This paper presents a community-centered study of cultural limitations of text-to-image (T2I) models in the South Asian context. We theorize these failures using scholarship on dominant media regimes of representations and locate them within participants' reporting of their existing social marginalizations. We thus show how generative AI can reproduce an outsiders gaze for viewing South Asian cultures, shaped by global and regional power inequities. By centering communities as experts and soliciting their perspectives on T2I limitations, our study adds rich nuance into existing evaluative frameworks and deepens our understanding of the culturally-specific ways AI technologies can fail in non-Western and Global South settings. We distill lessons for responsible development of T2I models, recommending concrete pathways forward that can allow for recognition of structural inequalities.

Unlike existing generative AI systems, CoDi can generate multiple modalities in parallel and its input is not limited to a subset of modalities like text or image. Despite the absence of training datasets for many combinations of modalities, we propose to align modalities in both the input and output space. This allows CoDi to freely condition on any input combination and generate any group of modalities, even if they are not present in the training data. CoDi employs a novel composable generation strategy which involves building a shared multimodal space by bridging alignment in the diffusion process, enabling the synchronized generation of intertwined modalities, such as temporally aligned video and audio. Highly customizable and flexible, CoDi achieves strong joint-modality generation quality, and outperforms or is on par with the unimodal state-of-the-art for single-modality synthesis. The project page with demonstrations and code is at https://codi-gen.github.io/

Diffusion models have emerged as the new state-of-the-art family of deep generative models, and their promising potentials for text generation have recently attracted increasing attention. Existing studies mostly adopt a single encoder architecture with partially noising processes for conditional text generation, but its degree of flexibility for conditional modeling is limited. In fact, the encoder-decoder architecture is naturally more flexible for its detachable encoder and decoder modules, which is extensible to multilingual and multimodal generation tasks for conditions and target texts. However, the encoding process of conditional texts lacks the understanding of target texts. To this end, a spiral interaction architecture for encoder-decoder text diffusion (DiffuSIA) is proposed. Concretely, the conditional information from encoder is designed to be captured by the diffusion decoder, while the target information from decoder is designed to be captured by the conditional encoder. These two types of information flow run through multilayer interaction spirally for deep fusion and understanding. DiffuSIA is evaluated on four text generation tasks, including paraphrase, text simplification, question generation, and open-domain dialogue generation. Experimental results show that DiffuSIA achieves competitive performance among previous methods on all four tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method.

ChatGPT is now a smartphone app, which could be good news for people who like to use the artificial intelligence chatbot and bad news for all the clone apps that have tried to profit off the technology. The free app started to become available on iPhones in the United States on Thursday and will later be coming to Android phones. Unlike the web version, you can also ask it questions using your voice. The company that makes it, OpenAI, said it will remain ad-free but "syncs your history across devices". "We're starting our rollout in the US and will expand to additional countries in the coming weeks," said a blog post announcing the new app, which is described in the App Store as the "official app" by OpenAI.

It's the first official smartphone app for the viral language model, joining a crowded field of third-party mobile AI software vying for your attention -- many of which tap into the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 APIs powering ChatGPT. It's only available in the US for now, but the company says it will expand to additional countries "in the coming weeks." Feature-wise, OpenAI's app looks and behaves much like the ChatGPT website -- with the addition of voice input using OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition. It also allows switching between standard and GPT-4 language models for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, as well as conversation history (synced from the desktop if you sign in with the same account) and the ability to export data and delete or rename conversations. However, the company's recently launched plugins, including live web access, are absent.

This article was co-published with Understanding AI, a newsletter that explores how A.I. works and how it's changing our world. When Silicon Valley executives testify before Congress, they normally get raked over the coals. But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's Tuesday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee went differently. Senators asked Altman probing questions and listened respectfully to his answers. Afterward, the committee's chairman, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut praised Altman.

If you've searched for "ChatGPT" in Apple's App Store since the chatbot launched six months ago, you may have discovered some of the dozens of apps with names like Genie, Genius, and AI Writer claiming to be powered by OpenAI's technology. Or you might have found Microsoft's Bing app with the company's own chatbot inside, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 text generator. But ChatGPT itself hasn't had an official iPhone app released by its own developer--until now. As with the original web model of the chatbot, the free-to-use version is built on GPT-3.5, and its most capable persona built on GPT-4 is accessible only if you're paying $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus. OpenAI says the mobile app syncs your history of chats with its bot across devices and will be expanding to other countries "in the coming weeks."

This week, US senators heard alarming testimony suggesting that unchecked AI could steal jobs, spread misinformation, and generally "go quite wrong," in the words of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (whatever that means). He and several lawmakers agreed that the US may now need a new federal agency to oversee the development of the technology. But the hearing also saw agreement that no one wants to kneecap a technology that could potentially increase productivity and give the US a lead in a new technological revolution. Worried senators might consider talking to Missy Cummings, a onetime fighter pilot and engineering and robotics professor at George Mason University. She studies use of AI and automation in safety critical systems including cars and aircraft, and earlier this year returned to academia after a stint at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which oversees automotive technology, including Tesla's Autopilot and self-driving cars.

In response to concerns in the classroom, a fleet of companies have released products claiming they can flag AI generated text. A Post examination showed it can wrongly flag human generated text as written by AI. In January, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said it created a tool that can distinguish between human and AI-generated text, but noted that it "is not fully reliable" and is wrong 9 percent of the time.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the artificial intelligence lab behind ChatGPT, took questions from reporters after his congressional hearing, including his definition of "scary AI." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before Congress in Washington, D.C., this week about regulating artificial intelligence as well as his personal fears over the tech and what "scary" AI systems means to him. Fox News Digital asked OpenAI's wildly popular chatbot, ChatGPT, to also weigh in on examples of "scary" artificial intelligence systems, and it reported six hypothetical instances of how AI could become weaponized or have potentially harmful impacts on society. When asked by Fox News Digital on Tuesday after his testimony before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, Altman gave examples of "scary AI" that included systems that could design "novel biological pathogens." "An AI that could hack into computer systems," he continued. "I think these are all scary. These systems can become quite powerful, which is why I was happy to be here today and why I think this is so important."