Technology and Computing
Written by Oliver Bown, UNSW Sydney In March, we saw the launch of a “ChatGPT for music” called Suno, which uses generative AI to produce realistic songs on demand from short text prompts. A few weeks later, a similar competitor – Udio – arrived on the scene. I’ve been working with various creative computational tools for the past 15 years, both as a researcher and a producer, and the recent pace of change has floored me. As I’ve argued elsewhere,…
Paper: ‘AI’s increasing capabilities at deception pose serious risks, ranging from short-term, such as fraud and election tampering, to long-term, such as losing control of AI systems’ CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Artificial intelligence systems are fast becoming increasingly sophisticated, with engineers and developers working to make them as “human” as possible. Unfortunately, that can also mean just like a person. AI platforms are reportedly learning to deceive us in ways that can have far-reaching consequences. A new study by researchers from…
PHILADELPHIA — Remember the holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”? That virtual reality room aboard the Enterprise that could create any kind of environment you could dream up, from alien jungles to the residence of Sherlock Holmes — using nothing but voice commands? It might have been an invention of the 24th century on television, but researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have brought that sci-fi dream to life today! Calling their new system “Holodeck” in honor of its Star…
Starting in early March, dozens of large, futuristic-looking white machines started slowly trolling through farmland in The Netherlands. At first glance, the machines look like a cross between a tractor and World War I-era track-based tank, albeit with a distinctly shiny sci-fi shimmer. The machines are actually fully autonomous, AI enabled agriculture robots tasked with spotting and eliminating diseased tulip bulbs ahead of the country’s iconic and financially significant Spring tulip bloom. The Dutch-made robot is just one of many…
Vernor Vinge, prolific science-fiction writer, professor, and one of the first prominent thinkers to conceptualize the concepts of a “Technological Singularity” and cyberspace, has died at the age of 79. News of his passing on March 20 was confirmed through a Facebook post from author and friend David Brin, citing complications from Parkinson’s Disease. “Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters, and the implications of science,”…
Article written by Nigel Mulligan, Assistant Professor in Psychotherapy, School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health, Dublin City University We all experience loss and grief. Imagine, though, that you don’t need to say goodbye to your loved ones. That you can recreate them virtually so you can have conversations and find out how they’re feeling. For Kim Kardashian’s fortieth birthday, her then-husband, Kanye West, gifted her with a hologram of her dead father, Robert Kardashian. Reportedly, Kim Kardashian reacted with…
In February, an absurd, AI-generated rat penis somehow snuck its way into a since retracted Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology article. Now that odd travesty seems like it may just be a particularly loud example of a more persistent problem brewing in scientific literature. Journals are currently at a crossroads on how best to respond to researchers using popular but factually questionable generative AI tools to help draft manuscripts or produce images. Detecting evidence of AI use isn’t always…
Fully self-driving cars, despite the claims of some companies, aren’t exactly ready to hit the roads anytime soon. There’s even a solid case to be made that completely autonomous vehicles (AVs) will never take over everyday travel. Regardless, some urban planners are already looking into ensuring how such a future could be as safe and efficient. According to a team at North Carolina State University, one solution may be upending the more-than-century-old design of traffic signals. The ubiquity of stop…
The Transportation Security Administration is launching the pilot phase of an autonomous self-screening checkpoint system. Unveiled earlier this week and scheduled to officially open on March 11 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, the station resembles grocery store self-checkout kiosks—but instead of scanning milk and eggs, you’re expected to…scan yourself to ensure you aren’t a threat. Or at least that’s what it seems from the looks of it. “We are constantly looking at innovative ways to enhance the…
This article was originally featured on The Conversation. A roomsize computer equipped with a new type of circuitry, the Perceptron, was introduced to the world in 1958 in a brief news story buried deep in The New York Times. The story cited the U.S. Navy as saying that the Perceptron would lead to machines that “will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.” More than six decades later, similar claims are being made about…
Researchers using an AI photo-scanning tool similar to facial recognition have learned that there’s been a 20% decline in North Pacific Ocean humpback whale populations over the past decade. The researchers pointed to a climate change related heat wave as a possible culprit. The findings, published this week in Royal Society Open Science, used the artificial intelligence-powered image detection model to analyze more than 200,000 photographs of humpback whales taken between 2001 and 2022. Facial recognition models used to identify…
You probably don’t know about Automattic, but they know you. As the parent company of WordPress, its content management systems host around 43 percent of the internet’s 10 million most popular websites. Meanwhile, it also owns a vast suite of mega-platforms including Tumblr, where a massive amount of embarrassing personal posts live. All this is to say that, through all those countless Terms & Conditions and third-party consent forms, Automattic potentially has access to a huge chunk of the internet’s…