On December 27, 2023, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that the company committed willful copyright infringement through its generative AI tool ChatGPT. The Times claimed both that ChatGPT was unlawfully trained on vast amounts of text from its articles and that ChatGPT’s output contained language directly taken from its articles. […]

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Customer help desks are a top target of money-saving schemes involving generative AI, as I reported earlier in an attempted takedown of the chatbot. Now I’m convinced that automating customer service will bring the apocalypse somewhat nearer, not because machines will become sentient, but because the machines turn perfectly normal human beings into morons. It started […]

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Last week, reports emerged that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are using an artificial intelligence (AI) system called Habsora (Hebrew for “The Gospel”) to select targets in the war on Hamas in Gaza. The system has reportedly been used to find more targets for bombing, to link locations to Hamas operatives and to estimate likely […]

The post Israel’s Gaza assault is the future of AI-decided war appeared first on Asia Times.

The turmoil at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, bookended by the board of directors firing high-profile CEO Sam Altman on November 17, 2023, and rehiring him just four days later, has put a spotlight on artificial intelligence safety and concerns about the rapid development of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. AGI is loosely defined as human-level intelligence across […]

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Amid rising tensions over Taiwan, a looming nuclear arms race and tit-for-tat espionage allegations, the US and China have agreed to crucial talks on the future use of artificial intelligence (AI) in sensitive military areas. US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping affirmed the need for bilateral government talks to address the risks […]

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On November 4, X owner Elon Musk unveiled his new AI chatbot Grok: a sarcastic ChatGPT alternative supposedly “modeled” after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of Musk’s favorite books. The verb Grok means “to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with”. Science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein first coined the term, which is […]

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Interest in the incorporation of robots into security, policing and military operations has been steadily increasing over the last few years. It’s an avenue already being explored in both North America and Europe. Robot integration into these areas could be seen as analogous to the inclusion of dogs in policing and military roles in the […]

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is a label that can cover a huge range of activities related to machines undertaking tasks with or without human intervention. Our understanding of AI technologies is largely shaped by where we encounter them, from facial recognition tools and chatbots to photo editing software and self-driving cars. If you think of AI […]

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As artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize warfare, the US Department of Defense released a plan in July called the Data, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence Adoption Strategy, which aims to enable DOD and military decision-makers to use data, analytics and AI to achieve their objectives. The strategy envisages leveraging high-quality data, analytics and AI to make rapid, […]

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The world is infatuated with artificial intelligence (AI), and for good reason. AI systems can process vast quantities of data in a seemingly superhuman way. However, current AI systems rely on computers running complex algorithms based on artificial neural networks. These use huge amounts of energy, and use even more energy if you are trying […]

The post Nanowire ‘brain’ learns more efficiently than computer AI appeared first on Asia Times.

On Monday (October 30), US President Joe Biden released a wide-ranging and ambitious executive order on artificial intelligence (AI) – catapulting the US to the front of conversations about regulating AI. In doing so, the US is leapfrogging over other states in the race to rule over AI. Europe previously led the way with its […]

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The US Department of Defense’s (DoD) latest annual report to Congress on the state of China’s military and security highlights the rising role of artificial intelligence (AI) in Beijing’s military strategy, capabilities and modernization, raising new concerns about a possible AI arms race between the two superpowers. The report ‘s opening warns that China’s People’s […]

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In 1950, British computer scientist Alan Turing proposed an experimental method for answering the question: can machines think? He suggested if a human couldn’t tell whether they were speaking to an artificially intelligent (AI) machine or another human after five minutes of questioning, this would demonstrate AI has human-like intelligence. Although AI systems remained far […]

The post AI closer than ever to passing Turing test for ‘intelligence’ appeared first on Asia Times.

Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence. Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the US presidential election. Over the next seven years, a number of countries […]

The post AI’s coming threat to global electoral democracy appeared first on Asia Times.

Rapid developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) – algorithms used to create new text, pictures, audio, or other types of content – are concerning regulators globally.  These systems are often trained on personal and copyrighted data scraped from the internet, leading to privacy and intellectual property fears. They can also be used to generate harmful misinformation and disinformation. On August […]

The post The future of AI in China appeared first on Asia Times.

In June 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines by claiming the company’s LaMDA chatbot had achieved sentience. The software had the conversational ability of a precocious seven-year-old, Lemoine said, and we should assume it possessed a similar awareness of the world. LaMDA, later released to the public as Bard, is powered by a “large […]

The post ChatGPT isn’t conscious but future AIs might be appeared first on Asia Times.

Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton made headlines earlier this year when he raised concerns about the capabilities of AI systems. Speaking to CNN journalist Jake Tapper, Hinton said: If it gets to be much smarter than us, it will be very good at manipulation because it would have learned that from us. And there are […]

The post AI has learned how to deceive humans. Is the end nigh? appeared first on Asia Times.

China is rapidly closing in on the United States’ lead in artificial intelligence, with US underfunding and reluctance to incorporate civilian AI firms into the defense sector out of cost-saving, giving self-inflicted disadvantages. This month, Defense One reported that the Pentagon must act quickly to prevent losing its AI advantages to China’s well-funded advances, according to experts […]

The post Why US is lagging behind China in AI race appeared first on Asia Times.

The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe. Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit […]

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Microsoft and Google have recently made big investments in two of the most valuable companies in artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, has received a staggering investment of US$10 billion from Microsoft, while Google has invested $300 million in Anthropic. The companies’ financial support for AI has pushed an ongoing rivalry into the public […]

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