Tag: bot
Google’s Bard AI bot mistake wipes $100bn off shares
Google will fight ChatGPT with ‘Bard,’ a similar AI-powered bot
Google has developed a music-making AI bot
As AI slowly creeps it way into every facet of our digital lives — from essay writing to conversations with therapists to the generation of original art — it’s the least bit surprising that artificial intelligence would also take a step into music. It’s also not surprising that tech giant Google would be the first major player on the scene.
The company is reportedly building an AI bot that can create “original” music from both text and sound prompts — users would be able to type in increasingly specific prompts noting genres and styles or even build songs based on a hummed or whistled melody, according to reports. The future app is known in-house as MusicLM.
The information was revealed in a research paper released on Jan. 26, describing MusicLM as a “model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions” that “generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes.” The paper explains that songs can be created from richly written captions, such as:
The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It is fast-paced and upbeat, with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but with unexpected sounds, like cymbal crashes or drum rolls.
Additional sequences of timed text prompts help build the structure of songs, along with a library of sounds and other AI prompts generated from sources like art archives.
Examples of the AI-generated songs have already been posted to Google’s Github account, part of a preliminary release of a 5,500 music-text pair dataset known as MusicCaps.
The unveiling of such a platform will inevitably stir additional conversations about the role of artificial intelligence in intellectual property theft and copyright infringement, generated by a plethora of artists and art repositories who haven’t consented to public use of their art in the creation of AI bots like these — others, meanwhile, are capitalizing on the surge in AI fronted tech. Additional AI developments also pose unique risks for the humans behind the tech as well, as exploited workforces face the brunt of data mining and moderation.
As for now, the Google AI music maker is not going to be released any time soon, with the company explaining ongoing concerns about cultural programming biases, glitches, and concerns about plagiarism that have to be resolved before its launch.
Celebrities, TikTok, and a Cat Bot Are Crashing Chess.com
Ticketmaster knows it has a bot problem, but it wants Congress to fix it
In November, millions of Taylor Swift fans logged on to Ticketmaster hoping to scoop up tickets to arguably the most-anticipated tour of 2023. When the time came, the site crashed, rendering verified users unable to purchase admission to the singer’s first slate of shows in five years. In the immediate aftermath, Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation explained that while 1.5 million people had signed up as legit customers, over 14 million hit the site when tickets went on sale — many of which were bots.
Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold told the Senate Judiciary Comittee on Tuesday that the company “learned valuable lessons” from the Swift debacle. “In hindsight there are several things we could have done better – including staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets,” he said.
Berchtold told Senators that Ticketmaster experienced three times more bot traffic that day than it ever had before, and that a cyberattack on the company’s verified fan password servers exacerbated the problem. He explained that despite investing over $1 billion in ticketing systems since the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, mostly to combat fraud and scalping, the company has a massive bot problem that it can’t get a handle on.
“We also need to recognize how industrial scalpers breaking the law using bots and cyberattacks to try to unfairly gain tickets contributes to an awful consumer experience,” Berchtold said. What he called “industrialized scalping” led to the Taylor Swift fiasco, he explained, but the executive wants Congress to act to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
Berchtold called for Congress to expand the scope of the BOTS Act to “increase enforcement.” Signed into law in 2016, the legislation makes it illegal to bypass a website’s security or tech features as a means of purchasing tickets. It also makes it illegal to resell tickets obtained via those methods. Specifically, Berchtold called for banning the use of fraudulent URLs and stopping the resale of tickets before their general on-sale date.
The law leaves enforcement with the FTC and states, a topic Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn discussed with Berchtold in some of the most pointed questioning of the session. “You told me yesterday you block about 90 percent of the bot attacks that you get, and that’s a failing grade,” she said. “There ought to be people you can get some good advice from because our critical infrastructure in this country gets bot attacks every single day. They have figured it out, but you guys haven’t?”
Blackburn admitted that the FTC has only taken action on the law once, and that the lack of widespread action was “unacceptable.” She pledged to do something about the lack of enforcement through the dealings of the Senate Commerce Committee, where she is also a member.
“The FTC has the authority, but you have a responsibility to consumers,” she continued. “I agree they are not exercising it, but how many times have you called the FTC and said ‘we need your help?'”
Berchtold explained that Live Nation had only contacted the FTC once about suspected bot activity — in late 2019 and early 2020. He said that was the only time they had necessary information to work with the commission in order to get a prosecution. “These are not bots that are trying to break into our system, they are trying to impersonate people… putting true fans at a disadvantage,” Berchtold told Blackburn when asked why Live Nation has such a hard time recognizing bots.
In regards to the BOTS Act, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal told Berchtold there are already legal options available to the company to go after scalpers using bots to procure tickets.
“You have unlimited power to go to court,” Blumenthal said. “Your approach seems to be that everyone else is responsible here — not us.”
Chess.com Visits Spike with New Cat-Themed AI Bot Named ‘Mittens’
Interest generated by Mittens is outpacing the surge that came on the heels of the wildly popular, chess-centric Netflix miniseries from 2020, “The Queen’s Gambit”. Chess.com has averaged 27.5 million games played per day in January and is on track for more than 850 million games this month — 40% more than any month in the company’s history, per the Wall Street Journal.
A Chess.com team developed a special passive-aggressive personality for Mittens, according to the article. The team “thought it would be ‘way more demoralizing and funny’ if, instead of simply smashing opponents, Mittens ground down opposing players through painstaking positional battles, similar to the tactics Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov used to become world champion, per the Journal.”
The Journal adds:
“This bot is a psycho,” the streamer and International Master Levy Rozman tweeted after a vicious checkmate this month. A day later, he added, “The chess world has to unite against Mittens.” He was joking, mostly.
Mittens is a meme, a piece of artificial intelligence and a super grandmaster who also happens to reflect the broader evolution in modern chess. The game is no longer old, stuffy and dominated by theoretical conversations about different lines of a d5 opening. It’s young, buzzy and proof that cats still rule the internet….
“I am inevitable. I am forever. Meow. Hehehehe,” Mittens tells her opponents in the chat function of games….
Getting absolutely creamed by Mittens might get old. But her surprising popularity speaks to an underlying current in the chess world as freshly minted fans flow in: people are endlessly curious about new ways to engage with the ancient game. Facing novelty bots is just one of them. There has also been a new wave of interest in previously obscure chess variants. Chess960, for instance, is a version of the game where all the non-pawn pieces are lined up in random order on the back rank…. Other variants include: “Fog of War,” where players have a limited view of their opponents’ pieces; “Bughouse Chess,” which is played across two boards with captured pieces potentially moving from one to the other; and “Three Check,” where the objective is simply to put the opposing king in check three times.
The wackiest of all is the chess variant known as Duck Chess. It looks mostly like regular chess — 64 squares and 32 pieces. But it also has one rubber ducky on the board. After every move in Duck Chess, the player moves the titular object to a new square of the board where it blocks pieces in its path. Good luck moving your bishop when there’s a duck squatting on its diagonal.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
To make an AI chat bot behave, Kenyan workers say they were ‘mentally scarred’ by graphic text
Psyonix unleashes ‘banwave’ against the Rocket League bot menace
Nick Cave really doesn’t like AI bot ChatGPT
Nick Cave, legendary musician and writer, is decidedly not a fan of ChatGPT, the AI tool that went viral for doing a remarkable job of passably completing nearly any writing prompt.
Cave has a famously close relationship with his fans, one of whom sent a song “written” by ChatGPT “in the style of Nick Cave.” The whole blog from Cave is worth reading, but among some wonderful and wise observations, Cave simply notes, “this song sucks.”
Writes Cave, in part:
“I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster. It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction. Who can possibly say which? Judging by this song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ though, it doesn’t look good.”
Cave notes that, through the process of cold replication, AI is capable only of creating empty art. It’s stripped of meaning and suffering. Cave writes: “It will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.”
OK now get ready for a bummer but profound paragraph from Cave. I’d try to paraphrase but he, obviously, puts it better than I could.
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.
That is the troubling thing about ChatGPT. You can see its business applications. You can see it replacing or buttressing human workers. But it’s inability to make anything truly artful hints at the limitations that lie in using ChatGPT. It has no true perspective, no experience, no pain, no humanity. It’s a wonderful bit of artificiality. But it’s still artificial.
Writes Cave, getting straight to the point: “With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it.”
Granted I am not a celebrated musician, but I agree.