Synthetic Content, Trust, and Common Sense
Last week saw the announcement of the world’s first AI news anchor. Released by China’s Xinhua news service, this artificial reporter highlights one of the most interesting and alarming ways in which AI stands to alter the world — the creation of synthetic content. This newsletter takes a look at the opportunities and ethical challenges such new content can offer to us.
We’ve been hard at work this last week on our upcoming AI Ethics primer, which gives you your ‘need to know’ introduction to the fascinating world of ethics in AI. Stay tuned for more!
Read on to hear more on the war against Deepfakes, ethics in AI education, imbuing machines with common sense, and tips on using AI in parental pranking.
Public Engagement
Xinhua’s use of an AI to synthesise their regular newsman Qiu Hao highlights the advance of these technologies. Though scary to some, SpeechKit at least welcomes the potential of such content to ‘inform a generation addicted to audio’.
Knowledge Structuring, Trust
In the Age of AI, Is Seeing Still Believing?
Given our strong reliance on visual information, the rise of synthesised visual content poses huge challenges for trust in society and politics. This is a fascinating article on the looming problem of Deepfakes, and highlights attempts at DARPA to identify ‘manipulation indicators’ for AI synthesised content.
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Knowledge Structuring, Trust
I Used Artificial Intelligence to Trick My Mom
Further illustrating the power of artificial intelligence in synthesising realistic content, a journalist uses AI to trick his own mother by generating a message in his voice.
AI Safety, Human Meaning
Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning
Despite the great hype and many successes of AIs in recent years, it is important to remember that AIs still struggle to understand situations in which they act — leading to comparatively easy ways of fooling them. Trustworthy AI requires some sort of ‘common sense’ contextual knowledge about the world in which it operates — and until then, we must not place too much reliance on these machines.
Educational Impact
Colleges Grapple with Teaching the Technology and Ethics of AI
Universities in the US are adapting to the need for courses on artificial intelligence and ethics — we hope the trend continues!
