🏛️ A House Divided

AND: Bots in Sheep's Clothing

In today’s Tracker:

  • 🧪 Research highlights: From Clever Bots to FLAIR-y Tales: Unmasking AI in Conversation

  • 🚨 Industry news: AI: The New Gold Rush? Baidu Stakes its Claim with $145 Million Fund

  • ⚖️ Policy and regulation: The Biden Administration's AI Regulation Standoff

  • 🌐 AI and society: AI Leaders' Unsettling Forecast

🤖 From Clever Bots to FLAIR-y Tales: Unmasking AI in Conversation

Concerns have been expressed regarding potential misuse or errors, such as AI bots masquerading as humans for fraudulent activities, despite the revolutionary impact of AI models such as ChatGPT in diverse fields ranging from education to banking.

Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Xi'an Jiaotong University in China have developed a model dubbed FLAIR that identifies artificial intelligence (AI) bots by asking them simple questions that exploit their inherent limitations.

These queries, which test bots in areas such as counting, character substitution, and noise recognition, reveal the bot has difficulty with tasks that humans find simple.

For example, whereas ChatGPT may have difficulty counting characters in a string or deciphering noisy words, a human respondent would easily navigate these obstacles.

Thus, the FLAIR model provides online service providers with a novel instrument for protecting against fraudulent activities and ensuring they serve genuine users.

The FLAIR dataset is available as open source on GitHub.

💰 AI: The New Gold Rush? Baidu Stakes its Claim with $145 Million Fund

Baidu Inc., the Chinese tech behemoth, has launched a 1 billion yuan ($145 million) venture capital fund to support startups centered on content creation via artificial intelligence applications.

In addition, the company is launching a competition for developers to create applications based on its ERNIE large language model (LLM) or integrate the model into existing products.

This initiative follows the burgeoning success of AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT. It has prompted nearly 80 Chinese organizations to develop their LLMs since 2020, surpassing the United States in releases this year.

Baidu adopted this trend in March with the launch of its AI-powered LLM, Ernie Bot, followed by other Chinese industry leaders such as Alibaba.

The rapid proliferation of LLMs prompted China to draft regulations governing the use of generative AI in April.

🏛️ The Biden Administration's AI Regulation Standoff

There is reportedly some disagreement within the Biden administration about regulating artificial intelligence generally and specific programs like ChatGPT and Dall-E.

The European Union has suggested stringent regulations for regulating AI, and reports indicate that White House and Commerce Department officials support these proposals.

Some US national security officials and State Department employees worry that too strict rules around this new technology may hurt the country's ability to compete.

The worldwide scope of the argument on AI legislation is being played out at a meeting taking place right now in Sweden.

⚠️ AI Leaders' Unsettling Forecast

Alphabet's DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic's founders have all issued dire warnings about the grave threats presented by their respective industries' quickly developing artificial intelligence technologies.

The nonprofit Center for AI Safety has issued a statement saying that preventing the extinction of humanity due to AI should be a global goal, on par with preventing widespread disease or nuclear war.

Did you miss our last newsletter? Check it out here!

—Barbara Elaine Smith

I have stood on a mountain of no’s for one yes.

Credit: Alucard

  • 🎨 ImagineMe.ai - is an AI-powered service that generates breathtaking graphic art of persons with only one line of text.

  • 🔊 GPT-3 Playground - language model is well-known for its capacity to generate natural-sounding text, and this web-based platform gives users access to that capability.

  • ⛏️ LALAL.AI - is an AI-powered internet platform that delivers automated audio separation and extraction services.

If you liked this edition, please share it with a friend or two! You could get some exclusive content in your inbox or even some merch very soon👇🏾

And that's a wrap!

Did we miss anything? Or want to say hey? Hit reply - I'd love to hear from you! You can

And if you haven’t already, sign up to get this in your inbox daily.