"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #42
August 15, 2023
"This week in the ➡️ #Metaverse" #42
Thanks for reading! togheter we got this newsletter to issue #42, the Ultimate Question of Life, the Metaverse, and Everything!!
Ahead with your weekly roundup of the relevant trends, regulatory developments and policy insights, about the metaverse, AI, crypto, neurotech, and gaming.
😩I’m exhausted, just give me “the weekly snapshot”:
Here we go!
OpenAI's GPT-4 is now in the content moderation business, making policy decisions in mere hours instead of months. All while in an ironic twist, ChatGPT is burning a hole in OpenAI's pockets, running up a daily bill that rivals some small country GDPs Meanwhile, Chile sets a new benchmark for neurorights, Paris Hilton is bridging the metaverse gap with her new Roblox venture, and, close to home, collectors are suing over some seriously hyped NFTs. And holy Digital Frontier Batman! if you've ever dreamt of texting Jesus, there's now an app for that (Mary Magdalene charges extra). Ending on a profound note: in an era where technology races ahead, can digital art truly stand the test of time like century-old paintings?
Quite the week!
👁️🗨️Now the full version, what's going on:
👀 => The future of policy? OpenAI is using GPT-4 for content moderation
A new article in the OpenAI blog explains how they use GPT-4 “for content policy development and content moderation decisions, enabling more consistent labeling, a faster feedback loop for policy refinement, and less involvement from human moderators”.
It states that “a content moderation system using GPT-4 results in much faster iteration on policy changes, reducing the cycle from months to hours”.
It also claims that GPT-4 is able to interpret rules and nuances in long content policy documentation and adapt instantly to policy updates, resulting in more consistent labeling.
They expect that AI can help moderate online traffic according to “platform-specific policy and relieve the mental burden of a large number of human moderators”.
According to the blog, anyone with OpenAI API access can implement this approach to create their own AI-assisted moderation system.
XR innovations showcased at SIGGRAPH
Hidden forces and sliding screens trick the senses to make VR feel more real. More on => techcrunch.com
Paris Hilton launches “Slivingland” metaverse experience on Roblox
As reported by Venture Beat, “The launch of Slivingland marks Hilton’s efforts to bridge the gap between Gen Z, the metaverse, and brands, providing a unique platform for strategic brand activations”.
ChatGPT’s huge running cost is threatening OpenAI’s future
According to a report by Analytics India Magazine, OpenAI spends $700,000 every day to run ChatGPT, and has already seen a $540 million loss since its debut. The company experienced a 12 percent decline in its user base between June and July, and is hardly making any profits.
It is also being hit by the increased shortage of GPUs in the market, partly because of the rivalry between the US and China. The EU recently passed a €43 billion Chips Act designed to enhance the production of semiconductors in the region and reduce the overdependence on foreign regions to develop semiconductor chips.
More on => windowscentral.com
Discord.io suffers massive data breach, announces closure
A hacker stole the data of 760,000 users, per TechRadar, and has posted a sample on Breached Forums in order to potentially sell it.
The discord.io site now displays a message saying "we are stopping all operations for the foreseeable future". Discord.io, a third-party service that helps people generate custom invites for their Discord channels, has been hacked, and information on some 760,000 members stolen.
Google says to Australian lawmakers that AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out
More on => theguardian.com
Music labels sue Internet Archive over digitized record collection, all while the Archive agree to streamline digital book-lending case
More on => reuters.com
VR Headsets Give Enough Data For AI To Accurately Guess Ethnicity, Income and More
A February study from reseachers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that they could single out a single person from more than 50,000 other VR users with more than 94% accuracy, after analyzing just 200 seconds of motion data.
In a second June study, researchers figured out a person’s height, weight, foot size and country with more than 80% accuracy using data from 1,000 people playing the popular VR game Beat Saber. They stated that even personal information like marital status, employment status and ethnicity could be identified with more than 70% accuracy.
More on => bloomberg.com
NVIDIA CEO Brings Generative AI to SIGGRAPH
News highlights include the next-generation GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip platform, NVIDIA AI Workbench — a new unified toolkit that introduces simplified model tuning and deployment on NVIDIA AI platforms — and a major upgrade to NVIDIA Omniverse with generative AI and OpenUSD
More on => blogs.nvidia.com
🤖I Am Not A Robot: AI news
Hackers red-teaming A.I. are ‘breaking stuff left and right,’at DefCon
Researchers have found that “poisoning” a small collection of images or text in the vast sea of data used to train AI systems can wreak havoc — and be easily overlooked.
A study co-authored by Florian Tramér of the Swiss University ETH Zurich determined that corrupting just 0.01% of a model was enough to spoil it — and cost as little as $60. The researchers waited for a handful of websites used in web crawls for two models to expire. Then they bought the domains and posted bad data on them.
More on => fortune.com
How Google is Planning to Beat OpenAI
In April, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai merged two large artificial intelligence teams to catch up to and surpass OpenAI and other rivals.
Now they are releasing a group of large machine-learning models collectively known as Gemini, and are expected to give Google the ability to build products its competitors can’t.
More on => theinformation.com
Sites scramble to block ChatGPT web crawler after instructions emerge
OpenAI recently added details about its web crawler, GPTBot, to its online documentation site. GPTBot is the name of the user agent that the company uses to retrieve webpages to train the AI models behind ChatGPT, such as GPT-4. Earlier this week, some sites quickly announced their intention to block GPTBot's access to their content.
More on => arstechnica.com
Mayhem ahead! Ethical considerations aside, “selective web-scraping” provides further opportunities to create new vectors of attack for these systems.
We can imagine an scenario where trusted information is opted-out while intentionally malicious information is inyected to be read by the GPTcrawler
Google's latest AI trick is summarizing long web pages
Google is testing a new capability for its generative AI in search that will make it a more veritable rival to Microsoft's AI Copilot in Edge. The tech giant has launched an early experiment for its generative AI-powered Search experience (SGE) called "SGE while browsing". The feature can quickly generate the most salient points of long-form content found on the web. However, the tool will not be able to provide key points for paywalled articles.
More on => engadget.com
🤦The WTF award of the week goes to…
A new AI app lets users ‘text’ with Jesus
“Text With Jesus”, launched in July, replicates an instant messaging platform, with biblical figures impersonated by ChatGPT. Many people in the Bible, Mary Magdalene among them, are only accessible in the app’s premium version, which costs $2.99 a month.
More on => washingtonpost.com
A screenshot of the app on a tablet (Catloaf Software)
🎮Gaming news
Researchers find China's game time limits ineffective in reducing excessive play
A new paper published in Nature Human Behavior found no evidence that the rules have had any impact on excessive gaming at all.
The researchers partnered with Unity to examine more than 7 billion hours of playtime and around 2.4 billion Chinese gamer profiles from mid-August of 2019 to mid-January of 2020, a span of time that includes the imposition of an hour-and-a-half daily playtime limit for minors, or three hours on holidays.
More on => gamesindustry.biz
💸CryptoLand:
the price of hype: a Group of Collectors Is Suing Sotheby’s Over Its ‘Misleading’ Marketing of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs
The auction house was added as a defendant in an ongoing class-action suit over NFTs sold at auction in 2021. Plaintiffs accuse the house, alongside the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and a pack of A-list celebrities, of deceptive practices relating to their marketing and sale of NFTs. The suit claims the auction house colluded with Yuga Labs, creator of BAYC NFTs, to allegedly inflate the value of the NFTs.
More on => artnet.com
🧠Neurotech:
Chile's Supreme Court sets a landmark precedent for neurorights
On August 9, the Court released aruling in what constitutes the world’s first case dealing with the protection of neural data. The case was litigated with the support of Fundacion Kamanau
More on => medium.com/abogamer
😬Meme corner:
✍️Ending nugget:
“Digital Whispers, programmed in 2016 to pick up live tweets within a two mile radius and “whisper” them via an attached speaker, stopped working in April, after Twitter cut-off access to its free API and removed the option to filter tweets by location”
“While there are entire museum departments concentrated on repairing medieval tapestries and examining the craquelure of 19th century paintings to preserve their lifespan, the comparatively nascent field of new media art conservation needs to take urgent action if it hopes to save valuable contemporary artworks from the accelerating pace of technological transformation.”
“Can a Digital Artwork Outlast a 19th-Century Painting?”, Jo Lawson-Tancred
That’s all for now!To continue the conversation, find me at https://linktr.ee/abogamer. And if you want to support my work, please consider sharing this newsletter!!