.”

I’m sorry! That is exactly the AI misalignment worry! If you spend your time managing AIs that are growing exponentially smarter, you might worry about losing control of them, and if you spend your time managing Sam Altman you might worry about losing control of him, and if you spend your time managing both of them you might get confused about which is which. Maybe Sam Altman will turn the old board members into paper clips.

matt levine tackles the sam altman alignment problem

[argumate]

Well, sure, but that is a fight about AI safety. It’s just a metaphorical fight about AI safety. I am sorry, I have made this joke before, but events keep sharpening it. The OpenAI board looked at Sam Altman and thought “this guy is smarter than us, he can outmaneuver us in a pinch, and it makes us nervous. He’s done nothing wrong so far, but we can’t be sure what he’ll do next as his capabilities expand. We do not fully trust him, we cannot fully control him, and we do not have a model of how his mind works that we fully understand. Therefore we have to shut him down before he grows too powerful.”

I’m sorry! That is exactly the AI misalignment worry! If you spend your time managing AIs that are growing exponentially smarter, you might worry about losing control of them, and if you spend your time managing Sam Altman you might worry about losing control of him, and if you spend your time managing both of them you might get confused about which is which. Maybe Sam Altman will turn the old board members into paper clips.

Matt Levine

[kp777]

By Gene Marks

The Guardian Opinions

April 9, 2023

Everyone seems to be worried about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Even technology leaders including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have signed a public petition urging OpenAI, the makers of the conversational chatbot ChatGPT, to suspend development for six months so it can be “rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts”.

Their concerns about the impact AI may have on humanity in the future are justified – we are talking some serious Terminator stuff, without a Schwarzenegger to save us. But that’s the future. Unfortunately, there’s AI that’s being used right now which is already starting to have a big impact – even financially destroy – businesses and individuals. So much so that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) felt the need to issue a warning about an AI scam which, according to this NPR report “sounds like a plot from a science fiction story”.

But this is not science fiction. Using deepfake AI technology, scammers last year stole approximately $11m from unsuspecting consumers by fabricating the voices of loved ones, doctors and attorneys requesting money from their relatives and friends.

“All [the scammer] needs is a short audio clip of your family member’s voice – which he could get from content posted online – and a voice-cloning program,” the FTC says. “When the scammer calls you, he’ll sound just like your loved one.”

And these incidents aren’t limited to just consumers. Businesses of all sizes are quickly falling victim to this new type of fraud.

That’s what happened to a bank manager in Hong Kong, who received deep-faked calls from a bank director requesting a transfer that were so good that he eventually transferred $35m, and never saw it again. A similar incident occurred at a UK-based energy firm where an unwitting employee transferred approximately $250,000 to criminals after being deep-faked into thinking that the recipient was the CEO of the firm’s parent. The FBI is now warning businesses that criminals are using deepfakes to create “employees” online for remote-work positions in order to gain access to corporate information.

Deepfake video technology has been growing in use over the past few years, mostly targeting celebrities and politicians like Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Cruise, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. And I’m sure that this election year will be filled with a growing number of very real-looking fake videos that will attempt to influence voters.

But it’s the potential impact on the many unsuspecting small business owners I know that worries me the most. Many of us have appeared on publicly accessed videos, be it on YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn. But even those that haven’t appeared on videos can have their voices “stolen” by fraudsters copying outgoing voicemail messages or even by making pretend calls to engage a target in a conversation with the only objective of recording their voice.

This is worse than malware or ransomware. If used effectively it can turn into significant, immediate losses. So what do you do? You implement controls. And you enforce them.

This means that any financial manager in your business should not be allowed to undertake any financial transaction such as a transfer of cash based on an incoming phone call. Everyone requires a call back, even the CEO of the company, to verify the source.

And just as importantly, no transaction over a certain predetermined amount must be authorized without the prior written approval of multiple executives in the company. Of course there must also be written documentation – a signed request or contract – that underlies the transaction request.

These types of controls are easier to implement in a larger company that has more structure. But accountants at smaller businesses often find themselves victim of management override which can best be explained by “I don’t care what the rules are, this is my business, so transfer the cash now, dammit!” If you’re a business owner reading this then please: establish rules and follow them. It’s for your own good.

So, yes, AI technology like ChatGPT presents some terrifying future risks for humanity. But that’s the future. Deepfake technology that imitates executives and spoofs employees is here right now and will only increase in frequency.

[zytes]

OpenAI has made a big step in generative text-to-video. The linked page is the homepage for Sora, and features unmodified AI-gen video clips throughout. The results are surprising, concerning, and also a bit disturbing as the implications settle in. This is realistic (and stylized) video with consistency that looks reasonably good in-motion. Regardless of how anyone feels about the ethics of AI in their current state, this is a significant change in potential and will almost certainly continue to improve. For obvious reasons, it’s not available publicly yet.

I’m not sharing this in support of the tools, nor am I necessarily against them. I’m habitually cautious and just trying to remain aware of what’s emerging in technology. This is a scary one, lots of risk for abuse. I feel like the potential for a tool like this to become a state sanctioned propaganda-generator or psychological torture device isn’t that far-fetched. How long until we reach a point where you can mix, modify, and extend real-footage using AI? We very very badly need some kind of standardized metadata or other hard-solution to the problem of provenance verification; or everyone will simply need to grow more skeptical of the things they see.

[kenyatta]

You thought the first page of Google was bunk before? You haven't seen Google where SEO optimizer bros pump out billions of perfectly coherent but predictably dull informational articles for every longtail keyword combination under the sun.

Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, “engaging” tweet 🧵 threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts.

It goes beyond text too: video essays on YouTube, TikTok clips, podcasts, slide decks, and Instagram stories can all be generated by patchworking together ML systems. And then regurgitated for each medium.

We're about to drown in a sea of pedestrian takes. An explosion of noise that will drown out any signal. Goodbye to finding original human insights or authentic connections under that pile of cruft.

Many people will say we already live in this reality. We've already become skilled at sifting through unhelpful piles of “optimised content” designed to gather clicks and advertising impressions.

4chan proposed dead internet theory years ago: that most of the internet is “empty and devoid of people” and has been taken over by artificial intelligence. A milder version of this theory is simply that we're overrun with bots. Most of us take that for granted at this point.

But I think the sheer volume and scale of what's coming will be meaningfully different. And I think we're unprepared. Or at least, I am.

from The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

[titleknown]

Robomaus wrote this disquieting vision of a possible future, shared with permission, where the anti-AI art push "wins" that I think any anti-AI folks should take pause over, if only because it's one where nobody wins except the megacorps:

2023-2024: An unknown number of challengers hop on the bandwagon of suing a handful of AI companies publishing open-source (er, relatively) models and software. Their PR campaign is centered around the abuses of closed platforms such as OpenAI, and continued reliance on public technical misunderstandings.

2025: Butterick, Getty, or some unknown challenger wins the lawsuit. Styles are now copyrightable or "infringeable" in some form, and all input has to be licensed before being used in a model that has any potential of being used for profit in any form whatsoever. Research on generative models continues in a handful of European universities where data mining is still legal for purely academic purposes. After additional lobbying, the USCO decision is reversed, allowing for AI-generated works to be copyrighted by the prompter.

2026: Midjourney disappears into the night. Stability AI declares bankruptcy. OpenAI is able to pay their legal fees by a bailout from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel-types after a public shift to "anti-wokeism", but will never live up to the "open" standard or publish any models, or access to them. Emad becomes an angel investor and technical advisor for Drawful (no relation to the game), an AI-generated licensed art startup.

2027: DeviantArt is bought by ArtStation and is now an archive and source for additional ad revenue. If they haven't been already, Midjourney's model-training techniques are leaked. Models are widely shared on pirate sites with names such as www27.notavirus.modelputlocker.ru. Since Automatic1111's webui doesn't actually contain any models, it's left up for research purposes, or easily downloadable. However, most AI research is now moved in house by new divisions of major publishing companies, who are now also lobbying to have access to consumer GPUs restricted.

2028: Drawful and Soundful are now in open beta, if they haven't been already! Now you can make art in the style your favorite artists for only $30 a month; however, any art you prompt, in addition to any derivative work you make from the art you prompt, is owned by the service. Licensing costs extra.

Although they make it easy to train your own model by uploading a folder of your own work, artists get paid a fraction of a cent per generation on these sites, decided by a mixture of nearest-match reverse CLIP search, and a dropdown menu suggesting "popular styles" such as classic Disney, Pixar, and whatever limited-time offer corporate crossover event is currently happening. Signing away your right to be trained on is common practice in the industry. When you sign away your right, you also sign away the rights to all works created by fine-tuning a model on your work. The "most liked" works on the site have a chance to be re-recorded by the artist, with no credit whatsoever to the prompter. After all, they only came up with the idea and happened to like what came out of the AI; anyone can do that.

The scary part of this is, the ideas don't come out of nowhere, according to the author, this is directly based on what happened with Napster, Facebook and Spotify.

Which I think any artists cheering on the idea of applying a Spotify model to AI art should take pause over...

[dalle2]

Still From the Video Clip of Hank Hill's Smash Hit Rap Song "Nothin But a Propane Thang" (1992).

Generated by OpenAI's DALLE

Sharing is caring!

Substack: dalle.substack.com

Twitter: @Dalle2AI

The heading of this post was used to generate the image, src

[mcbitchtits]

hey. hmm. you know, if tumblr is really about to sell their user content to midjourneyai. y'know what tumblr's full of? nice gifs of people's movies and tv shows. clips from sports games. photomanips of celebrities taken at galas by, like, i dunno, getty images. stories using other people's characters.

remember when tumblr told people they could totally monetize their fan content with post+ etc?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/george-carlin-estate-sues-podcasters-over-ai-generated-comedy-routine-2024-01-26/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/openai-microsoft-hit-with-new-author-copyright-lawsuit-over-ai-training-2023-11-21/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/04/nyt-ai-copyright-lawsuit-fair-use/

anyway. i guess they're trying hard to put all that to the test

[thehellsitenewsie]

Election disinformation takes a big leap with AI being used to deceive worldwide (AP News)

LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence is supercharging the threat of election disinformation worldwide, making it easy for anyone with a smartphone and a devious imagination to create fake – but convincing – content aimed at fooling voters.

It marks a quantum leap from a few years ago, when creating phony photos, videos or audio clips required teams of people with time, technical skill and money. Now, using free and low-cost generative artificial intelligence services from companies like Google and OpenAI, anyone can create high-quality “deepfakes” with just a simple text prompt.

A wave of AI deepfakes tied to elections in Europe and Asia has coursed through social media for months, serving as a warning for more than 50 countries heading to the polls this year.

“You don’t need to look far to see some people ... being clearly confused as to whether something is real or not,” said Henry Ajder, a leading expert in generative AI based in Cambridge, England.

The question is no longer whether AI deepfakes could affect elections, but how influential they will be, said Ajder, who runs a consulting firm called Latent Space Advisory.

Read more