Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will transform many aspects of our lives and society, bringing immense opportunities but also posing significant risks and challenges. The next several decades may well be a turning point for humanity, comparable to the industrial revolution. If so, future historians will judge how well we harnessed the benefits of AI for humanity, while protecting against potential harms. In this column, we share a set of recommendations for moving forward from the perspective of a founder and leaders of the One Hundred Year Study on AI.3 Launched 10 years ago with a dedicated endowment, the project is committed to a perpetual series of studies by multidisciplinary experts to evaluate the immediate, longer-term, and far-reaching effects of AI on people and society,1 and to make recommendations about AI research, policy, and practice.2,4 Beyond these recurrent studies and reports, our initiatives have included related efforts aimed at providing a diverse audience with insights about the trajectory of AI, including the creation of the AI Index, an annual benchmarking of AI progress.5

British singer-songwriter FKA twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property on Tuesday about the dangers of artificial intelligence. She relayed that she was especially concerned as an artist whose music and performances are used by third parties to train artificial intelligence models. She said that the power of this technology has become especially apparent to her as she has attempted to build a deepfake version of herself. "In the past year, I have developed my own deepfake version of myself that is not only trained in my personality, but also can use my exact tone of voice to speak many languages," the singer said in her statement. "I will be engaging my'AI twigs' later this year to extend my reach and handle my online social media interactions, whilst I continue to focus on my art from the comfort and solace of my studio."

A group of publications that include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and the Orlando Sentinel are suing Microsoft and OpenAI, as reported by The Verge. Their products can regurgitate Times' articles verbatim and can "mimic its expressive style," the publication said, even though they didn't have a prior licensing agreement. In a motion seeking to dismiss key parts of the lawsuit, Microsoft accused the Times of doomsday futurology by claiming that generative AI can pose a threat to independent journalism. ACG's newspapers complain of the same thing, that the companies' chatbots are reproducing their articles word-for-word shortly after they're published without a prominent link back to the sources. They included several examples in their complaint.

We propose WIBA, a novel framework and suite of methods that enable the comprehensive understanding of "What Is Being Argued" across contexts. Our approach develops a comprehensive framework that detects: (a) the existence, (b) the topic, and (c) the stance of an argument, correctly accounting for the logical dependence among the three tasks. Our algorithm leverages the fine-tuning and prompt-engineering of Large Language Models. We evaluate our approach and show that it performs well in all the three capabilities. First, we develop and release an Argument Detection model that can classify a piece of text as an argument with an F1 score between 79% and 86% on three different benchmark datasets. Second, we release a language model that can identify the topic being argued in a sentence, be it implicit or explicit, with an average similarity score of 71%, outperforming current naive methods by nearly 40%. Finally, we develop a method for Argument Stance Classification, and evaluate the capability of our approach, showing it achieves a classification F1 score between 71% and 78% across three diverse benchmark datasets. Our evaluation demonstrates that WIBA allows the comprehensive understanding of What Is Being Argued in large corpora across diverse contexts, which is of core interest to many applications in linguistics, communication, and social and computer science. To facilitate accessibility to the advancements outlined in this work, we release WIBA as a free open access platform (wiba.dev).

Recent advancements in language models have demonstrated remarkable improvements in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as web navigation. Supervised learning (SL) approaches have achieved impressive performance while utilizing significantly less training data compared to previous methods. However, these SL-based models fall short when compared to reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, which have shown superior results. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines SL and RL techniques over the MiniWoB benchmark to leverage the strengths of both methods. We also address a critical limitation in previous models' understanding of HTML content, revealing a tendency to memorize target elements rather than comprehend the underlying structure. To rectify this, we propose methods to enhance true understanding and present a new baseline of results. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous SL methods on certain tasks using less data and narrows the performance gap with RL models, achieving 43.58\% average accuracy in SL and 36.69\% when combined with a multimodal RL approach. This study sets a new direction for future web navigation and offers insights into the limitations and potential of language modeling for computer tasks.

In this paper, we introduce a privacy-preserving stable diffusion framework leveraging homomorphic encryption, called HE-Diffusion, which primarily focuses on protecting the denoising phase of the diffusion process. HE-Diffusion is a tailored encryption framework specifically designed to align with the unique architecture of stable diffusion, ensuring both privacy and functionality. To address the inherent computational challenges, we propose a novel min-distortion method that enables efficient partial image encryption, significantly reducing the overhead without compromising the model's output quality. Furthermore, we adopt a sparse tensor representation to expedite computational operations, enhancing the overall efficiency of the privacy-preserving diffusion process. We successfully implement HE-based privacy-preserving stable diffusion inference. The experimental results show that HE-Diffusion achieves 500 times speedup compared with the baseline method, and reduces time cost of the homomorphically encrypted inference to the minute level. Both the performance and accuracy of the HE-Diffusion are on par with the plaintext counterpart. Our approach marks a significant step towards integrating advanced cryptographic techniques with state-of-the-art generative models, paving the way for privacy-preserving and efficient image generation in critical applications.

Large language models (LLMs) with their strong zero-shot topic extraction capabilities offer an alternative to probabilistic topic modelling and closed-set topic classification approaches. As zero-shot topic extractors, LLMs are expected to understand human instructions to generate relevant and non-hallucinated topics based on the given documents. However, LLM-based topic modelling approaches often face difficulties in generating topics with adherence to granularity as specified in human instructions, often resulting in many near-duplicate topics. Furthermore, methods for addressing hallucinated topics generated by LLMs have not yet been investigated. In this paper, we focus on addressing the issues of topic granularity and hallucinations for better LLM-based topic modelling. To this end, we introduce a novel approach that leverages Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) to fine-tune open-source LLMs, such as Mistral-7B. Our approach does not rely on traditional human annotation to rank preferred answers but employs a reconstruction pipeline to modify raw topics generated by LLMs, thus enabling a fast and efficient training and inference framework. Comparative experiments show that our fine-tuning approach not only significantly improves the LLM's capability to produce more coherent, relevant, and precise topics, but also reduces the number of hallucinated topics.

Recent advances in deep learning have promoted the advent of many computational systems capable of performing intelligent actions that, until then, were restricted to the human intellect. In the particular case of human languages, these advances allowed the introduction of applications like ChatGPT that are capable of generating coherent text without being explicitly programmed to do so. Instead, these models use large volumes of textual data to learn meaningful representations of human languages. Associated with these advances, concerns about copyright and data privacy infringements caused by these applications have emerged. Despite these concerns, the pace at which new natural language processing applications continued to be developed largely outperformed the introduction of new regulations. Today, communication barriers between legal experts and computer scientists motivate many unintentional legal infringements during the development of such applications. In this paper, a multidisciplinary team intends to bridge this communication gap and promote more compliant Portuguese NLP research by presenting a series of everyday NLP use cases, while highlighting the Portuguese legislation that may arise during its development.

Causal reasoning is viewed as crucial for achieving human-level machine intelligence. Recent advances in language models have expanded the horizons of artificial intelligence across various domains, sparking inquiries into their potential for causal reasoning. In this work, we introduce Causal evaluation of Language Models (CaLM), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the causal reasoning capabilities of language models. First, we propose the CaLM framework, which establishes a foundational taxonomy consisting of four modules: causal target (i.e., what to evaluate), adaptation (i.e., how to obtain the results), metric (i.e., how to measure the results), and error (i.e., how to analyze the bad results). This taxonomy defines a broad evaluation design space while systematically selecting criteria and priorities. Second, we compose the CaLM dataset, comprising 126,334 data samples, to provide curated sets of causal targets, adaptations, metrics, and errors, offering extensive coverage for diverse research pursuits. Third, we conduct an extensive evaluation of 28 leading language models on a core set of 92 causal targets, 9 adaptations, 7 metrics, and 12 error types. Fourth, we perform detailed analyses of the evaluation results across various dimensions (e.g., adaptation, scale). Fifth, we present 50 high-level empirical findings across 9 dimensions (e.g., model), providing valuable guidance for future language model development. Finally, we develop a multifaceted platform, including a website, leaderboards, datasets, and toolkits, to support scalable and adaptable assessments. We envision CaLM as an ever-evolving benchmark for the community, systematically updated with new causal targets, adaptations, models, metrics, and error types to reflect ongoing research advancements. Project website is at https://opencausalab.github.io/CaLM.