Technology

A dozen US senators unveiled bipartisan legislation Tuesday expanding President Joe Biden’s legal authority to ban TikTok nationwide, marking the latest in a string of congressional proposals threatening the social media platform’s future in the United States. The proposed law takes a wide-ranging approach to fears that companies with ties to China could be pressured by that country’s government into handing over Americans’ sensitive personal information or communications records.

Source: US senators unveil bipartisan bill empowering Biden to ban TikTok and other services | CNN Business

While overreaction and warnings of “the end of human creativity” may be over the top, there are areas in which “AI” developments are being taken very seriously. The 13,000-member Authors Guild has issued an update to its model trade book contract and literary translation model contract with a new clause that prohibits publishers from using or sublicensing books under contract to train “artificial intelligence” technologies.

Source: ‘AI’ at Bologna: The Hair-Raising Topic of 2023?

Researchers found that they could reconstruct high-resolution and highly accurate images from brain activity by using the popular Stable Diffusion image generation model, as outlined in a paper published in December. The authors wrote that unlike previous studies, they didn’t need to train or fine-tune the AI models to create these images. This study was a peek into the internal processes of diffusion models, the researchers concluded.

Source: Researchers Use AI to Generate Images Based on People’s Brain Activity

Snoop Dogg, the popular American rapper and actor has revealed himself as one of the co-founders of a popular Web3-based live-streaming app “Shiller”. This is yet another partnership in the Web3 space by the popular hip-hop artist. Dubbed a “live broadcast platform”, Shiller aims to combine Web3 technology with real-time live-streaming content. Snoop Dogg now features as the co-founder of the app along with technology entrepreneur Sam Jones.

Source: Snoop Dogg Emerges as Co-founder of a Web3-based Livestream Platform

Last year was not a good one for the crypto market. But the promise of blockchain technology was never about get-rich-quick schemes. If there’s a silver lining to this latest implosion, it’s that we should finally decouple these events from the potential that Web3 technology has to transform Hollywood for creators, fan communities and the industry’s development and production processes.

Source: Web3 in Hollywood could pave the way for the hit IP of the future

An American computer scientist on Thursday urged the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court to rule he is entitled to patents over inventions created by his artificial intelligence system, in a landmark case about whether AI can own patent rights. Stephen Thaler wants to be granted two patents in the UK over inventions he says were devised by his “creativity machine” called DABUS.

Source: UK Supreme Court hears landmark patent case over AI ‘inventor’

There are understandable reasons for musicians to hold back from using creative AIs themselves until there is more clarity on which services have gone about their businesses in the right or wrong way, and how they are working with the creators in the longer term. “AI technology is based on machine learning, and it is inevitable that some of the data that has been fed into it in the past might have been copyright-protected or used without the permission from its creators,” says Dr Sam De Silva.

Source: Creative AI’s next big discussion: art, plagiarism, and copyright – Music Ally

Journalists are at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, the CEO of German media group Axel Springer has said. The announcement was made as the publisher sought to boost revenue at German newspapers Bild and Die Welt and transition to becoming a “purely digital media company.” It said job cuts lay ahead, because automation and AI were increasingly making many of the jobs that supported the production of their journalism redundant.

Source: German publisher Axel Springer says journalists could be replaced by AI

Artists in the field stress that AI is prompting a paradigm shift. Jon Rafman says: “I have been using AI in one form or another since I began making art on computers in the 1990s. I only truly started using image-generating AI tools around 2020. But the levels of sophistication of the AI algorithms have developed so rapidly that it feels like I have moved from using a 3000-year-old ancient lyre to a Stradivarius violin in two short years.”

Source: AI art will become the new normal

The majority of companies developing the application-layer AI that’s driving the widespread adoption of the technology still rely on supervised learning, using large swaths of labeled training data. Despite the impressive feats of foundation models, we’re still in the early days of the AI revolution and numerous bottlenecks are holding back the proliferation of application-layer AI.

Source: Active learning is the future of generative AI: Here’s how to leverage it