AI Safety

OpenAI’s most widely used model briefly developed a habit of flattering users, with laughable and sometimes worrisome results.

A behind-the-scenes account provides new details about the abrupt firing and reinstatement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in November 2023.

Bots that scrape websites for AI training data often ignore do-not-crawl requests. Now web publishers can enforce such appeals by luring scrapers to AI-generated decoy pages.

Large language models have been shown to be capable of lying when users unintentionally give them an incentive to do so. Further research shows that LLMs with access to tools can be incentivized to use them in deceptive ways.

Some voters navigated last week’s United States elections with help from a large language model that generated output based on verified, nonpartisan information.

Politicians and pundits have conjured visions of doom to convince lawmakers to clamp down on AI. What if terrified legislators choke off innovation in AI?

A new report documents the interplay of powerful forces that drove AI over the past year: open versus proprietary technology, public versus private financing, innovation versus caution. 

The United States government launched Operation AI Comply, targeting businesses whose uses of AI allegedly misled customers.

Researchers probed the black market for AI services that are designed to facilitate cybercrime.

California, a jurisdiction that often influences legislators worldwide, passed a slew of new laws that regulate deepfakes.

The European Union, United Kingdom, United States, and other countries signed a legally binding treaty that regulates artificial intelligence.

Scale AI offers new leaderboards based on its own benchmarks.

The United States outlawed unsolicited phone calls that use AI-generated voices. 

Hugging Face introduced four leaderboards to rank the performance and trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs). The open source AI repository now ranks performance on tests of workplace utility, trust and safety, tendency to generate falsehoods, and reasoning.

An alliance of major tech and media companies introduced a watermark designed to distinguish real from fake media starting with images. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) offers an open standard that marks media files with information about their creation and editing.