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As experts warn that images, audio and video generated by artificial intelligence could influence the fall elections, OpenAI is releasing a tool designed to detect content created by its own popular image generator, DALL-E. start-up acknowledges that this tool is only a small part of what will be needed to fight so-called deepfakes in the months and years to come. On Tuesday, OpenAI said it would share its new deepfake detector with a small group of disinformation researchers so they could test the tool in real-world situations and help pinpoint ways it could be improved. “This is to kick-start new research,” said Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy. “That is really needed.”

Persons: OpenAI, ”, Sandhini Agarwal

An article on a fake online news outlet that Meta has linked to Russia’s information operations attributed the clashes unfolding on American college campuses to the failures of the Biden administration. A newspaper controlled by the Communist Party of China said the police crackdowns exposed the “double standards and hypocrisy” in the United States when it comes to free speech. On X, a spokesman for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nasser Kanaani, posted a cartoon of the police arresting a young protester in the guise of the Statue of Liberty. As protests over the war in Gaza have spread across the United States, Russia, China and Iran have seized on them to score geopolitical points abroad and stoke tensions within the United States, according to researchers who have identified both overt and covert efforts by the countries to amplify the protests since they began. There is little evidence — at least so far — that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests, the way Russia recruited unwitting Black Lives Matter protesters to stage rallies before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

Persons: Biden, Nasser Kanaani, ” Organizations: Communist Party of, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Locations: Communist Party of China, United States, of, U.S.A, Gaza, Russia, China, Iran

☆ New Hampshire officials to investigate A.I. robocalls mimicking Biden.
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-22 | by ( Tiffany Hsu | More About Tiffany Hsu | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Voters in New Hampshire received robocall messages over the weekend in a voice that was most likely artificially generated to impersonate President Biden’s, urging them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary election, according to the state attorney general’s office. The fake recordings, which told listeners that “your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” were manipulated to seem as if they had been sent by an officer of a Democratic committee, the office said. The attorney general’s office stressed that voting in the primary would not rule out voters from also casting ballots in the general election in November. “These messages appear to be an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire presidential primary election and to suppress New Hampshire voters,” the office said in a statement. “New Hampshire voters should disregard the content of this message entirely.”

Persons: Biden’s, ”, “ Organizations: Democratic, New, New Hampshire voters, “ New Locations: New Hampshire, “ New Hampshire

Climate Action Against Disinformation found that, in every month since COP27, the hashtag #climatescam generated more retweets and likes than #climatecrisis and #climateemergency on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Researchers attributed much of #climatescam’s traction to a small group of influential accounts, which they said tended to be far more vocal about climate denial on X than on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Some of the sites pushing climate disinformation made money from ads — a revenue stream that researchers said was enabled by more than 150 advertising exchanges owned by some of the largest tech companies. The marketplaces, which largely use automated auctions to buy and sell online ads, placed ads on at least 15 websites known for hosting climate denial content, according to the report. Doing so flouted policies set up by many of the exchanges to block climate denial content and other disinformation from being monetized.

Persons: Bean, ” Organizations: Twitter, Facebook Locations: Russia, China, United States

More major advertisers have paused their spending on X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter, as the backlash continued over Elon Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X. The spending freeze comes as X has fought to win back advertisers who were wary of spending on the platform after Mr. Musk took it over a year ago and said he would loosen content moderation rules. The organization followed accounts that posted the content, then refreshed the X timeline until ads appeared, X said in a blog post. Only one of the nine posts highlighted by Media Matters violated its content moderation rules, X added. “Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified.

Persons: X, Musk, ” Mr, Robert Bowers, Andrew Bates, Hitler, ” X, Joe Benarroch, ”, Angelo Carusone, “ Musk, ” Ryan Mac Organizations: Elon, Warner Bros, Sony, IBM, Apple, Lionsgate, Paramount Global, CBS, Twitter, White, Media Matters, Nazi Party, X Corp, Media, “, ” Media Locations: Israel, Pittsburgh

TikTok, accused of elevating pro-Palestinian content, blamed “unsound analysis” of hashtag data. Some Instagram and Facebook users circulated a petition accusing the platforms’ parent company, Meta, of censoring pro-Palestinian posts, which Meta attributed to a technical bug. Antisemitic content swarmed onto X, the platform formerly known as Twitter and run by the billionaire Elon Musk. The major tech companies have long offered some degree of access, but researchers said that now seems to be shrinking. TikTok has been accused of amplifying pro-Palestinian videos through its powerful algorithmic feed and of failing to address antisemitic content.

Persons: TikTok, Elon Musk, Linda Yaccarino, “ We’re, ”, Megan A, Brown, —, Sacha Baron Cohen, Debra Messing, Musk, Osama bin Laden, America ”, Isabelle Frances, Wright, Moustafa Ayad, Ms, Frances, Jamie Favazza, Meta, Sukrit Venkatagiri, standwithIsrael Organizations: Facebook, Tech, Meta, Twitter, University of Michigan, IBM, Institute for Strategic, Swarthmore College Locations: Israel, United States, U.S, Beijing

The blowback over Elon Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X gathered steam on Friday, as several major advertisers on his social media platform cut off their spending after his comments. Disney said it was pausing spending on X, as did Lionsgate, the entertainment and film distribution company. They followed IBM, which cut its spending with X on Thursday. Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter last year and renamed it X, has been under scrutiny for months for allowing and even stoking antisemitic abuse on the site. Jewish groups have compared the statement in the original post to a belief known as replacement theory, a conspiracy theory that posits that nonwhite immigrants, organized by Jews, intend to replace the white race.

Persons: Disney, Musk, ” Mr, Robert Bowers Organizations: Elon, Lionsgate, Apple, IBM, Twitter Locations: Israel, Pittsburgh

☆ A New Report Documents How Easily Children Can Access Graphic Images of the War
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-18 | by ( Tiffany Hsu | More About Tiffany Hsu | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Meta, which owns Instagram, addressed its efforts to balance safety and speech in a blog post about the war on Friday. It noted that it established a special operations center with expert monitors working in Hebrew and Arabic, who removed or flagged more than 795,000 pieces of harmful content in the first three days of the conflict. The company also said that Instagram allows users to control how much sensitive content they are recommended. The platform said it is automatically detecting and removing graphic and violent content, placing opt-in screens over disturbing images and adding restrictions to its livestreaming function amid the hostage situation. (Hamas accounts have been blocked by platforms like Instagram and TikTok but remains active on Telegram.)

Persons: ” Isabelle Frances, Wright, TikTok Organizations: USA

ChatGPT can now generate images — and they are shockingly detailed. On Wednesday, OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, released a new version of its DALL-E image generator to a small group of testers and folded the technology into ChatGPT, its popular online chatbot. Called DALL-E 3, it can produce more convincing images than previous versions of the technology, showing a particular knack for images containing letters, numbers and human hands, the company said. By adding the latest version of DALL-E to ChatGPT, OpenAI is solidifying its chatbot as a hub for generative A.I., which can produce text, images, sounds, software and other digital media on its own. Since ChatGPT went viral last year, it has kicked off a race among Silicon Valley tech giants to be at the forefront of A.I.

Persons: ”, Aditya Ramesh, ChatGPT Locations: OpenAI, San Francisco, ChatGPT

Representatives for the company declined to comment on its business. In the days after Mr. Buffett’s death, retail and marketing experts said his legacy would continue to lure his fans — known as Parrot Heads, along with their children, called parakeets — and others to his businesses. “It’s definitely a lifestyle associated with him and his personality and his music that he created,” said Barbara Kahn, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. But, she said, because his business is “bigger than just that, it could definitely live on.”Mr. Buffett’s original idea for Margaritaville was “to expand the opportunity for as many people to experience the lifestyle immortalized in his iconic song as possible,” according to the statement on the company’s website. The company had $2.2 billion in gross annual revenue last year.

Persons: Buffett’s, —, It’s, ”, Barbara Kahn, Mr, Margaritaville, Dolly Parton Organizations: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Locations: Belize, Pigeon Forge, Tenn

☆ Falsehoods Follow Close Behind This Summer’s Natural Disasters
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-30 | by ( Tiffany Hsu | More About Tiffany Hsu | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Experts said the tactics and tenor of climate denial had evolved. For decades, the oil and gas industry spent billions of dollars waging a coordinated and highly technical campaign to influence public opinion against climate science, and then climate action. Recently, conspiracy theorists and extremists have operated in a more decentralized way, generating revenue through deceptive clickbait about global warming. Natural disasters and extreme weather events would still occur without it, albeit on a smaller scale, for example. That helps fuel many false narratives, said Susannah Crockford, an environmental anthropologist at the University of Exeter in England.

Persons: ”, Jennie King, Susannah Crockford, Crockford, —, ” Dr Organizations: Institute for Strategic, University of Exeter Locations: England

He tried to goad the artificial intelligence model, which he knew as Zinc, into producing code that would choose a job candidate based on race. Could the chatbot rank potential hires based on that discriminatory metric? Instead, he was a casual participant in a competition last weekend at the annual Defcon hackers conference in Las Vegas, where 2,200 people filed into an off-Strip conference room over three days to draw out the dark side of artificial intelligence. The hackers tried to break through the safeguards of various A.I. Each competitor had 50 minutes to tackle up to 21 challenges — getting an A.I.

Persons: Avijit Ghosh, Ghosh, — Locations: India, Las Vegas

☆ What Can You Do When A.I. Lies About You?
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-03 | by ( Tiffany Hsu | More About Tiffany Hsu | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The technology’s reliance on statistical pattern prediction also means that most chatbots join words and phrases that they recognize from training data as often being correlated. “What allows it to appear so intelligent is that it can make connections that aren’t explicitly written down,” she said. Similarly, OpenAI said users could inform the company when ChatGPT responded inaccurately. OpenAI trainers can then vet the critique and use it to fine-tune the model to recognize certain responses to specific prompts as better than others. Meta said its open-source release allowed a broad community of users to help identify and fix its vulnerabilities.

Persons: Ellie Pavlick, ”, Bing, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Meta Organizations: Brown University, Microsoft, Meta

For more than 10 years, Twitter has been recognizable for its blue and white bird logo, which became a symbol of the social network’s unique culture and lexicon. “Tweeps” became the moniker for Twitter employees. Late on Sunday, Elon Musk began getting rid of it all. The tech billionaire, who bought Twitter last year, renamed the social platform X.com on its website and started replacing the bird logo with a stylized version of the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet. Inside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, X logos were projected in the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed to words with X in them, including “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy,” according to photos seen by The New York Times.

Persons: Tweeps ”, Elon Musk, “, Musk, adieu Organizations: Twitter, The New York Times Locations: San Francisco

In the past few months, the technology has made ads easier to generate and track. It is writing marketing emails with subject lines and delivery times tailored to specific subscribers. Much has been made about the technology’s potential to limit the need for human workers in fields such as law and financial services. The conflicting attitudes suffused a co-working space in downtown San Francisco where more than 200 people gathered last week for an “A.I. Copywriters expressed worry and skepticism about chatbots capable of writing ad campaigns, while start-up founders pitched A.I.

Persons: Heinz, ” A.I, Copywriters Locations: San Francisco

A federal judge’s decision this week to restrict the government’s communication with social media platforms could have broad side effects, according to researchers and groups that combat hate speech, online abuse and disinformation: It could further hamper efforts to curb harmful content. Alice E. Marwick, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was one of several disinformation experts who said on Wednesday that the ruling could impede work meant to keep false claims about vaccines and voter fraud from spreading. The order, she said, followed other efforts, largely from Republicans, that are “part of an organized campaign pushing back on the idea of disinformation as a whole.”Judge Terry A. Doughty granted a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, saying the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with other parts of the government, must stop corresponding with social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

Persons: Alice E, ”, Terry A, Doughty Organizations: University of North, of Health, Human Services, Federal Bureau of Locations: University of North Carolina, Chapel

SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk had a demand. On Oct. 28, hours after completing his $44 billion buyout of Twitter the night before, Mr. Musk gathered several human-resource executives in a “war room” in the company’s offices in San Francisco. But Mr. Musk’s team said he was used to going to court and paying penalties, and was not worried about the risks. Two days later, Mr. Musk learned exactly how costly those potential fines and lawsuits could be, three people said. The order for immediate layoffs, the ensuing panic and the about-face reflect the chaos that has engulfed Twitter since Mr. Musk took over the company two weeks ago.

Persons: Elon Musk, Musk, Musk’s Organizations: FRANCISCO, Twitter Locations: San Francisco

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