AI comes under scrutiny after new concerns emerge

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Welcome back, Superhuman

AI’s dark side is coming into focus this week, as a former Google employee is arrested and a Microsoft engineer publicly calls on the company to take down one of its AI tools.

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TODAY’S MENU

• AI comes under fresh scrutiny as major new concerns emerge

• How to create presentations, ads, and other visuals with Canva AI

• Google wants to kill AI-generated spam in search results

• Chart: Demand for AI jobs is strong, despite overall drop in IT job listings

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI Generated Images: Unlikely Apple Products

NEWS

Today in AI & Tech

• Restored: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are back online after thousands of users reported an outage.

• App Wars: Apple escalates its feud with Epic Games by blocking the Fortnite app in the EU and deleting its developer account.

• Midnight Heist: Midjourney is reportedly banning Stability AI employees from its platform after alleged attempts to steal their data.

• Back on Top: Jeff Bezos replaces Elon Musk to become the richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

• Eye Candy: Meta exec says the company is building an AI model to power its video ecosystem, claiming it has already helped Facebook obtain “an 8% to 10% gain in Reels watch time.”

Correction: Yesterday we wrote about a Washington Post reviewer calling Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant “a disaster“ and “mostly useless.“ The reviewer had, in fact, said “the chatbot wasn’t a disaster. But I also found it mostly useless.“

NEXT IN AI

AI comes under fresh scrutiny as major new concerns emerge

What’s going on?

AI’s honeymoon period may be coming to an end, as the initial wave of hype turns into skepticism, and brings new questions about its impact on society.

What happened?

A Microsoft engineer has sent letters to US regulators and lawmakers warning that one of Microsoft’s AI tools could generate harmful images. The employee claims he repeatedly urged Microsoft to “remove Copilot Designer from public use until better safeguards could be put in place.”

A Chinese national has been arrested and charged with stealing AI trade secrets from Google. The former Google employee allegedly stole more than 500 files from the company and was secretly employed by two China-based tech companies.

AI model evaluation company Patronus AI released research showing how often AI models produce copyrighted content. They found copyrighted content across the board, with OpenAI’s GPT-4 producing copyrighted content on 44% of tested prompts.

AI-generated disinformation has risen by an average of 130% per month on X over the past year and creates risks for upcoming elections, claims a new report from the British non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

How bad is it?

We’ve been here before. Every new technological wave brings a new set of challenges, which in turn creates incentives for new solutions to be built.

While some of the challenges that AI brings are unique, many overlap with issues we have seen in the past with the proliferation of social media and other technologies. The onus will be on the companies that build these AI tools to create guardrails that ensure safe usage.

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AI AT WORK

How to create ads, thumbnails, and other visuals with Canva AI

• Go to Canva’s website and sign up.

• Once you’re in, click on Magic Studio and then Magic Design.

• Pick a template from the drop down menu that appears.

• Customize the template to your desired use cases e.g. business, social media, education, video, marketing, and so on.

• Click the Create a Design button on the top right corner and select from the options of use cases.

You can use Canva’s AI features to create presentations, Youtube thumbnails, videos, and more. We created the YouTube thumbnail and Instagram post above with Canva’s Magic Design feature.

ONLINE SEARCH

Google wants to kill AI-generated spam pages in search results

Ever searched for something on Google and found yourself scrolling through multiple results to find what you’re looking for? That’s because many companies have gamed Google’s search engine algorithm to get their pages to the top of the results — even when they’re spam.

The problem has been compounded by AI, which lets bad actors generate thousands of pages of spam or low-quality content with the click of a few buttons. And Google is finally bringing the hammer down.

The company said it will be downranking pages that mass produce low quality content with AI and other methods, as well as websites that deploy other sketchy tactics to rank their content on search results. Google is giving site owners until May 5 to make the necessary changes.

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CHART

Demand for AI jobs is strong, despite overall drop in IT job listings

According to data from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, AI job listings in the US are up 42% compared to December 2022, despite an overall decline in IT job listings, which were down 31% in January compared to December 2022.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

Castmagic: Turn your long form audio into ready to use content assets.

Opus AI: Repurpose long videos into top-quality shorts in one click using AI.

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Butternut AI: Create websites in 20 seconds with AI.

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AI GENERATED IMAGES

Unlikely Apple Products

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Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain

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