Developing the AI systems behind tools such as ChatGPT and the image generator Dall-E costs hundreds of millions of dollars--and it's about to get more expensive. OpenAI, Google, and other companies building large-scale AI projects have traditionally paid nothing for much of their training data, scraping it from the web. But Stack Overflow, a popular internet forum for computer programming help, plans to begin charging large AI developers as soon as the middle of this year for access to the 50 million questions and answers on its service, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says. The site has more than 20 million registered users. Stack Overflow's decision to seek compensation from companies tapping its data, part of a broader generative AI strategy, has not been previously reported. It follows an announcement by Reddit this week that it will begin charging some AI developers to access its own content starting in June.

Fresh fears have been raised about the training material used for some of the largest and most powerful artificial intelligence models, after several investigations exposed the fascist, pirated and malicious sources from which the data is harvested. One such dataset is the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, or C4, assembled by Google from more than 15m websites and used to train both the search engine's LaMDA AI as well as Meta's GPT competitor, LLaMA. The dataset is public, but its scale has made it difficult to examine the contents: it is supposedly a "clean" version of a more expansive dataset, Common Crawl, with "noisy" content, offensive language and racist slurs removed from the material. But an investigation by the Washington Post reveals that C4's "cleanliness" is only skin deep. While it draws on websites such as the Guardian – which makes up 0.05% of the entire dataset - and Wikipedia, as well as large databases such as Google Patents and the scientific journal hub PLOS, it also contains less reputable sites. The white nationalist site VDARE is in the database, one of the 1,000 largest sites, as is the far-right news site Breitbart.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google merged its two main artificial-intelligence research units, a major reshuffling as tech companies jockey for leadership in an area quickly reshaping business. Google said the new unit, Google DeepMind, would combine the existing Google Brain and DeepMind research groups into one team. The unit will be led by Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, which Google purchased for about $500 million in 2014.

In fact, I think it's misleading--maybe even a little dangerous. Everybody's already using the term, and it might seem a little late in the day to be arguing about it. But we're at the beginning of a new technological era--and the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it. The term "artificial intelligence" has a long history--it was coined in the nineteen-fifties, in the early days of computers. More recently, computer scientists have grown up on movies like "The Terminator" and "The Matrix," and on characters like Commander Data, from "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks public opinion, released a report today on how workers feel about AI. The technology has become an increasingly common workplace fixture over the past few years. And its role is likely to grow as AI becomes more capable, thanks to advances such as the large language models, like GPT-4, that gave us ChatGPT and a growing number of other tools. While there's no shortage of reports about people's attitudes toward AI, Pew's data is sizable and relatively fresh, drawing from 11,004 US adults who were consulted between December 12 and 18 of last year--just as ChatGPT mania was taking hold after its release at the end of November. The report suggests that most workers expect AI to transform hiring, firing, and evaluations.

I was lunching with a group of fellow professors, and, as happens these days when we assemble, generative artificial intelligence was discussed. Are your students using it? What are you doing to prevent cheating? Heads were shaken in chagrin as iced teas were sipped for comfort. But then, one of my colleagues wondered: Could he use AI to generate a reference letter for a student?

The AI chatbot ChatGPT produces content that can appear to have been created by a human. There are many proposed uses for the technology, but its impressive capabilities raise important questions about ownership of the content. UK legislation has a definition for computer-generated works. The first question is whether ChatGPT should be allowed to use original content generated by third parties to generate its responses. The second is whether only humans can be credited as the authors of AI-generated content, or whether the AI itself can be regarded as an author – particularly when that output is creative. Let's deal with question one.

Vishal Misra loves cricket and computer science. Years ago, the Columbia University professor cofounded Cricinfo, a collaborative website for sports fans to stay updated on match statistics. In 2021, he created a search tool using GPT-3 that enables cricket lovers to sift through Cricinfo's substantial database with conversational queries. So, what does Misra think about GPT-4, the newest release from OpenAI? He's excited to show me how to break the algorithm.

The city of Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture has a few claims to fame: It's home to a major U.S. naval base, it's the birthplace of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, and it lends its name to a local variation of Japanese curry. On Thursday, it staked out another as the first municipality in the country to use ChatGPT in its municipal offices. Roughly 4,000 employees at Yokosuka's municipal government office began using the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, which was created by OpenAI late last year, for a one-month trial in efforts to improve operations. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Artificial Intelligence poses both risks and rewards, but developers should be weary of technologies that could threaten "scary" outcomes, AI technologist says. Men who have trouble finding dates are reportedly turning to artificial intelligence and self-described love guru to craft appealing dating profiles. "My AI prompts and training can turn any guy from zero to hero," Stefan-Pierre Tomlin, a 32-year-old London model and self-described love guru, told South West News Service, according to the New York Post. Tomlin operates a website called Celebrity Love Coach where subscribers can pay between roughly $55 to $150 a month to receive his advice and "support to help you achieve your dating goals," according to the website. Subscribers also receive access to "bespoke" AI to draft appealing dating profiles.