The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has increased the potential for a wide range of attackers to target elections around the world in 2024, according to a new report by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. Both state-linked hackers and allied so-called "hacktivists" are increasingly experimenting with ChatGPT and other AI tools, enabling a wider range of actors to carry out cyberattacks and scams, according to the company's annual global threats report. This includes hackers linked to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, who have been testing new ways to use these technologies against the U.S., Israel, and European countries. With half the world's population set to vote in 2024, the use of generative AI to target elections could be a "huge factor," says Adam Meyers, head of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike. So far, CrowdStrike analysts have been able to detect the use of these models through comments in the scripts that would have been placed there by a tool like ChatGPT.

Generative AI is expected to have a vast, positive impact on education; however, at present, this potential has not yet been demonstrated at scale at university level. In this study, we present first evidence that generative AI can increase the speed of learning substantially in university students. We tested whether using the AI-powered teaching assistant Syntea affected the speed of learning of hundreds of distance learning students across more than 40 courses at the IU International University of Applied Sciences. Our analysis suggests that using Syntea reduced their study time substantially--by about 27\% on average--in the third month after the release of Syntea. Taken together, the magnitude of the effect and the scalability of the approach implicate generative AI as a key lever to significantly improve and accelerate learning by personalisation.

Mechanisms are essential components designed to perform specific tasks in various mechanical systems. However, designing a mechanism that satisfies certain kinematic or quasi-static requirements is a challenging task. The kinematic requirements may include the workspace of a mechanism, while the quasi-static requirements of a mechanism may include its torque transmission, which refers to the ability of the mechanism to transfer power and torque effectively. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based generative model for generating multiple crank-rocker four-bar linkage mechanisms that satisfy both the kinematic and quasi-static requirements aforementioned. The proposed model is based on a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) with modifications for mechanism synthesis, which is trained to learn the relationship between the requirements of a mechanism with respect to linkage lengths. The results demonstrate that the proposed model successfully generates multiple distinct mechanisms that satisfy specific kinematic and quasi-static requirements. To evaluate the novelty of our approach, we provide a comparison of the samples synthesized by the proposed cGAN, traditional cVAE and NSGA-II. Our approach has several advantages over traditional design methods. It enables designers to efficiently generate multiple diverse and feasible design candidates while exploring a large design space. Also, the proposed model considers both the kinematic and quasi-static requirements, which can lead to more efficient and effective mechanisms for real-world use, making it a promising tool for linkage mechanism design.

Traditional methods, such as JPEG, perform image compression by operating on structural information, such as pixel values or frequency content. These methods are effective to bitrates around one bit per pixel (bpp) and higher at standard image sizes. In contrast, text-based semantic compression directly stores concepts and their relationships using natural language, which has evolved with humans to efficiently represent these salient concepts. These methods can operate at extremely low bitrates by disregarding structural information like location, size, and orientation. In this work, we use GPT-4V and DALL-E3 from OpenAI to explore the quality-compression frontier for image compression and identify the limitations of current technology. We push semantic compression as low as 100 $\mu$bpp (up to $10,000\times$ smaller than JPEG) by introducing an iterative reflection process to improve the decoded image. We further hypothesize this 100 $\mu$bpp level represents a soft limit on semantic compression at standard image resolutions.

AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat, now in beta, is a new generative AI–powered conversational engine deeply integrated into Acrobat workflows, empowering everyone with the information inside their most important documents. As the creator of PDF, the world's most trusted digital document format, Adobe understands document challenges and opportunities well. Our continually evolving Acrobat PDF application, the gold standard for working with PDFs, is already used by more than half a billion customers to open around 400 billion documents each year. Starting immediately, customers will be able to use AI Assistant to work even more productively. All they need to do is open Acrobat on their desktop or the web and start working.

Cities worldwide are rapidly adopting smart technologies, transforming urban life. Despite this trend, a universally accepted definition of 'smart city' remains elusive. Past efforts to define it have not yielded a consensus, as evidenced by the numerous definitions in use. In this paper, we endeavored to create a new 'compromise' definition that should resonate with most experts previously involved in defining this concept and aimed to validate one of the existing definitions. We reviewed 60 definitions of smart cities from industry, academia, and various relevant organizations, employing transformer architecture-based generative AI and semantic text analysis to reach this compromise. We proposed a semantic similarity measure as an evaluation technique, which could generally be used to compare different smart city definitions, assessing their uniqueness or resemblance. Our methodology employed generative AI to analyze various existing definitions of smart cities, generating a list of potential new composite definitions. Each of these new definitions was then tested against the pre-existing individual definitions we have gathered, using cosine similarity as our metric. This process identified smart city definitions with the highest average cosine similarity, semantically positioning them as the closest on average to all the 60 individual definitions selected.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models can propose solutions to scientific problems beyond human capability. To truly make conceptual contributions, researchers need to be capable of understanding the AI-generated structures and extracting the underlying concepts and ideas. When algorithms provide little explanatory reasoning alongside the output, scientists have to reverse-engineer the fundamental insights behind proposals based solely on examples. This task can be challenging as the output is often highly complex and thus not immediately accessible to humans. In this work we show how transferring part of the analysis process into an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment can assist researchers in developing an understanding of AI-generated solutions. We demonstrate the usefulness of VR in finding interpretable configurations of abstract graphs, representing Quantum Optics experiments. Thereby, we can manually discover new generalizations of AI-discoveries as well as new understanding in experimental quantum optics. Furthermore, it allows us to customize the search space in an informed way - as a human-in-the-loop - to achieve significantly faster subsequent discovery iterations. As concrete examples, with this technology, we discover a new resource-efficient 3-dimensional entanglement swapping scheme, as well as a 3-dimensional 4-particle Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-state analyzer. Our results show the potential of VR for increasing a human researcher's ability to derive knowledge from graph-based generative AI that, which is a common abstract data representation used in diverse fields of science.

Well-designed prompts have demonstrated the potential to guide text-to-image models in generating amazing images. Although existing prompt engineering methods can provide high-level guidance, it is challenging for novice users to achieve the desired results by manually entering prompts due to a discrepancy between novice-user-input prompts and the model-preferred prompts. To bridge the distribution gap between user input behavior and model training datasets, we first construct a novel Coarse-Fine Granularity Prompts dataset (CFP) and propose a novel User-Friendly Fine-Grained Text Generation framework (UF-FGTG) for automated prompt optimization. For CFP, we construct a novel dataset for text-to-image tasks that combines coarse and fine-grained prompts to facilitate the development of automated prompt generation methods. For UF-FGTG, we propose a novel framework that automatically translates user-input prompts into model-preferred prompts. Specifically, we propose a prompt refiner that continually rewrites prompts to empower users to select results that align with their unique needs. Meanwhile, we integrate image-related loss functions from the text-to-image model into the training process of text generation to generate model-preferred prompts. Additionally, we propose an adaptive feature extraction module to ensure diversity in the generated results. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is capable of generating more visually appealing and diverse images than previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 5% across six quality and aesthetic metrics.

For much of last year, knocking OpenAI off its perch atop the tech industry looked all but impossible, as the company rode a riot of excitement and hype generated by a remarkable, garrulous, and occasionally unhinged program called ChatGPT. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has recently at least given Sam Altman some healthy competition, leading the development and deployment of an AI model that appears both as capable and as innovative as the one that powers OpenAI's barnstorming bot. Ever since Alphabet forged DeepMind by merging two of its AI-focused divisions last April, Hassabis has been responsible for corralling its scientists and engineers in order to counter both OpenAI's remarkable rise and its collaboration with Microsoft, seen as a potential threat to Alphabet's cash-cow search business. Google researchers came up with several of the ideas that went into building ChatGPT, yet the company chose not to commercialize them due to misgivings about how they might misbehave or be misused. In recent months, Hassabis has overseen a dramatic shift in pace of research and releases with the rapid development of Gemini, a "multimodal" AI model that already powers Google's answer to ChatGPT and a growing number of Google products.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more "generative AI" Pundits compared the new technology's impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution--or the discovery of fire. Time will sort hype from reality, but one consequence of the explosion of artificial intelligence is clear: this technology's environmental footprint is large and growing. AI use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which AI runs. As tech companies seek to embed high-intensity AI into everything from resume-writing to kidney transplant medicine and from choosing dog food to climate modeling, they cite many ways AI could help reduce humanity's environmental footprint.