🏆 Going Grammy

PLUS: Hear, There, and Everywhere

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI

Good morning, AI aficionados! It's Monday, and while your coffee is brewing, we're brewing the latest AI news for you.

In today’s Tracker:

  • 🧪 Research highlights: Stanford's Sonicverse Trains Robots to Listen and Learn

  • 🚨 Industry news: The Recording Academy Insists on Human Touch in Music

  • ⚖️ Policy and regulation: Hogarth's New Gig: Charting Safe Passage through the AI Landscape

  • 🌐 AI and society: Law and AI Disorder: The Troubling Case of Fictional Citations

  • 🧰 Tool of the day: AiPassportPhotos: Smile for the Camera

  • 🧠 Let’s get smart with AI: AI's Hidden Talents- What Is Emergent Behavior?

🤖 Stanford's Sonicverse Trains Robots to Listen and Learn

Sonicverse, a multisensory simulation platform that integrates both visual and auditory stimuli for training AI-powered robots, was developed by Stanford University researchers.

The platform, presented at ICRA 2023 and available on the arXiv preprint server, provides a more comprehensive training environment than existing simulators, which frequently disregard the significance of aural perception.

Sonicverse models both an environment's visual and aural components, providing robots with a more authentic training scenario. The team utilized this platform to teach a simulated version of the TurtleBot how to effectively navigate an indoor environment without colliding with obstacles.

The trained AI was effectively transferred to a real TurtleBot, demonstrating its capabilities in a real-world office setting. Using visual and auditory stimuli, Sonicverse may improve robotics training for real-world tasks, as the encouraging results suggest.

The platform is now online and available to other robotics teams. Future work will incorporate multisensory object assets and additional sensory modalities, such as tactile sensing.

📯 The Recording Academy Insists on Human Touch in Music

The Recording Academy has announced new rules for the Grammy Awards, stating that "only human creators are eligible" and that music exclusively created by artificial intelligence (AI) is prohibited, though music partially created with AI assistance may qualify in certain categories.

To be eligible for a nomination, music creators must have contributed at least 20% of an album.

This decision follows the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of generating human-like dialogue, and the subsequent rise of AI-powered apps that allow users to animate photos, create avatars in films, and compose music, essays, and speeches. Professional groups such as the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild are debating how to limit the use of AI in screenwriting and acting to ensure that members maintain control over their digital personas and receive adequate compensation.

In May, WGA writers went on strike over concerns such as the use of artificial intelligence, and actors may follow suit if their union cannot agree on similar issues.

🦺 Hogarth's New Gig: Charting Safe Passage through the AI Landscape

The British government has appointed tech entrepreneur Ian Hogarth as the chief of a new task force focused on artificial intelligence (AI) safety risks.

This action is part of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's plan to make London a global center for AI regulation. Hogarth, co-founder of the concert discovery service SongKick, will lead the UK's AI Foundation Model Taskforce in conducting ground-breaking safety research in advance of a significant summit on AI risks later this year.

The government has allocated an initial £100 million ($128.17 million) to establish the task force, which will not only assess the risks posed by artificial intelligence and conduct safety research but also assist in developing international safety and security standards.

Sunak emphasized the potential of artificial intelligence to stimulate economic growth and enhance public services while highlighting the need to ensure its safe and responsible development for future generations.

🦺 Law and AI Disorder: The Troubling Case of Fictional Citations

The implications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the U.S. judicial system are becoming increasingly apparent as more lawyers and judges grapple with the technology's pitfalls.

One such incident involved a lawyer unintentionally citing non-existent cases generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT in a court filing related to disputed car payments. Following this, the lawyer apologized and moved to withdraw from the case. This incident mirrors a similar case in New York where a lawyer included six fictitious cases made by ChatGPT in a legal brief, leading to possible sanctions.

In response to such issues, several U.S. judges have started requiring lawyers to disclose whether AI was used in court filings and certify all citations' accuracy.

Additionally, some judges mandate specific steps to safeguard data, citing AI technologies as a challenge to protecting confidential and proprietary information.

While the American Bar Association's professional conduct rules do not explicitly mention AI, existing ethics rules still apply to lawyers using the technology, encompassing competence and confidentiality.

🛫 AiPassportPhotos: Smile for the Camera

AiPassportPhotos is an AI-powered tool designed to make creating passport, visa, and ID photos more accessible and efficient. The tool transforms regular images into compliant photos that meet the specifications for these official documents.

Learn more about the tool here.

🧠 AI's Hidden Talents- What Is Emergent Behavior?

Emergent behavior: Unexpected or unintended capabilities in a large language model are enabled by the model's learning patterns and principles derived from its training data. For instance, models trained on programming and coding sites are capable of writing new code. Other examples include the ability to compose poetry, music, and works of fiction.

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—Henry David Thoreau

Success usually comes to those who are too busy looking for it.

  • 🌌 Sheldon AI - is an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that can assist businesses in automating monotonous chores and increasing productivity.

  • 📱 Virtuoso.qa - is an automated test platform that employs AI to accelerate software application testing.

  • 🛠️ VFitter - is a sophisticated artificial intelligence tool that allows users to develop unique systems and automate otherwise time-consuming operations.

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