Category: Artificial Intelligence

Join the EU stakeholder consultation on classification of AI systems as high-risk

Posted on by Robin Edgar

The EU is asking for feedback on how the AI act classifies and handles high risk AI systems This consultation is targeted to stakeholders of different categories. These categories include, but are not limited to, providers and deployers of (high-risk) AI systems, other industry organisations, as well as academia, other independent experts, civil society organisations, Read more about Join the EU stakeholder consultation on classification of AI systems as high-risk[…]

Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books, close on Federal judge ruling for Anthropic

Posted on by Robin Edgar

A federal judge sided with Meta on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought against the company by 13 book authors, including Sarah Silverman, that alleged the company had illegally trained its AI models on their copyrighted works. Federal Judge Vince Chhabria issued a summary judgment — meaning the judge was able to decide on the case Read more about Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books, close on Federal judge ruling for Anthropic[…]

Anthropic wins key US ruling on AI training in authors’ copyright lawsuit, but should only have used legally bought books.

Posted on by Robin Edgar

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic’s use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under U.S. copyright law. Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made “fair use” , opens new tab Read more about Anthropic wins key US ruling on AI training in authors’ copyright lawsuit, but should only have used legally bought books.[…]

MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek and is completely open source

Posted on by Robin Edgar

MiniMax, an AI firm based in Shanghai, has released an open source reasoning model that challenges Chinese rival DeepSeek and US-based Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in terms of performance and cost. MiniMax-M1 was released Monday under an Apache software license, and thus is actually open source, unlike Meta’s Llama family, offered under a community license Read more about MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek and is completely open source[…]

European Publishers Council stays true – to the tired old trope about “copyright theft”

Posted on by Robin Edgar

A few weeks ago Walled Culture explored how the leaders in the generative AI world are trying to influence the future legal norms for this field. In the face of a powerful new form of an old technology – AI itself has been around for over 50 years – those are certainly needed. Governments around Read more about European Publishers Council stays true – to the tired old trope about “copyright theft”[…]

Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw Read more about Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels[…]

Microsoft’s Partners With Holocaust Denying, White Genocide Peddling Grok AI

Posted on by Robin Edgar

[…] On Monday, Microsoft announced that it will begin offering access to Grok AI, specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini, through its Azure AI Foundry. For the uninitiated, Grok AI is a product of xAI, which is owned by the same guy whose social media site, X, is reportedly taking money from terrorist groups—Elon Read more about Microsoft’s Partners With Holocaust Denying, White Genocide Peddling Grok AI[…]

Brain implant does thought to speech

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Marking a breakthrough in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco has unlocked a way to restore naturalistic speech for people with severe paralysis. This work solves the long-standing challenge of latency in speech neuroprostheses, the time lag between when a subject attempts to speak Read more about Brain implant does thought to speech[…]

Can the EU’s Dual Strategy of Regulation and Investment Redefine AI Leadership?

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Beyond sharing a pair of vowels, AI and the EU both present significant challenges when it comes to setting the right course. This article makes the case that reducing regulation for large general-purpose AI providers under the EU’s competitiveness agenda is not a silver bullet for catching Europe up to the US and China, and Read more about Can the EU’s Dual Strategy of Regulation and Investment Redefine AI Leadership?[…]

Australian Radio station uses AI host for 6 months before anyone notices

Posted on by Robin Edgar

I got an interesting tipoff the other day that Sydney radio station CADA is using an AI avatar instead of an actual radio host. The story goes that their workdays presenter – a woman called Thy – actually doesn’t exist. She’s a character made using AI, and rolled out onto CADA’s website. […] What is Read more about Australian Radio station uses AI host for 6 months before anyone notices[…]

Meta gets caught gaming AI benchmarks with Llama 4

Posted on by Robin Edgar

tl;dr – Meta did a VW by using a special version of their AI which was optimised to score higher on the most important metric for AI performance. Over the weekend, Meta dropped two new Llama 4 models: a smaller model named Scout, and Maverick, a mid-size model that the company claims can beat GPT-4o Read more about Meta gets caught gaming AI benchmarks with Llama 4[…]

A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

Posted on by Robin Edgar

A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for “truth” — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of affecting the responses of AI models on topics in the news rather than by targeting human readers, NewsGuard Read more about A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda[…]

Paralyzed man moves robotic arm with his thoughts

Posted on by Robin Edgar

[…] He was able to grasp, move and drop objects just by imagining himself performing the actions. The device, known as a brain-computer interface (BCI), worked for a record 7 months without needing to be adjusted. Until now, such devices have only worked for a day or two. The BCI relies on an AI model Read more about Paralyzed man moves robotic arm with his thoughts[…]

Mistral adds a new API that turns any PDF document into an AI-ready Markdown file with pictures

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Unlike most OCR APIs, Mistral OCR is a multimodal API, meaning that it can detect when there are illustrations and photos intertwined with blocks of text. The OCR API creates bounding boxes around these graphical elements and includes them in the output. Mistral OCR also doesn’t just output a big wall of text; the output Read more about Mistral adds a new API that turns any PDF document into an AI-ready Markdown file with pictures[…]

27-Year-Old VB4 EXE turned into Python in minutes (with Claude) – AI-Assisted reverse engineering

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Reddit post detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered the program and rewrote it in Python. It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, Read more about 27-Year-Old VB4 EXE turned into Python in minutes (with Claude) – AI-Assisted reverse engineering[…]

Zypher’s speech model can clone your voice with 5s of audio

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Palo Alto-based AI startup Zyphra unveiled a pair of open text-to-speech (TTS) models this week said to be capable of cloning your voice with as little as five seconds of sample audio. In our testing, we generated realistic results with less than half a minute of recorded speech. Founded in 2021 by Danny Martinelli and Read more about Zypher’s speech model can clone your voice with 5s of audio[…]

The EU’s AI Act – a very quick primer on what and why

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Have you ever been in a group project where one person decided to take a shortcut, and suddenly, everyone ended up under stricter rules? That’s essentially what the EU is saying to tech companies with the AI Act: “Because some of you couldn’t resist being creepy, we now have to regulate everything.” This legislation isn’t Read more about The EU’s AI Act – a very quick primer on what and why[…]

ChatGPT crawler flaw opens door to DDoS, prompt injection

Posted on by Robin Edgar

In a write-up shared this month via Microsoft’s GitHub, Benjamin Flesch, a security researcher in Germany, explains how a single HTTP request to the ChatGPT API can be used to flood a targeted website with network requests from the ChatGPT crawler, specifically ChatGPT-User. This flood of connections may or may not be enough to knock Read more about ChatGPT crawler flaw opens door to DDoS, prompt injection[…]

You don’t need to make up like a clown to defeat AI face detection

Posted on by Robin Edgar

In a pre-print paper titled “Novel AI Camera Camouflage: Face Cloaking Without Full Disguise,” David Noever, chief scientist, and Forrest McKee, data scientist, describe their efforts to baffle face recognition systems through the minimal application of makeup and manipulation of image files. Noever and McKee recount various defenses that have been proposed against facial recognition Read more about You don’t need to make up like a clown to defeat AI face detection[…]

EU is ‘losing the narrative battle’ over AI Act to US fake news, says UN adviser

Posted on by Robin Edgar

European companies are believing the “absolute lie” that the EU AI Act is killing innovation, Carme Artigas, co-chair of the United Nations advisory board on artificial intelligence, has warned. “We are losing the battle of the narrative,” Artigas said last week at the Europe Startup Nations Alliance forum.  As Spain’s AI minister, Artigas led negotiations Read more about EU is ‘losing the narrative battle’ over AI Act to US fake news, says UN adviser[…]

Bad Likert Judge: A Novel Multi-Turn Technique to Jailbreak LLMs by Misusing Their Evaluation Capability

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Text-generation large language models (LLMs) have safety measures designed to prevent them from responding to requests with harmful and malicious responses. Research into methods that can bypass these guardrails, such as Bad Likert Judge, can help defenders prepare for potential attacks. The technique asks the target LLM to act as a judge scoring the harmfulness Read more about Bad Likert Judge: A Novel Multi-Turn Technique to Jailbreak LLMs by Misusing Their Evaluation Capability[…]

The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans

Posted on by Robin Edgar

[…] In this article, we present a comparative analysis of the carbon emissions associated with AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks. Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI Read more about The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans[…]

JailBreaking AI still easy, can be done with StRanGe CaSINg

Posted on by Robin Edgar

New research from Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies and the developer of the Claude family of Large Language Models (LLMs), has released research showing that the process for getting LLMs to do what they’re not supposed to is still pretty easy and can be automated. SomETIMeS alL it tAKeS Is typing prOMptS Like Read more about JailBreaking AI still easy, can be done with StRanGe CaSINg[…]

Training AI through human interactions instead of datasets

Posted on by Robin Edgar

[…] AI learns primarily through massive datasets and extensive simulations, regardless of the application. Now, researchers from Duke University and the Army Research Laboratory have developed a platform to help AI learn to perform complex tasks more like humans. Nicknamed GUIDE for short […] “It remains a challenge for AI to handle tasks that require Read more about Training AI through human interactions instead of datasets[…]

Hacking Back the AI-Hacker: Prompt Injection by your LLM as a Defense Against LLM-driven Cyberattacks

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being harnessed to automate cyberattacks, making sophisticated exploits more accessible and scalable. In response, we propose a new defense strategy tailored to counter LLM-driven cyberattacks. We introduce Mantis, a defensive framework that exploits LLMs’ susceptibility to adversarial inputs to undermine malicious operations. Upon detecting an automated cyberattack, Mantis plants Read more about Hacking Back the AI-Hacker: Prompt Injection by your LLM as a Defense Against LLM-driven Cyberattacks[…]