Category Archives: Futurism

While going through a rough patch, Spanish agency The Clueless decided it had enough of nagging and demanding human clients so it cooked up an AI model instead.

As Euronews reports, the agency says it used AI tools to create Aitana, a 25-year-old pink-haired woman from Barcelona.They say she looks real enough to fool a human celebrity into sliding into her DMs and asking her out.

And the agency says the gambit has paid off financially, with Aitana netting the team up to $11,000 a month in revenue.

"We did it so that we could make a better living and not be dependent on other people who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing," Aitana's cocreator, and founder of The Clueless Rubn Cruz told Euronews.

If true the whole thing does smack of intentionally courting controversy it's a fascinating new turn for a burgeoning AI influencer industry. We've already seen AI-generated models gaining huge social media followings,as well as ad agencies leveraging awkward-looking CGI influencers during the period before generative AI.

Now this team is apparently taking the concept to its logical conclusion by overtly commercializing it and saying the quiet part out loud: that they have no interest in working with human models now that AI image generators exist.

Besides netting brand deals worth over $1,100 each, Aitana also sells racy images on an OnlyFans-like platform called Fanvue. Her Instagram account is also popping off and has amassed almost 150,000 followers.

Are Aitana's too-smooth glamour shots fooling anybody? Cruz says they are.

"One day, a well-known Latin American actor texted to ask her out," he told Euronews. "This actor has about five million followers and some of our team watched his TV series when they were kids."

"He had no idea Aitana didn't exist," he added.

Apart from raking in revenue, AI influencers like Aitana could allow other agencies to create models that won't cause messy human drama.

"They want to have an image that is not a real person and that represents their brand values," Cruz told Euronews, "so that there are no continuity problems if they have to fire someone or can no longer count on them."

Additionally, using an AI image generator to create photos of influencers comes with some serious savings, considering the cost of working with a human celebrity.

"Kim Kardashian makes a million euros for an Instagram photo and she doesn't cure cancer," Cruz said. "Nobody earns a million euros for uploading a photo to a social network, it seems absurd to me."

Of course, replacing human influencers with AI-generated models is as contentious as it is potentially lucrative. After all, it's a rare and brazen example of AI tech directly being used to replace human labor.

It's also a particularly pertinent topic these days. The use of AI to replace actors was a key topic of this year's Hollywood actors' strike,with SAG-AFTRA union members horrified by proposals to scan background actors' likenesses in order to use them in perpetuity.

Is this really the end of human influencers? While more agencies are jumping on the AI bandwagon, nobody really knows if the concept will have long-term appeal.

More on AI influencers: Fully AI-Generated Influencers Are Getting Thousands of Reactions per Thirst Trap

Read more from the original source:
Creators of Fake Influencer Say She's Generating $11000/Month - Futurism

It was inevitable. Tired Out

After years of hemorrhaging billions of dollars, General Motors is finally cutting back its spending on its autonomous vehicle division Cruise, The New York Times reports, which may be yet another nail in the coffin for what was not long ago considered a leader in self-driving technology.

The past several months have marked a swift and disastrous reversal for the division. It was only this summer that Cruise announced its plans to expand its driverless robotaxi service to more cities. Those plans are now being put on hold, however, in the face of an enormous amount of public scrutiny over the safety of the robotaxis, coinciding with pushback from both state and federal regulators.

"We expect the pace of Cruise's expansion to be more deliberate when operations resume, resulting in substantially lower spending in 2024 than in 2023," said GM CEO Mary Barra at an investor conference on Wednesday, as quoted by the NYT.

"We must rebuild trust with regulators at the local, state and federal levels, as well as with the first responders and the communities in which Cruise will operate," she added.

Cruise's run-ins with the law began in late October, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began investigating it after receiving reports of its robotaxis endangering pedestrians, including an incident in which a woman was struck and pinned.

Just days later, the California Department of Motor Vehicles rescinded Cruise's permit to operate robotaxis in the state. Cruise, in crisis mode, then paused fully driverless operations everywhere, including San Francisco, Miami, and Dallas.

Since then, it's pulled all its robotaxis off the road, even those with supervising "safety drivers." Layoffs have also been announced at the company.

The downturn is a massive embarrassment for GM, which has poured ludicrous amounts of funding into its effort to spearhead self-driving. In the third financial quarter alone, the automaker lost $700 million on the division, with a total $8 billion in losses since 2016, according to Reuters.

Now, GM chief financial officer Paul Jacobson says that spending would fall by "hundreds of millions of dollars" in 2024, per the NYT, though the exact amount remains to be determined.

Still, Barra maintains that GM is optimistic about Cruise's future even though it's about to slash the hell out of its budget.

"What Cruise has accomplished in the eight years since we acquired the company is remarkable," Barra said, per the NYT.

That may be true, but whatever it's accomplished is now being vastly overshadowed. Locals can attest to Cruise robotaxis being involved in plenty of embarrassing traffic hiccups, like repeatedly causing jams and even getting stuck in wet concrete.

Some are a lot more serious, like barging through an active firefighting scene. A damning report revealed how Cruise even kept its robotaxis on the roads despite knowing they struggled to recognize children.

For now, GM isn't dumping the division outright, but it's seeming a lot more unlikely that Cruise will still be around in the next few years perhaps an omen for the increasingly controversial self-driving industry at large.

More on Cruise: Government Unsure How Many Pedestrians Have Been Hit by Self-Driving Cars

Follow this link:
General Motors to Slash Spending on Robotaxis After Disastrous Year - Futurism

Someone decided it was a good idea to make an entirely AI-generated "singer-songwriter," and she's so uncanny and unintentionally hilarious that people have begun making their own renditions of her "coffee shop vibes."

Named "Anna Indiana," which is apparently atortuous acronym for "Artificial Neural Networks Accelerate Innovative New Developments, Igniting A New Age," the creepy-yet-basic singer-songwriter avatar was crafted in the shape of a young woman by unidentified creators.

In a post debuting the avatar's second single, titled "The First Step," those creators said (in Anna's voice) that they used several AI tools to make her, including OpenAI's DALL-E image generator and GPT-4 large language network (LLM), Adobe Photoshop's new generative capabilities, and the royalty-free AI music generator Musicfy.

In the videos for both singles, the freakishly smooth-skinned and large-headed avatar is animated only from the neck up, and her hair doesn't move as the face twists within the boundaries of itself. It would be funny if it weren't so sketchy, and it makes one long for the days when Hatsune Mikuwas the worldsbuzziest virtual artist.

Like her first song "Betrayed By This Town," the lyrics sound like they were stolen from the diary of a 13-year-old girl if that girl just so happened to be a robot, that is.

So hilariously stereotypical are her lyrics, in fact, that people have begun using AI tools to make their own satirical versions of Anna Indiana, going so far as to name their avatar "Connie Connecticut" complete with pointedly AI-butchered fingers and to program her to sing goofy tweets in her "coffee shop vibes" aesthetic.

In one video, the even more robotic-sounding dupe sings a song titled "Stupid Boys," but the lyrics, as a background image behind the avatar illustrates, are actually a viral and since-deleted tweet from 2015 clearly intended to poke fun at such rote #justgirlythings tropes.

Podcaster Charles Austin, the brain genius behind Connie Connecticut, has kept up the bit and photoshopped the same generic cozy cafe girl image at the lighting of the Christmas tree at Manhattan's 30 Rockefeller Plaza and at a Taylor Swift concert, where the avatar, disposable coffee cup in hand, is superimposed over a crowd with the real-life singer catwalking downstage in the background.

"Having so much fun at the Taylor Swift concert!!" Austin tweeted in the avatar's voice. "My deep learning algorithm leads me to conclude that basically she is 'mother'!"

The dunks, of course, don't end there. In one particularly goofy throwback, someone left in the opening to Anna Indiana's first video and then, once the music came in, played Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," an incredible 2023 rickroll if we've ever seen one.

Real-life drummer Damon Krukowski of the legendary dreampop band Galaxie 500, meanwhile, made a salient point about the content of the AI singer-songwriter's first song, which includes in its chorus that she wants to "burn it all down."

"Uh that AI singer-songwriter launched with a bitter song about betrayal and collective retribution," Krukowski tweeted, "maybe this is actually significant...?"

Let's be clear: podcasters and musicians dunking on something doesn't mean anything on its own, but given how objectively bizarre and bad Anna Indiana's quote-unquote music is, we do, in this instance, have to hand it to them.

More on AI music: YouTube Launching AI Tool That Clones Singers' Voices

Read more:
People Cannot Stop Dunking on that Uncanny AI Singer-Songwriter - Futurism

It's triple the size of New York City -- and taller than the Empire State Building. On the Run Tour

At more than triple the size of New York City, the world's largest current iceberg is on the move.

As Reuters reports, the iceberg dubbed, forgettably, A23a actually broke off of the Antarctic coastline in 1986, but it quickly became stuck to the bottom of the ocean for much of that time, essentially becoming an island made of ice.

Now, however, A23a has finally broken free once again and begun to drift through the Southern Ocean's iceberg-filled Weddell Sea, moving past the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula with the help of fearsome winds and currents.

As British glaciologist Oliver Marsh told Reuters, scientists are stumped as to the exact reason why this iceberg, also believed to be one of the oldest in the world, is currently making a run for it.

"Over time it's probably just thinned slightly and got that little bit of extra buoyancy that's allowed it to lift off the ocean floor and get pushed by ocean currents," Marsh said, proffering a theory.

At a whopping 1,500 square miles and 1,312 feet thick which is nearly 75 feet higher than the Empire State Building, if you don't count its antenna there are understandable concerns about A23a's trajectory, though as New Scientist reports, most icebergs that break off in the Weddell Sea end up floating until they eventually melt in the South Atlantic's "iceberg alley."

While massive icebergs like this one generally break apart into pieces that melt separately, Marsh told the British news wire that A23a's colossal size may keep it together. And if that happens, it could spell trouble.

"An iceberg of this scale has the potential to survive for quite a long time in the Southern Ocean, even though it's much warmer," the glaciologist said, "and it could make its way farther north up toward South Africa where it can disrupt shipping."

Curiously enough, news of A23a's sudden voyage came admit more glacial drama.

Researchers out of England's University of Leeds have, per a school statement, found that Antarctica's Cadman Glacier retreated by about 5 miles between 2018 and 2021, and that its ice shelf had completely collapsed.

"We were surprised to see the speed at which Cadman went from being an apparently stable glacier to one where we see sudden deterioration and significant ice loss," Benjamin Wallis, who is also a British glaciologist, said in the UL statement.

It's been a busy week in the Antarctic and as climate change continues apace, we'll likely have more weeks like this to come.

More on Antarctica and climate change: The Hole in the Ozone Layer Is Getting Bigger Again, Scientists Say

Read the rest here:
The Word's Largest Iceberg Is on the Move - Futurism

In a new intelligence test, AI got *destroyed* by humans. Failing Grade

A team of researchers at Facebook's parent company Meta has come up with a new benchmark to gauge the abilities of AI assistants like OpenAI's large language model GPT-4.

And judging by current standards, OpenAI's current crop of AI models are all... still pretty stupid.

The team, which includes "AI godfather" and Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun, came up with an exam called GAIA that's made up of 466 questions that "are conceptually simple for humans yet challenging for most advanced AIs," per a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper.

The results speak for themselves: human respondents were capable of correctly answering 92 percent of the questions,while GPT-4, even equipped with some manually selected plugins, scored a measly 15 percent. OpenAI's recently-released GPT4 Turbo scored less than ten percent, according to the team's published GAIA leaderboard.

It's unclear, however, how competing LLMs like Meta's own Llama 2 or Google's Bard fared.

Nonetheless, the research demonstrates that we're likely still a long way away from reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI), the state at which AI algorithms can outperform humans in intellectual tasks.

That conclusion also flies in the face of some lofty claims made by notable figures in the AI industry.

"This notable performance disparity contrasts with the recent trend of LLMs outperforming humans on tasks requiring professional skills in e.g. law or chemistry," the researchers write in their paper.

Case in point, in January OpenAI competitor Anthropic claimed its AI dubbed Claude got a "marginal pass" on a blindly graded law and economics exam at George Mason University.

In its GPT-4 documentation, OpenAI also claimed that its model "exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam with a score around the top ten percent of test takers."

But how to actually gauge the intelligence of these systems has remained a thorny debate. Tools like GPT-4 still have plenty of inherent flaws and still can't reliably tell the truth from fiction.

In other words, how could an algorithm really pass the bar if it can't even tell whether Australia exists?

LeCun has long been an outspoken critic of AI doomsaying and has repeatedly downplayed comments alleging that we're facing an existential threat in the form of a rogue AGI.

"LLMs obviously have *some* understanding of what they read and generate," he tweeted over the weekend. "But this understanding is very limited and superficial. Otherwise, they wouldn't confabulate so much and wouldn't make mistakes that are contrary to common sense."

That, however, may not always be the case. If recent rumors are to be believed, OpenAI is working on a next-generation model dubbed Q*, pronounced Q star, that could introduce a level of deductive reasoning and "planning."

But whether it'll manage to score a higher mark on Meta's brutal GAIA test remains to be seen.

More on LLMs: Guy Brags About "Stealing" Millions of Pageviews by Rewriting Competitors' Articles Using AI

Read more from the original source:
Facebook Researchers Test AI's Intelligence and Find It Is ... - Futurism

Earlier this month, business publication Benzinga published what they billed as an interviewwith rapper and cannabis entrepreneur Gilbert Anthony "Berner" Milam, Jr.

In the apparent interview,Benzinga contributor David Daxsen appeared to press Milam Jr. on growing concerns over lawsuits that were filed against his cannabis company Cookies. In April, the entrepreneur was accused of using strongarming and bullying tactics to run the brand, generating millions of dollars in kickbacks.

"The lawsuits against Cookies allege that coercive tactics were employed to compel stakeholders into providing benefits and kickbacks to our company's executives," Milam Jr. allegedly told Benzinga. "This has, understandably, cast a cloud over not only our company but the entire industry."

But it turned out there was a huge problem with the piece: the interview apparently never actually took place and was entirely made up. In fact, according to a retraction posted by Benzinga just over a week after the original interview was published, "the information included was fabricated by external sources."

And,in a futuristic twist, the real Milam Jr. is accusing the fake interview of being AI-generated.

"Thats not a real interview," the real Milam Jr. wrote in a November 13 tweet, the day after the original interview was posted.

"Not one word is mine," he wrote in a followup. "Thats why Ive always done my own quotes or interviews in my own voice. That ain't me at all!"

Journalist Grant Smith Ellis dug a little deeper following Milam Jr.'s surprising comments.

"Some of these answers are laughable and clearly not real," he tweeted. "How did this get past an editor?"

Smith Ellis ran the interview through an AI content detector and found several red flags indicating it was largely, if not entirely, "written by AI."

The Benzinga contributor, Daxsen, may have a conflict of interest as well. As Smith Ellis pointed out, Daxsen runs a company that "invests in the cannabis industry."

Three days following the publication of the fateful interview, Benzinga's head of content Javier Hasse called Daxsen an "external unpaid contributor" and said that the piece "does not meet Benzinga's editorial standards."

Yet the relationship between Daxsen and the business publication is clearly more nuanced than that.

In a May profile, Hasse detailed Daxsen's "entrepreneurial endeavors and philanthropic ventures" and quoted him at length about his "financial success" and "positive change."

A simple search for Daxsen's name on Benzina comes up with nine hits, published over the last 14 months. He also still has an active profile on the website, listing his various contributions.His most recent published piece is from August.

It raises an inevitable question: how confident isBenzingathat Daxsen's other work for the site was real and not fictionalized, as the Milam Jr. interview appears to have been?

It wouldn't be the first time we've come across an entire "interview" that was in reality generated by AI. In April, German tabloid rag Die Aktuelle admitted to publishing an AI-generated interview with Formula 1 legend Michael Schumacher, who hasn't made a public appearance in almost a decade since suffering a near-fatal brain injury in 2013 (the magazine's editor was subsequently fired.)

"We apologize to Berner, Cookies, and Benzinga readers for the error," reads an official statement posted to Benzinga's cannabis-related X account, which has just over 9,000 followers (Benzinga's official account has more than 266,000).

The publication said in its retraction that it had "revoked access for the contributor who authored the piece."

"Its unfortunate how unreliable media has become in 2023, but even more disappointing how far competition will go to get you out the way," Milam Jr. wrote on Instagram. "Its time to create a better process for fact checking but also start holding the people behind these attacks on businesses and business owners RESPONSIBLE."

Futurism has reached out to Benzinga, Daxsen, and Milam Jr. for comment.

More on AI: Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

Continued here:
Benzinga Retracts "Interview" With Rapper That Was Allegedly AI ... - Futurism