The AI ​​arms race begins. During the first week of February, Google announce Bard, its ChatGPT competitor, will build it directly into Google search. got cool Wrong fact In the first promotional video that Google shared for him, this caused the company’s stock to plummet, causing a loss of more than $100 billion in its market value.

Less than 24 hours after Google’s initial announcement, Microsoft He said that it will integrate ChatGPT-enabled technology into its own search engine, Bing. No one in the world has been particularly enthusiastic about Bing yet.

Artificial intelligence gets creepy. Days after its launch, Microsoft’s shiny new Bing chatbot Tell New York Times columnist Kevin Rose that he loved him, then tried to convince him that he was unhappy in his marriage and that he should leave his wife and be with the robot instead. She also reveals “dark delusions” (hacking computers and spreading misinformation) and tells Rose that she wants to “be alive”. Next, Microsoft he gets excited Annoying chatbot personality and put them in barriers and restrictions.

In other corners of the Internet, there is an endlessly animated loop of Seinfeldwhich used artificial intelligence trained on episodes of sitcoms to generate jokes, was banned Posted by Twitch after a Jerry Seinfeld clone on the show made transphobic jokes during his AI-generated routine.

Artificial intelligence cannot and will not stop. AI companies have tried to address the controversies that have erupted around it. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, for example, has released its own AI text detector, which has turned out to be…Don’t be so good.

It became apparent that artificial intelligence was eating the world and detection tools were not very effective in stopping it. No one felt this more acutely than the publishers of science fiction magazines, many of which were inundated with spam submissions generated by artificial intelligence text generators. As a result, the prestigious Clarksworld magazine Paused new submissions indefinitely for the first time in its 17-year history.

Everything everywhere all AI once. Spotify announce It was adding AI-built DJs who would not only curate the music you like, but provide feedback between tracks with “amazingly realistic sound”. (Wired disagreeSaying that Spotify’s DJs don’t actually sound realistic.)

pop announce It will allow subscribers who pay $3.99 per month to access My AI, a chatbot powered by the latest version of ChatGPT, right inside Snapchat.

Mark Zuckerberg He said It is fully present. Meta will use generative AI across its product line, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, and with ads and videos.

Even Elon Musk, who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI but has since severed ties with the company, It said Approaches researchers to build a ChatGPT competitor.

January 2023

“It’s such a relief that Elon Musk is standing up for free speech and removing censorship,” SIFF co-founder Anil Murty told BuzzFeed News. (He declined to provide evidence that the group’s tweets were blocked in the shadows before Musk bought Twitter.)

Musk fired more than 70% of the company’s employees (including content moderators) since taking over Right-wing darling To restore more than 15,000 accounts, including accounts Donald Trump and far-right voices like Steve Bannon and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. But he is Also banned people who criticize him, including journalists, some of them still closed.

Morty said he was “grateful” to Musk for “a small contribution” to SIFF’s cause. Thanks Musk Repair From Twitter’s verification policy, Morty was finally able to pay for SIFF’s account verification, he said. “Earlier, verification was discriminatory,” said Morety. “Now it’s a lot fairer.”

A gray-haired man walks in an office lobby holding a cup of coffee, staring ahead as he passes through a doorway.

He seems unaware that he is being tracked by a network of cameras that can detect not only where he is but also who he’s been with.

Monitoring technology has always been able to identify you. Now, with the help of artificial intelligence, you are trying to find out who your friends are.

With a few clicks, this Common Appearance or Correlation Analysis program can find anyone who has appeared on the watch windows within a few minutes of the gray-haired male over the past month, and weed out those who may have been near him a time or two, never mind The man who appeared 14 times. The software can mark potential interactions between the two men, who are now considered potential partners, on an instantly searchable calendar.

Vintra, the San Jose-based company that showcased the technology at View industry video Last year, it sells syndication as part of its suite of video analytics tools. a company It prides itself on its website on relations With the San Francisco 49ers and the Florida Police Department. The Internal Revenue Service and additional police departments around the country have paid for Ventra’s services, according to the state contract database.

Although co-appearance technology is already in use by authoritarian regimes such as China, Vintra appears to be the first company to market it in the West, industry professionals say.

But the company is one of many AI and surveillance apps testing new apps with little public scrutiny and few formal safeguards against privacy infringement. In January, for example, New York state officials He criticized the company that owns Madison Square Garden For using facial recognition technology to ban employees of law firms that have sued the firm from attending events at the arena.

Industry experts and observers say that if the co-option tool is not in use now — and one analyst is certain it is — it will likely become more reliable and more widely available as AI capabilities advance.

None of the Vintra entities contacted by The Times has acknowledged the use of the common appearance feature in the Vintra software package. But some did not explicitly exclude it.

China’s government, which has been the most aggressive in using surveillance and artificial intelligence to control its population, is using appearance searches to spot protesters and dissidents by integrating video with a vast network of databases, something Vintra and its customers will not be able to do. said Connor Healy, director of government research for IPVM, the surveillance research group that hosted Vintra’s show last year. He said the Ventra technology could be used to create a “more basic version” of the Chinese government’s capabilities.

Some state and local governments in the United States restrict the use of facial recognition, particularly in policing, but there is no applicable federal law. There are no laws that expressly prohibit police from using searches in the same guise as a Ventra search, “but it is an open question” whether doing so would violate the constitutionally protected rights to freedom of assembly and protection from unauthorized searches, according to Claire Garvey, specialist In surveillance technology with the National Assembly. A criminal defense attorney. Few states have any restrictions on how private entities can use facial recognition.

Los Angeles Police Department Predictive policing program terminatedKnown as PredPol, in 2020 amid criticism that it did not stop and lead to crime Tightening policing in Black and Latino neighborhoods. The software used artificial intelligence to analyze a wide range of data, including suspected gang affiliation, in an effort to predict in real time where property crime might occur.

In the absence of national laws, many police departments and private companies have to weigh the balance of security and privacy on their own.

Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat: “This is Orwell’s future coming to life.” “A very disturbing surveillance situation where you are being tracked, flagged and categorized for use by public and private sector entities – of which you have no knowledge.”

Markey plans to reintroduce a bill in the coming weeks that would stop the use of facial recognition and biometric technologies by federal law enforcement and require local and state governments to ban them as a condition of winning federal grants.

Right now, some departments say they don’t have to choose because of reliability concerns. But as technology advances, they will.

Vintra, a San Jose-based software company, provided “correlation analysis” to IPVM, a subscriber research group, last year.

(IPVM)

Vintra executives did not return multiple calls and emails from The Times.

But the company’s CEO, Brent Boekestein, was expanded on the technology’s potential uses during a video presentation with IPVM.

“You can go up here and create a target, based on this guy, and then see who that guy hangs out with,” Boekstein said. “You can really start building a network.”

He added that “96% of the time, there is no event that security cares about, but there is always information that the system generates.”

Four agencies involved with the San Jose transit station used for the Ventra show denied using their cameras to shoot the company’s video.

Two companies listed on Vintra’s website, the 49ers and Moderna, the pharmaceutical company that made one of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, did not respond to emails.

Several police departments have acknowledged working with the Ventra, but none have explicitly said they have conducted research into the same guise.

Brian Jackson, Assistant Chief of Police in Lincoln, Nebraska, said his department is using Vintra software to save time analyzing hours of video by quickly looking for patterns like blue cars and other objects that match descriptions used to solve certain crimes. But the cameras his division is associated with — including those from Ring and those used by companies — aren’t good enough to match faces, he said.

“There are limitations. It’s not a magic technology,” he said. “It requires careful input for good output.”

Jarrod Kasner, assistant chief in Kent, Washington, said his department uses Fintra software. He said he was not aware of the shared visibility feature and would have to consider whether it was legal in his state, one of the few that restricts the use of facial recognition.

“We’re always looking for technology that can help us because it’s a power multiplier,” he said, for an administration with staffing problems. But “we just want to make sure we’re within the bounds to make sure we’re doing it right and professionally.”

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Florida said it only uses Vintra on suspects and not “to track people or vehicles not suspected of any criminal activity.”

The Sacramento Police Department stated in an email that it uses Vintra “sparingly, if at all” but did not specify if it has used co-visibility before.

“We are in the process of reviewing Vintra’s contract and whether we will continue to use its service,” the department said in a statement, which also said it could not indicate cases in which the software helped solve crimes.

The IRS said in a statement that it is using Vintra software to “more efficiently review lengthy video clips for evidence during criminal investigations.” Officials did not say if the IRS used the shared visibility tool or where the cameras were located, only that it followed “established agency protocols and procedures.”

Jay Stanley, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who first highlighted the Ventra video presentation last year in blog postHe said he’s not surprised some companies and departments are cautious about using them. In his experience, police departments often deploy new technology “without telling, let alone asking, permission from Democratic supervisors like city councils.”

Stanley warned that the software could be misused to monitor personal and political associations, including with potential intimate partners, labor activists, anti-police groups or party rivals.

The technology is already in use, said Danielle VanZant, who analyzes Ventra for market research firm Frost & Sullivan. Because it has reviewed classified documents from Vintra and other companies, it is subject to non-disclosure agreements that prevent it from discussing individual companies and governments that might use the software.

Retailers, who already collect huge data on the people who enter their stores, are also testing the software to determine “what else can it tell me?” VanZant said.

This could include identifying family members of the bank’s best customers to ensure they are treated well, a use that increases the likelihood that those without wealth or family connections will receive less attention.

“The bias concerns are huge in the industry,” VanZandt said, and they are being actively addressed through standards and testing.

Not everyone thinks this technology will be widely adopted. Law enforcement and corporate security agents often find that they can use less invasive techniques to obtain similar information, said Florian Matusic of Genetec, a video analytics company working with Vintra. This includes scanning ticket entry systems and mobile data that have unique features but are not associated with individuals.

“There’s a big difference between, like, product sheets and demo videos and things that get deployed in the field,” Matusic said. “Users often find that other technologies can also solve their problem without going through or jumping through all the hoops of installing cameras or dealing with privacy regulation.”

Matusic said he doesn’t know of any Genetec customers who use the common theme, which his company doesn’t offer. But he couldn’t rule it out.