Law
Child predators are using AI to create sexual images of their favorite 'stars': 'My body will never be mine again'
Predators active on the dark web are increasingly using artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit images of children, fixating especially on "star" victims, child safety experts warn. Child safety groups tracking the activity of predators chatting in dark web forums say they are increasingly finding conversations about creating new images based on older child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Many of these predators using AI obsess over child victims referred to as "stars" in predator communities for the popularity of their images. "The communities of people who trade this material get infatuated with individual children," said Sarah Gardner, chief executive officer of the Heat Initiative, a Los Angeles non-profit focused on child protection. "They want more content of those children, which AI has now allowed them to do."
The Morning After: Musk backs down from OpenAI lawsuit
Elon Musk has withdrawn his lawsuit against OpenAI, a day before a judge was set to hear a request for dismissal. Musk sued OpenAI, saying its founders had violated its nonprofit status, to become a de-facto part of Microsoft. OpenAI said there was no such violation, and the lawsuit was likely a way for Musk to gain access to its secrets. Despite ending the suit, Musk might be nursing this grudge, tweeting if Apple integrates OpenAI's tools into its software, he'll ban iPhones from his companies. You can't mirror your iPhone while mirroring your Mac on Apple Vision Pro Netflix drops a proper trailer for Arcane's second (and last) season Apple Intelligence: What devices and features will actually be supported?
Worried About AI Killing Art? This App Offers a Refuge--If Its Founder Can Keep the Lights On
"I was about to go to bed and then realized we had this interview," Jingna Zhang tells me. It's 9 am in Seattle, where she's currently living. The photographer and art director has been pulling all-nighters trying to keep up with demand for her social platform for artists, Cara, which recently exploded in popularity in response to widespread opposition to Meta's policies around art and artificial intelligence. More users has led to an onslaught of complications, including a hefty 96,000 bill from the social network's cloud storage provider, as well as service outages. Cara began as a side project, but its newfound prominence means that Zhang is now an accidental startup founder, keeping the hours to match.
Elon Musk drops lawsuit accusing OpenAI of betraying founding mission
Elon Musk has dropped his lawsuit accusing OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of reneging on the startup's pledge to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. Lawyers in the United States representing Musk, on Tuesday asked a California judge to dismiss the suit, court filings showed. No reason was provided for the application to dismiss the suit. Musk in February filed a suit claiming that ChatGPT had set "aflame" its founding agreement to put the good of humanity ahead of profit-seeking when it signed an investment deal with Microsoft. "To this day, OpenAI Inc's website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI'benefits all of humanity'," Musk claimed in the suit.
Vessel Re-identification and Activity Detection in Thermal Domain for Maritime Surveillance
Ginige, Yasod, Gunasekara, Ransika, Hewavitharana, Darsha, Ariyarathne, Manjula, Rodrigo, Ranga, Jayasekara, Peshala
Maritime surveillance is vital to mitigate illegal activities such as drug smuggling, illegal fishing, and human trafficking. Vision-based maritime surveillance is challenging mainly due to visibility issues at night, which results in failures in re-identifying vessels and detecting suspicious activities. In this paper, we introduce a thermal, vision-based approach for maritime surveillance with object tracking, vessel re-identification, and suspicious activity detection capabilities. For vessel re-identification, we propose a novel viewpoint-independent algorithm which compares features of the sides of the vessel separately (separate side-spaces) leveraging shape information in the absence of color features. We propose techniques to adapt tracking and activity detection algorithms for the thermal domain and train them using a thermal dataset we created. This dataset will be the first publicly available benchmark dataset for thermal maritime surveillance. Our system is capable of re-identifying vessels with an 81.8% Top1 score and identifying suspicious activities with a 72.4\% frame mAP score; a new benchmark for each task in the thermal domain.
ResearchArena: Benchmarking LLMs' Ability to Collect and Organize Information as Research Agents
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various tasks in natural language processing. Nevertheless, challenges still arise when these tasks demand domain-specific expertise and advanced analytical skills, such as conducting research surveys on a designated topic. In this research, we develop ResearchArena, a benchmark that measures LLM agents' ability to conduct academic surveys, an initial step of academic research process. Specifically, we deconstructs the surveying process into three stages 1) information discovery: locating relevant papers, 2) information selection: assessing papers' importance to the topic, and 3) information organization: organizing papers into meaningful structures. In particular, we establish an offline environment comprising 12.0M full-text academic papers and 7.9K survey papers, which evaluates agents' ability to locate supporting materials for composing the survey on a topic, rank the located papers based on their impact, and organize these into a hierarchical knowledge mind-map. With this benchmark, we conduct preliminary evaluations of existing techniques and find that all LLM-based methods under-performing when compared to basic keyword-based retrieval techniques, highlighting substantial opportunities for future research.
Towards Reliable Empirical Machine Unlearning Evaluation: A Game-Theoretic View
Tu, Yiwen, Hu, Pingbang, Ma, Jiaqi
Machine unlearning is the process of updating machine learning models to remove the information of specific training data samples, in order to comply with data protection regulations that allow individuals to request the removal of their personal data. Despite the recent development of numerous unlearning algorithms, reliable evaluation of these algorithms remains an open research question. In this work, we focus on membership inference attack (MIA) based evaluation, one of the most common approaches for evaluating unlearning algorithms, and address various pitfalls of existing evaluation metrics that lack reliability. Specifically, we propose a game-theoretic framework that formalizes the evaluation process as a game between unlearning algorithms and MIA adversaries, measuring the data removal efficacy of unlearning algorithms by the capability of the MIA adversaries. Through careful design of the game, we demonstrate that the natural evaluation metric induced from the game enjoys provable guarantees that the existing evaluation metrics fail to satisfy. Furthermore, we propose a practical and efficient algorithm to estimate the evaluation metric induced from the game, and demonstrate its effectiveness through both theoretical analysis and empirical experiments. This work presents a novel and reliable approach to empirically evaluating unlearning algorithms, paving the way for the development of more effective unlearning techniques.
Large Language Model Unlearning via Embedding-Corrupted Prompts
Liu, Chris Yuhao, Wang, Yaxuan, Flanigan, Jeffrey, Liu, Yang
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced to encompass extensive knowledge across diverse domains. Yet controlling what a large language model should not know is important for ensuring alignment and thus safe use. However, accurately and efficiently unlearning knowledge from an LLM remains challenging due to the potential collateral damage caused by the fuzzy boundary between retention and forgetting, and the large computational requirements for optimization across state-of-the-art models with hundreds of billions of parameters. In this work, we present Embedding-COrrupted (ECO) Prompts, a lightweight unlearning framework for large language models to address both the challenges of knowledge entanglement and unlearning efficiency. Instead of relying on the LLM itself to unlearn, we enforce an unlearned state during inference by employing a prompt classifier to identify and safeguard prompts to forget. We learn corruptions added to prompt embeddings via zeroth order optimization toward the unlearning objective offline and corrupt prompts flagged by the classifier during inference. We find that these embedding-corrupted prompts not only lead to desirable outputs that satisfy the unlearning objective but also closely approximate the output from a model that has never been trained on the data intended for forgetting. Through extensive experiments on unlearning, we demonstrate the superiority of our method in achieving promising unlearning at nearly zero side effects in general domains and domains closely related to the unlearned ones. Additionally, we highlight the scalability of our method to 100 LLMs, ranging from 0.5B to 236B parameters, incurring no additional cost as the number of parameters increases.
LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark
Wang, Weihan, He, Zehai, Hong, Wenyi, Cheng, Yean, Zhang, Xiaohan, Qi, Ji, Huang, Shiyu, Xu, Bin, Dong, Yuxiao, Ding, Ming, Tang, Jie
Recent progress in multimodal large language models has markedly enhanced the understanding of short videos (typically under one minute), and several evaluation datasets have emerged accordingly. However, these advancements fall short of meeting the demands of real-world applications such as embodied intelligence for long-term decision-making, in-depth movie reviews and discussions, and live sports commentary, all of which require comprehension of long videos spanning several hours. To address this gap, we introduce LVBench, a benchmark specifically designed for long video understanding. Our dataset comprises publicly sourced videos and encompasses a diverse set of tasks aimed at long video comprehension and information extraction. LVBench is designed to challenge multimodal models to demonstrate long-term memory and extended comprehension capabilities. Our extensive evaluations reveal that current multimodal models still underperform on these demanding long video understanding tasks. Through LVBench, we aim to spur the development of more advanced models capable of tackling the complexities of long video comprehension. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://lvbench.github.io/.
RAGged Edges: The Double-Edged Sword of Retrieval-Augmented Chatbots
Feldman, Philip, Foulds, James R., Pan, Shimei
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT demonstrate the remarkable progress of artificial intelligence. However, their tendency to hallucinate -- generate plausible but false information -- poses a significant challenge. This issue is critical, as seen in recent court cases where ChatGPT's use led to citations of non-existent legal rulings. This paper explores how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can counter hallucinations by integrating external knowledge with prompts. We empirically evaluate RAG against standard LLMs using prompts designed to induce hallucinations. Our results show that RAG increases accuracy in some cases, but can still be misled when prompts directly contradict the model's pre-trained understanding. These findings highlight the complex nature of hallucinations and the need for more robust solutions to ensure LLM reliability in real-world applications. We offer practical recommendations for RAG deployment and discuss implications for the development of more trustworthy LLMs.