2024 Innovator of the Year: Shawn Shan builds tools to help artists fight back against exploitative AI
Shawn Shan is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2024 Innovators Under 35. Meet the rest of this year’s honorees. When image-generating models such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion kick-started the generative AI boom in early 2022, artists started noticing odd similarities between AI-generated images and those they’d created themselves. Many found that their work…
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What impact will AI have on video game development?
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. Video game development has long been plagued by fear of the “crunch”—essentially, being forced to work overtime on a game to meet a deadline. In the early days of video games, the crunch was often…
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To be more useful, robots need to become lazier
Robots perceive the world around them very differently from the way humans do. When we walk down the street, we know what we need to pay attention to—passing cars, potential dangers, obstacles in our way—and what we don’t, like pedestrians walking in the distance. Robots, on the other hand, treat all the information they receive…
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Roblox is launching a generative AI that builds 3D environments in a snap
Roblox plans to roll out a generative AI tool that will let creators make whole 3D scenes just using text prompts, it announced today. Once it’s up and running, developers on the hugely popular online game platform will be able to simply write “Generate a race track in the desert,” for example, and the AI…
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What this futuristic Olympics video says about the state of generative AI
The Olympic Games in Paris just finished last month and the Paralympics are still underway, so the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles feel like a lifetime from now. But the prospect of watching the games in his home city has Josh Kahn, a filmmaker in the sports entertainment world who has worked in content…
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AI’s impact on elections is being overblown
This year, close to half the world’s population has the opportunity to participate in an election. And according to a steady stream of pundits, institutions, academics, and news organizations, there’s a major new threat to the integrity of those elections: artificial intelligence. The earliest predictions warned that a new AI-powered world was, apparently, propelling us…
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Here’s how ed-tech companies are pitching AI to teachers
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. This back-to-school season marks the third year in which AI models like ChatGPT will be used by thousands of students around the globe (among them my nephews, who tell me with glee each time they…
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How “personhood credentials” could help prove you’re a human online
As AI models become better at mimicking human behavior, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between real human internet users and sophisticated systems imitating them. That’s a real problem when those systems are deployed for nefarious ends like spreading misinformation or conducting fraud, and it makes it a lot harder to trust what you encounter…
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A new way to build neural networks could make AI more understandable
A tweak to the way artificial neurons work in neural networks could make AIs easier to decipher. Artificial neurons—the fundamental building blocks of deep neural networks—have survived almost unchanged for decades. While these networks give modern artificial intelligence its power, they are also inscrutable. Existing artificial neurons, used in large language models like GPT4, work…
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How machine learning is helping us probe the secret names of animals
Do animals have names? According to the poet T.S. Eliot, cats have three: the name their owner calls them (like George); a second, more noble one (like Quaxo or Cricopat); and, finally, a “deep and inscrutable” name known only to themselves “that no human research can discover.” But now, researchers armed with audio recorders and…
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