Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. This episode we're chatting with Harriet Pellereau about AI's lack of reasoning ability, uses of generative AI, creativity and AI (and what even is creativity?), creative duties, new ways of working, digital working, the four-day week, work-life balance, the hidden cost of convenience, responsible tech and more… Harriet Pellereau is co-founder and co-CEO of digital habits behaviour change company Mind over Tech. She spent nine years working at award-winning tech education company Decoded. As Teaching Director, she worked closely with corporate clients to build and facilitate transformational courses for senior leadership teams, and led a team of 30 data scientists to deliver data skills courses to Fortune 500 companies. Harriet has a background as a technologist and digital creative, and started her career developing 3D animations and web experiences for advertising clients, and interactive apps for media companies.

A senior Tory MP leads calls for more government action to prevent AI sabotaging British democracy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging technology that has the potential to transform many aspects of society, including the economy, healthcare, and transportation. This article synthesizes recent research literature on the global impact of AI, exploring its potential benefits and risks. The article highlights the implications of AI, including its impact on economic, ethical, social, security & privacy, and job displacement aspects. It discusses the ethical concerns surrounding AI development, including issues of bias, security, and privacy violations. To ensure the responsible development and deployment of AI, collaboration between government, industry, and academia is essential. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of public engagement and education to promote awareness and understanding of AI's impact on society at large.

Large language models (LLMs) are able to engage in natural-sounding conversations with humans, showcasing unprecedented capabilities for information retrieval and automated decision support. They have disrupted human-technology interaction and the way businesses operate. However, technologies based on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) are known to hallucinate, misinform, and display biases introduced by the massive datasets on which they are trained. Existing research indicates that humans may unconsciously internalize these biases, which can persist even after they stop using the programs. This study explores the cultural self-perception of LLMs by prompting ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Bard (Google) with value questions derived from the GLOBE project. The findings reveal that their cultural self-perception is most closely aligned with the values of English-speaking countries and countries characterized by sustained economic competitiveness. Recognizing the cultural biases of LLMs and understanding how they work is crucial for all members of society because one does not want the black box of artificial intelligence to perpetuate bias in humans, who might, in turn, inadvertently create and train even more biased algorithms.

Gate-defined quantum dots are a promising candidate system to realize scalable, coupled qubit systems and serve as a fundamental building block for quantum computers. However, present-day quantum dot devices suffer from imperfections that must be accounted for, which hinders the characterization, tuning, and operation process. Moreover, with an increasing number of quantum dot qubits, the relevant parameter space grows sufficiently to make heuristic control infeasible. Thus, it is imperative that reliable and scalable autonomous tuning approaches are developed. In this report, we outline current challenges in automating quantum dot device tuning and operation with a particular focus on datasets, benchmarking, and standardization. We also present ideas put forward by the quantum dot community on how to overcome them.

Language model attacks typically assume one of two extreme threat models: full white-box access to model weights, or black-box access limited to a text generation API. However, real-world APIs are often more flexible than just text generation: these APIs expose ``gray-box'' access leading to new threat vectors. To explore this, we red-team three new functionalities exposed in the GPT-4 APIs: fine-tuning, function calling and knowledge retrieval. We find that fine-tuning a model on as few as 15 harmful examples or 100 benign examples can remove core safeguards from GPT-4, enabling a range of harmful outputs. Furthermore, we find that GPT-4 Assistants readily divulge the function call schema and can be made to execute arbitrary function calls. Finally, we find that knowledge retrieval can be hijacked by injecting instructions into retrieval documents. These vulnerabilities highlight that any additions to the functionality exposed by an API can create new vulnerabilities.

Counter-argument generation -- a captivating area in computational linguistics -- seeks to craft statements that offer opposing views. While most research has ventured into paragraph-level generation, sentence-level counter-argument generation beckons with its unique constraints and brevity-focused challenges. Furthermore, the diverse nature of counter-arguments poses challenges for evaluating model performance solely based on n-gram-based metrics. In this paper, we present the ArgTersely benchmark for sentence-level counter-argument generation, drawing from a manually annotated dataset from the ChangeMyView debate forum. We also propose Arg-LlaMA for generating high-quality counter-argument. For better evaluation, we trained a BERT-based evaluator Arg-Judge with human preference data. We conducted comparative experiments involving various baselines such as LlaMA, Alpaca, GPT-3, and others. The results show the competitiveness of our proposed framework and evaluator in counter-argument generation tasks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/amazingljy1206/ArgTersely.

ABSTRACT: Accurate land use maps, describing the territory from an anthropic utilisation point of view, are useful tools for land management and planning. To produce them, the use of optical images alone remains limited. It is therefore necessary to make use of several heterogeneous sources, each carrying complementary or contradictory information due to their imperfections or their different specifications. This study compares two different approaches i.e. a pre-classification and a post-classification fusion approach for combining several sources of spatial data in the context of land use classification. The approaches are applied on authoritative land use data located in the Gers department in the south-west of France. Pre-classification fusion, while not explicitly modeling imperfections, has the best final results, reaching an overall accuracy of 97% and a macro-mean F1 score of 88%. 1. INTRODUCTION At the feature level, Fonte et al. (2018) identified building functions using Land Use (LU) describes the socio-economic human activity of a rule based classifications of OpenStreetMap (OSM), Facebook an area (e.g. Land al. (2022) identified building functions from images, POI and Use and Land Cover (LULC) maps are very useful for understanding, building footprint from Gaode map (authoritative database) and monitoring, planning and predicting the evolution of distance to OSM roads using a XGBoost classifier.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained prominence in the field of Legal Intelligence, offering potential applications in assisting legal professionals and laymen. However, the centralized training of these Legal LLMs raises data privacy concerns, as legal data is distributed among various institutions containing sensitive individual information. This paper addresses this challenge by exploring the integration of Legal LLMs with Federated Learning (FL) methodologies. By employing FL, Legal LLMs can be fine-tuned locally on devices or clients, and their parameters are aggregated and distributed on a central server, ensuring data privacy without directly sharing raw data. However, computation and communication overheads hinder the full fine-tuning of LLMs under the FL setting. Moreover, the distribution shift of legal data reduces the effectiveness of FL methods. To this end, in this paper, we propose the first Federated Legal Large Language Model (FedJudge) framework, which fine-tunes Legal LLMs efficiently and effectively. Specifically, FedJudge utilizes parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods to update only a few additional parameters during the FL training. Besides, we explore the continual learning methods to preserve the global model's important parameters when training local clients to mitigate the problem of data shifts. Extensive experimental results on three real-world datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of FedJudge. Code is released at https://github.com/yuelinan/FedJudge.

The use of NLP in the realm of financial technology is broad and complex, with applications ranging from sentiment analysis and named entity recognition to question answering. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective on a variety of tasks; however, no LLM specialized for the financial domain has been reported in literature. In this work, we present BloombergGPT, a 50 billion parameter language model that is trained on a wide range of financial data. We construct a 363 billion token dataset based on Bloomberg's extensive data sources, perhaps the largest domain-specific dataset yet, augmented with 345 billion tokens from general purpose datasets. We validate BloombergGPT on standard LLM benchmarks, open financial benchmarks, and a suite of internal benchmarks that most accurately reflect our intended usage. Our mixed dataset training leads to a model that outperforms existing models on financial tasks by significant margins without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks. Additionally, we explain our modeling choices, training process, and evaluation methodology. We release Training Chronicles (Appendix C) detailing our experience in training BloombergGPT.