Bosses expect artificial intelligence software to improve productivity, but workers say the tool does the opposite, according to a survey by find-a-workplace research org the Upwork Research Institute, a limb of talent-finding platform Upwork.

The survey elicited responses from 2,500 workers across the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. Half of respondents were C-suite execs, a quarter worked full time and the remained were freelancers. Respondents represent different age groups and genders, but all were required to have completed high school and to use a computer for their work at least “sometimes.”

Findings include that C-suite executives are asking more of workers – 81 percent of 1,250 executive respondents acknowledge as much, according to the survey.

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> Video games—and the people who make them—are in trouble. An estimated 10,500 people in the industry were laid off in 2023 alone. This year, layoffs in the nearly $200 billion sector have only gotten worse, with studios axing what is believed to be 11,000 more, and counting. Microsoft, home of the Xbox and parent company to several studios, including Activision Blizzard, shuttered Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games in May. All the while, generative AI systems built by OpenAI and its competitors have been seeping into nearly every industry, dismantling whole careers along the way. > > But gaming might be the biggest industry AI stands poised to conquer. Its economic might has long since eclipsed Hollywood's, while its workforce remains mostly nonunion. A recent survey from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference found that 49 percent of the survey’s more than 3,000 respondents said their workplace used AI, and four out of five said they had ethical concerns about its use.

Apparently their regular algorithm wasn't getting people as addicted as they want.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18310802

> Fun to see him (kmac2021) making shit again

@fuck\_ai I Will Luddite AI https://robertkingett.com/posts/6593/

Original text: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/fuck-up-ai

Companies are going all-in on artificial intelligence right now, investing millions or even billions into the area while slapping the AI initialism on their products, even when doing so seems strange and pointless.

Heavy investment and increasingly powerful hardware tend to mean more expensive products. To discover if people would be willing to pay extra for hardware with AI capabilities, the question was asked on the TechPowerUp forums.

The results show that over 22,000 people, a massive 84% of the overall vote, said no, they would not pay more. More than 2,200 participants said they didn't know, while just under 2,000 voters said yes.

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> Jaws 3 might be the worst 4K ever released as of this very moment. It's that bad and that horribly butchered with AI and awful DNR/Color Timing. The 2D version always looked a bit off due to the way that the film was shot specifically for 3D but with this abysmal 4K transfer it's limitations and issues are blown up and become glaringly obvious. Then on top of that you have AI interperetation the likes not even god has seen. > > The film legitimately looks like it was created with Midjourney on more than one occasion. Or entire frames look like the washed out color tone SNL bumpers. Remember those from the 70's and 80's that used to show the host for the night? Entire sequences of the film look like that. No film should look like that in 4K. People look like paper cut outs in more than one frame. This is abhorrent.

– Vindicator89 on Blu-ray.com

> I said this in another comment thread but will post here too: > > The bigger question is why is the upscale suddenly so much worse than it was before? > > Plenty of films finished at 2K had 4K UHD discs put out that were nothing more than upscales with HDR grades applied, but they were never this bad. It's like AI upscales became a thing and the studios tossed out whatever previous methods they used, that seemingly worked JUST FINE, in favour of new technology that has GLARING flaws such as this.

– /u/adamschoales on Reddit

Some of the world's wealthiest companies, including Apple and Nvidia, are among countless parties who allegedly trained their AI using scraped YouTube videos as training data. The YouTube transcripts were reportedly accumulated through means that violate YouTube's Terms of Service and have some creators seeing red. The news was first discovered in a joint investigation by Proof News and Wired.

While major AI companies and producers often keep their AI training data secret, heavyweights like Apple, Nvidia, and Salesforce have revealed their use of "The Pile", an 800GB training dataset created by EleutherAI, and the YouTube Subtitles dataset within it. The YouTube Subtitles training data is made up of 173,536 YouTube plaintext transcripts scraped from the site, including 12,000+ videos which have been removed since the dataset's creation in 2020.

Affected parties whose work was purportedly scraped for the training data include education channels like Crash Course (1,862 videos taken for training) and Philosophy Tube (146 videos taken), YouTube megastars like MrBeast (two videos) and Pewdiepie (337 videos), and TechTubers like Marques Brownlee (seven videos) and Linus Tech Tips (90 videos). Proof News created a tool you can use to survey the entirety of the YouTube videos allegedly used without consent.

Manual laborers should unionize and start demanding 80K per year with benefits

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Not the Goldman-Sachs paper, the analysis of it. It's really worth the read.

As if beauty pageants with humans weren't awful enough. Let's celebrate simulated women with beauty standards too unrealistic for any real women to live up to!

As part of the wider tech industry's wider push for AI, whether we want it or not, it seems that Google's Gemini AI service is now reading private Drive documents without express user permission, per a report from Kevin Bankster on Twitter embedded below. While Bankster goes on to discuss reasons why this may be glitched for users like him in particular, the utter lack of control being given over his sensitive, private information is unacceptable for a company of Google's stature —and does not bode well for future privacy concerns amongst AI's often-forced rollout.

>OpenAI is partnering with Los Alamos National Laboratory to study how artificial intelligence can be used to fight against biological threats that could be created by non-experts using AI tools, according to announcements Wednesday by both organizations. The Los Alamos lab, first established in New Mexico during World War II to develop the atomic bomb, called the effort a “first of its kind” study on AI biosecurity and the ways that AI can be used in a lab setting. > >The difference between the two statements released Wednesday by OpenAI and the Los Alamos lab is pretty striking. OpenAI’s statement tries to paint the partnership as simply a study on how AI “can be used safely by scientists in laboratory settings to advance bioscientific research.” And yet the Los Alamos lab puts much more emphasis on the fact that previous research “found that ChatGPT-4 provided a mild uplift in providing information that could lead to the creation of biological threats.” > >Much of the public discussion around threats posed by AI has centered around the creation of a self-aware entity that could conceivably develop a mind of its own and harm humanity in some way. Some worry that achieving AGI—advanced general intelligence, where the AI can perform advanced reasoning and logic rather than acting as a fancy auto-complete word generator—may lead to a Skynet-style situation. And while many AI boosters like Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have leaned into this characterization, it appears the more urgent threat to address is making sure people don’t use tools like ChatGPT to create bioweapons. > >“AI-enabled biological threats could pose a significant risk, but existing work has not assessed how multimodal, frontier models could lower the barrier of entry for non-experts to create a biological threat,” Los Alamos lab said in a statement published on its website. > >The different positioning of messages from the two organizations likely comes down to the fact that OpenAI could be uncomfortable with acknowledging the national security implications of highlighting that its product could be used by terrorists. To put an even finer point on it, the Los Alamos statement uses the terms “threat” or “threats” five times, while the OpenAI statement uses it just once.

I do not recommend reading this article on a full stomach.

> Generative AI is the nuclear bomb of the information age

Written by a so called "Julie Howell" who "loves scouring the internet for delicious, simple, heartwarming recipes that make her look like a MasterChef winner" on a website called "Chef's Resource."

I get the "scouring the internet" part, but less the "MasterChef winner" part.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/18541227

> cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/18541226 > > > > Google’s research focuses on real harm that generative AI is currently causing and could get worse in the future. Namely, that generative AI makes it very easy for anyone to flood the internet with generated text, audio, images, and videos.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17078489

> The Government™ has made an ad about the existential threat that AI poses to humanity, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17014995