Latitude Studio Launches 'Voyage' Platform for AI Games

Latitude, the studio behind A.I. Dungeon, is launching Voyager. This is a platform for other AI games and provides creation tools.

Voyage, which will launch as a subscription-based service, looks to deliver on that curiosity further with a suite of new games. In Medieval Problems, players take the role of a king who has to solve problems in his kingdom, much like the Reigns series. Rather than choosing between a few options, players will type anything they want and the computer will generate a unique response.

Generate AI Music With 'Boomy' And Sell it on Spotify

Boomy is a service that lets you generate AI music in less than 30 seconds, then submit the tracks to Spotify and other platforms.

While Boomy owns the copyright to each recording, and receives the funds in the first instance, the company says it passes on 80% of the streaming royalties to the person who created the song. Mr Mitchell adds that more than 10,000 of its users have published over 100,000 songs in total on various streaming services.

Leak Shows Crime Prediction Software Targets Black and Latino Neighborhoods

Here’s some news from the beginning of the month that I missed. Gizmodo and The Markup analyzed PredPol, a crime prediction software used in the U.S.

Residents of neighborhoods where PredPol suggested few patrols tended to be Whiter and more middle- to upper-income. Many of these areas went years without a single crime prediction.

By contrast, neighborhoods the software targeted for increased patrols were more likely to be home to Blacks, Latinos, and families that would qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program.

Proposed Bill Would Ban Bots From Buying Online Goods

A report from PCMag: Democrats are reintroducing a bill that would ban automated bots from buying online goods. The legislation aims to stop scalpers.

The proposed legislation expands on an earlier law passed in 2016 that outlawed automated bots from circumventing control measures to buy up ticket sales for public events, such as music concerts and sporting events. In addition, the law made it illegal for scalpers to resell the tickets obtained through the bot.

Chinese Hackers May be Stealing Data to Feed an Artificial Intelligence

Dina Temple-Raston of NPR published a fascinating investigation regarding the Microsoft Exchange attack earlier in 2021.

Officials believe that the breach was in the service of something bigger: China’s artificial intelligence ambitions. The Beijing leadership aims to lead the world in a technology that allows computers to perform tasks that traditionally required human intelligence — such as finding patterns and recognizing speech or faces.

IBM’s AI-Powered Chip Can Help Detect Fraud

IBM revealed its new Telum processor at the Hot Chips semiconductor conference. It claims it can detect fraud in real time.

IBM says this could lead to “a potentially new era of prevention of fraud at scale.” Although credit card fraud is the most direct application, Telum’s onboard A.I. accelerator can handle other workloads as well. Using machine learning, it can conduct risk analysis, detect money laundering, and handle loan processing, among other things.

This AI Text Generator Shortcut Will Replace Our Blogger Jobs

Over the weekend, u/ryandeanrocks shared an AI text generator via the r/Shortcuts subreddit. It’s an open source version of GPT-3. Of course, how good the output it produces depends upon the input, but I’ve seen it spit out some decent things. Here’s an example; I pasted the first sentence of this piece, and here is part of the output: “You’ll notice that if you type something and then choose to send it to someone, that the chat box in the corner will turn green. In theory, that’s the easiest way to see if someone is typing something out and waiting to send it, but it can take awhile to see the difference. With real-time chatting, it’s almost instantaneous.“

Researchers Hid Malware Inside an AI’s Brain

This is straight out of a sci-fi novel. Researchers created a proof-of-concept technique that let them hide malware inside of an AI’s neurons to avoid detection.

According to the paper, in this approach the malware is “disassembled” when embedded into the network’s neurons, and assembled into functioning malware by a malicious receiver program that can also be used to download the poisoned model via an update. The malware can still be stopped if the target device verifies the model before launching it, according to the paper. It can also be detected using “traditional methods” like static and dynamic analysis.

Someone Built a Preacherbot Powered by AI and it’s Awesome

Artist Diemut Strebe built a praying robot “to explore the possibilities of an approximation to celestial and numinous entities by performing a potentially never-ending chain of religious routines and devotional attempts for communication through a self-learning software.” The production is a collaboration with Regina Barzilay, Tianxiao Shen, Enrico Santus, all MIT CSAIL, Amazon Polly, Bill and Will Sturgeon, Elchanan Mossel, MIT, Stefan Strauss, Chris Fitch, Brian Kane, Keith Welsh, Webster University, Matthew Azevedo. “Wretched sinner unit! The path to robot heaven lies here… in the Good Book 3.0.” ―Lionel Preacherbot

The Singularity: Can Computers Make Themselves Smarter?

Writing for The New Yorker, Ted Chiang believes that the concept of a technological singularity, in which computers / AI would be able to make themselves ever smarter, is similar to an ontological argument. In other words, it probably won’t happen.

How much can you optimize for generality? To what extent can you simultaneously optimize a system for every possible situation, including situations never encountered before? Presumably, some improvement is possible, but the idea of an intelligence explosion implies that there is essentially no limit to the extent of optimization that can be achieved.