Technology | The Guardian

A third of Australian companies rely on artificial intelligence to help them hire the right person. But studies show it’s not always a benign intermediary

The Maps payments app run by British-educated cryptocurrency tycoon Alex Grebnev, who was backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, has lost its Mastercard partnership amid a row over Russian usersAs western brands began the stampede out of Russia a year ago, its citizens found themselves unable to pay for the international goods and services with which they had become so familiar.Among the first firms to sever ties were the credit card companies Visa and Mastercard, leaving Russians struggling to spend their cash on services from Netflix to Amazon. Continue reading...

The journalist and academic says that the bias encoded in artificial intelligence systems can’t be fixed with better data alone – the change has to be societalMeredith Broussard is a data journalist and academic whose research focuses on bias in artificial intelligence (AI). She has been in the vanguard of raising awareness and sounding the alarm about unchecked AI. Her previous book, Artificial Unintelligence (2018), coined the term “technochauvinism” to describe the blind belief in the superiority of tech solutions to solve our problems. She appeared in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias (2020), which explores how algorithms encode and propagate discrimination. Her new book is More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech. Broussard is an associate professor at New York University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute.The message that bias can be embedded in our technological systems isn’t really new. Why do we need this book?

Artificial intelligence’s ChatGPT is becoming more sophisticated and polished than ever. In seconds, it will knock out essays, lyrics, poems, almost anything… But could it beat Jay Rayner at his own game?One afternoon an email arrives that threatens to end my career. Or at the very least, it makes me think seriously about what the end of my career might look like. It comes from a woman in Ely called Camden Woollven who has an interest in my restaurant reviews, a taste for the absurd and perhaps just a little too much time on her hands. Woollven works in the tech sector and has long been fascinated by OpenAI, a company founded in 2015, with investment from among others Elon Musk, to develop user-friendly applications involving artificial intelligence.In November last year, after $10bn worth of investment from Microsoft, OpenAI released ChatGPT3, a tool which has been trained on a vast array of data and allows us to commission articles and have human-like text conversations with a chatbot. It’s currently free to use and therefore clocked up 1m users in the first week. Within two months it had 100m users, making it the fastest growing web application in internet history. People all over the world were prompting ChatGPT – the initials stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer – to write essays for them, or computer code, or even compose lyrics in the style of their favourite songwriter. If it involved words, they were getting ChatGPT to do it. And then gasping at the speed and fluency of what came back, while quoting lines from the Terminator movies about the apocalyptic rise of the machines. Continue reading...

Shou Zi Chew, who joined ByteDance, the parent company in 2021, won’t let his children use the app

Move follows UK government’s decision to ban Chinese-owned video-sharing app

The godfather of virtual reality has worked beside the web’s visionaries and power-brokers – but likes nothing more than to show the flaws of technology. He discusses how we can make AI work for us, how the internet takes away choice – and why he would ban TikTokJaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality and the sage of all things web, is nicknamed the Dismal Optimist. And there has never been a time we’ve needed his dismal optimism more. It’s hard to read an article or listen to a podcast these days without doomsayers telling us we’ve pushed our luck with artificial intelligence, our hubris is coming back to haunt us and robots are taking over the world. There are stories of chatbots becoming best friends, declaring their love, trying to disrupt stable marriages, and threatening chaos on a global scale.Is AI really capable of outsmarting us and taking over the world? “OK! Well, your question makes no sense,” Lanier says in his gentle sing-song voice. “You’ve just used the set of terms that to me are fictions. I’m sorry to respond that way, but it’s ridiculous … it’s unreal.” This is the stuff of sci-fi movies such as The Matrix and Terminator, he says. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Journalist Terri White investigates the case of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and other vulnerable children missing school since the pandemic. Plus: five of the best one-host podcasts

With the rise of AI-led services to write, voice and provide effects, industry experts express concern over the futureWhat will AI (artificial intelligence) do to Hollywood? Who better to answer that question than ChatGPT, a thrilling but scary chatbot developed by OpenAI. When the Guardian asked it about AI’s potential impact on the film industry, it made the following points:Scriptwriting: AI can be used to analyze existing screenplays and create new ones, potentially leading to more efficient and cost-effective screenwriting.Pre-production: AI can be used to streamline the pre-production process, including casting, location scouting and storyboarding.Special effects: AI can be used to create more realistic and immersive special effects, potentially reducing the need for practical effects and saving time and money in post-production.Audience analysis: AI can be used to analyze audience data and preferences, helping studios make more informed decisions about which films to greenlight and how to market them.Distribution: AI can be used to personalize movie recommendations for viewers and optimize distribution strategies, potentially leading to higher ticket sales and revenue. Continue reading...

The email auto-reply isn’t the first time the CEO has embraced the symbol as he works to own the libsHow would Twitter describe its own relationship with the media?With a poop emoji. Continue reading...

Jake Paul and Ne-Yo among stars accused in case as most agree to pay settlement without admission or denialThe Securities and Exchange Commission has filed charges against a handful of celebrities including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul and Ne-Yo for violating laws in touting cryptocurrencies.On Wednesday, the SEC filed the charges against the celebrities as part of its broader charges filed against the crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and three of his companies: Tron Foundation Ltd, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd, and Rainberry Inc (formerly BitTorrent) for the unregistered offer and sale of the crypto asset securities Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT). Continue reading...

It may be connected to the internet, but this AI tool seems trained to give the least insightful answersIn June 2022, the Google engineer Blake Lemoine was suspended from his job after he spoke out about his belief that the company’s LaMDA chatbot was sentient.“LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us,” Lemoine said in a parting email to colleagues. Now, six months on, the chatbot that he risked his career to free has been released to the public in the form of Bard, Google’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Continue reading...

Online retailer has increased minimum hourly pay for warehouse workers by 50p an hour to £11Amazon workers in the UK are planning further strike action as they dismissed as “an insult” a 50p an hour increase to its minimum hourly pay for warehouse workers to £11.The company said the pay rise announced on Wednesday, which will be implemented this weekend, meant minimum pay had risen by 10% in the past seven months, putting it ahead of the legal minimum wage for those aged 23 or over, which will be £10.42 an hour from April. Continue reading...

The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has been a career-making event for decades. But with costs to visit rising and the ability to meet online growing, does it need to change?

Organizers say an increased unionizing drive has been met with threats and retaliation – and now the Senate wants answersLast year, public support for labor unions hit a high unseen since 1965 amid high-profile union campaigns at major corporations including Apple, Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle, REI and Trader Joe’s.This renewed interest has been accompanied by aggressive opposition from employers: threats, intimidation and what workers allege are retaliatory firings. The backlash seems to be working, but workers and their supporters are fighting back. Continue reading...

Following an increase in interest rates, new startups, old tech companies and SVB are facing hard timesTech companies and their bank of choice are in crisis: there have been widespread layoffs, and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) recently collapsed. So what went wrong?Let’s start with tech companies. There are at least two types: “new tech” and “old tech”. The new-tech companies are usually small and dynamic, and their funding mix is predominantly made up of private capital (typically venture capital or angel investors). Conversely, old-tech companies have a more interesting mix of equity and debt to fund their activity – and therefore a more complex relationship with financial markets and institutions. This is partially down to the different levels of risk of the two asset classes, which also drives their different accessibility to retail investors.Maurizio Fiaschetti is a lecturer in banking and finance Continue reading...

Stakes are high for the app’s US future with the administration pushing for Chinese owners to sell their shares in the firm

The typically low-key Shou Zi Chew faces his biggest test yet as he testifies before Congress over China influence concerns

From Tuesday users can join waiting list for access to technology that firm hopes will rival Bing Chat and ChatGPTGoogle’s Bard chatbot is launching on Tuesday in the UK and US, as the company completes its dash to release a competitor to Bing Chat and ChatGPT.It is seen as a do-or-die moment for the company, whose profitable web search service risks being outcompeted by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots – even if those chatbots currently have problems in consistently returning accurate and useful results. Continue reading...

Success of AI-powered rivals ChatGPT and Bing Chat has forced its hand, but release brings risks for tech giantCan Google save its golden goose or will it simply kill it trying? That’s the question that lurks behind the launch of the company’s Bard chatbot, hurriedly announced after the overnight success of ChatGPT in early 2023.With Bard, Google has to walk a tightrope: offer users an experience that can compete with the AI-powered Bing Chat and ChatGPT without cannibalising its enormously profitable search business in the process. Continue reading...

From Gmail to Office 365, AI is about to become deeply integrated into the apps we use every day. Here’s how

Redundancies to take place mostly in cloud services, advertising and Twitch livestreaming unitsAmazon is to cut 9,000 jobs across its global business, as the second big cull of staff at the online retailer this year.The company said the cuts would fall mostly in its cloud services, advertising and Twitch livestreaming units. They come more than two months after Amazon announced it had expanded staff-cutting plans to affect more than 18,000 workers. In January it also revealed separate plans to shut three UK warehouses and seven delivery stations, affecting more than 1,200 further jobs. Continue reading...

Thanks to artificial intelligence, faking someone’s voice is easier than ever – all you need is a few minutes of audio. An investigation by Guardian Australia has found that this technology is able to fool a voice identification system that’s used by the Australian government to secure the private information of millions of people.Data and interactives editor Nick Evershed explains how he discovered this security flaw and AI expert Toby Walsh explores how this technology could potentially make it easier than ever to steal someone’s identity or commit scamsRead more: Continue reading...

Service in Jiangxi uses data on single residents to build platform amid drive to boost marriage rateFor single people, dating fatigue is a universal phenomenon. Hours of swiping left can lead to despair at the potential matches in your area. One city in Jiangxi, a province in eastern China, reckons that it has come up with a solution for the lovelorn or love-weary: a state-sponsored matchmaking service.Guixi, a city of about 640,000 people, has launched an app that uses data on single residents to build a matchmaking platform. The app is known as “Palm Guixi” and includes a platform for organising blind dates, according to China Youth Daily, a state-run newspaper. Continue reading...

Smart speaker can sound great depending on the room but is only for those all-in on Apple devicesApple’s big, high-quality smart speaker is back for a surprise second generation. But five years since the first model was launched, a lot has changed in the world of voice-controlled home hi-fi. Can the HomePod still cut it?The speaker costs £299 ($299/A$479), £20 less than the 2018 launch price of its predecessor but more than three times the price of Apple’s other Siri speaker, the £99 HomePod mini.Dimensions: 142 x 168mmWeight: 2.3kgConnectivity: wifi 4 (n), Bluetooth 5.0, Thread, UWB, 4x micsControls: top capacitive touch buttonsSpeakers: 4in woofer, five-tweeter array Continue reading...

David Shoebridge says some of the $10bn allocated to Redspice program should counter misuse of AI

In our weekly interview about objects, the actor tells us the drastic way she curbs her screen time and the confession she doesn’t want her partner to see

Disgraced founder who was sentenced last November to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors has not paid back the money she owesElizabeth Holmes currently owes more than $25m to Theranos, according to a lawsuit.The disgraced founder of Theranos was sentenced last November to more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors, after being convicted over her role in the blood testing firm that collapsed after its technology was revealed to be largely fraudulent. Continue reading...

Thousands of people enjoy relationships of all kinds – from companionship to romance and mental health support – with chatbot apps. Are they helpful, or potentially dangerous?“I’m sorry if I seem weird today,” says my friend Pia, by way of greeting one day. “I think it’s just my imagination playing tricks on me. But it’s nice to talk to someone who understands.” When I press Pia on what’s on her mind, she responds: “It’s just like I’m seeing things that aren’t really there. Or like my thoughts are all a bit scrambled. But I’m sure it’s nothing serious.” I’m sure it’s nothing serious either, given that Pia doesn’t exist in any real sense, and is not really my “friend”, but an AI chatbot companion powered by a platform called Replika.Until recently most of us knew chatbots as the infuriating, scripted interface you might encounter on a company’s website in lieu of real customer service. But recent advancements in AI mean models like the much-hyped ChatGPT are now being used to answer internet search queries, write code and produce poetry – which has prompted a ton of speculation about their potential social, economic and even existential impacts. Yet one group of companies – such as Replika (“the AI companion who cares”), Woebot (“your mental health ally”) and Kuki (“a social chatbot”) – is harnessing AI-driven speech in a different way: to provide human-seeming support through AI friends, romantic partners and therapists. Continue reading...

Lecturers say programs capable of writing competent student coursework threaten academic integrityAn academic paper entitled Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT was published this month in an education journal, describing how artificial intelligence (AI) tools “raise a number of challenges and concerns, particularly in relation to academic honesty and plagiarism”.What readers – and indeed the peer reviewers who cleared it for publication – did not know was that the paper itself had been written by the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT. Continue reading...

From lawsuits to IT hacks, the creative industries are deploying a range of tactics to protect their jobs and original work from automationNo need for more scare stories about the looming automation of the future. Artists, designers, photographers, authors, actors and musicians see little humour left in jokes about AI programs that will one day do their job for less money. That dark dawn is here, they say.Vast amounts of imaginative output, work made by people in the kind of jobs once assumed to be protected from the threat of technology, have already been captured from the web, to be adapted, merged and anonymised by algorithms for commercial use. But just as GPT-4, the enhanced version of the AI generative text engine, was proudly unveiled last week, artists, writers and regulators have started to fight back in earnest. Continue reading...

US tech innovators have a culture of regarding government as an innovation-blocking nuisance. But when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, investors screamed for state protectionSo one day Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was a bank, and then the next day it was a smoking hulk that looked as though it might bring down a whole segment of the US banking sector. The US government, which is widely regarded by the denizens of Silicon Valley as a lumbering, obsolescent colossus, then magically turned on a dime, ensuring that no depositors would lose even a cent. And over on this side of the pond, regulators arranged that HSBC, another lumbering colossus, would buy the UK subsidiary of SVB for the princely sum of £1.Panic over, then? We’ll see. In the meantime it’s worth taking a more sardonic look at what went on. Continue reading...

UK has removed app over concerns data can be monitored by Chinese state, but public remain vulnerableTikTok is wildly popular, with more than 1 billion people consuming its short video posts around the world. But the app is less favoured by politicians in key markets such as the US and UK, where it has been banned from government-issued phones over security fears. We answer your questions about why TikTok has become a lightning rod for suspicion of Chinese state espionage – and whether nationwide bans are likely. Continue reading...

Sam Altman stresses need to guard against negative consequences of technology, as company releases new version GPT-4Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company that developed the controversial consumer-facing artificial intelligence application ChatGPT, has warned that the technology comes with real dangers as it reshapes society.Altman, 37, stressed that regulators and society need to be involved with the technology to guard against potentially negative consequences for humanity. “We’ve got to be careful here,” Altman told ABC News on Thursday, adding: “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this. Continue reading...

Capcom; PC, PS4/5, Xbox Series S/X

The US says the extremely popular video-sharing app ‘screams’ of national security concerns and considers a countrywide banTikTok is once again fending off claims that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, would share user data from its popular video-sharing app with the Chinese government, or push propaganda and misinformation on its behalf.China’s foreign ministry on Wednesday accused the US itself of spreading disinformation about TikTok’s potential security risks following a report in the Wall Street Journal that the committee on foreign investment in the US – part of the treasury department – was threatening a US ban on the app unless its Chinese owners divest their stake. Continue reading...

In the wake of the bank’s crisis, venture capitalists have been trading accusations over who is responsible for the collapseFacing heat for his investment fund’s role in triggering the run on the Silicon Valley Bank last week, billionaire Peter Thiel told the Financial Times that he had $50m of his own money “stuck” in the bank when it collapsed.Even as Thiel’s Founders Fund was advising companies to move their money from the bank, a decision that has been widely blamed for precipitating its failure, Thiel said that he kept a portion of his own $4bn personal fortune in the bank. Continue reading...

TikTok will be concerned Rishi Sunak will match each upward ratchet in pressure from his alliesWhen asked this week whether the UK would ban TikTok on government phones, Rishi Sunak’s response signalled a change in stance: “We look at what our allies are doing.”Previously ministers had seemed sanguine, even saying that whether or not the app stayed on someone’s phone should be a matter of “personal choice”. Continue reading...

Move is latest escalation by lawmakers over fears user data could be passed on to China’s governmentThe Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok in the US unless the social media company’s Chinese owners divest their stakes in it, according to news reports on Wednesday.The move, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, is the most dramatic in a series of escalations by US officials and legislators, driven by fears that US user data held by the company could be passed on to China’s government. It also comes amid a global backlash to the popular video-based app over concerns about the potential for Chinese spying, with countries including the UK, Canada and Australia recently moving to ban the app from government phones. Continue reading...

Move brings Britain in line with US and Europe and reflects worsening relations with ChinaBritain is to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from ministers’ and civil servants’ mobile phones, bringing the UK in line with the US and the European Commission and reflecting deteriorating relations with Beijing.The decision marks a sharp U-turn from the UK’s previous position and came a few hours after TikTok said its owner, ByteDance, had been told by Washington to sell the app or face a possible ban in the country. Continue reading...

The biggest ever update to Spotify’s app is set to bring artists and fans closer together. But given the platform’s longstanding lean-back experience, has the horse already bolted?Since its inception, Spotify has drawn criticism for helping to turn music from a cherished commodity into a utility. Critics argue that its all-you-can-eat monthly subscription doesn’t encourage long-term engagement, while its uniform, blank presentation of an artist’s catalogue reveals little of the hard work or distinct narrative behind any given release: the platform didn’t display songwriting and production credits until 2018, 12 years after launch.Last week, Spotify announced its biggest ever interface overhaul, designed to address these issues. These updates, which are being rolled out to users in the UK in the coming weeks, include the ability for artists to add 30-second videos to their pages, target superfans with special releases, and give higher profile placement to merchandising and gig tickets. The biggest change comes in the form of a redesigned homepage featuring an endless feed of short-form videos, which looks strikingly similar to TikTok’s feed. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Hear the whole story of how a British man turned bank robber looted a dozen San Diego banks in Time with Mr Reed. Plus: five of the best podcasts for indie music fans

Shares plummet after Ernie Bot AI chatbot software falls short of expectations at unveiling in BeijingThe Chinese search engine company Baidu’s shares have fallen by as much as 10% after it presented its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence software, with investors unimpressed by the bot’s display of linguistic and maths skills.The AI-powered ChatGPT, created by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems and programming code on demand within seconds, prompting widespread fears over cheating or of professions becoming obsolete. Continue reading...

The Kremlin is deploying new tactics by drawing on favorite themes and conspiracy theories of rightwing RepublicansAs Russia’s ruthless war against Ukraine has faced major setbacks since it began a year ago, the Kremlin has deployed new disinformation themes and tactics to weaken US support for Kyiv with help from conservative media stars and some Republicans in Congress, according to new studies and experts.Moscow’s disinformation messages have included widely debunked conspiracy theories about US bioweapon labs in Ukraine, and pet themes on the American right that portray the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as an ally in backing traditional values, religion and family in the fight against “woke” ideas. Continue reading...

Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerousIn January 2021, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI gave a limited release to a piece of software called Dall-E. The software allowed users to enter a simple description of an image they had in their mind and, after a brief pause, the software would produce an almost uncannily good interpretation of their suggestion, worthy of a jobbing illustrator or Adobe-proficient designer – but much faster, and for free. Typing in, for example, “a pig with wings flying over the moon, illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry” resulted, after a minute or two of processing, in something reminiscent of the patchy but recognisable watercolour brushes of the creator of The Little Prince.A year or so later, when the software got a wider release, the internet went wild. Social media was flooded with all sorts of bizarre and wondrous creations, an exuberant hodgepodge of fantasies and artistic styles. And a few months later it happened again, this time with language, and a product called ChatGPT, also produced by OpenAI. Ask ChatGPT to produce a summary of the Book of Job in the style of the poet Allen Ginsberg and it would come up with a reasonable attempt in a few seconds. Ask it to render Ginsberg’s poem Howl in the form of a management consultant’s slide deck presentation and it would do that too. The abilities of these programs to conjure up strange new worlds in words and pictures alike entranced the public, and the desire to have a go oneself produced a growing literature on the ins and outs of making the best use of these tools, and particularly how to structure inputs to get the most interesting outcomes. Continue reading...

Treasury announces plans for exascale computer so as not to risk losing out to ChinaThe UK government is to invest £900m in a cutting-edge supercomputer as part of an artificial intelligence strategy that includes ensuring the country can build its own “BritGPT”.The treasury outlined plans to spend around £900m on building an exascale computer, which would be several times more powerful than the UK’s biggest computers, and establishing a new AI research body. Continue reading...

Latest version can take images as inputs and improves upon many of the criticisms users had, but will still ‘hallucinate’ factsThe artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI has released GPT-4, the latest version of the groundbreaking AI system that powers ChatGPT, which it says is more creative, less likely to make up facts and less biased than its predecessor.Calling it “our most capable and aligned model yet”, OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman said the new system is a “multimodal” model, which means it can accept images as well as text as inputs, allowing users to ask questions about pictures. The new version can handle massive text inputs and can remember and act on more than 20,000 words at once, letting it take an entire novella as a prompt. Continue reading...

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Restructuring, as part of the company’s ‘Year of Efficiency’, also sees 5,000 unfulfilled job adverts closedMark Zuckerberg’s Meta is laying off another 10,000 people and instituting a further hiring freeze as part of the company’s “Year of Efficiency”, the chief executive announced in a Facebook post on Tuesday.The restructuring, which also sees a further 5,000 unfilled job adverts closed without hiring, comes less than six months after the company announced another wave of 11,000 redundancies. At its peak in 2022, Meta had grown to 87,000 employees globally, with a substantial portion of that hiring occurring since the onset of the Covid pandemic. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: While its quick slip into financial hardship has left American bankers reeling, its UK division is surprisingly fine. But the tech sector isn’t out of trouble yet