AI

The folly of making art with text-to-image generative AI. Making art using artificial intelligence isn’t new. It’s as old as AI itself. What’s new is that a wave of tools now let most people generate images by entering a text prompt. All you need to do is write “a landscape in the style of van Gogh” into a text box, and the AI can create a beautiful image as instructed. The power of this technology lies in its capacity to use human language to control art generation. But do these systems accurately translate an artist’s vision? Can bringing language into art-making truly lead to artistic breakthroughs? Build Mobile Apps Powered by WordPress Engineering outputs I’ve worked with generative AI as an artist and computer scientist for years, and I would argue that this new type of tool const...

Can chatbots write inspirational and wise sermons? When several hundred Lutherans in Bavaria, Germany, attended a service on June 9, 2023, designed by ChatGPT, the program not only selected hymns and prayers, but also composed and delivered a sermon, delivered by an avatar on a big screen. Indeed, programs like ChatGPT, that can produce a sermon in seconds, might seem attractive to busy clergy. But several religious leaders, including rabbis serving Jewish congregations as well as Christian Protestant pastors, have conflicting feelings about utilizing chatbots in preparing sermons. There may be several reasons for being cautious. From my perspective, as a specialist in Catholic liturgy and ritual, the most important critique has to do with true intent of preaching – to offer insight and ...

US agencies buy vast quantities of personal information on the open market – a legal scholar explains why and what it means for privacy in the age of AI. Numerous government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, Treasury Department, Defense Intelligence Agency, Navy and Coast Guard, have purchased vast amounts of U.S. citizens’ personal information from commercial data brokers. The revelation was published in a partially declassified, internal Office of the Director of National Intelligence report released on June 9, 2023. The report shows the breathtaking scale and invasive nature of the consumer data market and how that market directly enables wholesale surveillance of people. The data includes not only where you’ve been and who you’re connected t...

Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law. In 2022, an AI-generated work of art won the Colorado State Fair’s art competition. The artist, Jason Allen, had used Midjourney – a generative AI system trained on art scraped from the internet – to create the piece. The process was far from fully automated: Allen went through some 900 iterations over 80 hours to create and refine his submission. Yet his use of AI to win the art competition triggered a heated backlash online, with one Twitter user claiming, “We’re watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes.” As generative AI art tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have been thrust into the limelight, so too have questions about ownership and authorship. These tools’ generative ability is the result of training them...

It doesn’t take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I’d help him out by looking up a few biographies. I tried asking for a list of books about Abraham Lincoln and it did a pretty good job: A reasonable list of books about Lincoln. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND Number 4 isn’t right. Garry Wills famously wrote “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it’s not a bad start. Then I tried something harder, asking instead about the much more obscure William Henry Harrison, and it gamely provided a list, nearly all of which was wrong. Books about Harrison, fewer than half of which are correct. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND Numbers 4 and 5 are correc...