Dive in — Merging design and computer science in creative ways || OpenAI updated its safety framework — but no longer sees mass manipulation and disinformation as a critical risk, and more
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Merging design and computer science in creative ways
Curator AI is designed to streamline online furniture shopping by providing context-aware product recommendations using AI and AR. The platform uses AR to take the dimensions of a room with locations of windows, doors, and existing furniture.
Users can then speak to the software to describe what new furnishings they want, and the system will use a vision-language AI model to search for and display various options that match both the user’s prompts and the room’s visual characteristics.
“Shoppers can choose from the suggested options, visualize products in AR, and use natural language to ask for modifications to the search, making the furniture selection process more intuitive, efficient, and personalized,” MIT MAD Fellow Alexander Htet Kyaw says.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is that most people don’t know where to start when furnishing a room, so we developed Curator AI to provide smart, contextual recommendations based on what your room looks like.” Although Curator AI was developed for furniture shopping, it could be expanded for use in other markets.
Read more | MIT NEWS
OpenAI updated its safety framework—but no longer sees mass manipulation and disinformation as a critical risk
OpenAI said it will stop assessing its AI models prior to releasing them for the risk that they could persuade or manipulate people, possibly helping to swing elections or create highly effective propaganda campaigns.
The company said it would now address those risks through its terms of service, restricting the use of its AI models in political campaigns and lobbying, and monitoring how people are using the models once they are released for signs of violations.
Read more | FORTUNE
Israel’s AI experiments in Gaza war raise ethical concerns
In the past 18 months, Israel has also combined A.I. with facial recognition software to match partly obscured or injured faces to real identities, turned to A.I. to compile potential airstrike targets, and created an Arabic-language A.I. model to power a chatbot that could scan and analyze text messages, social media posts and other Arabic-language data, two people with knowledge of the programs said.
Read more | NEW YORK TIMES
Researchers secretly ran a massive, unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit users
A team of researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich ran an “unauthorized,” large-scale experiment in which they secretly deployed AI-powered bots into a popular debate subreddit called r/changemyview in an attempt to research whether AI could be used to change people’s minds about contentious topics.
The bots made more than a thousand comments over the course of several months and at times pretended to be a “rape victim,” a “Black man” who was opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, someone who “work[s] at a domestic violence shelter,” and a bot who suggested that specific types of criminals should not be rehabilitated.
Some of the bots in question “personalized” their comments by researching the person who had started the discussion and tailoring their answers to them by guessing the person’s “gender, age, ethnicity, location, and political orientation as inferred from their posting history using another LLM.”
Read more | 404 MEDIA
MTA wants AI to flag 'problematic behavior' in NYC subways
MTA Chief Security Officer Michael Kemper said he’s working with AI companies to deploy software that can analyze real-time footage from subway security cameras and issue automated alerts to the NYPD “if someone is acting out irrationally.”
He called the technology “predictive prevention” that can essentially identify subway criminals before they commit crimes.
Read more | GOTHAMIST
Yelp’s upcoming AI-powered Call Answering Services
Yelp will soon begin testing AI-powered services — one for restaurants and another for services — to help businesses stay connected when they’re busy or unavailable.
Fully integrated into Yelp’s platform, with customizable features, these new offerings will handle incoming calls — like booking reservations for restaurants, collecting details about your project for pros, and answering general questions—while filtering spam and capturing leads or messages in real time.
Watch l YELP
Senior AI scientist Alex Lamb once shrugged off China. Now he’s joining Tsinghua
"Chinese institutions do 5 to 15 percent AI research now in articles and meetings, and produce quite a bit less research than US institutions.” — That was how noted AI researcher Alex Lamb described the significant gap in AI research between Chinese and US universities in 2017
Now, Lamb is headed to Beijing to work as an assistant professor at Tsinghua University.
Tsinghua University’s College of AI, established in April last year, is led by Yao Qizhi, another Turing Award winner and Chinese Academy of Sciences academician. It recruits the most outstanding students from across China.
Read more | SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
A.I. might count as a conceptual win for my field. Historians have long extolled the “power of the archive.”
Little did we know that the engineers would come along and plug it in. And it turns out that a huge amount of what we seek from a human person can be simulated through this Frankensteinian reanimation of our collective dead letters.
What a discovery! We have a new whole of ourselves with which to converse now. Let’s take our time; there is plenty to learn.
Read more | NEW YORKER
Anthropic Economic Index: AI’s Impact on Software Development
79% of conversations on Claude Code were identified as “automation”—where AI directly performs tasks—rather than “augmentation,” where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities (21%).
In contrast, only 49% of Claude.ai conversations were classified as automation. This might imply that as AI agents become more commonplace, and as more agentic AI products are built, we should expect more automation of tasks.
Read more | ANTHROPIC
Scolded by a car? My battle with an EV assistant going rogue
As I set out, I asked the assistant to perform a task well within its promised capability: “Directions to John Phelan’s house.”
It failed. Repeatedly. Infuriatingly.
So I did what anybody would do: I cut loose with a loud and thoroughly NSFW curse-filled product review.
After a moment, it responded: “I am a virtual assistant, but your words are real. Please be respectful.”
Read more | USA TODAY
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