“At some point you’ve got to wonder whether the bug is a feature.”
—Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, ponders xAI and Grok’s proclivity for surfacing Elon Musk-friendly and/or far-right sources, the Washington Post reports.
One more thing
The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI
Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could follow simple word prompts to depict fantasylands or whimsical chairs made of avocados.
But artists saw this technological wonder as a new kind of theft. They felt the models were effectively stealing and replacing their work.
Ben Zhao, a computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, was listening. He and his colleagues have built arguably the most prominent weapons in an artist’s arsenal against nonconsensual AI scraping: two tools called Glaze and Nightshade that add barely perceptible perturbations to an image’s pixels so that machine-learning models cannot read them properly.
But Zhao sees the tools as part of a battle to slowly tilt the balance of power from large corporations back to individual creators. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ If you’re ever tempted to try and recreate a Jackson Pollock painting, maybe you’d be best leaving it to the kids.
+ Scientists have discovered that lions have not one, but two distinct types of roars 🦁
+ The relentless rise of the quarter-zip must be stopped!
+ Pucker up: here’s a brief history of kissing 💋
