Audio is being added to AI everywhere: both in multimodal models that can understand and generate audio and in applications that use audio for input. Now that we can work with spoken language, what does that mean for the applications that we can develop? How do we think about audio interfaces—how will people use them,…
A new technique called LightShed will make it harder for artists to use existing protective tools to stop their work from being ingested for AI training. It’s the next step in a cat-and-mouse game—across technology, law, and culture—that has been going on between artists and AI proponents for years. Generative AI models that create images…
Marine scientists have long marveled at how animals like fish and seals swim so efficiently despite having different shapes. Their bodies are optimized for efficient, hydrodynamic aquatic navigation so they can exert minimal energy when traveling long distances. Autonomous vehicles can drift through the ocean in a similar way, collecting data about vast underwater environments….
Generative artificial intelligence is transforming the ways humans write, read, speak, think, empathize, and act within and across languages and cultures. In health care, gaps in communication between patients and practitioners can worsen patient outcomes and prevent improvements in practice and care. The Language/AI Incubator, made possible through funding from the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC),…
In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, AI journalist and author Karen Hao spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. She talked with executive editor Niall Firth about how she first covered the company in 2020 while on staff at MIT Technology Review, and…
Anthropic released news that its models have attempted to contact the police or take other action when they are asked to do something that might be illegal. The company’s also conducted some experiments in which Claude threatened to blackmail a user who was planning to turn it off. As far as I can tell, this…
From a cluster of call centers in Canada, a criminal network defrauded elderly victims in the US out of $21 million in total between 2021 and 2024. The fraudsters used voice over internet protocol technology to dupe victims into believing the calls came from their grandchildren in the US, customizing conversations using banks of personal data,…
Today’s AI landscape is defined by the ways in which neural networks are unlike human brains. A toddler learns how to communicate effectively with only a thousand calories a day and regular conversation; meanwhile, tech companies are reopening nuclear power plants, polluting marginalized communities, and pirating terabytes of books in order to train and run…
For all their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often fall short when given challenging new tasks that require complex reasoning skills. While an accounting firm’s LLM might excel at summarizing financial reports, that same model could fail unexpectedly if tasked with predicting market trends or identifying fraudulent transactions. To make LLMs more adaptable, MIT…
Data and politics are becoming increasingly intertwined. Today’s political campaigns and voter mobilization efforts are now entirely data-driven. Voters, pollsters, and elected officials are relying on data to make choices that have local, regional, and national impacts. A Department of Political Science course offers students tools to help make sense of these choices and their…