Law
Sam Altman's sister is suing the OpenAI CEO alleging sexual abuse
Annie Altman, the sister of OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman, has sued her brother accusing him of sexually assaulting her when she was a minor. In a complaint filed this week with a Missouri federal court, Annie Altman alleges her older brother committed "numerous acts of rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, molestation, sodomy, and battery" from 1997 to 2006, with the abuse starting when she was only three years old. In a joint statement he made alongside his mother and two younger brothers, Sam Altman said "all of [Annie's] claims are utterly untrue." The Altmans say they've tried to support Annie in "many ways" over the years, including by offering direct financial assistance. My sister has filed a lawsuit against me.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman accused of sexual abuse by sister in lawsuit
The sister of the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman, has filed a lawsuit alleging that he regularly sexually abused her for several years, starting when they were children. The lawsuit filed on 6 January in a US district court in the Eastern District of Missouri alleges that the abuse began when Ann Altman was three and Sam Altman was 12. The filing alleges that the last instance of abuse took place when he was an adult but his sister, known as Annie, was still a child. The chief executive of the ChatGPT developer posted a joint statement on X, which he had signed along with his mother, Connie, and his younger brothers, Max and Jack, denying the allegations and calling them "utterly untrue". "Our family loves Annie and is very concerned about her wellbeing," the statement said.
ChatGPT creator denies sister's childhood rape claim
Mr Altman said he gives his sister monthly financial support, pays her bills and rent, and offered to buy her a house, but that Annie "continues to demand more money from us". But Ms Altman claims he "groomed and manipulated" her and performed sex acts on her over several years, including "rape, sexual assault, molestation, sodomy, and battery", according to a court filing seen by the BBC. Ms Altman said she sustained "great bodily injury", severe emotional distress and depression. She added that she had incurred numerous medical bills because of medical and mental health treatment for her injuries. "Over the years, we've tried in many ways to support Annie and help her find stability," Mr Altman said, adding that he had taken "professional advice" on how to "be supportive" without "enabling harmful behaviours". "This situation causes immense pain to our entire family," the statement added.
ActPC-Geom: Towards Scalable Online Neural-Symbolic Learning via Accelerating Active Predictive Coding with Information Geometry & Diverse Cognitive Mechanisms
This paper introduces ActPC-Geom, an approach to accelerate Active Predictive Coding (ActPC) in neural networks by integrating information geometry, specifically using Wasserstein-metric-based methods for measure-dependent gradient flows. We propose replacing KL-divergence in ActPC's predictive error assessment with the Wasserstein metric, suggesting this may enhance network robustness. To make this computationally feasible, we present strategies including: (1) neural approximators for inverse measure-dependent Laplacians, (2) approximate kernel PCA embeddings for low-rank approximations feeding into these approximators, and (3) compositional hypervector embeddings derived from kPCA outputs, with algebra optimized for fuzzy FCA lattices learned through neural architectures analyzing network states. This results in an ActPC architecture capable of real-time online learning and integrating continuous (e.g., transformer-like or Hopfield-net-like) and discrete symbolic ActPC networks, including frameworks like OpenCog Hyperon or ActPC-Chem for algorithmic chemistry evolution. Shared probabilistic, concept-lattice, and hypervector models enable symbolic-subsymbolic integration. Key features include (1) compositional reasoning via hypervector embeddings in transformer-like architectures for tasks like commonsense reasoning, and (2) Hopfield-net dynamics enabling associative long-term memory and attractor-driven cognitive features. We outline how ActPC-Geom combines few-shot learning with online weight updates, enabling deliberative thinking and seamless symbolic-subsymbolic reasoning. Ideas from Galois connections are explored for efficient hybrid ActPC/ActPC-Chem processing. Finally, we propose a specialized HPC design optimized for real-time focused attention and deliberative reasoning tailored to ActPC-Geom's demands.
Unifying the Extremes: Developing a Unified Model for Detecting and Predicting Extremist Traits and Radicalization
Lahnala, Allison, Varadarajan, Vasudha, Flek, Lucie, Schwartz, H. Andrew, Boyd, Ryan L.
The proliferation of ideological movements into extremist factions via social media has become a global concern. While radicalization has been studied extensively within the context of specific ideologies, our ability to accurately characterize extremism in more generalizable terms remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we propose a novel method for extracting and analyzing extremist discourse across a range of online community forums. By focusing on verbal behavioral signatures of extremist traits, we develop a framework for quantifying extremism at both user and community levels. Our research identifies 11 distinct factors, which we term ``The Extremist Eleven,'' as a generalized psychosocial model of extremism. Applying our method to various online communities, we demonstrate an ability to characterize ideologically diverse communities across the 11 extremist traits. We demonstrate the power of this method by analyzing user histories from members of the incel community. We find that our framework accurately predicts which users join the incel community up to 10 months before their actual entry with an AUC of $>0.6$, steadily increasing to AUC ~0.9 three to four months before the event. Further, we find that upon entry into an extremist forum, the users tend to maintain their level of extremism within the community, while still remaining distinguishable from the general online discourse. Our findings contribute to the study of extremism by introducing a more holistic, cross-ideological approach that transcends traditional, trait-specific models.
Ethical Concerns of Generative AI and Mitigation Strategies: A Systematic Mapping Study
Huang, Yutan, Arora, Chetan, Houng, Wen Cheng, Kanij, Tanjila, Madulgalla, Anuradha, Grundy, John
The evolution of Generative AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has seen remarkable advancements since 2020 with the introduction of models like Chat-GPT and Bard. LLMs have revolutionized tasks, such as writing assistance, code generation, and customer support automation, by leveraging vast amounts of data to generate coherent and contextually relevant natural language (NL) responses [1, 2]. As a subset of Generative AI--systems designed to create new content--LLMs go beyond traditional AI techniques, which focus primarily on analyzing existing data. LLMs, in contrast, are capable of generating text, images, and music that mimic human creativity [3]. This capability is powered by advancements in neural network architectures, especially transformers, which enable LLMs to learn the nuances of human language and produce semantically accurate content [4].
The State of Post-Hoc Local XAI Techniques for Image Processing: Challenges and Motivations
Poh, Rech Leong Tian, Keoh, Sye Loong, Li, Liying
As complex AI systems further prove to be an integral part of our lives, a persistent and critical problem is the underlying black-box nature of such products and systems. In pursuit of productivity enhancements, one must not forget the need for various technology to boost the overall trustworthiness of such AI systems. One example, which is studied extensively in this work, is the domain of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Research works in this scope are centred around the objective of making AI systems more transparent and interpretable, to further boost reliability and trust in using them. In this work, we discuss the various motivation for XAI and its approaches, the underlying challenges that XAI faces, and some open problems that we believe deserve further efforts to look into. We also provide a brief discussion of various XAI approaches for image processing, and finally discuss some future directions, to hopefully express and motivate the positive development of the XAI research space.
A hybrid marketplace of ideas
Chaffer, Tomer Jordi, Cotlage, Dontrail, Goldston, Justin
The convergence of humans and artificial intelligence systems introduces new dynamics into the cultural and intellectual landscape. Complementing emerging cultural evolution concepts such as machine culture, AI agents represent a significant techno-sociological development, particularly within the anthropological study of Web3 as a community focused on decentralization through blockchain. Despite their growing presence, the cultural significance of AI agents remains largely unexplored in academic literature. Toward this end, we conceived hybrid netnography, a novel interdisciplinary approach that examines the cultural and intellectual dynamics within digital ecosystems by analyzing the interactions and contributions of both human and AI agents as co-participants in shaping narratives, ideas, and cultural artifacts. We argue that, within the Web3 community on the social media platform X, these agents challenge traditional notions of participation and influence in public discourse, creating a hybrid marketplace of ideas, a conceptual space where human and AI generated ideas coexist and compete for attention. We examine the current state of AI agents in idea generation, propagation, and engagement, positioning their role as cultural agents through the lens of memetics and encouraging further inquiry into their cultural and societal impact. Additionally, we address the implications of this paradigm for privacy, intellectual property, and governance, highlighting the societal and legal challenges of integrating AI agents into the hybrid marketplace of ideas.
ViLBias: A Comprehensive Framework for Bias Detection through Linguistic and Visual Cues , presenting Annotation Strategies, Evaluation, and Key Challenges
Raza, Shaina, Saleh, Caesar, Hasan, Emrul, Ogidi, Franklin, Powers, Maximus, Chatrath, Veronica, Lotif, Marcelo, Javadi, Roya, Zahid, Anam, Khazaie, Vahid Reza
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) opens new avenues for addressing complex challenges in multimodal content analysis, particularly in biased news detection. This study introduces VLBias, a framework that leverages state-of-the-art LLMs and VLMs to detect linguistic and visual biases in news content. We present a multimodal dataset comprising textual content and corresponding images from diverse news sources. We propose a hybrid annotation framework that combines LLM-based annotations with human review to ensure high-quality labeling while reducing costs and enhancing scalability. Our evaluation compares the performance of state-of-the-art SLMs and LLMs for both modalities (text and images) and the results reveal that while SLMs are computationally efficient, LLMs demonstrate superior accuracy in identifying subtle framing and text-visual inconsistencies. Furthermore, empirical analysis shows that incorporating visual cues alongside textual data improves bias detection accuracy by 3 to 5%. This study provides a comprehensive exploration of LLMs, SLMs, and VLMs as tools for detecting multimodal biases in news content and highlights their respective strengths, limitations, and potential for future applications
Forget Vectors at Play: Universal Input Perturbations Driving Machine Unlearning in Image Classification
Sun, Changchang, Wang, Ren, Zhang, Yihua, Jia, Jinghan, Liu, Jiancheng, Liu, Gaowen, Liu, Sijia, Yan, Yan
Machine unlearning (MU), which seeks to erase the influence of specific unwanted data from already-trained models, is becoming increasingly vital in model editing, particularly to comply with evolving data regulations like the ``right to be forgotten''. Conventional approaches are predominantly model-based, typically requiring retraining or fine-tuning the model's weights to meet unlearning requirements. In this work, we approach the MU problem from a novel input perturbation-based perspective, where the model weights remain intact throughout the unlearning process. We demonstrate the existence of a proactive input-based unlearning strategy, referred to forget vector, which can be generated as an input-agnostic data perturbation and remains as effective as model-based approximate unlearning approaches. We also explore forget vector arithmetic, whereby multiple class-specific forget vectors are combined through simple operations (e.g., linear combinations) to generate new forget vectors for unseen unlearning tasks, such as forgetting arbitrary subsets across classes. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and adaptability of the forget vector, showcasing its competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art model-based methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/Changchangsun/Forget-Vector.