White House addresses fake sexually explicit AI images of Taylor Swift

Saturday - January 27 - 2024 

In this week’s newsletter :

• White House addresses fake sexually explicit AI images of Taylor Swift

• AI will hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF warns

• ‘Creepy’ AI reimagines South Park characters as real people

• EU wants to upgrade its supercomputers to support generative AI startups

• OpenAI drops prices and fixes ‘lazy’ GPT-4 that refused to work

HEADLINES

White House addresses fake sexually explicit AI images of Taylor Swift
Summary:
The White House has addressed fake sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift.

Deepfake images of the singer were widely circulated on social media website X this week, despite the platform’s rules against such media.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre shared her “alarm” over false images created by artificial intelligence (AI) during Friday’s briefing (26 January).

“We are alarmed by the reports of the circulation of false images,” Ms Jean-Pierre said.

“This problem is not new. It is one that the Biden-Harris administration has been prioritising since day one. We have taken this very seriously... we are going to do what we can to deal with this issue.”

AI will hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF warns
Summary:
Artificial intelligence will affect 40 per cent of jobs globally and could worsen inequality between nations and within society, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

The IMF said AI would bring about a “technological revolution” that would impact advanced economies far more than developing ones, both replacing and complementing high-skilled jobs.

“In this evolving landscape, advanced economies and more developed emerging markets need to focus on upgrading regulatory frameworks and supporting labour reallocation, while safeguarding those adversely affected,” stated a report from the financial organisation, which was published on Sunday.

“Emerging market and developing economies should prioritise developing digital infrastructure and digital skills.”

The IMF said advanced economies will see around 60 per cent of roles affected, with about half of those workers benefiting from the integration of AI, which could boost productivity, but the remainder could see lower salaries, reduced hiring and, “in the most extreme cases, some of these jobs may disappear”.

‘Creepy’ AI reimagines South Park characters as real people
Summary:
South Park fans have been left divided over a “creepy” deepfake recreation of the show’s animated characters as real people set in an Eighties sitcom.

The Berlin-based artificial intelligence (AI) artist known as “demonflyingfox” used deepfake technology to depict what Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, and Kenny McCormick would look like if they were played by real actors on the sets of a live-action sitcom, which is on its 27th season.

The artist also recreated characters like Mr Mackey, delivering his infamous “drugs are bad” dialogue, as well as Stan’s father Randy Marsh, fourth-grader Timmy Burch, and Mr Garrison, in a YouTube video that has resurfaced on Reddit.

Deepfakes are photos and videos that have been digitally manipulated or altered using AI or machine learning.

Reacting to the YouTube video, some users suggested the deepfake versions were “creepy and weird” while others said the recreations were “on point”.

EU wants to upgrade its supercomputers to support generative AI startups
Summary:
European Union lawmakers scrambling for the bloc to be a contender in the generative AI race are presenting a package of support measures aimed at charging up homegrown AI startups and scale ups.

Artificial intelligence technologies — and especially generative AI models which are trained on very large data-sets and have capabilities such as being able to parse natural language and produce text, imagery or audio on demand — are

being viewed as a key strategic area for the bloc’s future competitiveness. However Commission officials concede lawmakers have been caught on the hop, somewhat, when it comes to compute infrastructure that’s fit for training such AIs.

They admit they were taken by surprise by the sudden rise of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year. So while the EU boasts an impressive network of high performance supercomputers — such as the newly inaugurated

MareNostrum 5 — this strategic infrastructure, historically been geared towards scientific users (and use-cases), hasn’t been optimized for training the new generation of disruptive generative AI models. And that’s one big missing component in the EU’s AI strategy that lawmakers are now rushing to change.

OpenAI drops prices and fixes ‘lazy’ GPT-4 that refused to work
Summary:
OpenAI is always making slight adjustments to its models and pricing, and today is no exception. The company has released a handful of new models and dropped the price of API access — this is primarily of interest to developers, but also serves as a bellwether for future consumer options.

GPT-3.5 Turbo is the model most people interact with, usually through ChatGPT, and it serves as a kind of industry standard now — if your answers aren’t as good as ChatGPT’s, why bother? It’s also a popular API, being lower cost and

faster than GPT-4 on a lot of tasks. So paying users will be pleased to hear that input prices are dropping by 50% and output by 25%, to $0.0005 per thousand tokens in, and $0.0015 per thousand tokens out.

As people play with using these APIs for text-intensive applications, like analyzing entire papers or books, those tokens really start to add up.

And as open source or self-managed models catch up to OpenAI’s performance, the company needs to make sure its customers don’t just leave.

Hence the steady ratcheting down of prices — though it’s also a natural result of streamlining the models and improving their infrastructure.

GPT-3.5 Turbo also gets a new model version, 0125 (i.e., today’s date) that includes “various improvements” but apparently little that OpenAI thought worth mentioning.

The last version was 0613, so it’s a little surprising they don’t mention more.

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