weekend ai reads for 2024-08-23

📰 ABOVE THE FOLD: IMAGES AND SOUND

This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it? — Big tech companies are backing the C2PA’s authentication standard, but they’re taking too long to put it to use. / The Verge (10 minute read)

llamafile v0.8.13 (and whisperfile) / Simon Willison (3 minute read)

  • short guide to running Whisper locally

Goodbye Discord — 10 things you need to know about migrating to Midjourney web app / Designing with AI, Substack (sorry) (5 minute read)

  • if you’ve been avoiding Midjourney because of Discord, this may be instructive

  • 25 free images available to all new and existing users

We are excited to release Ideogram 2.0, our new frontier text to image model with industry leading capabilities in generating realistic images, graphic design, typography, and more. Trained from scratch like all Ideogram models, Ideogram 2.0 significantly outperforms other text to image models across many quality metrics, including image-text alignment, overall subjective preference, and text rendering accuracy.

  • free tier

How Hackers Use AI Cheats / Ryscu, YouTube (19 minute video)

In late 2022, AI began taking the world by storm. It didn’t take long for this technology to find its way into online gaming, as hackers, began to realize its true potential. A new method of cheating, that was completely undetectable. If AI keeps progressing at the same rate it has been, the future of online gaming could be doomed. So how can AI cheats be stopped? And how... can we save gaming?

Procreate’s anti-AI pledge attracts praise from digital creatives — The popular iPad design app has vowed against introducing generative AI tools into its products. / The Verge (4 minute read)

 

📻 QUOTE OF THE WEEK

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (source)

sonder [sohn-dehrr] noun

The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.

(source)

 

🏗️ FOUNDATIONS & CULTURE

What I learned conducting user research for an AI service — Building AI services means new ways of working. CYB’s User Researcher Truly Capell writes about what she learned working on the FCDO’s first public-facing AI-enabled service / Caution Your Blast (7 minute read)

A.I. ‐ Humanity’s Final Invention? / Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, YouTube (18 minute video)

the one ai question every CEO should be asking (but isn't) / a thread from Neat Prompts, Twitter (sorry) (3 minute read)

so, ask yourself: 1. what if ai could predict your customers’ needs before they even know? 2. how could ai turn your data into new revenue streams? 3. could ai help you enter markets you never thought possible?

“We started out trying to boil the ocean and understand all the possible use cases,” he said. “We quickly found out that’s not what the business was asking for. The business was asking for very practical, tangible ways that they could solve their problems right in front of them.

We finally have a definition for open-source AI — Researchers have long disagreed over what constitutes open-source AI. An influential group has offered up an answer. / MIT Technology Review (4 minute read)

According to the group, an open-source AI system can be used for any purpose without securing permission, and researchers should be able to inspect its components and study how the system works.

It should also be possible to modify the system for any purpose—including to change its output—and to share it with others to use, with or without modifications, for any purpose.

How well can LLM agents complete diverse tasks compared to skilled humans? / a thread from METR_Evals, Twitter (sorry) (4 minute read)

On average, when agents can do a task, they do so at ~1/30th of the cost of the median hourly wage of a US bachelor’s degree holder. One example: our Claude 3.5 Sonnet agent fixed bugs in an ORM library at a cost of <$2, while the human baseline took >2 hours.

The Mantra of This AI Age: Don’t Repeat Yourself AI won't kill your job. But it will steal your repetitive tasks. / Chain of Thought, Every (6 minute read)

 

🎓 EDUCATION

Why AI celebrities are teaching kids math and physics — Onlock Learning leverages AI with the attention-grabbing tricks of TikTok to teach you math. / Freethink (5 minute read)

How Generative AI Improves Parent Engagement in K–12 Schools — With its ability to automate and personalize communication, generative artificial intelligence is the ideal technological fix for strengthening parent involvement in students’ education. / EdTech Magazine (6 minute read)

Other AI tools to be introduced into Korean classrooms include programs that can transcribe a teacher’s remarks on to an electronic whiteboard while they roam the classroom. The country has also piloted mobile robots offering AI-generated responses to student inquiries.

College students fear overreliance on AI could devalue education — Report stresses that AI is “new standard” and universities need to better communicate policies to learners. / Inside Higher Ed (3 minute read)

Using AI analysis to bring out the best in human tutors / Christensen Institute (8 minute read)

 

📊 DATA & TECHNOLOGY

Is Your Company Reading Data the Wrong Way? / Harvard Business Review Ideacast (26 minute listen)

But most leaders have two strong reactions to new data. Either they rely too heavily on studies or information to make decisions. Or they dismiss outright data that could be very relevant. The better way is learning how to interpret, question, and engage with data and studies.

Geekbench has an AI benchmark now / The Verge (2 minute read)

Automated Design of Agentic Systems / arXiv (26 minute read, excluding supplementary materials)

Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality

New report identifies critical vulnerabilities found in open-source tools used in AI — The full report contains 20 vulnerabilities, but notable among them were critical vulnerabilities found in tools such as Setuptools, Lunary and Netaddr. / Silicon Angle (4 minute read)

Fine-tuning now available for GPT-4o / OpenAI blog (5 minute read)

 

🎉 FUN and/or PRACTICAL THINGS

Real Fake — Spot the real vs. AI-generated Renewable Energy companies. Swipe right for real, left for fake.

ReviewMeta — Amazon Review Checker

ReviewMeta analyzes Amazon product reviews and filters out reviews that our algorithm detects may be unnatural.

What can an 8-year-old build in 45 minutes with the assistance of AI? / rickyrobinett, Twitter (sorry) (9 minute video)

  • she built a Harry Potter chatbot

 

🧿 AI-ADJACENT

Pieces of logic should be part of your product’s design system — Treating logic as building blocks will allow you to keep an eye on where redundancy can be reduced to maintain a cohesive experience across features. / Ed Orozco (4 minute read)