Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Closer and closer to the Panopticon!

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida/2023/09/19/florida-artificial-intelligence-prison-surveillance-leo-technologies-verus-calls-amazon/

Florida prisons use artificial intelligence to surveil calls

Florida is now using artificial intelligence to monitor and transcribe the phone conversations of the state’s 80,000-plus inmates.

The Florida Department of Corrections paid $2.5 million to California-based Leo Technologies to begin using its surveillance program called Verus beginning in August. The program scans incoming and outgoing calls, including to inmates’ friends and family, and does automatic searches for keywords selected by prison officials and the technology company’s employees. It uses speech-to-text technology powered by Amazon to transcribe the content of conversations that include those keywords.

The contract, which lasts until June 30 of next year, allows prisons to record and scan up to 50 million minutes of conversations. The only calls that the company says are excluded from monitoring are communications with lawyers, doctors and spiritual advisers.





What does ‘well trained’ mean in this context?

https://breakingdefense.com/2023/09/beyond-chatgpt-experts-say-generative-ai-should-write-but-not-execute-battle-plans/

Beyond ChatGPT: Experts say generative AI should write — but not execute — battle plans

Chatbots can now invent new recipes (with mixed success ), plan vacations, or write a budget-conscious grocery list. So what’s stopping them from summarizing secret intelligence or drafting detailed military operations orders?

Nothing, in theory, said AI experts from the independent Special Competitive Studies Project. The Defense Department should definitely explore those possibilities, SCSP argues, lest China or some other unscrupulous competitor get there first. In practice, however, the project’s analysts emphasized in interviews with Breaking Defense, it’ll take a lot of careful prep work, as laid out in a recently released SCSP study.

And, they warned, you’ll always want at least one well-trained human checking the AI’s plan before you act on it, let alone wire the AI directly to a swarm of lethal drones.





Closer and closer to useful?

https://www.platformer.news/p/how-google-taught-ai-to-doubt-itself

How Google taught AI to doubt itself

From the day that the chatbots arrived last year, their makers warned us not to trust them. The text generated by tools like ChatGPT does not draw on a database of established facts. Instead, chatbots are predictive — making probabilistic guesses about which words seem right based on the massive corpus of text that their underlying large language models were trained on.

As a result, chatbots are often “confidently wrong,” to use the industry’s term.

… Starting today, though, Bard will do a bit more work on your behalf. After the chatbot answers one of your queries, hitting the Google button will “double check” your response. Here’s how the company explained it in a blog post:

When you click on the “G” icon, Bard will read the response and evaluate whether there is content across the web to substantiate it. When a statement can be evaluated, you can click the highlighted phrases and learn more about supporting or contradicting information found by Search.

Double-checking a query will turn many of the sentences within the response green or brown. Green-highlighted responses are linked to cited web pages; hover over one and Bard will show you the source of the information. Brown-highlighted responses indicate that Bard doesn’t know where the information came from, highlighting a likely mistake.





Perspective. Some real AI applications.

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/3-business-problems-data-analytics-can-help-solve

3 business problems data analytics can help solve

Each year, the MIT Sloan Master of Business Analytics Capstone Project partners students with companies that are looking to solve a business problem with data analytics. The program offers unique and up-close insight into what companies were grappling with at the beginning of 2023. This year, students worked on 41 different projects with 33 different companies. The winning projects looked at measuring innovation through patents for Accenture and using artificial intelligence to improve drug safety for Takeda.

VIEW ALL OF THE CAPSTONE PROJECTS





Making lawyers into techies?

https://www.bespacific.com/artificial-intelligence-tools-and-tips/

Artificial Intelligence Tools and Tips

Via LLRX Artificial Intelligence Tools and Tips Jim Calloway, Director of the Oklahoma Bar Association’s Management Assistance Program and Julie Bays, OBA Practice Management Advisor, aiding attorneys in using technology and other tools to efficiently manage their offices, recommend that now is a good time to experiment with specific AI-powered tools and suggest the best techniques for using them.



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