The Pace Of The Progress Of, And Investment In, AI And Chatbots Is Becoming Dizzying!

This appeared a day or so ago:

American chatbots: oversexed, overhyped and over here

In just two weeks, Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have each previewed AI chatbots that critics say are as dangerous as they are impressive.

John Davidson Columnist

May 24, 2024 – 1.16pm

On Monday morning in Seattle, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced the world to a new type of PC that will help Windows computers cash in on the artificial intelligence craze and deal with the threat posed by Apple – both at the same time.

The new laptop computers, known as Copilot+ PCs, feature a complete overhaul of silicon chips typically found in a Windows laptop, replacing Intel-style processors with ones more like those in mobile phones, so the PCs can finally match the battery life of the world’s biggest selling laptop, Apple’s MacBook Air.

And, as part of that silicon upgrade, the Copilot+ PCs will come packed with high-powered AI processors and more than 40 different AI models, Microsoft officials said, to help Windows users with tasks ranging from making swords and escaping zombies in the game Minecraft to changing the settings on the PC.

Showcasing what these new on-device AI models would be capable of, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi revealed a new feature called Recall, that Copilot+ PC owners will be able to use to find anything they have ever seen or done on the computer, “as if you have photographic memory”.

The software frequently takes “snapshot” images of what’s on the user’s screen, saves them on the computer’s storage drive, and allows the AI to sift through them using image and text recognition whenever a user goes looking for something.

In a demo, Microsoft showed Recall calling up a PowerPoint slide with purple handwriting on it, when a Windows user asked the Copilot chatbot to find a chart with purple writing she remembered seeing. The software sifted through Discord chats to find images with purple dresses. It let the user scroll through the history of everything that had been on her computer screen, going back a week, to find something shared in a video call.

Mehdi promised the snapshots would never leave the owner’s Copilot+ PC to be processed in the cloud – the new “neural processing” chips in the computers would do all the image recognition and natural language processing themselves – and that no AI model would ever be trained on what it saw on users’ screens. All the same, by week’s end, Recall was getting heavily criticised for its potential privacy and security risks.

Privacy advocates worried that abusive partners who know their partner’s password could log on and scroll through snapshots of every web page viewed on the PC.

Workplace security experts said they were concerned the snapshots could reveal passwords if they happened to be taken at the same time a user was typing them in and the password entry software didn’t follow standard on-screen cloaking measures (which show passwords as a series of asterisks).

Likewise, confidential documents could get hoovered up into Recall’s database, just by calling them up onto Copilot+ PC screen, security experts said. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has asked Microsoft to explain itself.

But Microsoft isn’t the only major technology company that’s just shown off new AI capabilities that critics warn come with inherent risks.

A week before the Copilot+ PC launch, Microsoft’s AI partner OpenAI revealed a new “multi-modal” ChatGPT chatbot, based on a new AI model known as GPT-4o that’s capable of using not just text for its inputs and outputs, but also audio and video.

“The new voice [and video] mode is the best computer interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies, and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real,” said OpenAI cofounder and CEO, Sam Altman, at the time.

The new chatbot also surprised critics, who complained it was overly flirtatious in the OpenAI demo. And it surprised the actor Scarlett Johansson, who said she had been in talks to allow OpenAI to use her voice for the chatbot, but had never agreed to it, and was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the chatbot had “a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine”.

(The new chatbot model, minus Johansson’s voice, will be one of the 40-plus new AI models appearing in Copilot+ PCs, and it’s the one Windows users can share their screen with to help escape the zombies, Microsoft said.)

A day after GPT-4o was launched, Google showed off a new multi-modal chatbot of its own, for now named Project Astra, which can take in vastly more information than OpenAI’s chatbot can, and reason over it to answer questions with up-to-the-minute information.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s goal was to allow its chatbots to absorb “infinite context” whenever they’re answering a question, overcoming a limitation in current chatbots that means they often reply with months-old information that was gathered when the AI model was trained, rather than when the question was asked.

The new stuff is “impressive”, says Professor Anton Van Den Hengel, a former director of applied science at Amazon and the director of The University of Adelaide’s Centre for Augmented Reasoning.

A chatbot with infinite context could, for instance, help a cardiologist diagnose heart disease using “the absolute latest cardiology research”, he says.

Meanwhile, the move to multi-modal chatbots will help popularise AI in ways that were not possible with the text-only chatbots. Enabling voice and video chats is going to lead to an explosion of new user-generated AI applications that will match the explosion of user-generated video that occurred when YouTube appeared, he predicts.

But there’s a problem.

Chatbots from American companies such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta are typically trained on 100 times more American data than they are on Australian data, he says, and using them will tend to homogenise Australian culture around American values.

The Australian public service is now looking into using Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot as part of its workflow, and emails, documents and even government policies written with Copilot “will embody the American training data (Copilot) has been built from” more than it embodies Australian data, Professor Van Den Hengel warns.

“We have to decide collectively whether we’re going to have our own cultural and digital identity, or whether we’re just going to be homogenised. At the moment, it’s pretty clear which way we’re headed,” he says.

Dr Dana McKay, acting dean of Interaction Technology and Information at RMIT, has similar mixed feelings about the new generation of chatbots.

Adding voice and video prompts and replies to the chatbots will make them “incredibly inclusive”, she says, and will open up not just AI but computing as a whole to a range of people who now find computers inaccessible.

Multi-modality is great news for people with low literacy or visual impairment or even dyslexia, she says, and could even lead to new forms of creativity as people figure out how to combine text prompts with visual ones.

But the extremely high cost of training such chatbots is a problem, she says. Not only will it tend to force American values on the world because it’s generally only US-based big tech that can afford to train them, it also risks replacing the old digital divide, accessibility, with a new one: affordability.

There’s a real possibility that people who can afford to access the best chatbots will get to pay with money, while people who can’t afford it will have to pay for it by sacrificing their privacy and turning their personal information into training data.

“This could actually increase the divide between the haves and the have-nots,” Dr McKay says.

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/technology/american-chatbots-oversexed-overhyped-and-over-here-20240524-p5jg9t

Sounds to me like we are seeing a new version of American Cultural Imperialism and that we are going to have to work a whole lot harder to preserve of Australian distinctiveness and cultural identity against this US onslaught It was forever thus but seems to be accelerating.

To date I am not aware of having been faced with a chatbot as an interlocutor but I am sure the time is coming and fast.

What experiences – good and bad – have you had, so far, with the technology?

David.