In light of prominent discourse around the negative implications of generative AI, an emerging area of research is investigating the current and estimated impacts of AI-generated propaganda on African citizens participating in elections. Throughout Africa, there have already been suspected cases of AI-generated propaganda influencing electoral outcomes or precipitating coups in countries like Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Gabon, underscoring the need for comprehensive research in this domain. This paper aims to highlight the risks associated with the spread of generative AI-driven disinformation within Africa while concurrently examining the roles of government, civil society, academia, and the general public in the responsible development, practical use, and robust governance of AI. To understand how African governments might effectively counteract the impact of AI-generated propaganda, this paper presents case studies illustrating the current usage of generative AI for election-related propaganda in Africa. Subsequently, this paper discusses efforts by fact-checking organisations to mitigate the negative impacts of disinformation, explores the potential for new initiatives to actively engage citizens in literacy efforts to combat disinformation spread, and advocates for increased governmental regulatory measures. Overall, this research seeks to increase comprehension of the potential ramifications of AI-generated propaganda on democratic processes within Africa and propose actionable strategies for stakeholders to address these multifaceted challenges.

Amid the rising intersection of generative AI and human artistic processes, this study probes the critical yet less-explored terrain of alignment in human-centric automatic song composition. We propose a novel task of Colloquial Description-to-Song Generation, which focuses on aligning the generated content with colloquial human expressions. This task is aimed at bridging the gap between colloquial language understanding and auditory expression within an AI model, with the ultimate goal of creating songs that accurately satisfy human auditory expectations and structurally align with musical norms. Current datasets are limited due to their narrow descriptive scope, semantic gaps and inaccuracies. To overcome data scarcity in this domain, we present the Caichong Music Dataset (CaiMD). CaiMD is manually annotated by both professional musicians and amateurs, offering diverse perspectives and a comprehensive understanding of colloquial descriptions. Unlike existing datasets pre-set with expert annotations or auto-generated ones with inherent biases, CaiMD caters more sufficiently to our purpose of aligning AI-generated music with widespread user-desired results. Moreover, we propose an innovative single-stage framework called MuDiT/MuSiT for enabling effective human-machine alignment in song creation. This framework not only achieves cross-modal comprehension between colloquial language and auditory music perceptions but also ensures generated songs align with user-desired results. MuDiT/MuSiT employs one DiT/SiT model for end-to-end generation of musical components like melody, harmony, rhythm, vocals, and instrumentation. The approach ensures harmonious sonic cohesiveness amongst all generated musical components, facilitating better resonance with human auditory expectations.

In 2006 I was fired from my job at EB Games. It was, with the benefit of hindsight, a well-earned dismissal. One Sunday I'd set up a camera and filmed myself jumping over a stack of boxes and hip thrusting at a stranger. My area manager saw the video about eight months later. I was fired on the spot.

This work introduces the ClimateSent-GAT Model, an innovative method that integrates Graph Attention Networks (GATs) with techniques from natural language processing to accurately identify and predict disagreements within Reddit comment-reply pairs. Our model classifies disagreements into three categories: agree, disagree, and neutral. Leveraging the inherent graph structure of Reddit comment-reply pairs, the model significantly outperforms existing benchmarks by capturing complex interaction patterns and sentiment dynamics. This research advances graph-based NLP methodologies and provides actionable insights for policymakers and educators in climate science communication.

Modern AI technology like Large language models (LLMs) has the potential to pollute the public information sphere with made-up content, which poses a significant threat to the cohesion of societies at large. A wide range of research has shown that LLMs are capable of generating text of impressive quality, including persuasive political speech, text with a pre-defined style, and role-specific content. But there is a crucial gap in the literature: We lack large-scale and systematic studies of how capable LLMs are in impersonating political and societal representatives and how the general public judges these impersonations in terms of authenticity, relevance and coherence. We present the results of a study based on a cross-section of British society that shows that LLMs are able to generate responses to debate questions that were part of a broadcast political debate programme in the UK. The impersonated responses are judged to be more authentic and relevant than the original responses given by people who were impersonated. This shows two things: (1) LLMs can be made to contribute meaningfully to the public political debate and (2) there is a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society.

When asked to summarize articles or answer questions given a passage, large language models (LLMs) can hallucinate details and respond with unsubstantiated answers that are inaccurate with respect to the input context. This paper describes a simple approach for detecting such contextual hallucinations. We hypothesize that contextual hallucinations are related to the extent to which an LLM attends to information in the provided context versus its own generations. Based on this intuition, we propose a simple hallucination detection model whose input features are given by the ratio of attention weights on the context versus newly generated tokens (for each attention head). We find that a linear classifier based on these lookback ratio features is as effective as a richer detector that utilizes the entire hidden states of an LLM or a text-based entailment model. The lookback ratio-based detector -- Lookback Lens -- is found to transfer across tasks and even models, allowing a detector that is trained on a 7B model to be applied (without retraining) to a larger 13B model. We further apply this detector to mitigate contextual hallucinations, and find that a simple classifier-guided decoding approach is able to reduce the amount of hallucination, for example by 9.6% in the XSum summarization task.

Cue points indicate possible temporal boundaries in a transition between two pieces of music in DJ mixing and constitute a crucial element in autonomous DJ systems as well as for live mixing. In this work, we present a novel method for automatic cue point estimation, interpreted as a computer vision object detection task. Our proposed system is based on a pre-trained object detection transformer which we fine-tune on our novel cue point dataset. Our provided dataset contains 21k manually annotated cue points from human experts as well as metronome information for nearly 5k individual tracks, making this dataset 35x larger than the previously available cue point dataset. Unlike previous methods, our approach does not require low-level musical information analysis, while demonstrating increased precision in retrieving cue point positions. Moreover, our proposed method demonstrates high adherence to phrasing, a type of high-level music structure commonly emphasized in electronic dance music. The code, model checkpoints, and dataset are made publicly available.

Cinematic audio source separation (CASS) is a relatively new subtask of audio source separation, concerned with the separation of a mixture into the dialogue, music, and effects stems. To date, only one publicly available dataset exists for CASS, that is, the Divide and Remaster (DnR) dataset, which is currently at version 2. While DnR v2 has been an incredibly useful resource for CASS, several areas of improvement have been identified, particularly through its use in the 2023 Sound Demixing Challenge. In this work, we develop version 3 of the DnR dataset, addressing issues relating to vocal content in non-dialogue stems, loudness distributions, mastering process, and linguistic diversity. In particular, the dialogue stem of DnR v3 includes speech content from more than 30 languages from multiple families including but not limited to the Germanic, Romance, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, and Bantu families. Benchmark results using the Bandit model indicated that training on multilingual data yields significant generalizability to the model even in languages with low data availability. Even in languages with high data availability, the multilingual model often performs on par or better than dedicated models trained on monolingual CASS datasets.

The task of writing rap is challenging and involves producing complex rhyming schemes, yet meaningful lyrics. In this work, we propose Raply, a fine-tuned GPT-2 model capable of producing meaningful rhyming text in the style of rap. In addition to its rhyming capabilities, the model is able to generate less offensive content. It was achieved through the fine-tuning the model on a new dataset Mitislurs, a profanity-mitigated corpus. We evaluate the output of the model on two criteria: 1) rhyming based on the rhyme density metric; 2) profanity content, using the list of profanities for the English language. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at profanity mitigation for rap lyrics generation.

While personalized text-to-image generation has enabled the learning of a single concept from multiple images, a more practical yet challenging scenario involves learning multiple concepts within a single image. However, existing works tackling this scenario heavily rely on extensive human annotations. In this paper, we introduce a novel task named Unsupervised Concept Extraction (UCE) that considers an unsupervised setting without any human knowledge of the concepts. Given an image that contains multiple concepts, the task aims to extract and recreate individual concepts solely relying on the existing knowledge from pretrained diffusion models. To achieve this, we present ConceptExpress that tackles UCE by unleashing the inherent capabilities of pretrained diffusion models in two aspects. Specifically, a concept localization approach automatically locates and disentangles salient concepts by leveraging spatial correspondence from diffusion self-attention; and based on the lookup association between a concept and a conceptual token, a concept-wise optimization process learns discriminative tokens that represent each individual concept. Finally, we establish an evaluation protocol tailored for the UCE task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConceptExpress is a promising solution to the UCE task.