Elon Musk says he's working on "TruthGPT," a ChatGPT alternative that acts as a "maximum truth-seeking AI." The Verge reports: The billionaire laid out his vision for an AI rival during an interview with Fox News's Tucker Carlson, saying an alternative approach to AI creation was needed to avoid the destruction of humanity. "I'm going to start something which I call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe," Musk said. "And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe." Musk framed TruthGPT as a course correction to OpenAI, the AI software nonprofit he helped found, which has since begun operating a for-profit subsidiary. Musk implied that OpenAI's profit incentives could potentially interfere with the ethics of the AI models that it creates and positioned "TruthGPT" as a more transparent option. In March, Musk and over a thousand other people in the industry signed a petition calling for labs to stop training powerful AI systems for at least six months to allow for the development of shared safety protocols. He also quietly established a new AI company called X.AI.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A month ago, Adobe announced Firefly, its entry into the generative AI game. Initially, Firefly's focus was on generating commercially safe images, but the company is now pushing its technology beyond still images. As the company announced today, it will soon bring Firefly to its Creative Cloud video and audio applications. To be clear, you won't (yet) be able to use Firefly to create custom videos yet. Instead, the emphasis here is on making it easier for anyone to edit videos, color grade using just a few words, add music and sound effects and create title cards with animated fonts, graphics and logos. However, Firefly also promises to automatically turn scripts into storyboards and pre-visualizations -- and it will recommend b-roll to liven up videos. Maybe the highlight of these promised new features is being able to color grade a video by simply describing what a video should look like with just a few words (think "golden hour" or "brighten face"). Other new AI-based features include the ability to generate custom sounds and music. Firefly will also help editors create subtitles, logos and title cards by having them describe what they want them to look like.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A photographer has stirred up fresh controversy and debate after his artificial intelligence (AI) image won first prize at one of the world's most prestigious photography competitions. He has since declined to accept the prize while the contest has remained silent on the matter. Berlin-based "photomedia artist" Boris Eldagsen participated this year in the World Photography Organization's Sony World Photography Awards, a leading photo contest that offers prizes that include $5,000 cash, Sony camera equipment, a trip to London for the awards ceremony, and/or worldwide publicity through a book and exhibition. Eldagsen submitted an image titled THE ELECTRICIAN to the Creative category of the 2023 Open competition. It picture appears to be a portrait of two women captured with a photographic process from the early days of photography.

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There's a new problem with driverless test vehicles. Wired obtain records from San Francisco's public transit agency for about six months showing that driverless cars testing on city streets "resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays" for the city's "Muni" buses. And "that data likely doesn't reflect the true scale of the problem," Wired argues, since "a single delay can slow other lines, worsening the blow." Some examples from the article: - On January 22, a Cruise at a green light wouldn't budge, preventing a San Francisco light-rail train from moving for nearly 16 minutes. As the train driver headed out to investigate, a passenger said, "Nobody in there, huh?" Over a span of 10 minutes, the driver chatted with passengers, checked with managers over the radio, and walked around the motionless Cruise vehicle. Someone wearing a reflective vest and holding a tablet eventually got into the Cruise and drove it away... - On September 30, 2022, a Muni light-rail train, or streetcar, that was full of celebrating baseball fans began driving from a station into an intersection. An empty Cruise robotaxi at a stop sign to the train's left then also drove forward... It was seven minutes before the driverless car cleared the track and the train started again, drawing cheers from riders... - On January 21, a Muni bus with a couple of riders aboard had lost six minutes because a Cruise was lingering across an intersection crowded by police and fire vehicles, video shows. While other cars maneuvered past, the Cruise did not. "I have one of those autonomous cars in front of me, so I'm stuck," the driver radioed. "I could make this turn on Sixth Avenue if this car wasn't in front of me...." - In November, one light-rail passenger called it quits after waiting nearly six minutes for a Cruise driverless car in front to move. "There's nobody in the car," the driver told the person as they stepped off the train. - [After a white Waymo SUV stopped in the middle of the road, Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp] says one of the company's roadside assistance crews arrived within 11 minutes of being dispatched to drive the SUV, clearing the blockage about 15 minutes after it began. Karp declined to elaborate on why the remote responder's guidance failed but said engineers have since introduced an unspecified change that allows addressing "these rare situations faster and with more flexibility...."

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A New York Times opinion piece argues people in the AI industry "are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down." But how? What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That's where the government comes in — or so they hope... [A]fter talking to a lot of people working on these problems and reading through a lot of policy papers imagining solutions, there are a few categories I'd prioritize. The first is the question — and it is a question — of interpretability. As I said above, it's not clear that interpretability is achievable. But without it, we will be turning more and more of our society over to algorithms we do not understand... The second is security. For all the talk of an A.I. race with China, the easiest way for China — or any country for that matter, or even any hacker collective — to catch up on A.I. is to simply steal the work being done here. Any firm building A.I. systems above a certain scale should be operating with hardened cybersecurity. It's ridiculous to block the export of advanced semiconductors to China but to simply hope that every 26-year-old engineer at OpenAI is following appropriate security measures. The third is evaluations and audits. This is how models will be evaluated for everything from bias to the ability to scam people to the tendency to replicate themselves across the internet. Right now, the testing done to make sure large models are safe is voluntary, opaque and inconsistent. No best practices have been accepted across the industry, and not nearly enough work has been done to build testing regimes in which the public can have confidence. That needs to change — and fast. The piece also recommends that AI-design companies "bear at least some liability for what their models." But what legislation should we see — and what legislation will we see? "One thing regulators shouldn't fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry," the piece argues. "For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down."

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"A group of researchers at Stanford University and Google have created a miniature RPG-style virtual world similar to The Sims," writes Ars Technica, "where 25 characters, controlled by ChatGPT and custom code, live out their lives independently with a high degree of realistic behavior." "Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day," write the researchers in their paper... To pull this off, the researchers relied heavily on a large language model for social interaction, specifically the ChatGPT API. In addition, they created an architecture that simulates minds with memories and experiences, then let the agents loose in the world to interact.... To study the group of AI agents, the researchers set up a virtual town called "Smallville," which includes houses, a cafe, a park, and a grocery store.... Interestingly, when the characters in the sandbox world encounter each other, they often speak to each other using natural language provided by ChatGPT. In this way, they exchange information and form memories about their daily lives. When the researchers combined these basic ingredients together and ran the simulation, interesting things began to happen. In the paper, the researchers list three emergent behaviors resulting from the simulation. None of these were pre-programmed but rather resulted from the interactions between the agents. These included "information diffusion" (agents telling each other information and having it spread socially among the town), "relationship memory" (memory of past interactions between agents and mentioning those earlier events later), and "coordination" (planning and attending a Valentine's Day party together with other agents).... "Starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party," the researchers write, "the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time...." To get a look at Smallville, the researchers have posted an interactive demo online through a special website, but it's a "pre-computed replay of a simulation" described in the paper and not a real-time simulation. Still, it gives a good illustration of the richness of social interactions that can emerge from an apparently simple virtual world running in a computer sandbox. Interstingly, the researchers hired human evaluators to gauge how well the AI agents produced believable responses — and discovered they were more believable than when supplied their own responses. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: About a year ago, Ben found out that one of his friends had quietly started to work multiple jobs at the same time. The idea had become popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, when working from home became normalized, making the scheme easier to pull off. A community of multi-job hustlers, in fact, had come together online, referring to themselves as the "overemployed." The idea excited Ben, who lives in Toronto and asked that Motherboard not use his real name, but he didn't think it was possible for someone like him to pull it off. He helps financial technology companies market new products; the job involves creating reports, storyboards, and presentations, all of which involve writing. There was "no way," he said, that he could have done his job two times over on his own. Then, last year, he started to hear more and more about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by the research lab OpenAI. Soon enough, he was trying to figure out how to use it to do his job faster and more efficiently, and what had been a time-consuming job became much easier. ("Not a little bit more easy," he said, "like, way easier.") That alone didn't make him unique in the marketing world. Everyone he knew was using ChatGPT at work, he said. But he started to wonder whether he could pull off a second job. Then, this year, he took the plunge, a decision he attributes to his new favorite online robot toy. "That's the only reason I got my job this year," Ben said of OpenAI's tool. "ChatGPT does like 80 percent of my job if I'm being honest." He even used it to generate cover letters to apply for jobs. Over the last few months, the exploding popularity of ChatGPT and similar products has led to growing concerns about AI's potential effects on the international job market -- specifically, the percentage of jobs that could be automated away, replaced by a well-oiled army of chatbots. But for a small cohort of fast-thinking and occasionally devious go-getters, AI technology has turned into an opportunity not to be feared but exploited, with their employers apparently none the wiser. The people Motherboard spoke with for this article requested anonymity to avoid losing their jobs. For clarity, Motherboard in some cases assigned people aliases in order to differentiate them, though we verified each of their identities. Some, like Ben, were drawn into the overemployed community as a result of ChatGPT. Others who were already working multiple jobs have used recent advancements in AI to turbocharge their situation, like one Ohio-based technology worker who upped his number of jobs from two to four after he started to integrate ChatGPT into his work process. "I think five would probably just be overkill," he said.

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In a discussion about threats posed by AI systems, Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO and co-founder, has confirmed that the company is not currently training GPT-5, the presumed successor to its AI language model GPT-4, released this March. From a report: Speaking at an event at MIT, Altman was asked about a recent open letter circulated among the tech world that requested that labs like OpenAI pause development of AI systems "more powerful than GPT-4." The letter highlighted concerns about the safety of future systems but has been criticized by many in the industry, including a number of signatories. Experts disagree about the nature of the threat posed by AI (is it existential or more mundane?) as well as how the industry might go about "pausing" development in the first place. At MIT, Altman said the letter was "missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause" and noted that an earlier version claimed that OpenAI is currently training GPT-5. "We are not and won't for some time," said Altman. "So in that sense it was sort of silly." However, just because OpenAI is not working on GPT-5 doesn't mean it's not expanding the capabilities of GPT-4 -- or, as Altman was keen to stress, considering the safety implications of such work. "We are doing other things on top of GPT-4 that I think have all sorts of safety issues that are important to address and were totally left out of the letter," he said.

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Amazon announced on Thursday it's releasing a ChatGPT and DALL-E rival it calls Amazon Bedrock. Insider reports: Bedrock is a suite of generative AI tools that can help Amazon Web Service customers -- businesses who run their operations on Amazon's data servers -- build chatbots, generate and summarize text, and make and classify images based on prompts. While OpenAI's ChatGPT is run solely on its GPT-4 language model, Bedrock users can perform specific tasks by selecting from a range of machine learning models it calls "foundation models," such as AI21's Jurassic-2, Anthropic's Claude, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan. A content marketing manager, for example, can use Bedrock to create a targeted ad campaign for a new line of handbags by feeding it data so it can generate product social media posts, display ads, and web copy for each product, according to an AWS blog post. A preview of Amazon's generative AI toolkit is currently limited to select AWS customers. So far, Coda, an AI-document generation firm used by companies like Uber and the New York Times, is using Bedrock to scale its business operations, according to Amazon.

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Amazon is introducing a cloud service called Bedrock that developers can use to enhance their software with artificial intelligence systems that can generate text, similar to the engine behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot powered by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI. From a report: The announcement indicates that the largest provider of cloud infrastructure won't be leaving a trendy growth area to challengers such as Google and Microsoft, both of which have started offering developers large language models they can tap into. Generally speaking, large language models are AI programs trained with extensive amounts of data that can compose human-like text in response to prompts that people type in. Through its Bedrock generative AI service, Amazon Web Services will offer access to its own first-party language models called Titan, as well as language models from startups AI21 and Google-backed Anthropic, and a model for turning text into images from startup Stability AI. One Titan model can generate text for blog posts, emails or other documents. The other can help with search and personalization. "Most companies want to use these large language models but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years and most companies don't want to go through that," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Thursday. "So what they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that's big and great already and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And that's what Bedrock is."

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Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times. From the report: UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists. AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests "left and right," said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology. "We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists," UMG wrote to online platforms in March, in emails viewed by the FT. "This next generation of technology poses significant issues," said a person close to the situation. "Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say: compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists' intellectual property."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Debugging a faulty program can be frustrating, so why not let AI do it for you? That's what a developer that goes by "BioBootloader" did by creating Wolverine, a program that can give Python programs "regenerative healing abilities," reports Hackaday. (Yep, just like the Marvel superhero.) "Run your scripts with it and when they crash, GPT-4 edits them and explains what went wrong," wrote BioBootloader in a tweet that accompanied a demonstration video. "Even if you have many bugs it'll repeatedly rerun until everything is fixed." In the demo video for Wolverine, BioBootloader shows a side-by-side window display, with Python code on the left and Wolverine results on the right in a terminal. He loads a custom calculator script in which he adds a few bugs on purpose, then executes it. "It runs it, it sees the crash, but then it goes and talks to GPT-4 to try to figure out how to fix it," he says. GPT-4 returns an explanation for the program's errors, shows the changes that it tries to make, then re-runs the program. Upon seeing new errors, GPT-4 fixes the code again, and then it runs correctly. In the end, the original Python file contains the changes added by GPT-4.

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Reddit moderators say they already see an increase in spam and that the future will "require a lot of human labor." From a report: In December last year, the moderators of the popular r/AskHistorians Reddit forum noticed posts popping up that appeared to carry the hallmarks of AI-generated text. "They were pretty easy to spot," said Sarah Gilbert, one of the forum's moderators and a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University. "They're not in-depth, they're not comprehensive, and they often contain false information." The team quickly realized their little corner of the internet had become a target for ChatGPT-created content. When ChatGPT launched last year, it set off a seemingly never-ending carousel of hype. According to evangelists, the tech behind ChatGPT may eradicate hundreds of millions of jobs, exhibit "sparks" of singularity-esque artificial general intelligence, and quite possibly destroy the world, but in a way that means you must buy it right now. The less glamorous impacts, like unleashing a tidal wave of AI-produced effluvium on the internet, haven't garnered the same attention so far. The two-million-strong AskHistorians forum allows non-expert Redditors to submit questions about history topics, and receive in-depth answers from historians. Recent popular posts have probed the hive mind on whether the stress of being "on time" is a modern concept; what a medieval scribe would've done if the monastery cat left an inky paw print on their vellum; and how Genghis Khan got fiber in his diet. Shortly after ChatGPT launched, the forum was experiencing five to 10 ChatGPT posts per day, says Gilbert, which soon ramped up as more people found out about the tool. The frequency has tapered off now, which the team believes may be a consequence of how rigorously they've dealt with AI-produced content: even if the posts aren't being deleted for being written by ChatGPT, they tend to violate the sub's standards for quality.

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The federal government is taking what could be the first steps toward requiring safer, more transparent AI systems as a Commerce Department agency invited public comment to help shape specific policy recommendations. From a report: The move is far short of the comprehensive AI legislation critics have advocated. But with the frenzy over generative AI continuing to grow, the Biden administration is trying to get a head start on a government response to the fast-moving industry. The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is asking the public to weigh in on what role the federal government can play to ensure AI algorithms are acting as claimed and not causing harm. "We really believe in the promise of AI," Assistant Commerce Secretary Alan Davidson, who runs NTIA, tells Axios. "We do believe it needs to be implanted safely and we're concerned that's not happening right now." Davidson said that the government could take a range of actions to shape AI that don't require new legislation -- including mandating audits as part of its procurement standards or offering prizes or bounties to those who find bias within algorithms. "We need to start the hard work of actually putting in place processes that are going to make people feel like the (AI) tools are doing what they say they are going to do, that models are behaving," Davidson said.

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China plans to require a security review of generative AI services before they're allowed to operate, casting uncertainty over ChatGPT-like bots unveiled by the country's largest tech companies including Baidu. From a report: Providers of services must ensure content is accurate and respects intellectual property, and neither discriminates nor endangers security, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in draft guidelines published for public feedback. AI operators must also clearly label AI-generated content, the country's internet overseer said in a statement posted on its website. The CAC's requirements add to Beijing's growing attempts to regulate the explosive growth of generative AI since OpenAI's ChatGPT fired up the industry in November. Companies from Alibaba Group to SenseTime and Baidu all aim to build the definitive next-generation AI platform for the world's largest internet market. That mirrors a growing wave of development abroad with Alphabet's Google and Microsoft among the many tech companies exploring generative AI, which can create original content from poetry to art just with simple user prompts. China's made no secret of its wish to elevate AI at a time the country is locked in a conflict with the US over technology from chips to EVs. But it remains uncertain how the government intends to both galvanize and police the emergent field.

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For all the high-profile examples of ChatGPT getting facts and even basic math wrong, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan says the latest version of the generative AI engine makes a pretty good tutor. From a report: "This technology is very powerful," Khan told Axios in a recent interview. "It's getting better." Khan Academy was among the early users of GPT-4 that OpenAI touted when it released the updated engine. This week, two more school districts (Newark, N.J. and Hobart, Indiana) are joining the pilot of Khanmigo, the AI-assisted tutor. With the two new districts, a total of 425 teachers and students are testing Khanmigo. The chatbot works much like a real-life or online tutor, looking at students' work and helping them when they get stuck. In a math problem, for example, Khanmigo can detect not just whether a student got an answer right or wrong, but also where they may have gone astray in their reasoning. ChatGPT and its brethren have been highly controversial -- especially in education, where some schools are banning the use of the technology. Concerns range from the engines' propensity to be confidently wrong (or "hallucinate") to worries about students using the systems to write their papers. Khan said he understands these fears, but also notes that many of those criticizing the technology are also using it themselves and even letting their kids make use of it. And, for all its flaws, he says today's AI offers the opportunity for more kids -- in both rich and developing countries -- to get personalized learning. "The time you need tutoring is right when you are doing the work, often when you are in class," Khan said.

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VC firm Andreessen Horowitz believes the industry most affected by generative AI will be videogames. But they're not the only ones, reports the Economist: Games' interactivity requires them to be stuffed with laboriously designed content: consider the 30 square miles of landscape or 60 hours of music in "Red Dead Redemption 2", a recent cowboy adventure. Enlisting ai assistants to churn it out could drastically shrink timescales and budgets.... Making a game is already easier than it was: nearly 13,000 titles were published last year on Steam, a games platform, almost double the number in 2017. Gaming may soon resemble the music and video industries, in which most new content on Spotify or YouTube is user-generated. One games executive predicts that small firms will be the quickest to work out what new genres are made possible by AI. Last month Raja Koduri, an executive at Intel, left the chipmaker to found an AI-gaming startup. Don't count the big studios out, though. If they can release half a dozen high-quality titles a year instead of a couple, it might chip away at the hit-driven nature of their business, says Josh Chapman of Konvoy, a gaming-focused VC firm. A world of more choice also favours those with big marketing budgets. And the giants may have better answers to the mounting copyright questions around AI. If generative models have to be trained on data to which the developer has the rights, those with big back-catalogues will be better placed than startups . Trent Kaniuga, an artist who has worked on games like "Fortnite", said last month that several clients had updated their contracts to ban AI-generated art.

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AI now "automates creative impulses," writes New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka — then wonders where that will lead. Chayka's first example is a Berlin-based photographer using AI tools to create a viral video showing Harry Potter characters as fashion models for the upscale French label Balenciaga: A.I. tools were involved in each step of Alexander Niklass's process, and in each element of the video. He created the basic static images with Midjourney, evoking the Harry Potter actors and outfits through text prompts such as "male model, grotesque, balenciaga commercial." Then he used ElevenLabs — a "voice-cloning" tool — to create models of the actors' voices based on previously recorded audio. Finally, he fed the images into a service called D-ID, which is used to make "avatar videos" — subtly animated portraits, not so far off from those that appear in the newspapers of the Potter world. D-ID added the signature lip synchs and head nods, which Niklass explained were a reference to fashion models tilting their chins for the cameras. The combination of child-friendly film and adult luxury fashion held no particular symbolism nor expressed an artistic intent. It's "entertainment," Niklass said. Yet the video's most compelling aspect might be its vacuity, a meaningless collision of cultural symbols. The nonsense is the point. The article also cites a song where the French group AllttA performs with an AI-generated simulation of Jay-Z. Chayka marvels at a world where "The A.I. content has the appearance of realism, without actual reality — reality solely as a style.... it seems that a Rubicon has been crossed: It doesn't matter that these artifacts are generated by A.I.; we can just enjoy them for what they are. It happened faster than I thought possible, but now that A.I.-generated pop culture has entered the mainstream, it seems unlikely that we'll ever get rid of it." Chayka asked ChatGPT how AI-generated imagery is changing our perceptions, and "It responded that there has been a 'blurring of the lines between real and artificial.'" The article ultimately ponders the possible implications of "a world in which every style, every idea, and every possible remix is generated as fast and frictionlessly as possible, and the successful ones stick and get attention." But at the same time, Chayka believes the final output's quality still depends on the humans involved (arguing that the Harry Potter fashion video was still more "appealingly odd" than later AI-generated videos copying the idea, like "Matrix by Gucci," "Star Wars by Balenciaga," and "The Office by Balenciaga".) A.I. tools may have been able to replicate actors' faces and generate fashionable outfits, but only Niklass could have come up with the concept, which required keen observation of both high fashion and the wizarding world — and also a very specific, extremely online sense of humor. With tools like Midjourney publicly available to anyone online, "everybody can create something visually appealing now," he said. "But A.I. can't generate taste yet," he continued.... To put it another way, execution may have been democratized by generative A.I., but ideas have not. The human is still the originator, editor, and curator of A.I.'s effects.

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An anonymous readers shared this report from the Washington Post: Brian Hood is a whistleblower who was praised for "showing tremendous courage" when he helped expose a worldwide bribery scandal linked to Australia's National Reserve Bank. But if you ask ChatGPT about his role in the scandal, you get the opposite version of events. Rather than heralding Hood's whistleblowing role, ChatGPT falsely states that Hood himself was convicted of paying bribes to foreign officials, had pleaded guilty to bribery and corruption, and been sentenced to prison. When Hood found out, he was shocked. Hood, who is now mayor of Hepburn Shire near Melbourne in Australia, said he plans to sue the company behind ChatGPT for telling lies about him, in what could be the first defamation suit of its kind against the artificial intelligence chatbot.... "There's never, ever been a suggestion anywhere that I was ever complicit in anything, so this machine has completely created this thing from scratch," Hood said — confirming his intention to file a defamation suit against ChatGPT. "There needs to be proper control and regulation over so-called artificial intelligence, because people are relying on them...." If it proceeds, Hood's lawsuit will be the first time someone filed a defamation suit against ChatGPT's content, according to Reuters. If it reaches the courts, the case would test uncharted legal waters, forcing judges to consider whether the operators of an artificial intelligence bot can be held accountable for its allegedly defamatory statements. The article notes that ChatGPT prominently warns users that it "may occasionally generate incorrect information." And another Post article notes that all the major chatbots now include disclaimers, "such as Bard's fine-print message below each query: 'Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views.'" But the Post also notes that ChatGPT still "invented a fake sexual harassment story involving a real law professor, Jonathan Turley — citing a Washington Post article that did not exist as its evidence." Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 tipped us off to that story. But here's what happened when the Washington Post searched for accountability for the error: In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said, "When users sign up for ChatGPT, we strive to be as transparent as possible that it may not always generate accurate answers. Improving factual accuracy is a significant focus for us, and we are making progress...." Katy Asher, senior communications director at Microsoft, said the company is taking steps to ensure search results are safe and accurate. "We have developed a safety system including content filtering, operational monitoring, and abuse detection to provide a safe search experience for our users," Asher said in a statement, adding that "users are also provided with explicit notice that they are interacting with an AI system." But it remains unclear who is responsible when artificial intelligence generates or spreads inaccurate information. From a legal perspective, "we just don't know" how judges might rule when someone tries to sue the makers of an AI chatbot over something it says, said Jeff Kosseff, a professor at the Naval Academy and expert on online speech. "We've not had anything like this before."

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The company behind ChatGPT will propose measures to resolve data privacy concerns that sparked a temporary Italian ban on the artificial intelligence chatbot, regulators said Thursday. The Associated Press reports: In a video call late Wednesday between the watchdog's commissioners and OpenAI executives including CEO Sam Altman, the company promised to set out measures to address the concerns. Those remedies have not been detailed. The Italian watchdog said it didn't want to hamper AI's development but stressed to OpenAI the importance of complying with the 27-nation EU's stringent privacy rules. The regulators imposed the ban after some users' messages and payment information were exposed to others. They also questioned whether there's a legal basis for OpenAI to collect massive amounts of data used to train ChatGPT's algorithms and raised concerns the system could sometimes generate false information about individuals. Other regulators in Europe and elsewhere have started paying more attention after Italy's action. Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it's "following up with the Italian regulator to understand the basis for their action and we will coordinate with all EU Data Protection Authorities in relation to this matter." France's data privacy regulator, CNIL, said it's investigating after receiving two complaints about ChatGPT. Canada's privacy commissioner also has opened an investigation into OpenAI after receiving a complaint about the suspected "collection, use and disclosure of personal information without consent." In a blog post this week, the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office warned that "organizations developing or using generative AI should be considering their data protection obligations from the outset" and design systems with data protection as a default. "This isn't optional -- if you're processing personal data, it's the law," the office said. In an apparent response to the concerns, OpenAI published a blog post Wednesday outlining its approach to AI safety. The company said it works to remove personal information from training data where feasible, fine-tune its models to reject requests for personal information of private individuals, and acts on requests to delete personal information from its systems.

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