algorithms – The News Desk

Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

9Apr

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Technology

Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows.A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. (Turnitin is owned by Advance, which also owns Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED.) Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less t...

AI Is the Y2K Crisis, Only This Time It’s Real

1Dec

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Business

AI Is the Y2K Crisis, Only This Time It’s Real

Peggy Noonan is an opinion columnist at the Wall Street Journal where her column, "Declarations," has run since 2000. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2017. A political analyst for NBC News, she is the author of nine books on American politics, history and culture, from her most recent, “The Time of Our Lives,” to her first, “What I Saw at the Revolution.” She is one of ten historians and writers who contributed essays on the American presidency for the book, “Character Above All.” Noonan was a special assistant and speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. In 2010 she was given the Award for Media Excellence by the living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor; the following year she was chosen as Columnist of the Year by The Week. She has been a fellow a...

Here’s How Violent Extremists Are Exploiting Generative AI Tools

10Nov

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Technology

Here’s How Violent Extremists Are Exploiting Generative AI Tools

“We're going to partner with Microsoft to figure out if there are ways using our archive of material to create a sort of gen AI detection system in order to counter the emerging threat that gen AI will be used for terrorist content at scale,” Hadley says. “We're confident that gen AI can be used to defend against hostile uses of gen AI.”The partnership was announced today, on the eve of the Christchurch Call Leaders’ Summit, a movement designed to eradicate terrorism and extremist content from the internet, to be held in Paris.“The use of digital platforms to spread violent extremist content is an urgent issue with real-world consequences,” Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft said in a statement. “By combining Tech Against Terrorism’s capabilities with AI, we hope to help cr...

Big Tech Ditched Trust and Safety. Now Startups Are Selling It Back As a Service

6Nov

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Technology

Big Tech Ditched Trust and Safety. Now Startups Are Selling It Back As a Service

The same is true of the AI systems that companies use to help flag potentially dangerous or abusive content. Platforms often use huge troves of data to build internal tools that help them streamline that process, says Louis-Victor de Franssu, cofounder of trust and safety platform Tremau. But many of these companies have to rely on commercially available models to build their systems—which could introduce new problems.“There are companies that say they sell AI, but in reality what they do is they bundle together different models,” says Franssu. This means a company might be combining a bunch of different machine learning models—say, one that detects the age of a user and another that detects nudity to flag potential child sexual abuse material—into a service they offer clients.And while t...

This AI Bot Fills Out Job Applications for You While You Sleep

6Nov

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Technology

This AI Bot Fills Out Job Applications for You While You Sleep

In July, software engineer Julian Joseph became the latest victim of the tech industry’s sweeping job cuts. Facing his second layoff in two years, he dreaded spending another couple months hunched over his laptop filling out repetitive job applications and blasting them into the void.Joseph specializes in user interface automation and figured someone must have roboticized the unpleasant task of applying for jobs. Casting about online, he came upon a company called LazyApply. It offers an AI-powered service called Job GPT that promises to automatically apply to thousands of jobs “in a single click.” All he had to fill in was some basic information about his skills, experience, and desired position.After Joseph paid $250 for a lifetime unlimited plan and installed LazyApply’s Chrome extensi...

Joe Biden Wants US Government Algorithms Tested for Potential Harm Against Citizens

2Nov

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Technology

Joe Biden Wants US Government Algorithms Tested for Potential Harm Against Citizens

“The framework enables a set of binding requirements for federal agencies to put in place safeguards for the use of AI so that we can harness the benefits and enable the public to trust the services the federal government provides,” says Jason Miller, OMB’s deputy director for management.The draft memo highlights certain uses of AI where the technology can harm rights or safety, including health care, housing, and law enforcement—all situations where algorithms have in the past resulted in discrimination or denial of services.Examples of potential safety risks mentioned in the OMB draft include automation for critical infrastructure like dams and self-driving vehicles like the Cruise robotaxis that were shut down last week in California and are under investigation by federal and state reg...

This Showdown Between Humans and Chatbots Could Keep You Safe From Bad AI

15Aug

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Technology

This Showdown Between Humans and Chatbots Could Keep You Safe From Bad AI

Large language models like those powering ChatGPT and other recent chatbots have broad and impressive capabilities because they are trained with massive amounts of text. Michael Sellitto, head of geopolitics and security at Anthropic, says this also gives the systems a “gigantic potential attack or risk surface.”Microsoft’s head of red-teaming, Ram Shankar Sivu Kumar, says a public contest provides a scale more suited to the challenge of checking over such broad systems and could help grow the expertise needed to improve AI security. “By empowering a wider audience, we get more eyes and talent looking into this thorny problem of red-teaming AI systems,” he says.Rumman Chowdhury, founder of Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit developing ethical AI systems that helped design and organize the c...

TikTok Is Letting People Shut Off Its Infamous Algorithm—and Think for Themselves

14Aug

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Technology

TikTok Is Letting People Shut Off Its Infamous Algorithm—and Think for Themselves

TikTok recently announced that its users in the European Union will soon be able to switch off its infamously engaging content-selection algorithm. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is driving this change as part of the region’s broader effort to regulate AI and digital services in accordance with human rights and values.TikTok’s algorithm learns from users’ interactions—how long they watch, what they like, when they share a video—to create a highly tailored and immersive experience that can shape their mental states, preferences, and behaviors without their full awareness or consent. An opt-out feature is a great step toward protecting cognitive liberty, the fundamental right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. Rather than being confined to algorithmically cur...

Hands On With Google Search’s Answer to ChatGPT

28Jul

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Technology

Hands On With Google Search’s Answer to ChatGPT

Last weekend, I turned to Google Search for help figuring out how many stamps I needed to put on an 8-ounce piece of mail. (Naturally, I was sending a copy of the latest issue of WIRED!). It’s the exact sort of question that I hoped Google Search’s new generative AI feature, which I’ve been testing for the past month, would solve much faster than I could through my own browsing.Google’s clunkily named Search Generative Experience, SGE for short, infuses its search box with ChatGPT-like conversational functionality. You can sign up at Google’s Search Labs. The company says it wants users to converse with its search chatbot, which launched to testers in May, to dive deeper into topics and ask more challenging and intuitive questions than they would type into a boring old query box. And AI-g...

Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds

27Jul

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Technology

Meta Just Proved People Hate Chronological Feeds

For three months in late 2020, nearly 7,200 US adults on Facebook and 8,800 on Instagram received a radically different experience than the services’ billions of other users. When they scrolled through their newsfeeds, Facebook and Instagram showed them the newest posts as determined by the clock, not those judged most relevant by an algorithm. The response was clear: Users served chronological feeds got bored quicker and were much more likely to decamp to rivals such as YouTube and TikTok.That result emerged from a multimillion-dollar, Meta-backed science project designed to study how Facebook and Instagram affected people’s political attitudes during the 2020 US presidential election campaign. The experiment’s main purpose was to add empirical data to the ongoing debate about the role o...