As Russia’s targeted attacks on the Ukrainian energy infrastructure continue, Ukraine is forced to rethink its energy future. While inventing ways to quickly restore and improve the resilience of its energy system, Ukraine is also looking for green energy solutions. Anna Chernikova has the story from Irpin, one of the hardest-hit areas of the Kyiv region. Camera: Eugene Shynkar.
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Google is girding for a battle of wits in the field of artificial intelligence with “Bard,” a conversational service aimed at countering the popularity of the ChatGPT tool backed by Microsoft.
Bard initially will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before being widely released later this year, according to a Monday blog post from Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Google’s chatbot is supposed to be able to explain complex subjects such as outer space discoveries in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims the service will also perform other more mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party, or lunch ideas based on what food is left in a refrigerator. Pichai didn’t say in his post whether Bard will be able to write prose in the vein of William Shakespeare, the playwright who apparently inspired the service’s name.
“Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity,” Pichai wrote.
Google announced Bard’s existence less than two weeks after Microsoft disclosed it’s pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI, the San Francisco-based maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and generate new images.
Microsoft’s decision to up the ante on a $1 billion investment that it previously made in OpenAI in 2019 intensified the pressure on Google to demonstrate that it will be able to keep pace in a field of technology that many analysts believe will be as transformational as personal computers, the internet and smartphones have been in various stages over the past 40 years.
In a report last week, CNBC said a team of Google engineers working on artificial intelligence technology “has been asked to prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT.” Bard had been a service being developed under a project called “Atlas,” as part of Google’s “code red” effort to counter the success of ChatGPT, which has attracted tens of millions of users since its general release late last year, while also raising concerns in schools about its ability to write entire essays for students.
Pichai has been emphasizing the importance of artificial intelligence for the past six years, with one of the most visible byproducts materializing in 2021 as part of a system called “Language Model for Dialogue Applications,” or LaMDA, which will be used to power Bard.
Google also plans to begin incorporating LaMDA and other artificial intelligence advancements into its dominant search engine to provide more helpful answers to the increasingly complicated questions being posed by its billion of users. Without providing a specific timeline, Pichai indicated the artificial intelligence tools will be deployed in Google’s search in the near future.
In another sign of Google’s deepening commitment to the field, Google announced last week that it is investing in and partnering with Anthropic, an AI startup led by some former leaders at OpenAI. Anthropic has also built its own AI chatbot named Claude and has a mission centered on AI safety.
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The war in Ukraine has left thousands of wounded soldiers, many of whom require the latest technologies to heal and return to normal life. For VOA, Anna Chernikova visited a rehabilitation center near Kyiv, where cutting edge technology and holistic care are giving soldiers hope. (Myroslava Gongadze contributed to this report. Camera: Eugene Shynkar )
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Cybersecurity agencies in Europe are warning of ransomware attacks exploiting a two-year-old computer bug as Italy experienced widespread internet outages.
The Italian premier’s office said Sunday night the attacks affecting computer systems in the country involved “ransomware already in circulation” in a product made by cloud technology provider VMware.
A Friday technical bulletin from a French cybersecurity agency said the attack campaigns target VMware ESXi hypervisors, which are used to monitor virtual machines.
Palo Alto, California-based VMware fixed the bug back in February 2021, but the attacks are targeting older, unpatched versions of the product.
The company said in a statement Sunday that its customers should take action to apply the patch if they have not already done so.
“Security hygiene is a key component of preventing ransomware attacks,” it said.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Sunday it is “working with our public and private sector partners to assess the impacts of these reported incidents and providing assistance where needed.”
The problem attracted particular public attention in Italy on Sunday because it coincided with a nationwide internet outage affecting telecommunications operator Telecom Italia, which interfered with streaming the Spezia v. Napoli soccer match but appeared largely resolved by the time of the later Derby della Madonnina between Inter Milan and AC Milan. It was unclear whether the outages were related to the ransomware attacks.
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Chatbots spouting falsehoods, face-swapping apps crafting porn videos, and cloned voices defrauding companies of millions — the scramble is on to rein in AI deepfakes that have become a misinformation super spreader.
Artificial Intelligence is redefining the proverb “seeing is believing,” with a deluge of images created out of thin air and people shown mouthing things they never said in real-looking deepfakes that have eroded online trust.
“Yikes. (Definitely) not me,” tweeted billionaire Elon Musk last year in one vivid example of a deepfake video that showed him promoting a cryptocurrency scam.
China recently adopted expansive rules to regulate deepfakes but most countries appear to be struggling to keep up with the fast-evolving technology amid concerns that regulation could stymie innovation or be misused to curtail free speech.
Experts warn that deepfake detectors are vastly outpaced by creators, who are hard to catch as they operate anonymously using AI-based software that was once touted as a specialized skill but is now widely available at low cost.
Facebook owner Meta last year said it took down a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urging citizens to lay down their weapons and surrender to Russia.
And British campaigner Kate Isaacs, 30, said her “heart sank” when her face appeared in a deepfake porn video that unleashed a barrage of online abuse after an unknown user posted it on Twitter.
“I remember just feeling like this video was going to go everywhere — it was horrendous,” Isaacs, who campaigns against non-consensual porn, was quoted as saying by the BBC in October.
The following month, the British government voiced concern about deepfakes and warned of a popular website that “virtually strips women naked.”
‘Information apocalypse’
With no barriers to creating AI-synthesized text, audio and video, the potential for misuse in identity theft, financial fraud and tarnishing reputations has sparked global alarm.
The Eurasia group called the AI tools “weapons of mass disruption.”
“Technological advances in artificial intelligence will erode social trust, empower demagogues and authoritarians, and disrupt businesses and markets,” the group warned in a report.
“Advances in deepfakes, facial recognition, and voice synthesis software will render control over one’s likeness a relic of the past.”
This week AI startup ElevenLabs admitted that its voice cloning tool could be misused for “malicious purposes” after users posted a deepfake audio purporting to be actor Emma Watson reading Adolf Hitler’s biography “Mein Kampf.”
The growing volume of deepfakes may lead to what the European law enforcement agency Europol described as an “information apocalypse,” a scenario where many people are unable to distinguish fact from fiction.
“Experts fear this may lead to a situation where citizens no longer have a shared reality or could create societal confusion about which information sources are reliable,” Europol said in a report.
That was demonstrated last weekend when NFL player Damar Hamlin spoke to his fans in a video for the first time since he suffered a cardiac arrest during a match.
Hamlin thanked medical professionals responsible for his recovery, but many who believed conspiracy theories that the COVID-19 vaccine was behind his on-field collapse baselessly labeled his video a deepfake.
‘Super spreader’
China enforced new rules last month that will require businesses offering deepfake services to obtain the real identities of their users. They also require deepfake content to be appropriately tagged to avoid “any confusion.”
The rules came after the Chinese government warned that deepfakes present a “danger to national security and social stability.”
In the United States, where lawmakers have pushed for a task force to police deepfakes, digital rights activists caution against legislative overreach that could kill innovation or target legitimate content.
The European Union, meanwhile, is locked in heated discussions over its proposed “AI Act.”
The law, which the EU is racing to pass this year, will require users to disclose deepfakes but many fear the legislation could prove toothless if it does not cover creative or satirical content.
“How do you reinstate digital trust with transparency? That is the real question right now,” Jason Davis, a research professor at Syracuse University, told AFP.
“The [detection] tools are coming and they’re coming relatively quickly. But the technology is moving perhaps even quicker. So like cyber security, we will never solve this, we will only hope to keep up.”
Many are already struggling to comprehend advances such as ChatGPT, a chatbot created by the U.S.-based OpenAI that is capable of generating strikingly cogent texts on almost any topic.
In a study, media watchdog NewsGuard, which called it the “next great misinformation super spreader,” said most of the chatbot’s responses to prompts related to topics such as COVID-19 and school shootings were “eloquent, false and misleading.”
“The results confirm fears … about how the tool can be weaponized in the wrong hands,” NewsGuard said.
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