AI is already unlocking massive growth in industries across the economy. Many Canadians are already feeling the benefits of using AI to work smarter and faster. The Prime Minister’s office has just announced a large investment in AI. See Securing Canada’s AI advantage | Prime Minister of Canada. This is a pre-budget announcement of $2.4 billion going to AI related things including: 2 billion “to build and provide access to computing capabilities and technological infrastructure for Canada’s world-leading AI researchers, start-ups, and scale-ups” Setting up a “Canadian AI Safety Institute ..read more

Cadbury has a funny web site and video for their 5star candy bar. See Cadbury 5 Star – IMC University. The idea is that with AI we need to learn to do nothing (and enjoy a candy bar when doing nothing.) For that we need a Nothing University. Who knows … perhaps this is the future of liesure ..read more

It astonishes me that society apparently believes that women and girls should accept becoming the subject of demeaning imagery. The New York Times has an opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof on deepfake porn,  The Deepfake Porn of Kids and Celebrities That Gets Millions of Views. The opinion says what is becoming obvious, that deepfake tools are being used overwhelmingly to create porn of women, whether celebrities, or girls people know. This artificial intelligence technology is not neutral, it is hurtful of a specific group – girls and women. The article points to some research like a s ..read more

The Power of AI Is In Our Hands. What Do We Need to Know? The New Trail has a great feature story by Lisa Szabo on generative AI, The Power of AI Is In Our Hands. What Do We Need to Know? The story features a number of us at U of Alberta talking about the generative AI tools like ChatGPT. It quotes me talking about art and how I believe we will still want art by humans despite what AIs can generate. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we will enjoy and consume both AI generated entertainment and art that we believe was generated by people we know ..read more

Today CIFAR announced five new Canada CIFAR AI Chairs who will join the more than 120 Chairs already appointed at Canada’s three National AI Institutes (Amii in Edmonton, Mila in Montréal, and the Vector Institute in Toronto). Today they announced that I have been appointed a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, CIFAR welcomes five new Canada CIFAR AI Chairs – CIFAR. Here is the U of A Folio story. Hurrah ..read more

In many ways, the long 21st century began when Apple launched the Macintosh with its ‘1984’ Super Bowl ad The Guardian has a story about the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill. The famous 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh ad by Ridley Scott was aired on January 22nd, 1984 and announced that on January 24th, the Macintosh would be introduced. What made the Mac so revolutionary? To be honest, the Mac wasn’t really that innovative. Apple had tried to sell a GUI (Graphical User Interface) computer before in the Lisa ..read more

The goal of this project is to generate knowledge about the behaviour of literary characters at large scale and make this data openly available to the public. Characters are the scaffolding of great storytelling. This Zooniverse project will allow us to crowdsource data to train AI models to better understand who characters are and what they do within diverse narrative worlds to answer one very big question: why do human beings tell stories? Today we are going live on Zooinverse with our Citizen Science (crowdsourcing) project, The Lives of Literary Characters. The goal of the project is of ..read more

For ‘deeper reading’ among children aged 10-12, paper trumps screens. What does it mean when schools are going digital? The title of this Guardian story says it all, A groundbreaking study shows kids learn better on paper, not screens. Now what? The story reports on a study led by Karen Froud at Columbia University titled, Middle-schoolers’ reading and processing depth in response to digital and print media: An N400 study. They found “evidence of differences in brain responses to texts presented in print and digital media, including deeper semantic encoding for print than digital texts.” Pa ..read more

OpenAI’s store rules are already being broken, illustrating that regulating GPTs could be hard to control From Slashdot I learned about a stroy on how OpenAI’s GPT store is already being flooded with AI girlfriend bots. It isn’t particularly surprising that you can get different girlfriend bots. Nor is it surprising that these would be something you can build in ChatGPT-4. ChatGPT is, afterall, a chatbot. What will be interesting to see is whether these chatbot girlfriends are successful. I would have imagined that men would want pornographic girlfriends and that the market for friends woul ..read more

AI investors say their work is so important that they should be able to trample copyright law on their pathway to riches. Here’s why you shouldn’t believe them. Michael Hiltzik has a nice colum about how  AI investors say they’ll go broke if they have to pay for copyrighted works. Don’t believe it. He quotes the venture capital firm investing a lot in AI, Adreessen Horowitz as saying, The only way AI can fulfill its tremendous potential is if the individuals and businesses currently working to develop these technologies are free to do so lawfully and nimbly. This is like saying that ..read more