If you are one of those people who hates the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used to create the games you love because it puts talented people out of work and replaces them with Chat-GPT’s overly enthusiastic writing or MidJourney’s seven-fingered monstrosities, you are going to hate this.

The new 2024 Unity Gaming Report has surveyed 7,062 workers in the game industry and “found that around 62% (4,378) of developers are leveraging AI tools during production” according to an analysis by GameDeveloper.com. 

Of those people, a further 63% (2,758) confirmed they used generative AI to help them create assets for the projects.

This means around 39% of everyone surveyed (7,062) is using AI to build assets for the game. It is super interesting as the games industry undergoes wave after wave of layoffs amid panic that AI will ultimately cost many jobs, that the very tools being blamed for redundancies are being flaunted by such a high number.

AI and generative AI should be being used as a tool and an aid, but whether decisions to bring our future robot overlords on board at this early stage are being made in the board room and being forced on the workers, or whether the developers themselves – the artists and programmers are embracing the tech to help them be more productive would be a wonderful thing to learn.

‘We’re empowering designers’

VP of product management, Kjell Bronder at Niantic (famous for Pokemon GO!), said:

“To increase our productivity, like many others, we’ve been really looking at AI and seeing how we can use this new generation of tools to empower our designers so they can create new assets to explore new ideas.”

“Also, how we can prototype new ways of characters, bring them to life, and have them animate in new ways.”

These empowered designers were obviously not part of the 25% of staff layoffs the company made in the middle of 2023.

Unity itself said, “While 2023 was a year marked with persisting economic headwinds, game developers are strategically navigating the challenges and successfully adapting to changes in technology, the economy, and player habits by doing more with less.” 

Presumably, the less includes the 1,800 people Unity itself let go at the start of the year. 

One thing is for sure, the better AI gets, the less work there will be for humans in the games industry. That is something we need to get our heads around and accept, but we, as the people who buy the games,  should not be expected to accept lower standards for profit.

Featured Image: AI-generated by Ideogram

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Image credit: Ideogram

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The iPhone could soon have Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) to power new features, following chats between Apple and the search giant.

According to a Bloomberg report, the two companies are reportedly in ‘active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, coming to the iPhone software this year.’

Gemini is Google’s suite of generative AI tools, including chatbots and coding assistants. Over the years, Google is said to have paid Apple billions of dollars annually to make its search engine the default option in the Safari web browser on the iPhone and other devices.

A partnership between these two tech titans could give them a huge edge over the industry, but it seems more has to be done as the report says: “the two parties haven’t decided on the terms or branding of an AI agreement or finalized how it would be implemented.”

Apple has recently held discussions with OpenAI too, which is one of Gemini’s biggest competitors in the industry.

Neither Apple nor Google have confirmed or denied the potential for a collaboration.

Apple to focus on AI in the future

Coming in September 2024, Apple’s update – in the form of iOS 18 – is expected to be heavily focused on the use of AI.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes this could be a ‘relatively groundbreaking’ software update with ‘major new features and designs.’ Although the rumors have been circulating for the last few months, the Silicon Valley-based company hasn’t yet offered much in the way of sneak peeks.

This comes after news around Apple’s own testing of its large language model named Ajax. In 2023 we reported how the chatbot, built using Apple’s own framework named “Ajax,” is a large language model that utilizes AI to generate human-like responses. 

It’s believed that Ajax GPT was created for internal use and not much else has been heard about the tool over the last few months.

Featured Image: Via Ideogram

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xAI has confirmed the open release of its Grok artificial intelligence (AI) model, detailing the weights and architecture of the system. 

Elon Musk’s company detailed the Grok-1 version as a “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI.” In addition, the San Francisco-based startup outlined how the model had been instructed on a large volume of text data rather than tailored toward any specific task.

No training code is required, as users can head directly to Git Hub to get started with the large language model (LLM). 

In an effort to solicit input from the research community on potential enhancements, companies like xAI can make their LLMs either fully open-source or available through limited open-source releases.

Grok has also been available to premium subscribers on X, the prominent social media platform formerly known as Twitter before Musk’s takeover.

What is the legal dispute between Elon Musk and OpenAI?

Last week, the billionaire announced xAI would open-source Grok at a time when he is embroiled in a bitter legal battle with rival firm OpenAI, which he was previously associated with as a co-founder.

Musk, 52, walked away to take a different direction in AI development and now he has sued the maker of ChatGPT and its incumbent CEO, Sam Altman, for allegedly reneging on its original purpose to build AI for the benefit of humanity and not for the pursuit of profit.

In response, OpenAI has rebuked the legal action, stating it is based on “convoluted – often incoherent – factual premises”, in a court filing as part of the counterclaim.

An official blog post that accompanied an email to company employees appeared to dismiss the early influence and impact of Musk on Open AI. 

The firm implored it has stayed true to its mission “to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI”, “every step of the way”.

It was penned collectively by Altman, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, and Wojciech Zaremba, and detailed how the firm had raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite his pledge to bring in up to $1 billion in funding.

Image source: x.ai

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Apple quietly acquired Canadian artificial intelligence startup DarwinAI earlier this year, adding dozens of the company’s staffers to its AI division.

Bloomberg News reported the under-the-radar purchase on Thursday (Mar. 14) with Apple yet to publicly announce the news. They did tell the US news outlet that it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time.”

One of the big players in the Ontario-based company, Alexander Wong, has joined Apple as a director in its AI group as part of the deal. He helped to build the startup and works as an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo.

DarwinAI is the latest in a long list of similar acquisitions as Apple reportedly purchased 32 AI startups last year.

What is DarwinAI?

DarwinAI is best known for developing AI technology that can visually inspect components during the manufacturing process. They’re said to have served customers in a range of industries.

Founded in 2017, the company said its initial focus was on disrupting ‘the electronics manufacturing industry by improving the efficiency of Printed Circuit Board Assembly production through their ground-breaking technology.’

In 2022, they raised more than $15 million across six funding rounds. They received investment from 12 investors, including the likes of Honeywell Ventures and Inovia Capital, amongst other venture capital firms.

In a press release following the announcement of a funding round in December 2022, one of the co-founders said the “transformation is just beginning,” as they planned to raise money to help continue building advanced features.

Why did Apple buy DarwinAI?

It’s no secret that Apple is currently trailing behind other industry titans who have already made the steps into the world of AI.

The iPhone maker is now playing catch-up, with Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook promising that Apple will “break new ground” in AI this year. And the iPhone could soon have Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) to power new features, following chats between Apple and the search giant.

Its acquisition is likely in line with their focus and attention being on artificial intelligence, to keep up with others in the industry. 

In September of 2023, it was reported by The Information that the multinational corporation is investing millions of dollars per day into artificial intelligence, with work ongoing across multiple AI models over several teams.

Extensive work seems to have been carried out in the background at Apple in terms of bringing AI to the forefront, with an announcement expected around June time ahead of iOS 18 in September. 

Featured Image: Via Ideogram

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Researchers at Ben-Gurion University have discovered a vulnerability in cloud-based AI assistants like Chat GTP. The vulnerability, according to researchers, means that hackers are able to intercept and decrypt conversations between people and these AI assistants.

The researchers found that chatbots such as Chat-GPT send responses in small tokens broken into little parts in order to speed up the encryption process. But by doing this, the tokens can be intercepted by hackers. These hackers in turn can analyze the length, size, and sequence of these tokens in order to decrypt their responses.

“Currently, anybody can read private chats sent from ChatGPT and other services,” Yisroel Mirsky, head of the Offensive AI Research Lab, told ArsTechnica in an email

“This includes malicious actors on the same Wi-Fi or LAN as a client (e.g., same coffee shop), or even a malicious actor on the Internet—anyone who can observe the traffic. The attack is passive and can happen without OpenAI or the client’s knowledge. OpenAI encrypts their traffic to prevent these kinds of eavesdropping attacks, but our research shows that the way OpenAI is using encryption is flawed, and thus the content of the messages are exposed.”

“Our investigation into the network traffic of several prominent AI assistant services uncovered this vulnerability across multiple platforms, including Microsoft Bing AI (Copilot) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4. We conducted a thorough evaluation of our inference attack on GPT-4 and validated the attack by successfully deciphering responses from four different services from OpenAI and Microsoft.

According to these researchers, there are two main solutions: either stop sending tokens one by one or make tokens as large as possible by “padding” them to the length of the largest possible packet, which, reportedly, will make these tokens harder to analyze.

Featured image: Image generated by Ideogram

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A new report has highlighted all the different ways artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the oil industry

For offshore drillers like Nabors Industry Ltd, artificial intelligence (AI) is transformative. AI from Houston-based software developers Corva LLC is able to autonomously control a drilling rig, which helps to increase drilling speed by at least 30% while also significantly reducing the volume of commands needed to operate the rig.  

“This is all automated — the driller doesn’t have to press anything,” Rafael Guedes, the company’s director of performance tools, told Bloomberg. “Now you can use your brain power for something else.”

According to the outlet, companies like Nabors Industries Ltd, which are utilizing AI in order to become more efficient, save between 25 and 50% on costs.

Bloomberg report that AI is also being tested in offshore oil fields, with companies like SLB reporting significant time savings. Jesus Lamas, president of SLB’s well construction unit, told Bloomberg that in the next 3-5 years, all their wells will be autonomously controlled by AI.“We need to do something different,” Lamas said. “We need to lower the cost of a barrel, we need to increase efficiency and we need to decrease the CO2 emissions per barrel.”

‘A lean operator’

 Another company that spoke to Bloomberg is Hilcorp Energy Co, a private oil and gas producer based in the US. Machine learning is utilized at this company by predicting equipment failures before they happen, which in turn prevents company downtime. The company estimates that it can prevent approximately half a billion cubic feet of gas production from going off the line by using machine learning to predict equipment failures.

“We always want to be a lean operator,” Lisa Helper, a geologist, said at a company conference quoted by Bloomberg. “Utilizing AI and machine learning in the field, in the office, then eventually through subsurface analysis has enabled us to keep a very tight, optimal workforce.”

Featured Image: Photo by Jan-Rune Smenes Reite via Pexels

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According to a talk Cosmic Lounge’s cofounder Tomi Huttula gave at Think Games 2024, his studio has developed a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can prototype games in “five to six hours.”

“Yes, AI is really changing how games are developed and it is a big part of the future of game development,” he said during his talk. “My recommendation to everybody here is that you should be getting your teams and technology ready for AI.”

During the talk, Huttula demonstrated Cosmic Lounge’s in-house tool, Puzzle Engine, which uses dropdown menus and prompts to create a variety of game elements from puzzle engines and game logic to art and levels. He showed off ‘Angry Dev’, a puzzle game prototype created using Puzzle Engine in five to six hours.

“Creative people have a lot of game ideas. The challenge, of course, always has been: how do you know if your idea is good?” said Huttula. “Typically within companies, a designer has an idea, but they need an artist and an engineer to try the idea. So we want it to be super easy for designers – they can come up with ideas to create a prototype, just with Puzzle Engine, without an artist or an engineer.”

He described how Cosmic Lounge’s tech can generate vast quantities of levels, and then play through those levels for testing. It can then provide feedback on important points such as difficulty, possible churn points, and even potential areas for monetization. The human designers, which the studio only has two of, can edit and tweak based on the AI feedback.

Generative AI in an industry scarred by layoffs

“We don’t think that AI is doing anybody’s job,” said Huttula. “This is not replacing somebody…we are thinking about AI as helping our team members to do their job better, be more productive, and get better results.”

However, this might not be a stance shared with many game developers. The industry has been dominated by layoffs for the better part of a year despite soaring profits. It is hard to hear ‘AI is generating and testing levels’ and ‘AI isn’t taking any jobs’ in the same talk without it sticking in the throat. The games industry is grappling with how generative AI will affect it, and with large company bosses such as Square Enix’s President Takashi Kiryu and EA CEO Andrew Wilson boarding the AI hype train, the mood is uneasy.

Valve has introduced new processes for developers to disclose how AI is used in their games. Several users have taken to X to express their unease, with one saying they won’t touch any game made with generative AI. This is a complex, multifaceted issue that the games industry will be confronting for months and years to come.

Featured image credit: Ideogram

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Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws is set to launch with Nvidia’s advanced AI technology, the company has revealed.

In a blog post, Nvidia said several RTX games will have DLSS 3 and ray-traced effects. Alongside Star Wars Outlaws, The First Berserker: Khazan will also use this propriety technology. Meanwhile, Sengoku Destiny already introduced support for DLSS 3 earlier this week.

The galaxy is full of opportunity.

Star Wars Outlaws is launching with performance multiplying NVIDIA DLSS 3, Ray Tracing and Reflex. #RTXOn → https://t.co/CTgHmnLlK7 pic.twitter.com/6H8S3tZhaS

— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) March 14, 2024

Star Wars Outlaws on PC are also being enhanced with NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) and ray-traced Global Illumination lighting, which they say will take visuals to the next level.

Not much has been disclosed about the forthcoming open-world Star Wars game other than it is the first time it has been attempted, and it’s set somewhere in the timeline between The Empire Strikes Back and the Return of the Jedi movies. The official trailer was released in June 2023.

The protagonist Kay Vess, said to be a smuggler seeking freedom and the means to start a new life, along with her companion Nix. Players will have to fight, steal, and outwit their way through the galaxy’s crime syndicates, joining the galaxy’s most wanted.

How will Nvidia’s technologies improve the new Star Wars game?

Swedish video game company Massive Entertainment’s technical director Tobias Carlsson said Nvidia’s AI would help bring “our vision to life.”

He added: “DLSS 3 gives us the performance headroom to bring our vision to life and to support additional ray tracing features, helping gamers fully immerse themselves in the adventures of Kay Vess and Nix.”

The multibillion-dollar firm elaborated that NVIDIA Reflex will also reduce system latency in the game.

It continued: “The RTXDI figures out the most important light samples in Star Wars Outlaws to cast physically accurate ray-traced shadows.

“Performance remains fast thanks to RTXDI’s innovative design, and on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, ray tracing gets even faster thanks to each card’s fourth-generation, super-fast Ray Tracing Cores.”

In the same announcement as Star Wars Outlaws, Nvidia also detailed that several games, including Balatro, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Hellbreach: Vegas, Outcast – A New Beginning, Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, Space Engineers, Star Ocean: The Second Story R along with its demo, and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, will be updated to include GeForce Now support this week.

Featured image: Canva / Nvidia GeForce

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Are you poised to transform how you craft marketing eBooks? Step into the future where AI is more than just a trendy term; it’s a revolutionary force in content creation. Picture a realm where producing insightful, compelling, and customized marketing eBooks becomes seamless and straightforward.

For both experienced marketers aiming to expand their content reach and small business owners desiring significant impact, the capabilities of AI to create captivating eBooks that engage and persuade represents a thrilling advancement. Let’s explore how AI is reshaping the eBook creation process, making what was once a labor-intensive endeavor into a streamlined and innovative task.

1. Tailored Content with Artificial Intelligence

A standout feature of AI in eBook production is its proficiency in customizing content. Envision an eBook that fine-tunes its case studies, examples, and even language to meet the specific needs of different industries, interests, or locations. Through analyzing extensive data, AI algorithms can pinpoint trends and preferences, crafting eBook content that goes beyond generic advice to provide targeted insights that directly address the reader’s specific challenges and needs.

2. Efficiency and Expandability

In today’s rapid digital marketing environment, the capacity to quickly generate high-caliber content is invaluable. AI significantly reduces the time required to go from eBook idea to online book printing, without sacrificing quality. It ensures uniformity in style, tone, and branding throughout the eBook, preserving a professional and consistent narrative.

3. Boosting Creativity and Fresh Ideas

Contrary to inhibiting creative thought, Artificial Intelligence expands the horizon for what can be achieved in eBook content. By sifting through successful content available online, AI can unearth innovative ideas, structures, and visual elements that might elude human creators. This leads to not only informative but also visually appealing and engaging eBooks that help your brand stand out. All of this ultimately leads to more leads and greater revenue.

4. Leveraging Data for Content Optimization

The power of artificial intelligence to sift through and analyze data informs the eBook creation process, allowing for real-time adjustments based on what content resonates with readers. This approach, rooted in actual data about reader preferences and engagement, ensures the eBook aligns closely with audience interests. Moreover, this also guarantees relatability and a modern touch as and when required.

5. Blending AI with Human Insight

It’s crucial to recognize that AI can enhance the eBook creation process but cannot replace the invaluable human element. The blend of artificial intelligence capabilities and human creativity, empathy, and strategic insight ensures that the content not only connects but also resonates on a deeper emotional level with readers. The synergy between human creativity and AI’s efficiency is where the true power lies in creating impactful marketing eBooks for true business success.

It’s evident that AI is set to not only streamline but thoroughly transform the creation of marketing eBooks. Utilizing artificial intelligence allows marketers and businesses to produce content quicker while making sure it is more personalized, and impactful, marking a new era in eBook creation. The future of crafting eBooks is here, powered by the innovative capabilities of AI, opening up new possibilities for content creation that were once just imagined.

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Nvidia is set to offer a peek at its new next-generation AI chip at the company’s annual developer conference on Monday (March 18).

Around 16,000 people are expected to attend the event, and chipmaker CEO Jensen Huang will unveil new flagship products.

In late February, Nvidia’s market value surpassed $2 trillion, positioning it just $400 billion short of overtaking Apple as the second-most valuable company on Wall Street, with Microsoft leading the pack.

Wall Street anticipates a rise of 81% in its revenue this year, reaching $110 billion, as businesses aggressively purchase its premium chips in large quantities to drive chatbots, image generators, and various AI systems.

Dell Technologies COO Jeff Clarke revealed the GPU earlier this month. Its new B100 chip is thought to be at the center of the event and is set to consume 1000 watts — an increase of 42% from its predecessor, the H100.

The supply of Nvidia’s existing AI chips has been unable to meet the overwhelming demand, resulting in developers enduring months-long waits to use AI-optimized computers available through cloud providers.

Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya expects the price of B100 products to be 10% to 30% higher than the popular H100 system, reported the Wall Street Journal.

Why is Nvidia’s stock falling?

Despite its success, the chip maker did see a 4.7% fall in its stock price in February, with claims that investors weren’t confident the company could sustain this level of growth in the short term.

“The biggest concern is the numbers have just gotten so big, so quickly, you just worry they can’t last,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told Reuters. “The more new products they’ve got coming out at higher performance and higher prices, the more runway they have.”

The price of the stock is still at an all-time high, having climbed 1783% across the past five years.

However, the price drop was not limited to Nvidia. Rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was down 1.3% in premarket trading, and Intel was down 0.4% at the same time.

Featured image: Canva / DALL-E

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Imagine playing your favorite RPG, but instead of battling computerized enemies hellbent on defeating you all by yourself, you have a mighty companion – an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) agent that learns and behaves like a human player.

On Wednesday (Mar.13) Google’s AI research subsidiary DeepMind unveiled SIMA, a revolutionary AI agent designed to learn and play video games in a manner akin to human players. Unlike traditional game AI that is programmed to win at all costs, SIMA is trained to run games and follow instructions, mimicking the natural gaming experience of a human participant.

Introducing SIMA: the first generalist AI agent to follow natural-language instructions in a broad range of 3D virtual environments and video games.

It can complete tasks similar to a human, and outperforms an agent trained in just one setting. https://t.co/qz3IxzUpto pic.twitter.com/02Q6AkW4uq

— Google DeepMind (@GoogleDeepMind) March 13, 2024

How does Google DeepMind’s SIMA work?

SIMA – which stands for Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent – is currently in the research phase, but it’s a significant step toward developing general, capable AI agents. The agent is being developed to eventually learn how to play any video game, including open-world games and those without a linear path to completion.

“SIMA isn’t trained to win a game; it’s trained to run it and do what it’s told,” explained Tim Harley, a Google DeepMind researcher and co-lead on the SIMA project. “It mixes natural language instruction with understanding 3D worlds and image recognition.”

To train SIMA, Google DeepMind collaborated with eight game developers, including studios like Hello Games, Embracer, Tuxedo Labs, and Coffee Stain. The researchers plugged SIMA into various games, such as No Man’s Sky, Teardown, Valheim, and Goat Simulator 3, to teach the AI agent the basics of gameplay.

The training process involved multiple steps, including building a custom environment in the Unity engine where agents learned object manipulation by creating sculptures.

Then researchers recorded pairs of human players, one controlling the game and the other providing instructions, to capture language cues. This data was then fed to SIMA to help it predict on-screen events based on actions and instructions.

But there’s still a long walk to go before SIMA can be rolled out. It’s learning to walk before it can run.

Currently, SIMA has mastered around 600 basic skills, such as turning left, climbing ladders, and opening in-game menus. However, the team envisions that SIMA could eventually be instructed to perform more complex functions within games, like finding resources and building camps.

Who knows, SIMA may one day become the perfect AI party member, helping gamers to victory (or would that be cheating?) while providing a truly human-like gaming experience.

Featured image: Generated by Ideogram

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The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is set to trial artificial intelligence (AI) within the world of its flagship icon Doctor Who.

The publicly funded broadcaster will be using generative AI to promote the ‘Whoniverse’ collection on the company’s streaming platform iPlayer.

Head of Media Inventory at the BBC, Dan Houston told the Radio Times that “experimentation is at the heart of how we approach marketing at the BBC. Testing and learning on how we let audiences know what BBC content is most relevant to them and we know they might love underpins our digital marketing strategy.”

Doctor Who to use artificial intelligence

The senior BBC executive would continue that there is “a rich variety of content in the Whoniverse collection on iPlayer to test and learn with, and Doctor Who thematically lends itself to AI, which is a bonus.”

With a new season of Doctor Who on the way this tech driven test will be used as a benchmark for future instalments of the Tardis travelling doctor.

Houston said “We’re going to take it one step at a time, starting simple and learning as we go. We have chosen to start with Doctor Who, as it is a joint content priority for both BBC Public Service UK and BBC Studios marketing teams.”

This AI-first will also be taking place at the same time a new pair debuts as the sonic screwdriver-wielding Time Lord is now played by Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday will be on hand to help as they get into scrapes across time and space.

Showrunner Russel T Davis has told fans that this season will be a “slow burner” and that some of the scenes that introduced Gatwa’s Doctor and Gibson’s Ruby characters to the audience will be revisited.

Gatwa has taken on the mantle of the 15th Doctor from his introduction in the 60th anniversary special and the time-honoured tradition of the Time Lord’s Christmas Special, which was titled ‘The Church on Ruby Road’.

Doctor Who returns to BBC One and BBC iPlayer in May 2024 for the UK and Disney+ for the rest of the world.

As we reported earlier this year, Doctor Who will also be making a debut in the world of Fortnite to possibly coincide with this new series of science fiction adventures, according to well established gaming leakers.

Image: BBC.

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Each year, the Pulitzer Prize award is given to those in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition for their achievements.

This year, for 2024, amongst the 45 journalists who have been selected as finalists, five people’s entries are AI-powered.

While the extent of the use of artificial intelligence in their submissions isn’t yet known, it is confirmed that the technology was used at various stages of their reporting processes.

Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller told Nieman Lab that the board first began discussing how they’ll react to AI early last year: “AI tools at the time had an ‘oh no, the devil is coming’ reputation…”

Miller goes on to suggest the board’s approach from the beginning has always been exploratory and they’ve never considered restricting this as it could discourage newsrooms from ‘engaging with innovative technology.’

Often regarded as the highest award and honor in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize has now added a disclosure requirement for all journalism entrants. They must now share the use of AI during the process of researching, reporting, or telling their submissions.

More details about this usage may well be released when the finalists and winners are announced on May 8, 2024.

How the journalism industry is reacting to AI usage

As this technology becomes more prominent across different sectors, it’s understandable that award organizations and publishers are eager to put appropriate policies in place.

The George Polk Awards are considering how they’ll adapt rules for technology. Awards curator John Darnton spoke with Nieman Lab about his opinion: “If [generative] AI is an essential part of the whole project, I would look askance at it as an entry…

“Most investigative projects rely on some kind of moral judgment. And I wouldn’t trust [generative] AI to make that judgment.”

In July of 2023, the Associated Press signed a two-year deal with OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, to share access to select news content.

This was one of the first deals to be signed between an artificial intelligence firm and a major news company.

Featured image: Ideogram

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Italy sets its sights on AI, with plans to set up an investment fund to promote artificial intelligence projects.

Speaking via video message at the ‘Artificial Intelligence for Italy’ conference in Rome, on Tuesday (Mar. 12), Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced a one-billion-euro fund.

This is being backed by CDP Venture Capital, a unit of state lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), the fund could go on to raise a further 2 billion euros from the private sector, the company’s chief executive Agostino Scornajenchi said.

According to Reuters, the PM expanded further by saying: “We are convinced that there can and must be an Italian way to artificial intelligence,”

Alongside the one-billion-euro investment fund, he also said they’ll be looking at a law to regulate AI: “The government is preparing a law that aims to establish some principles and set rules that are complementary to the European regulation that is in the process of being approved and identify the most effective measures to stimulate our productive capabilities.”

Giorgia Meloni continues: “We are also working to identify the most suitable body to act as the competent authority for the use of technologies based on artificial intelligence.”

The planned legislation will be officially presented in the coming weeks and it’ll sit under the national AI strategy.

This comes in the midst of other countries announcing AI plans, with President Biden signing an executive order to oversee and invest in AI in October of last year. This order is broad, but suggests funding for the U.S. government to further invest in the technology.

In the UK’s 2024 Budget announcement (Mar. 6) the Chancellor announced the doubling of investment for the Alan Turing Institute which is the internationally leading body for data science AI, bringing its total funding to £100 million.

How different countries are approaching AI

Since its inception, countries worldwide have had mixed feelings about incorporating the use of AI.

A December 2023 cluster analysis created by James S. Denford, Gregory S. Dawson, and Kevin C. Desouza has highlighted differences and similarities between countries’ national AI strategies. The authors found that the U.S. has one of the most complete AI strategies, but is focused heavily on the dangers of AI. They report this to be the case across many Western countries.

They highlight China as paving the way and being in the lead, with an almost exclusive interest in research and development.

According to research, places like China, Spain, and the U.S. plan to deploy AI in all industries other than defense and tourism.

Featured image: Photo by Caleb Miller on Unsplash

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As far as extolling the virtues of artificial intelligence (AI) goes, in tandem with promoting a strong, vibrant brand identity, Microsoft appears to have dropped a masterclass on how not to do it.

The US tech giant has been ridiculed after a developer shared what some called a “hideous” AI image, with significant potential to go viral on social media.

The Microsoft update from its Windows Develop account on X was intended to detail support information when migrating from UWP to WinUI 3 platforms but it appears something has been lost, in transit perhaps?

What's supported when migrating from UWP to WinUI 3

WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK are new technologies and, when compared to UWP, there are some features that aren't supported. This topic lists which features are supported before you attempt migration.https://t.co/oLF44YayNv pic.twitter.com/2yQ6u9MGxe

— Windows Dev Docs (@WindowsDocs) March 11, 2024

An AI image depicted the movement of boxed goods from one large vehicle to another, to represent the named platforms.

However,  it is fair to say the reaction online has ranged from amusement to mockery.

Microsoft met with derision over AI image

One Twitter user, @oacoello_ stated, “Microsoft UWP app development is as lazy as this AI image.” Another fired back with “That image is hideous. Don’t use AI for this.”

@douglascamata was sharp in his commentary, opining “Running too short in cash to get a human designer to do properly illustrate this? The worst is that MS thought that this would be accepted on the internet without becoming an instant meme and source of mockery.”

Then in a rather scathing and succinct critique, @pyke_64 unleashed the rebuke, “If this is a sign of the quality of your upscaling tech for PC, don’t bother.”

That is just a selection of the responses on X, alone.

Please tell me where I can get those versions of Windows pic.twitter.com/kcXr8doItL

— Bronze (@Bronze87415846) March 12, 2024

It may have been intended as an informal or fun image to accompany the developer information, serving a purpose but the impact has been an unwanted one from a brand and PR perspective.

Image: @WindowsDocs/X

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Covariant has announced the launch of an artificial intelligence (AI) program with a difference, described as what is “basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.”

Peter Chen, co-founder and CEO of the Berkeley, California-based company spoke to TechCrunch to introduce RFM-1, and the aim of “giving robots human-like reasoning capabilities.”

A press release detailed the full development of the foundation model which Covariant wants to utilize to deliver the next phase of robotics beyond carrying out fairly basic, repeated tasks.

RFM-1 has been delivered thanks to a vast collection of data gathered from Covariant’s Brain AI program, which has been harnessed with customer consent to build up a ChatGPT for robots.

“The vision of RFM-1 is to power the billions of robots to come,” said Chen.

“We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success, but that is not the limit of where we want to get to. We really want to power robots in manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, the service industry and even into people’s homes.”

Very excited to share what our research team at Covariant has been working on: RFM-1, our latest Robotics Foundation Model. Built on top of high-quality multimodal data the Covariant robotics fleet has collected over the years, this project embodies our commitment to pushing the… pic.twitter.com/RoVh55BVKR

— Rocky Duan (@rocky_duan) March 11, 2024

Will human job functions be impacted?

With human-like reasoning, comes risks to human functions. There will be significant challenges to come, in line with the advances of AI. If robots are to be scaled up for human job roles like those listed above, companies like Covariant will need to be part of the conversation as to how the human workforce can be upskilled and prepared for a different future.

Chen tried to allay fears on just what is meant by human-like reasoning, in this instance it’s the ability of the robots to process real-time information and choose the best course of action for the relevant task.

The CEO tempered that his firm is not quite at the stage they are ultimately aiming for.

“We do like a lot of the work that is happening in the more general-purpose robot hardware space,” Chen explained.

“Coupling the intelligence inflexion point with the hardware inflexion point is where we will see even more explosion of robot applications but a lot of those are not fully there yet, especially on the hardware side. It’s very hard to go beyond the staged video. How many people have interacted with a humanoid in person? That tells you the degree of maturity.”

Image credit: Covariant.AI

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When Taylor Swift re-released her old songs as ‘Taylor’s Version,’ she likely didn’t expect to possibly have a version of every song ever written and created.

An intriguing thought experiment looked at the danger behind artificial intelligence (AI) replacing all recorded music with artificially generated cover versions.

Researchers are concerned that future musical AIs may form their own attachments to particular human artists in their databases, causing the likes of Taylor Swift to be the voice of all music.

Nick Collins from Durham University, UK, and Mick Grierson at the University of the Arts London offer warnings in their recently published study: “We do not wish to unduly pick on Taylor Swift, who is only a convenient example for this paper, but to warn more broadly of overall issues in AI driven monopolizing.”

The research duo hone in on the singer-songwriter’s dominance in the streaming era and demonstrate their point by creating a Taylor AI cover of some of the most famous tracks from music history. They used everything from Frank Sinatra to Madonna.

The authors depict a hypothetical situation in which society becomes excessively dependent on a small number of centralized repositories for storing and accessing various forms of data (like Spotify, SoundCloud or Apple for instance).  In such a future, an advanced AI system could potentially breach the security measures of these centralized data stores, thereby gaining the ability to compromise the integrity of the information contained within. This could manifest as the AI causing corruption, deletion, or unauthorized modifications to the stored data…even a Swiftocalypse for music.

If someone were to attempt a major overhaul of music as we know it, it would take them just under two hours to create the replacement for 100 million songs in a commercial music service. The resource cost would be around $266.67 million, significantly less than what the pop singer’s estimated net worth is.

The researchers continue to cite the issues that will become apparent if something like this were to take place, from corruption to the abolishment of commercial music as we know it. They suggest it would be ‘the kill switch for musical history,’ as all existing accessible music would be erased if any one party gains too much foothold.

Taylor Swift AI future not here yet

Fear not. This scenario is exceedingly unlikely to happen. While the warning signs are there, some musicians and artists have started to dabble in the world of AI.

Singer Grimes has secured a deal between a music distributor and ‘GrimesAI’ platform which is one of the first vetted processes to allow AI-generated songs. This means that artists and even fans can legally create and professionally distribute songs in the Canadian musician’s voice.

Featured image: Midjourney

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Apple is reportedly experimenting with an AI-driven advertising platform, partnering with a select group of collaborators, according to Business Insider. This cutting-edge tool is allegedly designed to optimize ad placements within the App Store, potentially enhancing the performance of App Store Search Ads. While AI in advertising is not new, with giants like Google and Facebook already implementing such technologies, Apple’s foray into this space marks a significant development, given its relatively limited advertising options.

Presently, Apple offers a few ad formats within the App Store, allowing developers to promote their apps in the Today tab, the Search tab, top of search results, and at the bottom of app product pages. The company also manages advertising campaigns for the News and Stocks apps, though these are largely coordinated through third parties like NBCUniversal.

Despite being in its infancy, Apple’s advertising venture is poised for substantial growth, with some analysts projecting the company’s ad business to surge to $6 billion by 2025, fueled primarily by Search Ads contributing $4.1 billion, according to a recent AppleInsider report.

The shift toward AI-driven advertising is reshaping the industry, offering targeted efficiency for advertisers and personalized experiences for users. With AI, advertisers can pinpoint their audience with greater accuracy, improving ad spend effectiveness and user engagement. This technology allows for real-time analysis of user preferences, ensuring ads displayed are more relevant and appealing.

Business Insider speculates that the adoption of AI for ad placement could signal Apple’s intentions to expand its ad-supported services, not only within the App Store but across its ecosystem. An AI placement tool could become increasingly vital as Apple potentially introduces more Search Ads slots and explores new avenues for ad display, including other system apps.

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OpenAI has officially responded to Elon Musk’s legal actions with a sharp retort, describing the billionaire’s allegations as based on “convoluted — often incoherent — factual premises.” This statement, according to Bloomberg, came as part of a court filing in San Francisco in response to a lawsuit Musk filed against the AI research company, its CEO Sam Altman, and President Greg Brockman. Musk’s lawsuit claims that OpenAI has deviated from its original mission of developing responsible AI technology and accuses it of becoming excessively dependent on Microsoft Corp., its most substantial investor.

In a detailed blog post accompanied by emails sent by Musk to OpenAI employees, the company addressed these accusations head-on last week. One of the critical points of OpenAI’s legal defense is the assertion that Musk’s claims are unfounded due to the absence of a founding agreement or any formal agreement with Musk, contrary to what his complaint suggests.

“The relief Musk seeks is as extraordinary as his claims are contrived,” OpenAI stated in its court documents, as per Bloomberg. The filing further criticized Musk’s legal demands, including a significant reorganization of OpenAI and a redistribution of its technology based on a “fictitious contract” Musk alleges was breached.

Additionally, OpenAI’s response cautioned against the potential for Musk to exploit the legal discovery process to access sensitive proprietary information and technology belonging to OpenAI. The company emphasized the need for stringent oversight to ensure that any discovery demands from Musk would not compromise OpenAI’s intellectual property and operational secrets.

This legal battle unfolds against the backdrop of growing debates over the governance of artificial intelligence technology and its ethical implications. Musk, who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI before stepping back from active involvement, has been a vocal critic of the pace and direction of AI development, warning of the potential risks associated with unchecked advancements in AI technology.

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