Innovation Profs - 10/31/2023

Generative AI News

Biden issues U.S.' first AI executive order, requiring safety assessments, civil rights guidance, research on labor market impact

On Monday, President Biden issued an executive order on AI, with eight main components: (1) creating new safety and security standards for AI, (2) protecting consumer privacy, (3) advancing equity and civil rights, (4) protecting consumers overall, (5) supporting workers, (6) promoting innovation and competition, (7) working with international partners, and (8) developing guidance for federal agencies’ use and procurement of AI. “This executive order represents bold action, but we still need Congress to act,” Biden said.

AI’s proxy war heats up as Google reportedly backs Anthropic with $2B

Google is investing $2 billion in Anthropic, which comes on the heels of the news that Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic, as we reported last month. With Microsoft investing billions in OpenAI, the AI arms race continues to unfold as the biggest tech companies pour money into generative AI.

New Tool Defends Artists by “Poisoning” AI Image Generators

Nightshade is a new tool that artists can use to prevent their artwork from being included as the training set of a machine learning model. An invisible pixel is injected into the artist’s piece of work; if the work is subsequently added to a model’s training set, it will cause the model to misidentify objects, which renders it unusable. Moreover, the poisoned pixel in these images is difficult to remove. “The ingenious tool, which is currently under peer review but was previewed by the MIT Technology Review, could be the saving grace of artists who are rightly concerned about AI infringing on their copyright.”

Artists Lose First Round of Copyright Infringement Case Against AI Art Generators

On Monday a U.S. district judge dismissed a number of claims against Midjourney and DeviantArt raised in a lawsuit by a group of artists. The judge rejected the claim that the AI systems in question actually contain copies of copyrighted images. However, the judge allowed a claim against Stability AI, (the company behind Stable Diffusion) to proceed; the claim is that the company used copyrighted images to train their models without artists’ permission.

Bing's AI Refuses to Generate Photorealistic Images of Women, Saying They're "Unsafe"

Bing AI Image Creator is still working out the bugs in its content moderation. Asking for a photorealistic image of a man yields no issues. Ask for a photorealistic image of a woman? The response: "Your image generations are not displayed because we detected unsafe content in the images based on our content policy." Clearly, this is a deeply problematic approach to content moderation.

Quick Hits

Tool of the week: TinyWow.com

This one isn't all AI, but it's too good of a resource not to share. TinyWow has tools to help with PDFs, videos, images and other online tools to make your life easier.

Here are some things you can do with TinyWow:

• Remove an image background

• Upscale an image

• Merge PDFs

• Complete a paragraph you started

• Create Facebook ad headlines

• Extract the audio from a video

• And so much more

Innovation Profs Homework

Check out TinyWow (above) and reply to this email with which of these tools you will use to speed up your workflow.

AI-generated image of the week

Prompt: humorous halloween-themed comic, new yorker style, black and white

Generative AI tip of the week

Get starting with Generative AI

New to generative AI? Here are some places to start…

• NightCafe image prompting tips

• Learn ChatGPT prompting

• Best AI image generators

• AI terms everyone should know

What we found

Twitter user Dave Villalva made animated AI baby monsters using Midjourney for images, Runway to turn them into video and a couple other tools you can see in this step-by-step tutorial.