Researchers find systems to counter deepfakes can be deceived

Researchers have found that systems designed to counter the increasing prevalence of deepfakes can be deceived.

The researchers, from the University of California - San Diego, first presented their findings at the WACV 2021 conference.

Shehzeen Hussain, a UC San Diego computer engineering PhD student and co-author on the paper, said:

"Our work shows that attacks on deepfake detectors could be a real-world threat.

More alarmingly, we demonstrate that it's...

10 February 2021 | Deepfakes

How can the public sector use AI to identify fraud?

Accountability and transparency are essential for public sector audits. The public sector is under a watchful eye to ensure finances are being managed ethically and appropriately, whilst also being responsible for providing early warnings of financial pressures or failures. Due to COVID measures, there is currently a huge volume of funds being distributed to individuals or companies from the public ‘purse’, placing increased pressure on audits to ensure the funds are being used for...

9 February 2021 | Fintech

Google is leaking AI talent following ethicist’s controversial firing

Some high-profile AI experts have departed Google after the controversial firing of leading ethicist Timnit Gebru.

Gebru was fired from Google after criticising the company’s practices in an email following a dispute over a paper she was told not to publish which questioned whether language models can be too big and whether they can increase prejudice and inequalities. In her email, Gebru also expressed frustration at the lack of progress in hiring women at...

5 February 2021 | Ethics

Learning the lessons of the past to fast-forward to the future of work

If you take a keen interest in technology and the economy, you may well have come across the term ‘fourth industrial revolution’ recently. This moniker has become a common label for the current period in which intelligent technologies such as AI, automation and robotics are becoming commonplace in our daily lives, and completely changing the nature of work. It’s not always clear, however, why it is described in this way, so let’s turn to the history books to find the...

3 February 2021 | Society

NHS will use AI to improve COVID-19 treatment and shorten hospital stays

The UK’s NHS (National Health Service) will use AI to help improve the outcome for COVID-19 patients and reduce their time spent in hospital.

While the UK’s vaccine rollout is among the fastest in the world – certainly in comparison to its European peers – a series of late lockdowns and initial lack of PPE equipment has put the health service under immense pressure and left the country with one of the highest COVID-19 deaths rates per capita.

The latest lockdown...

18 January 2021 | Healthcare

Police use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition increased 26% after Capitol raid

Clearview AI reports that police use of the company’s highly-controversial facial recognition system jumped 26 percent following the raid on the Capitol.

The facial recognition system relies on scraping the data of people from across the web without their explicit consent, a practice which has naturally raised some eyebrows—including the ACLU’s which called it a “nightmare scenario” for privacy.

Around three billion images are said to have been scraped for...

11 January 2021 | Face Recognition

OpenAI’s latest neural network creates images from written descriptions

OpenAI has debuted its latest jaw-dropping innovation, an image-generating neural network called DALL·E.

DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 which is trained to generate images from text descriptions.

“We find that DALL·E is able to create plausible images for a great variety of sentences that explore the compositional structure of language,“ OpenAI explains.

Generated images can range from drawings, to objects, and even manipulated...

6 January 2021 | Neural Network

Google is telling its scientists to give AI a ‘positive’ spin

Google has reportedly been telling its scientists to give AI a “positive” spin in research papers.

Documents obtained by Reuters suggest that, in at least three cases, Google’s researchers were requested to refrain from being critical of AI technology.

A “sensitive topics” review was established by Google earlier this year to catch papers which cast a negative light on AI ahead of their publication.

Google asks its scientists to consult with legal,...

24 December 2020 | Ethics

Facebook is developing a news-summarising AI called TL;DR

Facebook is developing an AI called TL;DR which summarises news into shorter snippets.

Anyone who’s spent much time on the web will know what TL;DR stands for⁠—but, for everyone else, it’s an acronym for “Too Long, Didn’t Read”.

It’s an understandable sentiment we’ve all felt at some point. People lead busy lives. Some outlets now even specialise in short, at-a-glance news.

The problem is, it’s hard to get the full picture of a story in just...

16 December 2020 | Facebook

EU human rights agency issues report on AI ethical considerations

The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) has issued a report on AI which delves into the ethical considerations which must be made about the technology.

FRA’s report is titled Getting The Future Right and opens with some of the ways AI is already making lives better—such as helping with cancer diagnosis, and even predicting where burglaries are likely to take place.

“The possibilities seem endless,” writes Michael O’Flaherty, Director of the FRA,...

14 December 2020 | Adoption