Generative AI
A Framework for Lightweight Responsible Prompting Recommendation
Machado, Tiago, Berger, Sara E., Sanctos, Cassia, de Santana, Vagner Figueiredo, Williams, Lemara, Wu, Zhaoqing
Computer Science and Design practitioners have been researching and proposing alternatives for a dearth of recommendations, standards, or best practices in user interfaces for decades. Now, with the advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), we have yet again an emerging, powerful technology that lacks sufficient guidance in terms of possible interactions, inputs, and outcomes. In this context, this work proposes a lightweight framework for responsible prompting recommendation to be added before the prompt is sent to GenAI. The framework is comprised of (1) a human-curated dataset for recommendations, (2) a red team dataset for assessing recommendations, (3) a sentence transformer for semantics mapping, (4) a similarity metric to map input prompt to recommendations, (5) a set of similarity thresholds, (6) quantized sentence embeddings, (7) a recommendation engine, and (8) an evaluation step to use the red team dataset. With the proposed framework and open-source system, the contributions presented can be applied in multiple contexts where end-users can benefit from guidance for interacting with GenAI in a more responsible way, recommending positive values to be added and harmful sentences to be removed.
Delving into: the quantification of Ai-generated content on the internet (synthetic data)
While it is increasingly evident that the internet is becoming saturated with content created by generated Ai large language models, accurately measuring the scale of this phenomenon has proven challenging. By analyzing the frequency of specific keywords commonly used by ChatGPT, this paper demonstrates that such linguistic markers can effectively be used to esti-mate the presence of generative AI content online. The findings suggest that at least 30% of text on active web pages originates from AI-generated sources, with the actual proportion likely ap-proaching 40%. Given the implications of autophagous loops, this is a sobering realization.
GIScience in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: A Research Agenda Towards Autonomous GIS
Li, Zhenlong, Ning, Huan, Gao, Song, Janowicz, Krzysztof, Li, Wenwen, Arundel, Samantha T., Yang, Chaowei, Bhaduri, Budhendra, Wang, Shaowen, Zhu, A-Xing, Gahegan, Mark, Shekhar, Shashi, Ye, Xinyue, McKenzie, Grant, Cervone, Guido, Hodgson, Michael E.
The advent of generative AI exemplified by large language models (LLMs) opens new ways to represent and compute geographic information and transcends the process of geographic knowledge production, driving geographic information systems (GIS) towards autonomous GIS. Leveraging LLMs as the decision core, autonomous GIS can independently generate and execute geoprocessing workflows to perform spatial analysis. In this vision paper, we further elaborate on the concept of autonomous GIS and present a conceptual framework that defines its five autonomous goals, five autonomous levels, five core functions, and three operational scales. We demonstrate how autonomous GIS could perform geospatial data retrieval, spatial analysis, and map making with four proof-of-concept GIS agents. We conclude by identifying critical challenges and future research directions, including fine-tuning and self-growing decision-cores, autonomous modeling, and examining the societal and practical implications of autonomous GIS. By establishing the groundwork for a paradigm shift in GIScience, this paper envisions a future where GIS moves beyond traditional workflows to autonomously reason, derive, innovate, and advance geospatial solutions to pressing global challenges. Meanwhile, as we design and deploy increasingly intelligent geospatial systems, we carry a responsibility to ensure they are developed in socially responsible ways, serve the public good, and support the continued value of human geographic insight in an AI-augmented future.
OpenAI is phasing out GPT-4.5 for developers
OpenAI has announced its phasing out GPT-4.5 from its developer API in favor of its new GPT-4.1 model. When it launched, OpenAI described GPT-4.5 as its best and most capable model so far, in part because it was a more natural conversationalist and could capably mimic some notion of emotional intelligence. Despite what its name suggests, GPT-4.1 is supposed to be better and more efficient. That means that if you won't find it as in option in the public-facing ChatGPT interface, but you could someday interact with an agent that leverages the model's improvements. GPT-4.1 is supposed to be better at coding and "long context understanding," according to OpenAI, with support for "up to one million tokens of context" and knowledge of the world up to June 2024.
OpenAI's New GPT 4.1 Models Excel at Coding
OpenAI announced today that it is releasing a new family of artificial intelligence models optimized to excel at coding, as it ramps up efforts to fend off increasingly stiff competition from companies like Google and Anthropic. The models are available to developers through OpenAI's application programming interface (API). OpenAI is releasing three sizes of models: GPT 4.1, GPT 4.1 Mini, and GPT 4.1 Nano. Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, said on a livestream that the new models are better than OpenAI's most widely used model, GPT-4o, and better than its largest and most powerful model, GPT-4.5, in some ways. GPT-4.1 scored 55 percent on SWE-Bench, a widely used benchmark for gauging the prowess of coding models.
Could AI Trace and Explain the Origins of AI-Generated Images and Text?
Fang, Hongchao, Liu, Yixin, Du, Jiangshu, Qin, Can, Xu, Ran, Liu, Feng, Sun, Lichao, Lee, Dongwon, Huang, Lifu, Yin, Wenpeng
AI-generated content is becoming increasingly prevalent in the real world, leading to serious ethical and societal concerns. For instance, adversaries might exploit large multimodal models (LMMs) to create images that violate ethical or legal standards, while paper reviewers may misuse large language models (LLMs) to generate reviews without genuine intellectual effort. While prior work has explored detecting AI-generated images and texts, and occasionally tracing their source models, there is a lack of a systematic and fine-grained comparative study. Important dimensions--such as AI-generated images vs. text, fully vs. partially AI-generated images, and general vs. malicious use cases--remain underexplored. Furthermore, whether AI systems like GPT-4o can explain why certain forged content is attributed to specific generative models is still an open question, with no existing benchmark addressing this. To fill this gap, we introduce AI-FAKER, a comprehensive multimodal dataset with over 280,000 samples spanning multiple LLMs and LMMs, covering both general and malicious use cases for AI-generated images and texts. Our experiments reveal two key findings: (i) AI authorship detection depends not only on the generated output but also on the model's original training intent; and (ii) GPT-4o provides highly consistent but less specific explanations when analyzing content produced by OpenAI's own models, such as DALL-E and GPT-4o itself.
MCP Safety Audit: LLMs with the Model Context Protocol Allow Major Security Exploits
Radosevich, Brandon, Halloran, John
To reduce development overhead and enable seamless integration between potential components comprising any given generative AI application, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) (Anthropic, 2024) has recently been released and subsequently widely adopted. The MCP is an open protocol that standardizes API calls to large language models (LLMs), data sources, and agentic tools. By connecting multiple MCP servers, each defined with a set of tools, resources, and prompts, users are able to define automated workflows fully driven by LLMs. However, we show that the current MCP design carries a wide range of security risks for end users. In particular, we demonstrate that industry-leading LLMs may be coerced into using MCP tools to compromise an AI developer's system through various attacks, such as malicious code execution, remote access control, and credential theft. To proactively mitigate these and related attacks, we introduce a safety auditing tool, MCPSafetyScanner, the first agentic tool to assess the security of an arbitrary MCP server. MCPScanner uses several agents to (a) automatically determine adversarial samples given an MCP server's tools and resources; (b) search for related vulnerabilities and remediations based on those samples; and (c) generate a security report detailing all findings. Our work highlights serious security issues with general-purpose agentic workflows while also providing a proactive tool to audit MCP server safety and address detected vulnerabilities before deployment. The described MCP server auditing tool, MCPSafetyScanner, is freely available at: https://github.com/johnhalloran321/mcpSafetyScanner
Netflix is reportedly testing a search function powered by OpenAI
Netflix has started testing a new search feature powered by OpenAI that can help customers find movies and shows to watch, according to Bloomberg. The streaming service has reportedly given select users in Australia and New Zealand the option to use the tool. It will allow users to search for terms other than a specific show's title, an actor's name or the genre they want to watch. Bloomberg says it will give them a way to search for content using more specific terms, like their mood. Presumably, that means the service can surface dramatic shows for a search query that says "sad," and seeing as it's powered by generative AI, users will most likely be able to use natural language in their search terms.
A Disaster for American Innovation
Nearly three months into President Donald Trump's term, the future of American AI leadership is in jeopardy. Basically any generative-AI product you have used or heard of--ChatGPT, Claude, AlphaFold, Sora--depends on academic work or was built by university-trained researchers in the industry, and frequently both. Today's AI boom is fueled by the use of specialized computer-graphics chips to run AI models--a technique pioneered by researchers at Stanford who received funding from the Department of Defense. They rely on a training method called "reinforcement learning," the foundations of which were developed with National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. "I don't think anybody would seriously claim that these [AI breakthroughs] could have been done if the research universities in the U.S. didn't exist at the same scale," Rayid Ghani, a machine-learning researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me.
OpenAI prepares to send GPT-4 out to pasture
GPT-4, OpenAI's first big upgrade to ChatGPT months after unleashing it on the world, is on its way out. A changelog the company published on Thursday said the model will be retired from ChatGPT on April 30. GPT-4o, which has been available since last May, will fully replace it. OpenAI says GPT-4o improves on it in writing, coding and STEM. Recent upgrades have boosted the newer model further, enhancing its instruction following, problem-solving and conversational flow.