Writers, editors, and researchers: Hold on to your red pens. Because MIT-powered A.I. may be coming for your jobs.
A new “text-generating system” created by the brains behind Massachusetts Institute of Technology may be the beginning of the end for all human editing jobs. The system, announced in a press release Wednesday, is able to rummage through the millions of Wikipedia pages, sniff around for outdated data, and replace it with the most recent information available on the internet in a “human-like” style — thus making the need for real, hot-blooded editors basically obsolete.
If this scares you, reader, imagine how much it scares us.
But have no fear, because the system will always require some human assistance, according to the study’s co-author and MIT Ph.D. student Darsh Shah.
“We are trying to make tasks that are somewhat straightforward to be done by machines, we don’t want to replace humans,” Shah told Digital Trends. “It is not replacing, just aiding.”
Current bots that troll encyclopedia-esque sites like Wikipedia typically try to prevent vandalism and identify whether the source of edits is accurate, but that’s different than the kind of structured, contextual, and coherent edits Shah and his team aim for.
The interface MIT designed allows users to type in very bare-bones pieces of information, for example, the latest news on the Iowa caucuses or Sprint/T-Mobile merger, and then the system can easily rewrite any relevant article to reflect that information. There’s also no need to enter complete sentences on the human’s behalf, either: The system analyzes for style and grammar, then makes sure all rewrites match.
There is also a fact-checking and neutrality component, co-author Tal Schuster said. The system reads for “polarizing” words that conflict with the most current information and even has a deletion feature.
“It can offer and suggest edits, but at the end of the day, a human user can make the final call,” Schuster said.
Schuster and Shah see the system operating primarily in the medical field, where new studies, prescription drugs, and technology are constantly being published and updated.
Bots like theirs could be one of the first pioneers to combat fake news. But the task of fighting disinformation is so large that platforms where it proliferates still don’t know what to do about it.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.