Exclusive: Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, on his hopes and fears for the future of AI
Ilya Sutskever, head bowed, is deep in thought. His arms are spread wide and his fingers are splayed on the tabletop like a concert pianist about to play his first notes. We sit in silence. I’ve come to meet Sutskever, OpenAI’s cofounder and chief scientist, in his company’s unmarked office building on an unremarkable street in…
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This new tool could give artists an edge over AI
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The artist-led backlash against AI is well underway. While plenty of people are still enjoying letting their imaginations run wild with popular text-to-image models like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion,…
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This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against…
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How Meta and AI companies recruited striking actors to train AI
One evening in early September, T, a 28-year-old actor who asked to be identified by his first initial, took his seat in a rented Hollywood studio space in front of three cameras, a director, and a producer for a somewhat unusual gig. The two-hour shoot produced footage that was not meant to be viewed by…
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China has a new plan for judging the safety of generative AI—and it’s packed with details
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Ever since the Chinese government passed a law on generative AI back in July, I’ve been wondering how exactly China’s censorship machine would adapt for the AI era. The content produced by…
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Why it’ll be hard to tell if AI ever becomes conscious
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Many people in AI will be familiar with the story of the Mechanical Turk. It was a chess-playing machine built in 1770, and it was so good its opponents were tricked…
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Minds of machines: The great AI consciousness conundrum
David Chalmers was not expecting the invitation he received in September of last year. As a leading authority on consciousness, Chalmers regularly circles the world delivering talks at universities and academic meetings to rapt audiences of philosophers—the sort of people who might spend hours debating whether the world outside their own heads is real and…
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Are we ready to trust AI with our bodies?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I hate going to the gym. Last year I hired a personal trainer for six months in the hope she would brainwash me into adopting healthy exercise habits longer-term. It was…
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Driving companywide efficiencies with AI
Autonomous shopping carts that follow grocery store customers and robots that pick ripe cucumbers faster than humans may grab headlines, but the most compelling applications of AI and ML technology are behind the scenes. Increasingly, organizations are finding substantial efficiency gains by applying AI- and ML-powered tools to back-office procedures such as document processing, data…
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Why Big Tech’s bet on AI assistants is so risky
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, tech companies have been feverishly trying to come up with the killer app for the technology. First it was online search, with mixed results. Now…
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