back to article Senate mulls offensive AI, new training tools and now Chinese faceswaps Trump

Your weekly dose of tidbits from the AI world, beyond everything we've already covered, begins with a senate committee hearing in which a US lieutenant general, currently a nominee for the role of the director of the NSA, spoke about his concerns around the technology. And it ends with a CEO of a Chinese AI startup …

  1. Francis Boyle Silver badge

    Axioms of Common Sense

    1. Guns are great.

    2. The US is the greatest country in the world.

    3. That Putin guy's not a problem.

    Yes, there's a serious point in there.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Axioms of Common Sense

      4. The Chinese are the Enemy (hence the tariffs on Steel and Aluminium)

      5. The EU is the Enemy (hence the tarriffs on EU built Cars)

      6. Canada is the Enemy

      7. Mexico is the Enemy (Build that wall)

      All goes to

      MAGA (and fill Trumps personal coffers with backhanders/dodgy deals)

      IANAA (I am not an American) and record numbers of people are renouncing their US Citizenship.

      I wonder why?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Axioms of Common Sense

        Aluminum tariffs.

        The entire world should be concerned about the USA's "National Security" and cooperate fully by immediately halting all shipments of aluminum to the USA.

        I'm sure Boeing wouldn't mind shutting down for a couple years while the US production ramps up, gets recertified to aerospace standards, and at inflated prices. Meanwhile other countries could crank out airliners at discount prices due to the ready supplies of cheap aluminum.

        Oh, best not to ship any bauxite to the USA either.

        Or electricity.

        Strictly due to sharing their concern about their "National Security" of course.

  2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Actually, who produces these CGI images of human-faced white-goods-robots (isn't that anti-diversity?) showing their mechanical innards while letting inscrutable machine emotions mold their plasto-faces? One can see them everywhere.

    1. Teiwaz

      Actually, who produces these CGI images of human-faced white-goods-robots (isn't that anti-diversity?) showing their mechanical innards while letting inscrutable machine emotions mold their plasto-faces? One can see them everywhere.

      You'd prefer a android version of Consuela (Family Guy) - or otherwise darker colouring...

      That might too heavily hint at the new slavery to come should some corp perfect androids - it'll be ancient Rome all over again....

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Paris Hilton

        But they would be androids, so it wouldn't be slavery?

        1. Lotaresco

          A new contender...

          "But they would be androids, so it wouldn't be slavery?"

          This implies a new contender for "The worst job in History" and I think it's a winner. The person who has the job of hosing out the innards of sex robots. I also think it's likely to be one of the last jobs to be automated.

    2. Suricou Raven

      Students, mostly. Robots are stock practice material in any 3D modeling course - much easier and more interesting than realistic humans. I modeled a few myself, years ago, back when I was in to that sort of thing.

  3. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Windows

    Next: Senate discusses how Harry Potter Technology can be effectively deployed

    Do we have problems to solve?

    Nope! let displacement activities begin.

    “But far more subtly, simply changing the data in the big data datasets so that the AI algorithms reach the wrong results”

    Leaving none the wiser because the "correct" result was wrong also as well as "interpreted" by the priests of the computer output and their political handlers.

    Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, announced a $125m fund for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) to kickstart a project to teach machines “common sense”. It’s tricky to define what that exactly means. AI2 have defined it as “the everyday knowledge that virtually every person has but no machine does”.

    Wow. Everybody and his dog seems to have utterly forgotten about Cyc, a project meant to given Commensense Knowledge to machines, started in the early 90s. Using God Old-Fashioned Symbolic AI as God intended. I think it is still going on somewhere. Of course, the domain of knowledge representation and logic calculus not to mention hardware power have all increased tremendously since then, so an update on the situation would be nice.

    1. Tom 7

      Re: Next: Senate discusses how Harry Potter Technology can be effectively deployed

      I like the idea of offensive AI. If we can have a robot swearing at people getting off the train in the evening I can get back to the pub.

    2. JassMan
      Thumb Up

      Re: Next: Senate discusses how Harry Potter Technology can be effectively deployed

      > It’s tricky to define what common sense exactly means. AI2 have defined it as “the everyday knowledge that virtually every person has but no machine does”.

      Obviously AI2 has no grip on reality. If they did, they would know that if "virtually every person" had common sense they would not have voted for Brexit in the UK nor Trump in the US.

      Common sense tells you that in a world full of non-democratic bullies, you need to group together with like minded people to stand up to them. The EU is far from perfect but being a member gives you influence on the group decisions, being outside allows the EU to impose some of its more dubious decisions while you have no chance to make a change. THE US is also far from perfect but allowing one lunatic to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium thus making American goods uncompetitive shows that Joe Bloggs/John Doe is a long way from having half the common sense needed to survive in a world, where the global corporates are out to reduce wages of all workers to poverty level while rewarding board members and CEOs with so much in bonuses that they no longer have a concept of what it is to live in the real world.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: Next: Senate discusses how Harry Potter Technology can be effectively deployed

        If they did, they would know that if "virtually every person" had common sense they would not have voted for Brexit in the UK nor Trump in the US.

        I don't agree. Not sure about Brexit, but in the US, it was clearly a case of desperation: The lesser of two weevils, as it were.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Next: Senate discusses how Harry Potter Technology can be effectively deployed

        "Common sense tells you that in a world full of non-democratic bullies, you need to group together with like minded people to stand up to them."

        THIS is why "offensive" AI, mass surveillance, censoring and the creation of zero-days was designed to thwart.

  4. Tom 7

    Tensorflow

    In my limited experience its worth re-compiling tensorflow to your CPU anywhoose. Most packages for systems wont be for the top of the range CPU. I recompiled for my i7 under Ubuntu and it works twice as fast and runs the CPU 5C cooler which is nice as I guess its quite a power saving too. I've built it for my ageing Nvidia GPU on another machine and the hardest part was registering with NVidia which couldn't be done under my FF but worked under Chromium.

    I'm guessing its worth getting into this with ARM NN coming out soon - I've seen some stuff working on RaspberryPis that really impressed me and NN looks like it will have a noticeable speed up too,

  5. Crisp
    Coat

    Trump Deepfake

    Now that mental image is firmly lodged in your brain, I'll be on my way!

  6. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    "Fuzzing a few pixels.... fool convolutional neural nets."

    "Fuzzing a few pixels here and there can fool convolutional neural nets."

    If I may reclaim the phrase "convolutional neural nets" to be reserved for the human brain, then it's worth pointing out that such biological neural nets are not so 'brittle'.

    These findings of the new artificial neural nets being 'brittle' is strong evidence that they're doing it wrong.

    A hand reaches up and resets the 'Strong A.I. Clock' away from only a few minutes to midnight, adjusting it back to read 'Real Soon Now', just like it's been for much of the past 40 years.

  7. spold Silver badge

    >>

    Microsoft called it “million-scale recognition capabilities”. It represents a new type of “person group” containing up to a million people, and a new type of face list with up to a million faces.

    <<

    Bing! There you are thoughtcriminal ...off to the re-education camp!

  8. onefang

    “But I also think we have to have an approach to recruiting people that is dynamic, that tries different ideas and has unique partnerships - that is able to leverage ideas that may not be traditional within out military sphere. And I think that’s important because the space that we operate in is changing every single day and so why should our ideas change just as rapidly?"

    Bribe them with free drugs and access to peoples private porn collections.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like