AI Safety

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.

Retrenching after its November leadership shakeup, OpenAI unveiled a new framework for evaluating risks posed by its models and deciding whether to limit their use. 

Angst at the prospect of intelligent machines boiled over in moves to block or limit the technology. Fear of AI-related doomsday scenarios prompted proposals to delay research and soul searching by prominent researchers. Amid the doomsaying, lawmakers took dramatic regulatory steps. 

A new consortium aims to support open source AI. Led by Meta and IBM, dozens of organizations from the software, hardware, nonprofit, public, and academic sectors formed the AI Alliance, which plans to develop tools and programs that aid open development.

Europe’s sweeping AI law moved decisively toward approval. After years of debate, representatives of the European Union’s legislative and executive branches agreed on a draft of the AI Act, a comprehensive approach to regulating AI.