Media
OpenAI claims New York Times 'hacked' ChatGPT to build copyright lawsuit
OpenAI said in a filing in Manhattan federal court on Monday that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through "deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI's terms of use". "The allegations in the Times's complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards," OpenAI said. "The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI's products." OpenAI did not name the "hired gun" whom it said the Times used to manipulate its systems and did not accuse the newspaper of breaking any anti-hacking laws. Representatives for the New York Times and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing. The Times sued OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, in December, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots to provide information to users.
'Left and woke': Americans blast bias in AI chatbots, but some still find new tech useful
"I think they're programming it to be left and woke. It's scary," Scott told Fox News while on Music City's famous Broadway street. He said he would "absolutely not" trust AI to answer questions for him. But Mike disagreed, saying he had confidence AI chatbot would give him reliable information. "We watched the '60 Minutes' on it," he said.
Thinking About A.I. with Stanisław Lem
"We are going to speak of the future," the Polish writer Stanisław Lem wrote, in "Summa Technologiae," from 1964, a series of essays, mostly on humanity and the evolution of technology. "Yet isn't discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now?" Lem, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four, is likely the most widely read writer of science fiction who is not particularly widely read in the United States. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, many millions of copies of his books have been printed, and yet, if I polled a hundred friends, 2.3 of them would know who he was. His best-known work in the U.S. is the 1961 novel "Solaris," and its renown stems mostly from the moody film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. Among Lem's fictional imaginings are a phantomatic generator (a machine that gives its user an extraordinarily vivid vision of an alternate reality), an opton (an electronic device on which one can read books), and a network of computers that contains information on most everything that is known and from which people have a difficult time separating themselves.
Trump's list, Biden's green tax, and more from Fox News Opinion
Fox News host Sean Hannity has the latest on his exciting new episode on'Hannity.' HANNITY – Fox News host has the latest on his exciting new episode. HUGH HEWITT – Trump's list of proposed key appointees he should issue soon. LIZ PEEK – Biden, Democrats will do anything to stay in the White House. GUTFELD – Doing the same thing over and over again and denying the outcome is intentionality.
COPR: Continual Human Preference Learning via Optimal Policy Regularization
Zhang, Han, Gui, Lin, Lei, Yu, Zhai, Yuanzhao, Zhang, Yehong, He, Yulan, Wang, Hui, Yu, Yue, Wong, Kam-Fai, Liang, Bin, Xu, Ruifeng
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is commonly utilized to improve the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Given the evolving nature of human preferences, continual alignment becomes more crucial and practical in comparison to traditional static alignment. Nevertheless, making RLHF compatible with Continual Learning (CL) is challenging due to its complex process. Meanwhile, directly learning new human preferences may lead to Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) of historical preferences, resulting in helpless or harmful outputs. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Continual Optimal Policy Regularization (COPR) method, which draws inspiration from the optimal policy theory. COPR utilizes a sampling distribution as a demonstration and regularization constraints for CL. It adopts the Lagrangian Duality (LD) method to dynamically regularize the current policy based on the historically optimal policy, which prevents CF and avoids over-emphasizing unbalanced objectives. We also provide formal proof for the learnability of COPR. The experimental results show that COPR outperforms strong CL baselines on our proposed benchmark, in terms of reward-based, GPT-4 evaluations and human assessment. Furthermore, we validate the robustness of COPR under various CL settings, including different backbones, replay memory sizes, and learning orders.
SongComposer: A Large Language Model for Lyric and Melody Composition in Song Generation
Ding, Shuangrui, Liu, Zihan, Dong, Xiaoyi, Zhang, Pan, Qian, Rui, He, Conghui, Lin, Dahua, Wang, Jiaqi
We present SongComposer, an innovative LLM designed for song composition. It could understand and generate melodies and lyrics in symbolic song representations, by leveraging the capability of LLM. Existing music-related LLM treated the music as quantized audio signals, while such implicit encoding leads to inefficient encoding and poor flexibility. In contrast, we resort to symbolic song representation, the mature and efficient way humans designed for music, and enable LLM to explicitly compose songs like humans. In practice, we design a novel tuple design to format lyric and three note attributes (pitch, duration, and rest duration) in the melody, which guarantees the correct LLM understanding of musical symbols and realizes precise alignment between lyrics and melody. To impart basic music understanding to LLM, we carefully collected SongCompose-PT, a large-scale song pretraining dataset that includes lyrics, melodies, and paired lyrics-melodies in either Chinese or English. After adequate pre-training, 10K carefully crafted QA pairs are used to empower the LLM with the instruction-following capability and solve diverse tasks. With extensive experiments, SongComposer demonstrates superior performance in lyric-to-melody generation, melody-to-lyric generation, song continuation, and text-to-song creation, outperforming advanced LLMs like GPT-4.
The Mechanical Turkness: Tactical Media Art and the Critique of Corporate AI
The extensive industrialization of artificial intelligence (AI) since the mid-2010s has increasingly motivated artists to address its economic and sociopolitical consequences. In this chapter, I discuss interrelated art practices that thematize creative agency, crowdsourced labor, and delegated artmaking to reveal the social rootage of AI technologies and underline the productive human roles in their development. I focus on works whose poetic features indicate broader issues of contemporary AI-influenced science, technology, economy, and society. By exploring the conceptual, methodological, and ethical aspects of their effectiveness in disrupting the political regime of corporate AI, I identify several problems that affect their tactical impact and outline potential avenues for tackling the challenges and advancing the field.
Outdoor Environment Reconstruction with Deep Learning on Radio Propagation Paths
Khachatrian, Hrant, Mkrtchyan, Rafayel, Raptis, Theofanis P.
Conventional methods for outdoor environment reconstruction rely predominantly on vision-based techniques like photogrammetry and LiDAR, facing limitations such as constrained coverage, susceptibility to environmental conditions, and high computational and energy demands. These challenges are particularly pronounced in applications like augmented reality navigation, especially when integrated with wearable devices featuring constrained computational resources and energy budgets. In response, this paper proposes a novel approach harnessing ambient wireless signals for outdoor environment reconstruction. By analyzing radio frequency (RF) data, the paper aims to deduce the environmental characteristics and digitally reconstruct the outdoor surroundings. Investigating the efficacy of selected deep learning (DL) techniques on the synthetic RF dataset WAIR-D, the study endeavors to address the research gap in this domain. Two DL-driven approaches are evaluated (convolutional U-Net and CLIP+ based on vision transformers), with performance assessed using metrics like intersection-over-union (IoU), Hausdorff distance, and Chamfer distance. The results demonstrate promising performance of the RF-based reconstruction method, paving the way towards lightweight and scalable reconstruction solutions.
On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Models
Kapoor, Sayash, Bommasani, Rishi, Klyman, Kevin, Longpre, Shayne, Ramaswami, Ashwin, Cihon, Peter, Hopkins, Aspen, Bankston, Kevin, Biderman, Stella, Bogen, Miranda, Chowdhury, Rumman, Engler, Alex, Henderson, Peter, Jernite, Yacine, Lazar, Seth, Maffulli, Stefano, Nelson, Alondra, Pineau, Joelle, Skowron, Aviya, Song, Dawn, Storchan, Victor, Zhang, Daniel, Ho, Daniel E., Liang, Percy, Narayanan, Arvind
Foundation models are powerful technologies: how they are released publicly directly shapes their societal impact. In this position paper, we focus on open foundation models, defined here as those with broadly available model weights (e.g. Llama 2, Stable Diffusion XL). We identify five distinctive properties (e.g. greater customizability, poor monitoring) of open foundation models that lead to both their benefits and risks. Open foundation models present significant benefits, with some caveats, that span innovation, competition, the distribution of decision-making power, and transparency. To understand their risks of misuse, we design a risk assessment framework for analyzing their marginal risk. Across several misuse vectors (e.g. cyberattacks, bioweapons), we find that current research is insufficient to effectively characterize the marginal risk of open foundation models relative to pre-existing technologies. The framework helps explain why the marginal risk is low in some cases, clarifies disagreements about misuse risks by revealing that past work has focused on different subsets of the framework with different assumptions, and articulates a way forward for more constructive debate. Overall, our work helps support a more grounded assessment of the societal impact of open foundation models by outlining what research is needed to empirically validate their theoretical benefits and risks.
Markovletics: Methods and A Novel Application for Learning Continuous-Time Markov Chain Mixtures
Spaeh, Fabian, Tsourakakis, Charalampos E.
Sequential data naturally arises from user engagement on digital platforms like social media, music streaming services, and web navigation, encapsulating evolving user preferences and behaviors through continuous information streams. A notable unresolved query in stochastic processes is learning mixtures of continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs). While there is progress in learning mixtures of discrete-time Markov chains with recovery guarantees [GKV16,ST23,KTT2023], the continuous scenario uncovers unique unexplored challenges. The intrigue in CTMC mixtures stems from their potential to model intricate continuous-time stochastic processes prevalent in various fields including social media, finance, and biology. In this study, we introduce a novel framework for exploring CTMCs, emphasizing the influence of observed trails' length and mixture parameters on problem regimes, which demands specific algorithms. Through thorough experimentation, we examine the impact of discretizing continuous-time trails on the learnability of the continuous-time mixture, given that these processes are often observed via discrete, resource-demanding observations. Our comparative analysis with leading methods explores sample complexity and the trade-off between the number of trails and their lengths, offering crucial insights for method selection in different problem instances. We apply our algorithms on an extensive collection of Lastfm's user-generated trails spanning three years, demonstrating the capability of our algorithms to differentiate diverse user preferences. We pioneer the use of CTMC mixtures on a basketball passing dataset to unveil intricate offensive tactics of NBA teams. This underscores the pragmatic utility and versatility of our proposed framework. All results presented in this study are replicable, and we provide the implementations to facilitate reproducibility.