https://cyberscoop.com/meta-large-language-model-available-online/
A set of sophisticated large language models developed by Facebook parent company Meta — and intended to be accessed only by authorized researchers — were made available for download on Friday, releasing to the public the most powerful such AI model yet and increasing the likelihood that the technology might be misused.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/07/privacy-loophole-ring-doorbell-00084979
Police were investigating his neighbor. A judge gave officers access to all his security-camera footage, including inside his home.
…
It really takes the control out of the hands of the homeowners, and I think that’s hugely problematic,” said Jennifer Lynch, the surveillance litigation director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.
In the debate over home surveillance, much of the concern has focused on Ring in particular, because of its popularity, as well as the company’s track record of cooperating closely with law enforcement agencies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/05/ai-voice-scam/
Scammers are using artificial intelligence to sound more like family members in distress. People are falling for it and losing thousands of dollars.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-next-big-threat-to-ai-might-already-be-lurking-on-the-web/
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine-learning experts are warning against the risk of data-poisoning attacks that can work against the large-scale datasets commonly used to train the deep-learning models in many AI services.
Data poisoning occurs when attackers tamper with the training data used to create deep-learning models. This action means it’s possible to affect the decisions that the AI makes in a way that is hard to track.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23618804/google-facebook-login-ads-web-design-hell
There is a new trend among websites where they want my email address before I’m allowed to read their free content. While I sympathize with the struggles of the media business, I am just going to point out something obvious: not reading is easier than reading — and way easier than logging in.
…
And confidential to Substack: if I have clicked into a newsletter on the web, blocking my view of the thing I’m trying to read with a subscription pop-up isn’t going to make me more likely to subscribe. It just means I’m probably not going to read the newsletter.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/
Russian antiwar activists placed their faith in Telegram, a supposedly secure messaging app. How does Putin’s regime seem to know their every move?
…
She says the officer told her that investigators had been following along with her private Telegram chats as she wrote them.
…
In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts—whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company; whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow; or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on.
https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2021/11/29/researchers-shrink-camera-size-salt-grain
Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have developed an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The system relies on a technology called a metasurface, which is studded with 1.6 million cylindrical posts and can be produced much like a computer chip.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7axa/how-i-broke-into-a-bank-account-with-an-ai-generated-voice
Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. I proved it’s possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.
As many early users have shown, the chatbot seemed pretty normal when used for short periods of time. But when users started to have extended conversations with the technology, that’s when things got weird. Microsoft seemed to agree with that assessment. And that’s why it’s only going to be allowing shorter conversations from here on out.
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do all of the other fun things that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been demonstrating over the past few months: the ability to generate poetry, and jokes, and do creative writing, and so much more.
This week, people have started gaining access to it via the waiting list. It’s increasingly looking like this may be one of the most hilariously inappropriate applications of AI that we’ve seen yet.
If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what’s transpired so far.
- The demo was full of errors
- It started gaslighting people
- It suffered an existential crisis
- The prompt leaked
- And then it started threatening people
…