Hanson and I talked about the idea of adding real intelligence to these evocative machines. Ben Goertzel, a well-known AI researcher and the CEO of SingularityNET, leads an effort to apply advances in machine learning to the software inside Hanson’s robots that allows them to respond to human speech. The AI behind Sophia can sometimes…
Now, generative AI is the potential kill shot, the one that could cause copyright owners to surrender their library of scripts, created over decades, in exchange for promised benefits that will never arrive. When it comes to generative AI and video, Silicon Valley only needs to hook one constituency— Hollywood executives. Once studios buy in,…
And it’s working. Aron Levitz, president of media and publishing platform Wattpad WEBTOON Studios, says access to that kind of data has empowered the platform’s writers and artists. “As a user, not only do you see how big the story is, how many subscribers it has, how many people have commented on it, how many…
The explosion of consumer-facing tools that offer generative AI has created plenty of debate: These tools promise to transform the ways in which we live and work while also raising fundamental questions about how we can adapt to a world in which they’re extensively used for just about anything. As with any new technology riding…
In some ways, it’s hard to understand how this misalignment happened. We created all this by ourselves, for ourselves. True, we’re by nature “carbon chauvinists,” as Tegmark put it: We like to think only flesh-and-blood machines like us can think, calculate, create. But the belief that machines can’t do what we do ignores a key…
In April, Elon Musk told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that he was starting a project to compete with ChatGPT and build “a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” Today, Musk unveiled that new artificial intelligence venture. It’s called xAI. The company’s spare landing page repeats that goal of understanding…
American action movie villains have always acted as a sort of paranoia litmus test, capturing a snapshot of the particular anxieties plaguing the country and its citizens at any given time. During the Cold War, movies like From Russia with Love, Rocky IV, and Red Dawn nodded at the public’s fear of wily Soviets, ostensibly…
Late last month, Meta quietly announced the results of an ambitious, near-global deliberative “democratic” process to inform decisions around the company’s responsibility for the metaverse it is creating. This was not an ordinary corporate exercise. It involved over 6,000 people who were chosen to be demographically representative across 32 countries and 19 languages. The participants…
While some workers may shun AI, the temptation to use it is very real for others. The field can be “dog-eat-dog,” Bob says, making labor-saving tools attractive. To find the best-paying gigs, crowd workers frequently use scripts that flag lucrative tasks, scour reviews of task requesters, or join better-paying platforms that vet workers and requesters….
What about cyber entities who operate below some arbitrary level of ability? We can demand that they be vouched for by some entity who is ranked higher, and who has a Soul Kernel based in physical reality. (I leave theological implications to others; but it is only basic decency for creators to take responsibility for…