Generative AI
Watermark-based Detection and Attribution of AI-Generated Content
Jiang, Zhengyuan, Guo, Moyang, Hu, Yuepeng, Gong, Neil Zhenqiang
Several companies--such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI--have deployed techniques to watermark AI-generated content to enable proactive detection. However, existing literature mainly focuses on user-agnostic detection. Attribution aims to further trace back the user of a generative-AI service who generated a given content detected as AI-generated. Despite its growing importance, attribution is largely unexplored. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by providing the first systematic study on watermark-based, user-aware detection and attribution of AI-generated content. Specifically, we theoretically study the detection and attribution performance via rigorous probabilistic analysis. Moreover, we develop an efficient algorithm to select watermarks for the users to enhance attribution performance. Both our theoretical and empirical results show that watermark-based detection and attribution inherit the accuracy and (non-)robustness properties of the watermarking method.
Poisoning Data to Protect It
After they released a tool designed to foil facial recognition systems in 2020, computer scientist Ben Zhao and his colleagues at the University of Chicago received a confusing email. Their solution, Fawkes, subtly alters the pixels in digital portraits, rendering images incomprehensible to automated facial recognition systems. So when an artist emailed Zhao to ask whether Fawkes might be used to protect her work, he did not see the connection. Then news of revolutionary generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions like Midjourney and Dall-E began to spread. Digital illustrations, photographs, and other visual works had been scraped from the Internet to train various generative models without the consent of the creators.
AI Has Lost Its Magic
I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even saw the answer. "The oozing cream, like time, escapes our grasp, / Each moment slipping with a silent gasp." I read the poem, Slacked part of it to a colleague, and closed the window.
Google set to charge for internet searches with AI, reports say
Google is reportedly drawing up plans to charge for AI-enhanced search features, in what would be the biggest shake up to the company's revenue model in its history. The radical shift is a natural consequence of the vast expense required to provide the service, experts say, and would leave every leading player in the sector offering some variety of subscription model to cover its costs. Google's proposals, first reported by the Financial Times, would entail the company exclusively offering its new search feature to users of its premium subscription services, which customers already have to sign up to if they want to use artificial intelligence assistants in other Google tools such as Gmail and its office suite. With that search experience, being trialled in beta for selected users, Google's generative AI is used to respond to queries directly with a single answer, in a similar style to the conversational approach of ChatGPT and competitors. "AI search is more expensive to compute than Google's traditional search processes. So in charging for AI search Google will be seeking to at least recoup these costs," said Heather Dawe, chief data scientist at the digital transformation consultancy UST.
OpenAI's GPT Store Is Triggering Copyright Complaints
For the past few months, Morten Blichfeldt Andersen has spent many hours scouring OpenAI's GPT Store. Since it launched in January, the marketplace for bespoke bots has filled up with a deep bench of useful and sometimes quirky AI tools. Cartoon generators spin up New Yorkerโstyle illustrations and vivid anime stills. Programming and writing assistants offer shortcuts for crafting code and prose. There's also a color analysis bot, a spider identifier, and a dating coach called RizzGPT.
Generative AI and Teachers -- For Us or Against Us? A Case Study
Pettersson, Jenny, Hult, Elias, Eriksson, Tim, Adewumi, Tosin
We present insightful results of a survey on the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) by university teachers in their teaching activities. The transformation of education by GenAI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has been presenting both opportunities and challenges, including cheating by students. We prepared the online survey according to best practices and the questions were created by the authors, who have pedagogy experience. The survey contained 12 questions and a pilot study was first conducted. The survey was then sent to all teachers in multiple departments across different campuses of the university of interest in Sweden: Lule{\aa} University of Technology. The survey was available in both Swedish and English. The results show that 35 teachers (more than half) use GenAI out of 67 respondents. Preparation is the teaching activity with the most frequency that GenAI is used for and ChatGPT is the most commonly used GenAI. 59% say it has impacted their teaching, however, 55% say there should be legislation around the use of GenAI, especially as inaccuracies and cheating are the biggest concerns.
GENEVIC: GENetic data Exploration and Visualization via Intelligent interactive Console
Nath, Anindita, Mwesigwa, Savannah, Dai, Yulin, Jiang, Xiaoqian, Zhao, Zhongming
Summary: The vast generation of genetic data poses a significant challenge in efficiently uncovering valuable knowledge. Introducing GENEVIC, an AI-driven chat framework that tackles this challenge by bridging the gap between genetic data generation and biomedical knowledge discovery. Leveraging generative AI, notably ChatGPT, it serves as a biologist's 'copilot'. It automates the analysis, retrieval, and visualization of customized domain-specific genetic information, and integrates functionalities to generate protein interaction networks, enrich gene sets, and search scientific literature from PubMed, Google Scholar, and arXiv, making it a comprehensive tool for biomedical research. In its pilot phase, GENEVIC is assessed using a curated database that ranks genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, and cognition, based on their effect weights from the Polygenic Score Catalog, thus enabling researchers to prioritize genetic variants in complex diseases. GENEVIC's operation is user-friendly, accessible without any specialized training, secured by Azure OpenAI's HIPAA-compliant infrastructure, and evaluated for its efficacy through real-time query testing. As a prototype, GENEVIC is set to advance genetic research, enabling informed biomedical decisions. Availability and implementation: GENEVIC is publicly accessible at https://genevic-anath2024.streamlit.app. The underlying code is open-source and available via GitHub at https://github.com/anath2110/GENEVIC.git.
As Good As A Coin Toss: Human detection of AI-generated images, videos, audio, and audiovisual stimuli
Cooke, Di, Edwards, Abigail, Barkoff, Sophia, Kelly, Kathryn
As synthetic media becomes progressively more realistic and barriers to using it continue to lower, the technology has been increasingly utilized for malicious purposes, from financial fraud to nonconsensual pornography. Today, the principal defense against being misled by synthetic media relies on the ability of the human observer to visually and auditorily discern between real and fake. However, it remains unclear just how vulnerable people actually are to deceptive synthetic media in the course of their day to day lives. We conducted a perceptual study with 1276 participants to assess how accurate people were at distinguishing synthetic images, audio only, video only, and audiovisual stimuli from authentic. To reflect the circumstances under which people would likely encounter synthetic media in the wild, testing conditions and stimuli emulated a typical online platform, while all synthetic media used in the survey was sourced from publicly accessible generative AI technology. We find that overall, participants struggled to meaningfully discern between synthetic and authentic content. We also find that detection performance worsens when the stimuli contains synthetic content as compared to authentic content, images featuring human faces as compared to non face objects, a single modality as compared to multimodal stimuli, mixed authenticity as compared to being fully synthetic for audiovisual stimuli, and features foreign languages as compared to languages the observer is fluent in. Finally, we also find that prior knowledge of synthetic media does not meaningfully impact their detection performance. Collectively, these results indicate that people are highly susceptible to being tricked by synthetic media in their daily lives and that human perceptual detection capabilities can no longer be relied upon as an effective counterdefense.
AI-Generated Spoofs of 'RuPaul's Drag Race' Are Flooding Instagram and TikTok
Now in its 16th season, RuPaul's Drag Race has birthed more than a few iconic lip-sync battles, but precious few have featured Muppets. AI Drag Race changed that. In the Instagram account's recent season finale, Miss Piggy, wearing an AI-generated drag look, faced off against lover-turned-rival Kermisha Ihman, who had a thick, 40-inch-long ponytail atop her green felt head. Tackling Lady Gaga's "Telephone," the two whirled and jumped, kicking and bucking in front of head judge Betty Boop. Kermisha worked her faux-nailed webbed feet, sickening in her bejeweled purple corset, but ultimately she fell to Piggy, whose fringe flew as she went for a well-timed jump split at the song's climax.
Deep Generative Models through the Lens of the Manifold Hypothesis: A Survey and New Connections
Loaiza-Ganem, Gabriel, Ross, Brendan Leigh, Hosseinzadeh, Rasa, Caterini, Anthony L., Cresswell, Jesse C.
In recent years there has been increased interest in understanding the interplay between deep generative models (DGMs) and the manifold hypothesis. Research in this area focuses on understanding the reasons why commonly-used DGMs succeed or fail at learning distributions supported on unknown low-dimensional manifolds, as well as developing new models explicitly designed to account for manifold-supported data. This manifold lens provides both clarity as to why some DGMs (e.g. diffusion models and some generative adversarial networks) empirically surpass others (e.g. likelihood-based models such as variational autoencoders, normalizing flows, or energy-based models) at sample generation, and guidance for devising more performant DGMs. We carry out the first survey of DGMs viewed through this lens, making two novel contributions along the way. First, we formally establish that numerical instability of high-dimensional likelihoods is unavoidable when modelling low-dimensional data. We then show that DGMs on learned representations of autoencoders can be interpreted as approximately minimizing Wasserstein distance: this result, which applies to latent diffusion models, helps justify their outstanding empirical results. The manifold lens provides a rich perspective from which to understand DGMs, which we aim to make more accessible and widespread.