AI in Focus: AI humbug

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Got some questions about AI you’d like answered? Or just some AI hallucinations you’d like to share? Email us anytime. Enjoy!

Here’s what you need to know

The UK’s top court said AI systems can’t be the inventor behind a patent. Even if robots make something new, they don’t have the same rights as humans under current law.

ByteDance is relying on OpenAI to train its own competing large language model, according to The Verge. The TikTok parent has relied on OpenAI through every part of the process, even though that’s against OpenAI’s service terms.

A large dataset that’s being used to build AI image generators contains depictions of child sexual abuse. At least 1,000 instances of the explicit content were found by the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Meta’s oversight board is blaming AI for moderation issues

The oversight board of Meta said that artificial intelligence tools just won’t cut it when it comes to moderating content related to the Israel-Hamas war.

On Dec. 7, the board opened an expedited review of two videos that Meta removed for “violating both its violence and incitement and its dangerous organizations and individuals rules,” but soon after reinstated them. One was a video of hostages being kidnapped from Israel by Hamas, and one showed the aftermath of the bombing of Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital.

The board blamed AI tools for misjudging the posts, since both the initial removal decision and the rejection of the user’s appeal were taken automatically based on a classifier score, without any human review. As Quartz’s Ananya Bhattacharya explains, Meta needs more human oversight in content moderation decisions—especially non-English-language posts.

Quotable: The open-source debate

“We need more companies and organizations to share their models and datasets publicly and in open-source so that everyone can understand and build AI themselves.” —Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue in a message to Quartz

Delangue doesn’t like the tendency of big tech companies to hold on to machine learning codes like business patents. Instead, he’s working to build a world where every developer or startup can freely access artificial intelligence models—and helping AI, effectively, go open-source.

One big number: 200,000

Number of images in a dataset that was used to train femtech company Sonio’s AI software, which reads ultrasounds to look for abnormalities

Cécile Brosset Dubois, the founder and CEO of Sonio, is betting that artificial intelligence can help hospitals and individual clinicians make more sophisticated assessments. As she told Quartz, AI-powered ultrasounds can quicken the pace at which doctors diagnose rare pathologies, along with reducing error in their reads.

Ask an AI

Illustration: DALL-E 3

The holidays are here, and this year, Mariah Carey, the long-unchallenged Queen of Christmas was briefly toppled by one Brenda Lee, a septuagenarian whose classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” was buoyed to its number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 thanks to a social media campaign, shiny new video, and the power of streaming. But Carey herself was only on the throne thanks to a lot of these same factors—the younger generation may not even be aware that the singer never intended to become some sort of holiday icon, and in fact was one of the most successful 1990s pop stars before “All I Want for Christmas” was even a snowflake’s gleam in her eye.

In a recent episode of the Quartz Obsession podcast, guest Drew Gillis from the A.V. Club talks to host Thomas Germain about how the Christmas comebacks—and resulting duel—of Carey and Lee would never have been possible without streaming.

So we asked another massively disruptive technological advancement to weigh in. Bard, ChatGPT, and Grok were all asked how Mariah Carey became the Queen of Christmas. All three instantly pinpointed the song that gave her the moniker and the album it came from (Merry Christmas), but all called the song an instant hit.

That’s not really true. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was never released as a single, and didn’t even become popular until years after the 1994 album’s release (and it certainly didn’t make it onto the charts until much later). Generally, all three straightened out what wasn’t at all a smooth sleigh ride to the top—in other words, what’s become the typical, “almost right but just wrong enough to fail” AI version of the truth.

Then, because it’s festive, we asked them all to write number one chart-topping holiday hits of their own, and scored the results accordingly (we’ll include some quotes so you get the idea).

👎Grok: “And when the clock strikes midnight, and the New Year begins / We’ll know that our hearts are filled with the warmth of kin”

👎👎Bard: “Grandma’s pies, twinkling eyes, mitten hands reaching for the skies / Snowflakes fall, snowmen tall, laughter echoes through the hall”

👎👎👎ChatGPT: “Fireplace crackling, cozy and bright, / Families gather, hearts unite. / Stories told of yesteryears, / Echoes of love, joy, and cheers.”

Each AI depicted sentimental scenes getting together with family and making memories on cold nights. That’s a very nice thought, but no.

Holiday hits are almost always about having fun, being in or out of love, and/or dancing. Imagine any of these put to an up-tempo beat. Mariah would walk right off the stage.

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