Chaos Theory
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🥟 Chao-Down #25: Audiobook narrators suspect Apple trained AI with their voices, Microsoft reflects on first week of new Bing

🥟 Chao-Down #25: Audiobook narrators suspect Apple trained AI with their voices, Microsoft reflects on first week of new Bing

Plus, Tesla recalls cars over full-self-driving crash risk

February 17, 2023

Earlier this year, Apple launched digital narration for audiobooks, allowing authors who publish on Apple Books the ability to convert their texts into audio.

What people didn’t know was that Apple and their distributor Findaway Voices were using these audio files to train machine learning algorithms to power the synthetic voice feature.

Actors and authors claimed they were not informed or consulted about the use of their voice data for this purpose. Now, after backlash from the artists and their union, the companies have agreed to stop the AI training program.

Synthetic generation is here to stay, but people need to be made aware when their data goes beyond the bounds of a single recording.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Tesla Recalls Roughly 362,800 Vehicles Equipped With ‘Full Self-Driving’ Beta Over Crash Risk (WSJ)

Audiobook Narrators Fear Apple Used Their Voices to Train AI (WIRED)

The new Bing & Edge – Learning from our first week (Bing Search Blog)

Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You (The Markup)

Screenshot of a web page with the heading “Turn insights into activation.” Below a photo of a group of people sharing a meal at a large table is annotated, highlighting two people seated at the table, “Julie” and “Miles.” The annotations include details about each of them based on demographics, coupon engagement, media consumption, and purchase data.

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

Blueprints for recommender system architectures: 10th anniversary edition (link)

How does in-context learning work? A framework for understanding the differences from traditional supervised learning (Stanford AI Blog)

CMU CS Academy - Computer science curriculum: free for all, designed for you (Carnegie Mellon)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

An AI-powered debugger Built with OpenAI Codex (Github)

A new way to encode and generate Super Mario Bros levels (TechXplore)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

Offsite-Tuning: Transfer Learning without Full Model (arxiv)

MINOTAUR: Multi-task Video Grounding From Multimodal Queries (arxiv)

PersonNeRF: Personalized Reconstruction from Photo Collections (washington.edu)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Rise of zombie VCs haunts tech investors as startup valuations plunge (CNBC)

Inside Meta’s Push to Solve the Noisy Office (WSJ)