The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has issued a report featuring seven proposed principles that aim to “ensure consumer protection and healthy competition are at the heart of responsible development and use of foundation models,” or FMs. Ranging from “accountability” and “diversity” to “transparency,” the principles aim to “spur innovation and growth” while implementing social safety measures amidst rapid adoption of apps including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. The transformative properties of FMs can “have a significant impact on people, businesses, and the UK economy,” according to the CMA. Continue reading UK’s Competition Office Issues Principles for Responsible AI

Adobe Firefly is out of beta and in release, adding generative AI features to the Creative Cloud suite. The upgrade starts this week with Firefly added to Photoshop and Illustrator. “AI-powered innovation” is also being integrated into Premiere Pro and After Effects, the company says. Creative Cloud paid plans now include the Firefly web application, “a playground for exploring AI-assisted creative expression.” The company is also going wide with Adobe GenStudio for enterprises, and is rolling out a bonus program that pays contributors to Adobe Stock, on which Firefly was trained for model training data. Continue reading Adobe Releases Firefly and Intros Contributor Model Training

Stability AI is launching Stable Audio, a music generation AI tool that uses latent diffusion to deliver what the company says is high-quality 44.1 kHz music for commercial use. Stable Audio uses a web-based interface to generate music from text prompts and duration. Because its latent diffusion model architecture has been conditioned on text metadata as well as audio file duration and start time, it defeats a problem common to diffusion for generative audio — producing cohesive musical segments as opposed to arbitrary sections of a song that start or end in the middle of a phrase. Continue reading Stability AI Develops ‘Stable Audio’ Generative Text-to-Music

Microsoft says it will assume legal responsibility for commercial customers who get sued for copyright infringement as a result of the company’s AI Copilot product services. A new initiative called the Copilot Copyright Commitment is designed to provide peace of mind to Microsoft business users as more copyright holders challenge the handling of protected works by the companies building AI models. “If a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer” and pay any resulting fees, including settlements, Microsoft says. Continue reading Microsoft Copilot AI Customers Shielded from Legal Exposure

Walmart is putting generative AI in the hands of roughly 50,000 non-store U.S. employees who will have access to My Assistant, an LLM trained on information. From speeding the drafting process to serving as a creative partner and summarizing documents, “My Assistant has the potential to change how our associates work and solve problems,” Walmart said, emphasizing the launch goes beyond productivity gains. “We believe the key to unlocking transformation lies in the creativity and innovation of our associates. Ideally, this technology will free them from monotonous, repetitive tasks, allowing more time and focus for improving the customer/member experience.”  Continue reading Walmart Is ‘Empowering’ 50,000 U.S. Associates with GenAI

OpenAI has shared instructions for training to handle content moderation at scale. Some customers are already using the process, which OpenAI says can reduce time for fine-tuning content moderation policies from weeks or months to mere hours. The company proposes its customization technique can also save money by having GPT-4 do the work of tens of thousands of human moderators. Properly trained, GPT-4 could perform moderation tasks more consistently in that it would be free of human bias, OpenAI says. While AI can incorporate biases from training data, technologists view AI bias as more correctable than human predisposition. Continue reading OpenAI: GPT-4 Can Help with Content Moderation Workload

A group of news organizations, including Gannett, Getty Images and the Associated Press, have joined forces to call for copyright protection with regard to artificial intelligence training data. The 10 outlets signed an open letter charging foundation models are trained using media content without permission that is then disseminated “without any consideration of, remuneration to, or attribution to the original creators.” The group is demanding laws to protect journalism from AI, which if left unregulated they claim “can threaten the sustainability of the media ecosystem” by eroding the public’s trust and undermining financial viability. Continue reading News Orgs Calling for IP Protection Against AI Model Training

Meta Platforms is releasing AudioCraft, a generative AI framework that creates “high-quality,” “realistic” audio and music from text prompts. AudioCraft consists of three models: MusicGen, AudioGen and EnCodec, all of which Meta announced it is open-sourcing. Released in June, MusicGen was trained on Meta-owned and licensed music, and generates music from text prompts, while AudioGen, which was trained on public domain samples, generates sound effects (like honking horns and barking dogs) from text prompts. The EnCodec decoder allows “higher quality music generation with fewer artifacts,” according to Meta. Continue reading Meta’s AudioCraft Turns Words into Music with Generative AI

The Federal Trade Commission has opened a civil investigation into OpenAI to determine the extent to which its data policies are harmful to consumers as well as the potentially deleterious effects of misinformation spread through “hallucinations” by its ChatGPT chatbot. The FTC sent OpenAI dozens of questions last week in a 20-page letter instructing the company to contact FTC counsel “as soon as possible to schedule a telephonic meeting within 14 days.” The questions deal with everything from how the company trains its models to the handling of personal data. Continue reading FTC Investigates OpenAI Over Data Policies, Misinformation

As a next step in its advances in ethical AI, Adobe has announced its Firefly generative AI platform now supports text prompts in more than 100 international languages. The company says its Firefly AI app has generated over one billion images in Firefly and Photoshop since implementation in March. Adobe has also deployed artificial intelligence in Express, Illustrator and the Creative Cloud. Positioning its latest news as an expansion of global proportions, Adobe’s generative AI products will now support text prompts in native dialects in the standalone Firefly web service, with localization coming to more than 20 additional languages. Continue reading Adobe Pursues Ethical, Responsible AI in the Creative Space

Bozeman, Montana-based DaaS firm Snowflake has partnered with Nvidia to let clients customize LLMs (large language models) using proprietary data in the Snowflake Data Cloud. Nvidia’s NeMo platform and GPU-accelerated computing will power the effort to tailor models to specific business use cases, such as chatbots with category expertise as opposed to generalists, search engines attuned to context or generative text deep knowledge. Since most companies are eager to harness brand-specific AI without having to build a model from scratch, this category of service is generating a lot of interest. Continue reading Nvidia’s NeMo Delivers AI Customization to Snowflake Cloud

AI-startup Inflection has unveiled a new foundation LLM (large language model) to power its Pi chatbot. Inflection-1 approximates OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in terms of size and functionality, which puts it on a par with ChatGPT insofar as model training. Inflection claims its LLM exceeds some benchmarks when tested against that competing system, as well as Meta Platforms’ LLaMA, DeepMind’s Chinchilla and Google’s PaLM-540B. Pi is short for Personal Intelligence, and Inflection compiled its LLM with a goal of creating an emotive AI whose conversation provides a reasonable facsimile of empathy and human-like sensibilities. Continue reading Inflection Shares Test Results for Its First AI Language Model

The AI Hub server on Discord has drawn attention from the Recording Industry Association of America, which sent a DMCA takedown notice and is alleging copyright infringement. The users are said to share a wide range of AI voice models, including some based on recognizable performers. Those that may sound familiar are in the style of Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra, Rihanna and Bruno Mars. AI Hub reportedly has more than 142,000 members that engage in sharing topical information, such as guides. One point that is getting a lot of attention is the RIAA demand that Discord identify the accused infringers. Continue reading RIAA Alleges Popular ‘AI Hub’ on Discord Violates Copyright

Snorkel AI is offering new capabilities to help companies curate and prep data for generative artificial intelligence. Formed in 2015, Snorkel AI has been developing software for data-centric AI. Its best known product is Snorkel Flow, which helps enterprise clients build and deploy AI applications efficiently using programmatic labeling to automate the process of creating training data for AI models. Now Snorkel AI’s Foundation Model Data Platform is going beyond programmatic labeling with two new core solutions: Snorkel GenFlow for building generative AI applications and Snorkel Foundry for developing custom LLMs with proprietary data. Continue reading Snorkel AI Debuts Products for Model Training, Development

Meta Platforms has unveiled Voicebox, an AI model that can produce high-quality audio clips and edit pre-recorded audio. It also uses artificial intelligence for speech generation efforts, using what Meta calls “in-context learning” to accomplish tasks it was not specifically trained for. The company says Voicebox is first in class with this type of generalized learning for audio. Untrained tasks include sampling, stylizing and editing. As an editor, it can isolate and remove sounds like car horns and background animal noise while preserving the content and style of the source audio. The multilingual model generates speech in six languages. Continue reading Meta Creates Voicebox Generative AI Model for Audio Synth