The increasing cost of training machine learning (ML) models has led to the inclusion of new parties to the training pipeline, such as users who contribute training data and companies that provide computing resources. This involvement of such new parties in the ML training process has introduced new attack surfaces for an adversary to exploit. A recent attack in this domain is the model hijacking attack, whereby an adversary hijacks a victim model to implement their own -- possibly malicious -- hijacking tasks. However, the scope of the model hijacking attack is so far limited to the homogeneous-modality tasks. In this paper, we transform the model hijacking attack into a more general multimodal setting, where the hijacking and original tasks are performed on data of different modalities. Specifically, we focus on the setting where an adversary implements a natural language processing (NLP) hijacking task into an image classification model. To mount the attack, we propose a novel encoder-decoder based framework, namely the Blender, which relies on advanced image and language models. Experimental results show that our modal hijacking attack achieves strong performances in different settings. For instance, our attack achieves 94%, 94%, and 95% attack success rate when using the Sogou news dataset to hijack STL10, CIFAR-10, and MNIST classifiers.

China's tech sector has a new obsession: competing with U.S. titans like Google and Microsoft in the breakneck global artificial intelligence race. Billionaire entrepreneurs, midlevel engineers and veterans of foreign firms alike now harbor a remarkably consistent ambition: to outdo China's geopolitical rival in a technology that may determine the global power stakes. Among them is internet mogul Wang Xiaochuan, who entered the field after OpenAI's ChatGPT debuted to a social media firestorm in November. He joins the ranks of Chinese scientists, programmers and financiers -- including former employees of ByteDance, e-commerce platform JD.com and Google -- expected to propel some $15 billion of spending on AI technology this year. For Wang, who founded the search engine Sogou that Tencent bought out in a $3.5 billion deal less than two years ago, the opportunity came fast.

China's state news agency Xinhua this week introduced the newest members of its newsroom: AI anchors who will report "tirelessly" all day every day, from anywhere in the country. Chinese viewers were greeted with a digital version of a regular Xinhua news anchor named Qiu Hao. The anchor, wearing a red tie and pin-striped suit, nods his head in emphasis, blinking and raising his eyebrows slightly. "Not only can I accompany you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I can be endlessly copied and present at different scenes to bring you the news," he says.

At the China Online Literature conference last week, Chinese search engine Sogou announced plans to create artificial intelligence-powered avatars that look and sound like two of the country's most famous authors--taking the experience of listening to an audiobook to an entirely new level. The first authors to get the A.I. avatar treatment will be Yue Guan and Bu Xin Tian Shang Diao Xian Bing. But if the project is successful, it could be a jumping off point for the industry to create avatars of even more authors. The audiobook industry is already big business in China and is expected to be worth more than $1 billion in the country by next year, according to iiMedia Research Group. A.I. avatars have the potential to give that an even greater boost.

Chinese search engine Sogou is creating artificial-intelligence lookalikes to read popular novels in authors' voices. It announced "lifelike" avatars of Chinese authors Yue Guan and Bu Xin Tian Shang Diao Xian Bing - created from video recordings - at the China Online Literature conference. Last year, Sogou launched two AI newsreaders, which are still used by the government's Xinhua news agency. Appetite for audiobooks in China is on the rise, mirroring trends in the West. Chinese think tank iiMedia expects the market to more than double between 2016 and 2020, to 7.8bn Chinese yuan (£900m) a year. It is now a simple process to use text-to-speech technology to quickly generate an audio version of a book, using digitised, synthetic voices.

In a remarkable step to render human journalism obsolete, state news outlet Xinhua teamed up with search engine Sogou to create the world's first female AI news anchor. According to reports, the anchor, Xin Xiaomeng will make her first appearance in March, during the upcoming two sessions political meeting. As far as applying artificial intelligence in journalism goes, China is pushing the boundaries further than ever. Just four months ago, Xinhua debuted the first male AI News anchor during China's world internet conference in Wuzhen. But, that was just the beginning.

China continues to make remarkable strides in making human journalists obsolete. State news outlet Xinhua announced yesterday (Feb. The anchor will make "her" debut during the upcoming Two Sessions political meetings at the start of March. The announcement comes after Xinhua debuted the world's first male AI news anchor, Qiu Hao, during China's annual World Internet Conference held in November in the town of Wuzhen. Xinhua and Sogou said that they also developed an improved male anchor called Xin Xiaohao, who is also able to stand up and gesticulate and has more natural mouth movements.

China's state news agency Xinhua this week introduced the newest members of its newsroom: AI anchors who will report "tirelessly" all day every day, from anywhere in the country. Chinese viewers were greeted with a digital version of a regular Xinhua news anchor named Qiu Hao. The anchor, wearing a red tie and pin-striped suit, nods his head in emphasis, blinking and raising his eyebrows slightly. "Not only can I accompany you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I can be endlessly copied and present at different scenes to bring you the news," he says.

China's state-owned Xinhua News Agency introduced so-called "composite anchors" on Wednesday, combining the images and voices of human anchors with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The new AI anchors, launched by Xinhua and Beijing-based search engine operator Sogou during the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, can deliver the news with "the same effect" as human anchors because the machine learning programme is able to synthesise realistic-looking speech, lip movements and facial expressions, according to a Xinhua news report on Wednesday. "AI anchors have officially become members of the Xinhua News Agency reporting team. They will work with other anchors to bring you authoritative, timely and accurate news information in both Chinese and English," Xinhua said. The AI anchors are now available throughout Xinhua's internet and mobile platforms such as its official Chinese and English apps, WeChat public account, and online TV webpage.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the verge of becoming a'bubble' in China as a large influx of money and talent heat the market, analysts and experts warn. "For the job market in China's AI sector, I see a bubble already exists now. Some practitioners in the AI industry and are paid salaries that are unfairly high," said Wang Xiaochuan, chief executive officer of Chinese internet company Sogou. "Investors expect too high a return on their investments, and the valuations of China's AI enterprises are much more expensive than those in the US." In terms of investment in AI enterprises, China was in second place in 2016 on US$2.6 billion, followed by the UK on US$800 million, according to data from Chinese think tank WuZhen Institute.