Get up to speed on the rapidly evolving world of AI with our roundup of the week’s developments.
We’re just half a month into the new year, but predictions that 2024 will be remembered as boom times for generative AI seem to be coming true already.
Microsoft got things rolling on Jan. 4 by announcing the biggest change to its keyboard design in nearly 30 years, adding a button that will give people direct access to its AI Copilot tool on new Windows 11 computers starting this month. Makes sense given that Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT and the large language model that powers the Copilot service.
Sareena Dayaram called the new keyboard button “a bold bid for AI dominance,” explaining how it will serve “as a physical portal to its Copilot service, which helps people perform tasks like summarizing documents, recommending music and answering questions you might ask a search engine or AI chatbot.”
For its part, Microsoft said its goal is to make gen AI a part of everyday life, which doesn’t seem that far-fetched given that Windows is the most popular computer operating system and there are over 1 billion people using Windows today. On Jan. 15, the company announced new subscriptions services for Copilot, which Microsoft says has been part of more than 5 billion chat and created over 5 billion images so far. The consumer Copilot Pro is $20 a month (same pricing as ChatGPT Plus.)
“AI will be seamlessly woven into Windows from the system, to the silicon, to the hardware,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer marketing chief, wrote in a post announcing the Copilot key. “This will not only simplify people’s computing experience but also amplify it, making 2024 the year of the AI PC.”
It’s not just PCs that are getting an AI boost. Last week at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics show, companies including Volkswagen, Intel, McDonald’s, L’Oreal and LG showcased AI-branded products and services. (You can find CNET’s complete coverage of CES here.) According to the Consumer Technology Association, which runs CES, over 230 million smartphones and PCs sold in the US this year will “tap the powers of generative AI” in some way.
“You don’t want to show up at the costume party in plain clothes, right?” Dipanjan Chatterjee, a principal analyst at Forrester, told CNET about the AI tagline being added to what seemed like every gadget and new service at CES. “Everyone’s going to be there saying AI. You’re probably going to look like a fool if you don’t.”
One of the more interesting AI announcements out of CES was Volkswagen’s news that it’s adding gen AI tech, including ChatGPT, to some of its car models in North America and Europe so you can talk to your car (visions of Knight Rider, anyone?). To be delivered to new and existing cars on the road through an over-the-air software update starting in the second quarter of 2024, the AI software will expand the capabilities of Volkswagen’s IDA voice assistant beyond handling simple tasks, like initiating a call, to automatically turning up the heat after you ask IDA “to warm up the driver’s side.” And it will be able answer thousands of questions beyond giving you driving directions and destination info — including all kinds of advice, including how to rekindle your love life.
Why you should get on the chatbot bandwagon sooner rather than later
If you’ve read this far and are still unsure what the gen AI fuss is all about, don’t worry — I got you. Despite all the noise around AI, most Americans (82%) haven’t even tried ChatGPT, and over half say they’re more concerned than excited by the increased use of AI in their daily life, according to the Pew Research Center.
Still, chatbots are literally changing the conversation around the future of work, education and how we may go about day-to-day tasks. So becoming comfortable with chatbots should be on your 2024 to-do list.
To help with that, I wrote an expansive, consumer-friendly overview of chatbots as January’s cover story for CNET. And I included practical tips about how to start working with tools like ChatGPT and beyond, talked to experts about which jobs will and won’t be affected by the gen AI tsunami (TL;DR: pretty much everything), about the issues that you need to be aware of when working with these tools — including privacy, security and copyright — and about the use cases, ethical use cases that is, that we all should be experimenting with as soon as possible.
I encourage you to read it if you want to know what I’ve learned after a year looking into all things gen AI. In the meantime, here are few takeaways:
Natural language: The new generation of chatbots — including ChatGPT, Google Bard, Microsoft Bing, Character.ai and Claude.ai — are based on a large language model, or LLM, a type of AI neural network that uses deep learning (it tries to simulate the human brain) to work with an enormous set of data to perform a variety of natural language processing tasks. What does that mean? They can understand, summarize, predict and generate new content in a way that’s easily accessible to everyone. Instead of needing to know programming code to speak to a gen AI chatbot, you can ask questions (known as “prompts” in AI lingo) using plain English.
Gen AI is a general purpose technology: Generative AI’s ability to have that natural language collaboration with humans puts it in a special class of technology — what researchers and economists call a general-purpose technology. That is, something that “can affect an entire economy, usually at a national or global level,” Wikipedia explains. “GPTs have the potential to drastically alter societies through their impact on pre-existing economic and social structures.” Other such GPTs include electricity, the steam engine and the internet — things that become fundamental to society because they can affect the quality of life for everyone. (That GPT is different, by the way, from the one in ChatGPT, which stands for “generative pretrained transformer.”)
Mass market phenomenon: If hitting a million users is a key milestone for turning an untested tech service into a mainstream destination, think about this: It took Netflix three and a half years to reach 1 million users launching in 1999, Facebook 10 months and Instagram three months in 2010. ChatGPT, which debuted on Nov. 30, 2022, reached 1 million users in five days. Yep, just five days.
The AI effect on jobs: There’s been a lot of talk about the future or work and how jobs may fare due to the expected productivity and profit boost AI and automated tech should help deliver. There’s good news and bad news on the jobs front. The bad news: v-pre as many as 40% of roles could be affected by the new tech, which means reskilling, retraining and redoing job descriptions to incorporate how AI will change the nature of jobs needs to happen now.
What should today’s — and tomorrow’s — workers do? The experts agree: Get comfortable with AI chatbots if you want to remain attractive to employers. The good news: v-pre according to Goldman Sachs, new tech has historically ushered in new kinds of jobs. In a widely cited March 2023 report, the firm noted that 60% of today’s workers are employed in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940. Still, Goldman and others, including the International Monetary Fund, said AI will lead to significant disruption in the workforce.
Among the new occupations we’re already seeing is prompt engineering. That refers to someone able to effectively “talk” to chatbots because they know how to ask questions to get a satisfying result. Prompt engineers don’t necessarily need to be technical engineers but rather people with problem-solving, critical thinking and communication skills. (Liberal arts majors — your time has come!) Job listings for prompt engineers showed salaries of $300,000 or more in 2023.
Think of it the way that Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, described it to me. “When the pocket calculator came out, a lot of people thought that their jobs were going to be in danger because they calculated for a living,” he said. “It turns out we still need a lot of analysts and engineers and scientists and accountants — people who work with numbers. If they’re not working with a calculator or by now a spreadsheet, they’re really not going to be very employable anymore.”
Jobs most worried about AI
There are many reports citing which careers will be most affected by AI, including one from Pew Research that said the roles with the highest exposure include budget analysts, data entry keyers, tax preparers, technical writers and web developers. Indeed.com in September looked at 55 million job postings and more than 2,600 skills to determine which jobs and skills had low, moderate and high exposure to gen AI disruption and offered some words of optimism to us humans. “The human element required in many critical job skills — including empathy, intuition, and manual dexterity — remains irreplaceable. Gen AI, while adept at processing data and executing specific tasks, lacks the innate human qualities that define various roles, especially those centered around manual work, human interactions and decision-making based on nuanced understanding.”
In a survey by software developer DevRev, lawyers, artists, accountants, doctors and data scientists in the US — in that order — expressed the most concerns with how gen AI could affect their work. Meanwhile, the UK Department of Education cited white-collar jobs as being the most disrupted by gen AI, with telephone salespeople, lawyers, psychologists and some teachers topping its list, according to ZDNet.
Which raises the question: Who’s less at risk? Anyone whose jobs require manual skills — vets and nurses — and those who work on projects outdoors, including builders and gardeners.
OpenAI opens store with 3 million custom versions of ChatGPT
Making good on its promise in November to give creators — no programming skills required — a way to create customized tools based off its popular ChatGPT chatbot, OpenAI last week opened the GPT Store. The company said that over 3 million GPTs have been created, and that it’s still figuring out a revenue plan to be able to pay “GPT builders.”
“As a first step, US builders will be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs,” OpenAI said. “We’ll provide details on the criteria for payments as we get closer.”
Among the GPTs featured are an AllTrails personal trail recommendations for hikes, runs or riders, a Khan Academy programming tutor, a Canva design tool, a book recommender called Books and an AI scientist called Scholar AI that lets you “generate new hypotheses” and analyze text, figures and tables from over 200 million scientific paper and books.
Anyone who subscribes to OpenAI’s $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus subscription can run the GPTs and create their own GPTs, reports CNET’s Stephen Shankland.
“The GPT Store is designed to promote and categorize GPTs, making it easier to find what you’re looking for or discover what you didn’t even know you wanted,” Shankland said. other examples of GPTs available now include a fitness trainer, laundry buddy washing label decoder, music theory instructor, coloring book picture generator, haiku writer and the Pearl for Pets for vet advice.
Washing label decoder? I like how people’s minds work. Let me know if you’ve got a favorite.
Copyrighted content, training data and fair use
How much of your copyrighted content can an AI large language model co opt for training purposes?
That’s at the heart of The New York Times Dec. 27 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, with the paper noting that the maker of ChatGPT had used its intellectual property in the form of “millions” of unique, high-value and copyrighted articles to train the chatbot without the NYT’s permission or compensation. The suit comes after discussions that started in April between OpenAI and Microsoft, a top investor in the San Francisco-based startup, failed to reach an “amicable resolution possibly involving a commercial agreement and ‘technological guardrails’ around generative AI products, the NYT said. The paper said it isn’t asking for a specific amount of money in compensation but argues that OpenAI should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.”
“Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism,” the NYT wrote in its complaints. OpenAI and Microsoft, it argued, are “using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”
OpenAI, which has raised billions in funding and has a valuation of more than $80 billion, said in a Jan. 8 blog post that the NYT’s suit is “without merit.” OpenAI says that training with copyrighted material falls under the category of fair use, and that if publishers don’t want their content co-opted for training purposes, publishers can opt-out of the scraping process. Says OpenAI, “The negotiations focused on a high-value partnership around real-time display with attribution in ChatGPT, in which The New York Times would gain a new way to connect with their existing and new readers, and our users would gain access to their reporting. We had explained to The New York Times that, like any single source, their content didn’t meaningfully contribute to the training of our existing models and also wouldn’t be sufficiently impactful for future training.”
The NYT isn’t the only copyright holder taking on gen AI companies or copyright infringement, notes the Associated Press. The Authors Guild, which represents authors such as John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picault and Scott Turow, filed suit against OpenAI in September and amended its complaint in December. “The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to A Game of Thrones that was titled A Dawn of Direwolves and used “the same characters from Martin’s existing books in the series ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,'” the AP reported.
A third lawsuit was filed by nonfiction writers, “including an author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on which the hit movie Oppenheimer was based,” the AP added.
And when it comes to images and AI, there are suits brought by artists who claim the big AI text-to-image generators, including Stability AI and Midjourney, are co opting their copyrighted art, as well as reports that AI companies may be working to bypass copyrights.
As for how the NYT suit will play out (or won’t — the sides might reach a settlement), lawyers, as you would expect, say it could go either way. The NYT is attempting, through copyright law, to protect one of its most valuable assets, its content, while OpenAI is trying to figure out a path forward for AI that doesn’t stifle innovation.
AI term of the week: Training data
An LLM is only as good as the data it’s been trained on, which is why 2024 will see legal arguments around copyright issues and who should be compensated or not for the data used to make these systems smarter. Training data can be used to introduce bias and error into the AI system as well — which is why there’s a push for AI companies to be transparent about what training data has been used in their systems. (That transparency doesn’t exist today.)
So I thought it was worthwhile to share some of the ways “training data” is being defined today.
According to Coursera, training data is “the information or examples given to an AI system to enable it to learn, find patterns, and create new content.”
Venture capitalist firm A16z, which has invested in dozens of AI startups, defines training data as the “dataset used to train a machine learning model.”
But software developer Lark offers a more robust definition that also addresses the underlying concerns around training data: “Training data, in the context of AI and machine learning, refers to the datasets used to train AI models or algorithms. This data serves as the foundational material on which the AI system learns to perform specific tasks or make predictions. The quality and diversity of training data play a pivotal role in determining the accuracy, generalization, and effectiveness of AI models. Essentially, the training data serves as the information source that enables AI models to recognize patterns, make decisions, and improve their performance over time. In simple terms, it can be described as the educational material for AI systems, shaping their understanding and decision-making abilities.”
Computing Guides
LAPTOPS
- Best Laptop
- Best Chromebook
- Best Budget Laptop
- Best Cheap Gaming Laptop
- Best 2-in-1 Laptop
- Best Windows Laptop
- Best Macbook
- Best Gaming Laptop
- Best Macbook Deals
AI and You: The Job Debate Continues, Social Media Isn’t So Swift Handling Porn Deepfakes
Expect the conversation about how AI technology will affect the future of work — and by that, I mean jobs — to continue to be a huge topic of debate, optimism and pessimism in the coming months (and next few years, TBH.)
Companies are already planning for potential productivity and profit boosts from the adoption of generative AI and automated tech, as evidenced by job cuts at Google, Spotify, Amazon and others that have specifically noted their need to shift resources to AI-forward roles and projects.
The International Monetary Fund said this month that nearly 40 percent of jobs around the world are exposed to change due to AI. In its September “Jobs of Tomorrow” report, the World Economic Forum predicts 23% of global jobs will change in the next five years due to factors including AI. That transformation will reshape existing jobs and create new roles in categories including AI developers, interface and interaction designers, AI content creators, data curators, and AI ethics and governance specialists, the WEF said. (Remember, Goldman Sachs noted last year that 60% of workers are employed in occupations right now that didn’t exist in 1940.)
Which of today’s occupations will be most affected and how do employers find the right people for those new roles, since experts agree it will take time to build an AI education workforce? And who’s going to do that reskilling? Is it the responsibility of the government, the workers themselves, or the companies rewriting job descriptions as they retune their businesses?
The answer is a mix of all of the above. Workers should learn new skills, the government should set policies that promote an AI-skilled workforce and companies should invest in training employees to give them new skills, said New York University professor Robert Seamans, who is also director of the NYU Stern Center for the Future of Management. But he particularly hopes that companies will step up.
“From a policy point of view, there’s a lot of focus put on programs that help the worker to gain the skills that they need to succeed in the jobs of the future … but it puts a lot of the burden on the worker to basically make bets on the skill sets that are going to be needed one year, let alone five years, in the future,” he said in a Q&A for the Collective[i} Forecast lecture series last week.
Seamans hopes to see incentives given to companies for investing in and retraining their staff. “The firms would then be able to take advantage of a much better trained workforce,” he believes. “Instead of trying to identify the people, trying to understand what skills we need right now and trying to identify who out there has those skills [and] trying to convince them to come — let’s just take the employees that we have. We have a rough idea of the skills we think that they need, and we’re being encouraged by the government to sort of invest in training in those skills.”
The good news is even the most AI bullish businesses have time to invest in training their workers. An MIT study released Jan. 22 found companies seeking to replace jobs or shift tasks to AI won’t see a return on investment in AI tools for a while. They looked at jobs around computer vision to run their analysis and concluded that “at today’s costs, US businesses would choose not to automate most vision tasks that have ‘AI Exposure,’ and that only 23% of worker wages being paid for vision tasks would be attractive to automate.”
“AI job displacement will be substantial, but also gradual,” the researchers added. “Therefore there is room for policy and retraining to mitigate unemployment impacts.”
Longtime tech investor Esther Dyson also weighed in on the question of AI and jobs. Instead of focusing on AI jobs, she encourages us instead to think about becoming “better humans: more self-aware and more understanding of the world around us, better able to understand our own and others’ motivations.”
“We should not compete with AI; we should use it,” Dyson said in an essay for The Information. “People should train themselves to be better humans even as we develop better AI. People are still in control, but they need to use that control wisely, ethically and carefully.”
As an aside, if you’re interested in learning what hiring managers want to see in resumes and applications, graphic design provider Canva set up a new hub for job seekers that offers info, tools, templates and tips that it says are based on interviews with 5,000 hiring managers.
Here are the other doings in AI worth your attention.
Taylor Swift victim of pornographic deepfake images
A week after noting that musician Taylor Swift was the victim of deepfake videos showing a fake Swift pitching cookware, the musician was victimized again when dozens of explicit, faked photos of her appeared on social media sites including Telegram, X, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit. The photos, says the DailyMail.com, were “uploaded to Celeb Jihad, that show Swift in a series of sexual acts while dressed in Kansas City Chief memorabilia and in the stadium. … Swift has been a regular at Chiefs games since going public with her romance with star player Travis Kelce.”
Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) told the BBC in a statement that it was “actively removing” the images and taking “appropriate actions” against the accounts that had published and spread the images. But the BBC added that while many of them were removed at the time it published its story, dated Jan. 26, “one photo of Swift was reviewed a reported 47 million times before being taken down.” The photos were up for at least a day.
Pornography, added the BBC, “consists of the overwhelmingly majority of the deepfakes posted online, with women making up 99% of those targeted in such content, according to the State of Deepfakes report published last year.”
AI being used to create deepfakes — audio and video showing real people doing things they haven’t done or said — is on the rise because new tools make it faster and easier to do so. Last week, someone sent out a robocall that used President Joe Biden’s voice to tell people not to vote in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Fake versions of celebrities pitching products — including Steve Harvey touting Medicare scams — is on the rise, Popular Science reported. YouTube said it shut down 90 accounts and “suspended multiple advertisers for faking celebrity endorsements,” according to USA Today.
And it’s not just living celebrities who have to worry. Since AI can create fake versions of people living or dead, there are now concerns about how the tech is being used to resurrect those who have passed on. Case in point: Comedian George Carlin, who died in 2008, was the star of an AI-generated, hourlong audio comedy special called “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” reports the Associated Press. Carlin’s estate has filed a lawsuit against the company that created the show, with Carlin’s daughter Kelly Carlin telling the AP that it’s “a poorly executed facsimile cobbled together by unscrupulous individuals to capitalize on the extraordinary goodwill my father established with his adoring fanbase.”
If you’re interested in more about legal rights concerning AI revivals of those who have died, look for this upcoming article in the California Law Review by University at Buffalo legal expert Mark Bartholomew called “A Right to Be Left Dead.” He argues that a “new calculus” is needed “that protects the deceased against unauthorized digital reanimation.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was asked by anchor Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News about the Taylor Swift deepfakes — and how long they were available online. “This is alarming and terrible, and so therefore yes, we have to act, and quite frankly all of us in the tech platform, irrespective of what your standing on any particular issue is — I think we all benefit when the online world is a safe world,” Nadella said. “I don’t think anyone would want an online world that is completely not safe for, both for content creators and content consumers. So therefore I think it behooves us to move fast on this.” The complete interview airs Tuesday, NBC said.
Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who works on ferreting out deepfakes, told The New York Times that the Swift photos will now prompt “a tsunami of these AI-generated explicit images. The people who generated this see this as a success.”
As for Swift, her fans, known as Swifties, have rallied around the award-winning artist and expressed outrage over the abusive images, adding a line to their social media posts saying “Protect Taylor Swift.” The DailyMail.com said Swift is reportedly considering legal action. Rep. Joseph Morelle, a Democrat from New York, unveiled a bill last year that would make sharing deepfake pornography illegal. Last week, he said it was time to pass the legislation, called Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act.
“The spread of AI-generated explicit images of Taylor Swift is appalling — and sadly, it’s happening to women everywhere, every day,” Morelle wrote on X. “It’s sexual exploitation, and I’m fighting to make it a federal crime.”
Vogue’s Emma Specter writes that if anyone can bring attention to the problem with deepfakes and get more legal and regulatory action to stop its proliferation, it’s the much admired Swift.
“It’s deeply unfortunate that Swift is now weathering the predatory manipulation of her image online, but her reach and power are likely to bring attention to the issue of criminal AI misuse — one that has already victimized far too many people,” Specter wrote.
Google’s Lumiere, a text-to-video model
Speaking of AI technology that can make it easier to create video, Google Research last week released a paper describing Lumiere, a text-to-video model that says it can portray “realistic, diverse, and coherent motion — a pivotal challenge in video synthesis.”
Lumiere is currently just a research project, notes CNET’s Lisa Lacy. “Lumiere’s capabilities include text-to-video and image-to-video generation, as well as stylized generation — that is, using an image to create videos in a similar style. Other tricks include the ability to fill in any missing visuals within a video clip,” Lacy says. But she adds, “It’s not clear when — or if — anyone outside the search giant will be able to kick the tires. It’s certainly fun to look at, though.”
ZDNet describes Lumiere’s potential as “pretty amazing.”
You may have noticed video generation models typically render choppy video, but Google’s approach delivers a more seamless viewing experience,” writes ZDNet’s Sabrina Ortiz. “Not only are the video clips smooth to watch, but they also look hyper-realistic, a significant upgrade from other models. Lumiere can achieve this through its Space-Time U-Net architecture, which generates the temporal duration of a video at once through a single pass.”
You can see a short demo of Lumiere on YouTube here. By the way, Lacy reminds us that fans of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast will know that lumiere is French for “light.”
FTC investigates Big Tech investments among AI companies
Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, said last week that she’s going to open an inquiry into the relationships between top AI companies, including ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and the tech companies investing billions of dollars in them. That pretty much includes Microsoft, which has over $13 billion in OpenAI, Amazon, Google and Anthropic.
“We’re scrutinizing whether these ties enable dominant firms to exert undue influence or gain privileged access in ways that could undermine fair competition,” said Khan in remarks at the FTC’s first Tech Summit on AI on Jan. 25. The inquiry, she added, is a “market inquiry into the investments and partnerships being formed between AI developers and major cloud service providers. … Will this be a moment of opening up markets to fair and free competition in unleashing the full potential of emerging technologies or will a handful of dominant firms concentrate control over these key tools, locking us into a future of their choosing.”
“At the FTC, the rapid development and deployment of AI is informing our work across the agency,” Khan said, according to a recap of the event by CNBC. “There’s no AI exemption from the laws on the books, and we’re looking closely at the ways companies may be using their power to thwart competition or trick the public.”
You can listen to Khan’s remarks on YouTube here, starting at the 5:30 minute mark, or read the transcript there.
In other government-related AI news, the US National Science Foundation released a pilot program to spur AI research and development as part of Biden’s push to promote responsible AI. Called the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource pilot, it’s a partnership between 10 federal agencies — including the NSF, Department of Defense, Department of Energy and US Patent and Trademark Office — and 25 private sector, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, including Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.
Their goal is to “provide access to advanced computing, datasets, models, software, training and user support to US-based researchers and educators.”
You can find all the details of the program, as well as the complete list of partners, here.
Etsy gets into gift mode with personalized AI-generated guides
If you’ve ever gone down the Etsy rabbit hole looking for presents to buy for others (or for yourself), you may be interested in a new AI-powered feature called gift mode, which helps you find products based on your gifting preferences.
“After entering a few quick details about the person they’re shopping for, we use the power of machine-learning technology to match gifters with special/unique items from Etsy sellers, categorized by 200+ recipient personas,” Etsy says. Those personas include the music lover, the adventurer, and the pet parent.
Here’s how TechCrunch describes the feature: “Gift mode is essentially an online quiz that asks about who you’re shopping for (sibling, parent, child), the occasion (birthday, anniversary, get well), and the recipient’s interests. At launch, the feature has 15 interests to choose from, including crafting, fashion, sports, video games, pets, and more. It then generates a series of gift guides inspired by your choices, pulling options from the over 100 million items listed on the platform.”
Reminder: Valentine’s Day is Feb. 14.
Researchers give artists ‘poison sauce’ to fight image copying
A project led by the University of Chicago aims to give artists, graphic designers and other image creators a way to protect their work from being scraped and co-opted by AI image generators. Called Nightshade, it basically “poisons” the image data to confuse or mislead the large language models powering today’s image chatbots and prevent the LLMs from training on those images.
Ben Zhao, a computer science professor who led the project, told TechCrunch that Nightshade is like “putting hot sauce in your lunch so it doesn’t get stolen from the workplace fridge.”
Here’s how the Nightshade team describes it:
“Nightshade [is] a tool that turns any image into a data sample that is unsuitable for model training. More precisely, Nightshade transforms images into “poison” samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g., a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.”
“Used responsibly, Nightshade can help deter model trainers who disregard copyrights, opt-out lists, and do-not-scrape/robots.txt directives. It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade’s goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.”
AI word of the week: drift
If you don’t know what a hallucination means with regard to generative AI, you should. That’s why I made it the word of the week in July. Simply put, it means that AI engines, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have a tendency to make up stuff that isn’t true but that sounds true.
How much do AIs hallucinate? Researchers at a startup called Vectara, founded by former Google employees, tried to quantify it and found that chatbots invent things at least 3% of the time and as much as 27% of the time. Vectara has a “Hallucination Leaderboard” that shows how often an LLM makes up stuff when summarizing a document, if you want to see the rate for your favorite AI tool yourself.
Well, riffing off the concept of hallucinations brings us to this week’s word: drift. It’s more a term that people developing LLMs are concerned with, but you should be aware of what it’s all about.
AI drift “refers to when large language models (LLMs) behave in unexpected or unpredictable ways that stray away from the original parameters. This may happen because attempts to improve parts of complicated AI models cause other parts to perform worse,” note my colleagues at ZDNET in their story titled “What is ‘AI drift’ and why is it making ChatGPT dumber?”
Cem Dilmegani, a principal analyst at AIMultiple, offers a more detailed definition. “Model drift, also called model decay, refers to the degradation of machine learning model performance over time. This means that the model suddenly or gradually starts to provide predictions with lower accuracy compared to its performance during the training period.”
Dilmegani says there are two types of model drift: concept drift and data drift. I’ll let you read up on those.
And IBM has an explainer that talks about the perils of model drift and how developers can address it. They explain the problem this way: The accuracy of AI model can drift (degrade) within days when production data differs from training data. This can negatively affect business KPIs.”