Tyler Perry Puts $800 Million Studio Expansion on Hold Because of OpenAI's Sora

Cards Against Humanity Writers Are Battling an AI to Keep Their Jobs, and You Can Watch 20 comments

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

[Ed. The event is done by now but you can still watch it on YouTube.]

Cards Against Humanity writers are battling an AI to keep their jobs, and you can watch

The creators of Cards Against Humanity are back for their annual Black Friday stunt, and this one is delightfully dystopian. Starting at 11AM ET today and lasting for the next 16 hours, the human writers on the CAH team are facing off against an artificial intelligence to see who can create the most popular new pack of cards, based on how many people pay for more $5 packs. You can upvote or downvote your favorite cards for each side on CAH's website before buying, and you can also watch the humans struggle to come up with new iterations in real time over live stream.
On the line are $5,000 bonuses for every employee if team human comes up victorious, or heartless termination in the event the AI takes the top spot. We don't think CAH actually plans to fire their writers if they lose, but it is a clever stunt nonetheless to drum up the human vs. machine narrative at a time when automation may pose a very real threat to millions of jobs in the coming decade, writing included.
For Black Friday, we taught a computer how to write Cards Against Humanity cards. Now we put it to the test. Over the next 16 hours, our writers will battle this powerful card-writing algorithm to see who can write the most popular new pack of cards. https://t.co/BOZ5cuuEJk
— CardsAgainstHumanity (@CAH) November 29, 2019

Robots Might Take Our Jobs, but Maybe We Need Them to 50 comments

upstart writes:

Robots might take our jobs, but maybe we need them to - Utah Business:

AI is no longer just the musings of sci-fi writers. AI is being implemented in automation technology to help with manual labor and other types of tasks. The technology is at a point where nearly every industry could implement it, and many already have. The question is no longer when will this technology exist, but what do we do now that it does?
[...] In 2019, 5,333 workers died on the job in America. The following year, Covid-19 changed the landscape of the workplace, bringing even higher levels of on-the-job risk to nearly every industry.
[...] According to OSHA, about 20 percent of workplace fatalities are in the construction industry. As automation technology advances, making it affordable for business owners to use is essential in order to protect laborers in the industry.
[...] Ben Wolff, CEO of Utah-based Sarcos Robotics, says, “there are significant labor shortages expected in almost every skilled labor industry over the next decade despite the increase in the availability of automation technologies. The US is expecting a 2.4 million worker shortage in manufacturing from 2018 through 2028, as well as a $1.6 trillion global labor productivity shortfall in the construction industry.”
Though a shifting labor market can be scary, human workers are not replaceable. Leading AI researcher, Andrew Ng, says, “despite all the hype and excitement about AI, it’s still extremely limited today relative to what human intelligence is.”

AI Systems Can't Patent Inventions, US Federal Circuit Court Confirms 8 comments

upstart writes:

'There is no ambiguity,' says judge:

The US federal circuit court has confirmed that AI systems cannot patent inventions because they are not human beings.
The ruling is the latest failure in a series of quixotic legal battles by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to copyright and patent the output of various AI software tools he's created.
In 2019, Thaler failed to copyright an image on behalf of an AI system he dubbed Creativity Machine, with that decision upheld on appeal by the US Copyright Office in 2022. In a parallel case, the US Patent Office ruled in 2020 that Thaler's AI system DABUS could not be a legal inventor because it was not a "natural person," with this decision then upheld by a judge in 2021. Now, the federal circuit court has, once more, confirmed this decision.
[...] The Patent Act clearly states that only human beings can hold patents, says Stark. The Act refers to patent-holders as "individuals," a term which the Supreme Court has ruled "ordinarily means a human being, a person" (following "how we use the word in everyday parlance"); and uses personal pronouns — "herself" and "himself" — throughout, rather than terms such as "itself," which Stark says "would permit non-human inventors" in a reading.
[...] According to BloombergLaw, Thaler plans to appeal the circuit court's ruling, with his attorney, Ryan Abbott of Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan LLP, criticizing the court's "narrow and textualist approach" to the Patent Act.

Previously:
    UK Decides AI Still Cannot Patent Inventions
    When AI is the Inventor Who Gets the Patent?
    AI Computers Can't Patent their Own Inventions -- Yet -- a US Judge Rules

Original Submission

Adobe Stock Begins Selling AI-Generated Artwork 15 comments

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/adobe-stock-begins-selling-ai-generated-artwork/

On Monday, Adobe announced that its stock photography service, Adobe Stock, would begin allowing artists to submit AI-generated imagery for sale, Axios reports. The move comes during Adobe's embrace of image synthesis and also during industry-wide efforts to deal with the rapidly growing field of AI artwork in the stock art business, including earlier announcements from Shutterstock and Getty Images.
Submitting AI-generated imagery to Adobe Stock comes with a few restrictions. The artist must own (or have the rights to use) the image, AI-synthesized artwork must be submitted as an illustration (even if photorealistic), and it must be labeled with "Generative AI" in the title.
Further, each AI artwork must adhere to Adobe's new Generative AI Content Guidelines, which require the artist to include a model release for any real person depicted realistically in the artwork. Artworks that incorporate illustrations of people or fictional brands, characters, or properties require a property release that attests the artist owns all necessary rights to license the content to Adobe Stock.
[...]
AI-generated artwork has proven ethically problematic among artists. Some criticized the ability of image synthesis models to reproduce artwork in the styles of living artists, especially since the AI models gained that ability from unauthorized scrapes of websites.

Original Submission

AI Everything, Everywhere 32 comments

fliptop writes:

Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve has become a woke, sanitized shell of its former self. The crowd of rowdy, inebriated locals and tourists is long gone. What you see now is bouncing and screaming for the latest flash-in-the-pan artists while industry veterans like Duran Duran barely elicit a cheer.

Youtuber and music industry veteran Rick Beato recently posted an interesting video on how Auto-Tune has destroyed popular music. Beato quotes from an interview he did with Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan where the latter stated, "AI systems will completely dominate music. The idea of an intuitive artist beating an AI system is going to be very difficult." AI is making inroads into visual art as well, and hackers, artists and others seem to be embracing it with enthusiasm.

AI seems to be everywhere lately, from retrofitting decades old manufacturing operations to online help desk shenanigans to a wearable assistant to helping students cheat. Experts are predicting AI to usher in the next cyber security crisis and the end of programming as we know it.

Will there be a future where AI can and will do everything? Where artists are judged on their talents with a keyboard/mouse instead of a paintbrush or guitar? And what about those of us who will be developing the systems AI uses to produce stuff? Will tomorrow's artist be the programming genius who devises a profound algorithm that can produce stuff faster, or more eye/ear-appealing, where everything is completely computerized and lacking any humanity? Beato makes a good point in his video on auto-tune, that most people don't notice when something has been digitally altered, and quite frankly, they don't care either.

Will the "purists" among us be disparaged and become the new "Boomers"? What do you think?.

Original Submission

Microsoft's New AI Can Simulate Anyone's Voice With Three Seconds of Audio 16 comments

Freeman writes:

Text-to-speech model can preserve speaker's emotional tone and acoustic environment:

On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person's voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker's emotional tone.
Its creators speculate that VALL-E could be used for high-quality text-to-speech applications, speech editing where a recording of a person could be edited and changed from a text transcript (making them say something they originally didn't), and audio content creation when combined with other generative AI models like GPT-3.

Original Submission

90% of Online Content Could be ‘Generated by AI by 2025,’ Expert Says 35 comments

fliptop writes:

Generative AI, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, could completely revamp how digital content is developed, said Nina Schick, adviser, speaker, and A.I. thought leader told Yahoo Finance Live:

"I think we might reach 90% of online content generated by AI by 2025, so this technology is exponential," she said. "I believe that the majority of digital content is going to start to be produced by AI. You see ChatGPT... but there are a whole plethora of other platforms and applications that are coming up."
The surge of interest in OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT has facilitated a wide-ranging public discussion about AI and its expanding role in our world, particularly generative AI.
[...] Though it's complicated, the extent to which ChatGPT in its current form is a viable Google competitor, there's little doubt of the possibilities. Meanwhile, Microsoft already has invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and there's talk of further investment from the enterprise tech giant, which owns search engine Bing. The company is reportedly looking to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI.

Previously:

Original Submission

Netflix Stirs Fears by Using AI-Assisted Background Art in Short Anime Film 15 comments

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/netflix-taps-ai-image-synthesis-for-background-art-in-the-dog-and-the-boy/

Over the past year, generative AI has kicked off a wave of existential dread over potential machine-fueled job loss not seen since the advent of the industrial revolution. On Tuesday, Netflix reinvigorated that fear when it debuted a short film called Dog and Boy that utilizes AI image synthesis to help generate its background artwork.
Directed by Ryotaro Makihara, the three-minute animated short follows the story of a boy and his robotic dog through cheerful times, although the story soon takes a dramatic turn toward the post-apocalyptic. Along the way, it includes lush backgrounds apparently created as a collaboration between man and machine, credited to "AI (+Human)" in the end credit sequence.
[...] Netflix and the production company WIT Studio tapped Japanese AI firm Rinna for assistance with generating the images. They did not announce exactly what type of technology Rinna used to generate the artwork, but the process looks similar to a Stable Diffusion-powered "img2img" process than can take an image and transform it based on a written prompt.

Original Submission

IBM Pauses Hiring to Onboard AI Instead 34 comments

IBM to Stop Hiring for Jobs That AI Could Do

upstart writes:

Routine tasks like transferring employees between departments are likely to be fully automated:

American tech major IBM anticipates pausing hiring for positions that it believes artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually take over.
In an interview with Bloomberg, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company will suspend or pause hiring for back-office functions such as human resources.
The company employs some 26,000 people in these non-customer-facing roles, Krishna said.
"I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," he added.
[...] Routine tasks like transferring employees between departments or providing letters of employment verification are likely to be fully automated, said the company's chief.
Over the next ten years, he continued, it is likely that some HR functions related to workforce composition analysis and productivity will not be replaced.

“Meaningful Harm” From AI Necessary Before Regulation, says Microsoft Exec 41 comments

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/meaningful-harm-from-ai-necessary-before-regulation-says-microsoft-exec/

As lawmakers worldwide attempt to understand how to regulate rapidly advancing AI technologies, Microsoft chief economist Michael Schwarz told attendees of the World Economic Forum Growth Summit today that "we shouldn't regulate AI until we see some meaningful harm that is actually happening, not imaginary scenarios."
The comments came about 45 minutes into a panel called "Growth Hotspots: Harnessing the Generative AI Revolution." Reacting, another featured speaker, CNN anchor Zain Asher, stopped Schwarz to ask, "Wait, we should wait until we see harm before we regulate it?"
[...]
Lawmakers are racing to draft AI regulations that acknowledge harm but don't threaten AI progress. Last year, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned Congress that lawmakers should exercise "great caution" when drafting AI policy solutions. The FTC regards harms as instances where "AI tools can be inaccurate, biased, and discriminatory by design and incentivize relying on increasingly invasive forms of commercial surveillance." More recently, the White House released a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, describing some outcomes of AI use as "deeply harmful," but "not inevitable."

Original Submission

Tech Industry Leaders Endorse Regulating Artificial Intelligence at Rare Summit in Washington 12 comments

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/private-ai-summit-with-senate-titans-of-tech-garners-controversy/

On Wednesday, US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) hosted an "AI Insight Forum" in the Senate's office building about potential AI regulation. Attendees included billionaires and modern-day industry titans such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. But this heavily corporate guest list—with 14 out of 22 being CEOs—had some scratching their heads.
"This is the room you pull together when your staffers want pictures with tech industry AI celebrities. It's not the room you'd assemble when you want to better understand what AI is, how (and for whom) it functions, and what to do about it," wrote Signal President Meredith Whittaker on X.

upstart writes:

Tech Industry Leaders Endorse Regulating Artificial Intelligence at Rare Summit in Washington:

The nation's biggest technology executives on Wednesday loosely endorsed the idea of government regulations for artificial intelligence at an unusual closed-door meeting in the U.S. Senate. But there is little consensus on what regulation would look like, and the political path for legislation is difficult.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who organized the private forum on Capitol Hill as part of a push to legislate artificial intelligence, said he asked everyone in the room — including almost two dozen tech executives, advocates and skeptics — whether government should have a role in the oversight of artificial intelligence, and "every single person raised their hands, even though they had diverse views," he said.
Among the ideas discussed was whether there should be an independent agency to oversee certain aspects of the rapidly-developing technology, how companies could be more transparent and how the United States can stay ahead of China and other countries.
"The key point was really that it's important for us to have a referee," said Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and X, during a break in the daylong forum. "It was a very civilized discussion, actually, among some of the smartest people in the world."
Schumer will not necessarily take the tech executives' advice as he works with colleagues on the politically difficult task of ensuring some oversight of the burgeoning sector. But he invited them to the meeting in hopes that they would give senators some realistic direction for meaningful regulation.
Congress should do what it can to maximize AI's benefits and minimize the negatives, Schumer said, "whether that's enshrining bias, or the loss of jobs, or even the kind of doomsday scenarios that were mentioned in the room. And only government can be there to put in guardrails."
Other executives attending the meeting were Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Musk said the meeting "might go down in history as being very important for the future of civilization."
First, though, lawmakers have to agree on whether to regulate, and how.
Congress has a lackluster track record when it comes to regulating new technology, and the industry has grown mostly unchecked by government in the past several decades. Many lawmakers point to the failure to pass any legislation surrounding social media, such as for stricter privacy standards.

AI Energy Demands Could Soon Match The Entire Electricity Consumption Of Ireland 12 comments

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

We hear plenty of legitimate concerns regarding the new wave of generative AI, from the human jobs it could replace to its potential for creating misinformation. But one area that often gets overlooked is the sheer amount of energy these systems use. In the not-so-distant future, the technology could be consuming the same amount of electricity as an entire country.
Alex de Vries, a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, authored 'The Growing Energy Footprint of Artificial Intelligence,' which examines the environmental impact of AI systems.
De Vries notes that the training phase for large language models is often considered the most energy-intensive, and therefore has been the focus of sustainability research in AI.
Following training, models are deployed into a production environment and begin the inference phase. In the case of ChatGPT, this involves generating live responses to user queries. Little research has gone into the inference phase, but De Vries believes there are indications that this period might contribute significantly to an AI model's life-cycle costs.
According to research firm SemiAnalysis, OpenAI required 3,617 Nvidia HGX A100 servers, with a total of 28,936 GPUs, to support ChatGPT, implying an energy demand of 564 MWh per day. For comparison, an estimated 1,287 MWh was used in GPT-3's training phase, so the inference phase's energy demands were considerably higher.
Google, which reported that 60% of AI-related energy consumption from 2019 to 2021 stemmed from inference, is integrating AI features into its search engine. Back in February, Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy said that a single user exchange with an AI-powered search service "likely costs ten times more than a standard keyword search."
[...] "It would be advisable for developers not only to focus on optimizing AI, but also to critically consider the necessity of using AI in the first place, as it is unlikely that all applications will benefit from AI or that the benefits will always outweigh the costs," said De Vries.

Original Submission

Microsoft Aims to Equip Two Million People in India With AI Skills by 2025 22 comments

anubi writes:

Looks like Microsoft is preparing yet more helpful tech reps...

https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-02-12-microsoft-to-equip-2m-indians-with-ai-skills.html

Tech billionaire and globalist Bill Gates' Microsoft has announced plans to recruit up to two million workers from India who will be trained to use artificial intelligence.
According to Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, the company will equip two million Indians with AI skills by 2025 in an effort to generate more jobs in the nation of nearly 1.5 billion. (Related: Technocrats Gates and Altman admit current AI is the stupidest version of AGI but believe it can eventually "overcome polarization" – or in reality – censor views.)
"We are devoted to equip two million-plus people in India with AI skills, that is, really taking the workforce and making sure that they have the right skills in order to be able to be a part of this domain," said Nadella on Wednesday, Feb. 7, during a Microsoft CEO Connection event in Mumbai. "But it's not just the skills, it's even the jobs that they create."
The skilling program will focus on training individuals in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities – cities with 50,000 to 99,999 residents and 20,000 to 49,999 residents, respectively – as well as rural areas with below 20,000 residents in an effort to "unlock inclusive socio-economic progress," according to the company in a statement.

Original Submission

OpenAI Teases a New Generative Video Model Called Sora 9 comments

upstart writes:

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora [technologyreview.com]:

OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a detailed, high-definition film clip up to a minute long.
Based on four sample videos that OpenAI shared with MIT Technology Review ahead of today's announcement, the San Francisco–based firm has pushed the envelope of what's possible with text-to-video generation (a hot new research direction that we flagged as a trend to watch in 2024).
"We think building models that can understand video, and understand all these very complex interactions of our world, is an important step for all future AI systems," says Tim Brooks, a scientist at OpenAI.
[...] Impressive as they are, the sample videos shown here were no doubt cherry-picked to show Sora at its best. Without more information, it is hard to know how representative they are of the model's typical output.
It may be some time before we find out. OpenAI's announcement of Sora today is a tech tease, and the company says it has no current plans to release it to the public. Instead, OpenAI will today begin sharing the model with third-party safety testers for the first time.
In particular, the firm is worried about the potential misuses [technologyreview.com] of fake but photorealistic video [technologyreview.com]. "We're being careful about deployment here and making sure we have all our bases covered before we put this in the hands of the general public," says Aditya Ramesh, a scientist at OpenAI, who created the firm's text-to-image model DALL-E [technologyreview.com].
But OpenAI is eyeing a product launch sometime in the future. As well as safety testers, the company is also sharing the model with a select group of video makers and artists to get feedback on how to make Sora as useful as possible to creative professionals. "The other goal is to show everyone what is on the horizon, to give a preview of what these models will be capable of," says Ramesh.

Toys “R” Us Riles Critics With “First-Ever” AI-Generated Commercial Using Sora 11 comments

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/06/toys-r-us-riles-critics-with-first-ever-ai-generated-commercial-using-sora/

On Monday, Toys "R" Us announced that it had partnered with an ad agency called Native Foreign to create what it calls "the first-ever brand film using OpenAI's new text-to-video tool, Sora." OpenAI debuted Sora in February, but the video synthesis tool has not yet become available to the public. The brand film tells the story of Toys "R" Us founder Charles Lazarus using AI-generated video clips.
"We are thrilled to partner with Native Foreign to push the boundaries of Sora, a groundbreaking new technology from OpenAI that's gaining global attention," wrote Toys "R" Us on its website. "Sora can create up to one-minute-long videos featuring realistic scenes and multiple characters, all generated from text instruction. Imagine the excitement of creating a young Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys "R" Us, and envisioning his dreams for our iconic brand and beloved mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe in the early 1930s."

Previously on SoylentNews:
Tyler Perry Puts $800 Million Studio Expansion on Hold Because of OpenAI's Sora - 20240225
OpenAI Teases a New Generative Video Model Called Sora - 20240222
Toys 'R' Us Files for Bankruptcy Protection in US - 20170919 (Toys 'R' Us is a "zombie brand" now. The entity in Canada was and is separate and still exists.)

Original Submission

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