Using AI to Bomb and Kill People, a New Kind of Comic App, and Rock Climbing AI

News and tools you can use! Have a great day!

May 08, 2024

Morning y’all!

We’re halfway through this week and there have been a number of really large movements in the AI space as well as some new products and updates to existing products. This stuff is not slowing down!

There are also a few interesting ethical things to review, like how AI is being used to bomb and kill people. Yikes. Let’s jump in.

※\(^o^)/※

— Summer

I approve of this new term:

Watching in real time as "slop" becomes a term of art. the way that "spam" became the term for unwanted emails, "slop" is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content.

Spam is now slop.

A look into Lavendar:

A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group as a suspected militant. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it?

Good questions. Not great answers. Here’s another look at the program:

Not exactly warm and fuzzies.

How cool is this new comic and translation app?!

Wow:

Whoa the new gpt2-chatbot just created Flappy Bird clone in one-shot! And it was a dead simple prompt.

Now that’s kinda fun.

Deloitte has another update to their “State of Generative AI” in the enterprise.

An AI climbing coach? This is really neat. Take the video from wherever and then you get suggestions on routes.

A bunch of creative design tools. Simple, straight-forward, useful.

And in terms of using AI for creative work, why not use it to predict future design trends? Why not:

Enter predictive analytics — a machine learning approach that can trace patterns in datasets and even anticipate future pattern shifts.
Predictive analytics has been around for decades, but it’s only with the maturation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that the analytical processes can be automated, allowing practical application of what, until now, has been a largely theoretical field.

Nike is building their own generative model for the future of footwear.

Opera is opening up their Aria browser which has AI ****gasp**** built-in.

Of course it wasn’t available in my region. Ooph.

Autodesk is bringing AI to modeling where you can create a 3D object out of just a flat image.

The AI model that underlies Project Bernini is designed to have an understanding of how real-world objects tend to exist. For example, it can see an image of a water pitcher and understand that the resulting 3D image should be hollow and water-tight.

Dope.

Coding is changing thanks to AI and as a result the way we learn how to code and are taught by teachers is also changing.

“Students are early adopters and have been actively testing these tools,” says Johnny Chang, a teaching assistant at Stanford University pursuing a master’s degree in computer science. He also founded the AI x Education conference in 2023, a virtual gathering of students and educators to discuss the impact of AI on education.
So as not to be left behind, educators are also experimenting with generative AI. But they’re grappling with techniques to adopt the technology while still ensuring students learn the foundations of computer science.

Not surprising!

A huge post of 101 companies that are using generative AI and their use cases.

Here are 4 Chinese companies that are racing to build China’s version of ChatGPT.

I couldn’t help but doubt the veracity of this article about China but it might be true. The US is building tooling to fight disinformation and there are a lot of defense startups being built.

Oh, and this is kinda cute: