This article was initially published as two posts on Drew Breunig’s blog. He’s been kind enough to share them here. Back in May, Ásgeir Thor Johnson convinced Claude to give up its system prompt. The prompt is a good reminder that chatbots are more than just their model. They’re tools and instructions that accrue and…
A technique known as “machine unlearning” could teach AI models to forget specific voices—an important step in stopping the rise of audio deepfakes, where someone’s voice is copied to carry out fraud or scams. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have revolutionized the quality of text-to-speech technology so that people can convincingly re-create a piece of…
School’s out and it’s high summer, but a bunch of teachers are plotting how they’re going to use AI this upcoming school year. God help them. On July 8, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic announced a $23 million partnership with one of the largest teachers’ unions in the United States to bring more AI into K–12…
In order to produce effective targeted therapies for cancer, scientists need to isolate the genetic and phenotypic characteristics of cancer cells, both within and across different tumors, because those differences impact how tumors respond to treatment. Part of this work requires a deep understanding of the RNA or protein molecules each cancer cell expresses, where…
AI agents are reshaping how software is written, scaled, and experienced, and many expect the technology to unlock the gains AI firms have long promised. While most companies today remain in the “testing” phase, as agents make their way throughout the organization, workers will need to figure out how to integrate them into their workflows….
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…