2023-11-27

AI Posion Pill

Google, Meta, OpenAI are all facing lawsuits from creatives for their work being consumed for training. So, Ben Zhao from the university of Chicago created a tool called Nightshade that gives artists the abilities to protect their work form AI consumption for training. Nightshade works by injecting an anchor image (lets say a cat) into your images (lets say a dog). The pixels are swapped and perturbated in a way that makes the original image unaffected to the human eye, but to an AI scanning the pixels it sees the two images in a way that confuses its understanding and makes it unable to accurately replicate the original image. They also have a tool called Glaze that allows an artist to protect their style. Nightshade will be available for the public soon (https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/)

MIT Review: (https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/)
Detailed Breakdown of Technology: (https://towardsdatascience.com/how-nightshade-works-b1ae14ae76c3)

Neurolink Raises $43M

Earlier this year Elon Musk’s Neurolink was granted FDA approval for human trial implants of their device. So now they are looking for volunteers to implant the device in their brains for data collection.This may feel a little risky given that Neurolink employees had been concerned that the company was rushing experiments in the past leading to avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering of animals during their trials. The $43M round was done by Peter Theil’s Founder fund and thirty two other investors. 

Tech Crunch Release: https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/25/neuralink-elon-musks-brain-implant-startup-quietly-raises-an-additional-43m/

Google DeepMind Lyria

If you don’t know how to play an instrument but have lots of sound in your head, Deepmind in collaboration with Youtube created Lyria  a music tool that lets you turn your hums into an orchestra.

Original Release: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/transforming-the-future-of-music-creation/