AI

The interviewer asked, "Is that image real"? There's no way to tell. "What about this video?" It's hard to say. "You can't tell if that's real or fake either." No. Not without analyzing it. "Well, what about the prose? Did a human write this sentence?" It's possible, but it would not surprise me to learn that it was machine generated. "What about the voice in the video?" It's sonically perfect. I'd say 60/40 it's a machine, but I'd need to hear a few more sentences to be sure. "So, what you're saying is that I can't trust my eyes or my ears?" Yes. That's what I'm saying. "Is this the end of truth?" Continue Reading →

Facebook AI has announced Ego4D, a project that is trying to give AI the ability to understand and interact with the world from a first-person perspective (the way that humans do). AI typically learns from photos and videos captured in third-person, but next-generation AI will need to learn from videos that show the world from the center of action. Continue Reading →

I have often said, "Technology is neither good nor bad; that distinction is for people." Most of the exceptions to this statement are technologies specifically designed to cause harm. Is the robotic sniper dog good or bad? Continue Reading →

If you were Mark Zuckerberg and you wanted to get ahead of potential government regulation of your business, what would you fix first? Would you try to curtail social media addiction, protect privacy, reduce mental health risks, reduce weaponized information, eliminate hate speech, flag misinformation, deal with data governance, or address some other seemingly intractable problem? Here's what I'd fix first. Continue Reading →

You find yourself looking at an amazing image of a plaid shirt and wonder if you'll ever find socks to match. Soon, Google will be able to do that search for you. Continue Reading →

Cool or creepy? These are the opposite ends of the Shelly Palmer scale for evaluating AI-powered surveillance systems built into robots, IoT, and other tech. With my cool or creepy scale in mind, behold Amazon's Astro. Continue Reading →

Adam Mosseri, Facebook's Head of Instagram, just sat for a live interview on NBC's Today Show. He shouldn't have. Continue Reading →

OpenAI recently shut down a GPT-3 bot that was programmed to emulate a person's dead fiancée. Getting past the "Wow, that's weird," part of the story… how is this different from training an AI model to emulate a customer service representative? Continue Reading →

Have you seen more synthetic content recently? Continue Reading →

Technology is meaningless unless it changes the way we behave. As many of you have pointed out, my writing is increasingly focused on blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts and NFTs, decentralized finance (DeFi), Web 3.0, and the role AI and other nascent computational tools may play in the future. There's a simple reason. They are all behavior-changing technologies. At one end of the spectrum, there's the potential of an alternative, decentralized system for value exchange that challenges our understanding about the role of central governance. At the other end of the spectrum, this is nothing more than a fad which can be easily ignored. In my experience, no technology is ever "either, or." As you know, almost $8 trillion of wealth vaporized when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Those speculative losses didn't have anything to do with the underlying technology; it was all about the hype. With that in mind, think about this... Continue Reading →