technologyreview.com

The return of pneumatic tubes ( www.technologyreview.com )

Researchers are making progress on producing cows from just stem cells, with no eggs or sperm involved. Some people are wondering if the same tech might one day work with humans. ( www.technologyreview.com )

Tech workers should shine a light on the industry’s secretive work with the military ( www.technologyreview.com )

China has a flourishing market for deepfakes that clone the dead. The same technologies are being used by Chinese people to make replicas of themselves, their children, and famous public figures. ( www.technologyreview.com )

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI ( www.technologyreview.com )

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....

GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites ( www.technologyreview.com )

Of the 100 results, only three of them are common enough to be used in everyday conversations; everything else consisted of words and expressions used specifically in the contexts of either gambling or pornography. The longest token, lasting 10.5 Chinese characters, literally means “_free Japanese porn video to watch.” Oops....

An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary ( www.technologyreview.com )

Thanks to rapid advancements in generative AI and a glut of training data created by human actors that has been fed into its AI model, Synthesia has been able to produce avatars that are indeed more humanlike and more expressive than their predecessors. The digital clones are better able to match their reactions and intonation...

Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media ( www.technologyreview.com )

From the article: "In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung....