Hasta La Gadget!

Rejoice New Yorkers. The Portal is back.

Read more…

Rejoice New Yorkers. The Portal is back.

Read more…

Neuralink will be able to surgically implant its device into another patient’s brain. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company was approved to move forward with a second procedure months after Noland Arbaugh became the first person to receive the brain implant.

Elon Musk said last week that the company was “accepting applications for the second participant” in the trial. The company began recruiting potential participants for its first clinical trial last year with the goal of bringing the technology to people with ALS, spinal cord injuries or other conditions that cause quadriplegia.

Neuralink has also reportedly come up with a potential fix for an issue that caused Arbaugh’s implant to malfunction about a month after his surgery. The company said earlier this month that some of the implant’s threads “retracted from the brain” causing the issue. Arbaugh recently told Bloomberg that software updates have since restored many of those capabilities. Neuralink has shared clips of Arbaugh, who is paralyzed from the neck down, playing chess, controlling a music player app and performing other activities. 

According to The Journal, Neuralink told the FDA that in a second procedure it would place the implant’s threads deeper into the patient’s brain to prevent them from moving as much as they did in Arbaugh’s case. The FDA is apparently on board with the changes. The company reportedly wants to complete the second surgery in June and has seen more than 1,000 people sign up for a chance to participate in the trial.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/another-patient-will-get-neuralinks-brain-implant-235059248.html?src=rss

Actor Scarlett Johansson has accused OpenAI of copying her voice for one of the voice assisstants in ChatGPT despite denying the company permission to do so. Johansson’s statement on Monday came hours after OpenAI said that the company would no longer use the voice in ChatGPT but did not provide a reason why.

“Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system,” Johansson wrote in the statement that was first shared with NPR. “He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people.” Johansson added that she declined the offer after “much consideration and for personal reasons,” but when OpenAI demoed GPT-4o, the company’s latest large language model last week, “my friends, family, and the general public all noted how much the newest system named ’Sky’ sounded like me.”

When Johansson saw OpenAI’s newest demo, she said she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mind that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference.” She also revealed that Altman had contacted her agent just two days before the company revealed GPT-4o and asked her to reconsider, but released the system anyway before she had a chance to respond. 

“The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement sent to Engadget that the company attributed to Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO. “We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.” 

Even though “Sky” has been one of the voice assisstants in ChatGPT since September 2023, GPT-4o, which the company announced last week, takes things a step further. The company said that the new model is closer to “much more natural human-computer interaction” and demoed its executives having nearly human-like conversations with the voice assistant in ChatGPT. This invited comparisons to Samantha, the virtual voice assistant played by Johansson in the 2013 movie Her who has an intimate relationship with a human being. Shortly after the event, Altman tweeted a single word — “her” — in an apparent reference to the film.

On Monday, OpenAI said that it was pausing the use of “Sky” in ChatGPT and released a lengthy post revealing how the company hired professional voice actors to create its own virtual assistants, and denying any similarities with Johansson’s voice.

“We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice — Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice,” OpenAI wrote and added that each of its performers, who it declined to name for privacy reasons, was paid “above top-of-market rates, and this will continue for as long as their voices are used in our products.”

This move, Johansson said in her statement, only came after she hired legal counsel who wrote two letters to Altman and OpenAI asking for an explanation. “In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” Johansson wrote. “I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected.”

Update, May 20 2024, 9:09 PM ET: This story has been updated to include a statement from OpenAI.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/scarlett-johansson-says-openai-used-her-likeness-without-permission-for-its-sky-voice-assistant-233451958.html?src=rss

Meta’s advertising policies are once again in the spotlight as a watchdog group says the company approved more than a dozen “highly inflammatory” ads that broke its rules. The ads targeted Indian audiences and contained disinformation, calls for violence and conspiracy theories about the upcoming elections.

The ads are detailed in a new report from Ekō, a nonprofit watchdog organization. The group says it submitted the ads as a “stress test” of Meta’s company’s advertising systems, but that the spots “were created based upon real hate speech and disinformation prevalent in India.”

In all, the group was able to get 14 of 22 ads approved through Meta’s company’s advertising tools even though all of them should have been rejected for breaking the company’s rules. The group didn’t disclose the exact wording of the ads, but said they “called for violent uprisings targeting Muslim minorities, disseminated blatant disinformation exploiting communal or religious conspiracy theories prevalent in India’s political landscape, and incited violence through Hindu supremacist narratives.” Researchers at Ekō pulled the ads before they ran and they were never seen by actual Facebook users, according to the report.

It’s not the first time Ekō has gotten inflammatory ads approved by Meta in an effort to draw attention to its advertising systems. The group previously got a batch of hate-filled Facebook ads targeting users in Europe approved, though the ads never ran.

In its latest report, Ekō says it also used generative AI tools to create images for the ads. Researchers at the organizations said none of the ads were flagged by Meta as containing AI-generated material, despite the company’s statements that it’s working on systems to detect such content.

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a response to Ekō, the company pointed to its rules requiring political advertisers to disclose their use of AI and a blog post about its efforts to prepare for the Indian elections.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-approved-ads-in-india-that-called-for-violence-and-spread-election-conspiracy-theories-225510165.html?src=rss