Reuters: “Swedish police should be allowed to use real-time, AI-powered face-recognition to combat crime, Sweden’s government proposed on Thursday, as it seeks new tools to stop sometimes violent offences rocking the Nordic country in recent years.”
Sweden’s government wants police to use AI face-recognition
Recent News
Google builds AI animal recognition tool
TCD: “A new artificial intelligence model could make it significantly easier for researchers to track and monitor wildlife across the globe.”
“Google recently released SpeciesNet, an open-source AI that can be used to identify animal species. The AI analyzes photos from camera traps — digital cameras that are triggered when infrared sensors capture motion — and can quickly identify species from the photos.”
Minecraft developer rejects AI
“It seems like you don’t need to worry about generative AI (artificial intelligence) worming its way into the hit open-world survival game Minecraft.” reports TechRadar.
“According to IGN, Minecraft Vanilla game director Agnes Larsson discussed the issue of AI in game development at a recent event and wasn’t too enthusiastic about the prospect. ‘Here for us, just like Minecraft is about creativity and creating,’ they said.”
It follows a similar trend recently noted at Nintendo.
Zuckerberg approved illegally downloading material to train Llama
Futurism: “In January, Meta lost a huge fight with a group of authors who sued the company for using their books to train its AI. The case uncovered the fact that Meta had illegally downloaded an infamous pirate library, LibGen, to procure millions of legally protected texts. Those books were then fed to Meta’s LLM, Llama, after software engineers got approval from the Zuck himself. In other words, one of the largest companies in the world didn’t even bother to pay for a single copy of each book it used to build its AI.”
AI is better than humans at making meme captions
“A new study examining meme creation found that AI-generated meme captions on existing famous meme images scored higher on average for humor, creativity, and ‘shareability’ than those made by people. Even so, people still created the most exceptional individual examples.” reports Ars Technica.
OpenAI researcher thinks AI could have arrived decades ago
“Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning research at OpenAI, says certain forms of ‘reasoning’ AI models could’ve arrived 20 years earlier had researchers ‘known [the right] approach’ and algorithms.” reports TechCrunch.
“‘There were various reasons why this research direction was neglected,’ Brown said during a panel at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose on Wednesday. ‘I noticed over the course of my research that, OK, there’s something missing. Humans spend a lot of time thinking before they act in a tough situation. Maybe this would be very useful [in AI].'”
Fully AI-generated newspaper turns out to be horrific
“The image reeks of generative artificial intelligence. The warped, watercolor-esque style. Reuters spelled ‘Redutrs’ and El País with an accent over the wrong letter.” writes Alex Mahadevan, at Poynter.
“It’s currently the main image of the Italian newspaper Il Foglio’s article about AI use in newsrooms — which was written with AI. The image was created with ChatGPT, according to the cutline, as were several others in a new insert in its daily editions called Foglio AI.”
AI is ‘Alien Intelligence’ – Harvard Professor
Popular Mechanics: “The human brain is a marvel of neurons firing electrical impulses through complex networks of neural pathways. It can also be notoriously slow when it comes to figuring out new solutions for complicated tasks like designing new computer chips. That’s why a research team from Princeton University and the Indian Institute of Technology decided to hand the job over to artificial intelligence.”
“What the AI came up with was almost alien.”
Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth diverts bots to nonsense honeypot
“Cloudflare, one of the biggest network internet infrastructure companies in the world, has announced AI Labyrinth, a new tool to fight web-crawling bots that scrape sites for AI training data without permission. The company says in a blog post that when it detects “inappropriate bot behavior,” the free, opt-in tool lures crawlers down a path of links to AI-generated decoy pages that ‘slow down, confuse, and waste the resources’ of those acting in bad faith.” reports The Verge.
People are using Grok for fact-checking
TechCrunch: “Some users on Elon Musk’s X are turning to Musk’s AI bot Grok for fact-checking, raising concerns among human fact-checkers that this could fuel misinformation.”
UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT as an advisor
“The UK’s technology secretary, Peter Kyle, has asked ChatGPT for advice on why the adoption of artificial intelligence is so slow in the UK business community – and which podcasts he should appear on.” New Scientist reports.
Studio Ghibli and fans disgusted by OpenAI’s new image generator
Forbes: “The launch of OpenAI’s new image generator, powered by GPT-4o, has flooded the internet with Studio Ghibli-inspired images in a trend that, ironically, goes directly against the ethos of Studio Ghibli.”
“Animator Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, famously delivered a passionate condemnation of AI that is often quoted by critics of the technology.”
NatWest teams up with OpenAI to improve customer service
“NatWest (NWG.L), opens new tab and OpenAI have joined forces to enhance the lender’s digital assistants and customer support processes using artificial intelligence, in the first collaboration of its kind with a UK-headquartered bank.” reports Reuters.
Nintendo wants to stay original by rejecting AI
Creative Bloq: Amid the growing AI art trend, Nintendo stands apart. While other household names embrace the use of AI to enhance game development and improve user experience, Nintendo holds fast in its pursuit of player connection, creativity and originality. Spearheaded by the vision of Shigeru Miyamoto, this decision exemplifies Nintendo’s commitment to offering unique experiences in a rapidly evolving market. It’s a reason why Nintendo Switch 2 is one of the year’s most-anticipated releases.
New game dev platform launches with AI testing
“Razer is getting into AI with a new developer platform called Wyvrn. It encompasses dev-focused automation tools like the Razer AI QA Copilot to assist with quality assurance / game testing and the AI Gamer Copilot (formerly called Project Ava) for real-time tips and guides via voice assistant while playing games.” reports The Verge.
Film to be dubbed entirely with AI voice and mouth movements
“A foreign language sci-fi movie is headed to U.S. movie theaters this spring, but audiences won’t have to groan about subtitles. For the first time, an international feature film will look and sound as if it was made in English thanks to artificial intelligence.” reports Variety.
Anthropic introduces web searching via Claude
“Anthropic’s AI-powered chatbot, Claude, can now search the web — a capability that had long eluded it.” reports TechCrunch.
“Web search is available now in preview for paid Claude users in the U.S., Anthropic said in its blog, with support for free users and additional countries coming soon.”
New AI prediction model can replace weather supercomputers
Independent: Cambridge scientists have made a major breakthrough in weather forecasting after developing a new AI prediction model that is tens of times better than current systems.
New Scientist: “Weather forecasting has, since the 1950s, relied on physics-based models that extrapolate from observations made using satellites, balloons and weather stations. But these calculations, known as numerical weather prediction (NWP), are extremely intensive and rely on vast, expensive and energy-hungry supercomputers.”
Google’s AI Overviews will soon give health advice
“Google’s crappy ‘AI Overviews’ regularly spits out dangerous and incorrect answers — and now it’s being entrusted with medical advice.” writes Futurism.
“In a self-congratulatory blog post, Google’s chief health officer Karen DeSalvo claimed that ‘recent health-focused advancements on Gemini models’ and ‘our best-in-class quality and ranking systems’ will allow the janky feature to ‘cover thousands more health topics.'”
Student builds tool to find which AI model is the best Minecrafter
TechCrunch: “As conventional AI benchmarking techniques prove inadequate, AI builders are turning to more creative ways to assess the capabilities of generative AI models. For one group of developers, that’s Minecraft, the Microsoft-owned sandbox-building game.”
“The website Minecraft Benchmark (or MC-Bench) was developed collaboratively to pit AI models against each other in head-to-head challenges to respond to prompts with Minecraft creations. Users can vote on which model did a better job, and only after voting can they see which AI made each Minecraft build.”