Oct 27, 2021

7 Posts

Illustration of Andrew Ng dressed as a panda holding a bag full of candy
Oct 27, 2021

The Batch: Halloween Special! Monsters of AI Including Tech Giants, Explosive Drones, Surveillance Democracies, Foundation Models

On Halloween, the veil lifts between the spirit and AI worlds, allowing the two to pass through one another. The resulting paranormal — or, as AI practitioners call it, paragaussian — phenomena raise questions...
Illustration of Andrew Ng dressed as a panda holding a bag full of candy
Oct 27, 2021

When the AI and Spirit Worlds Collide

On Halloween, the veil lifts between the spirit and AI worlds, allowing the two to pass through one another. The resulting paranormal — or, as AI practitioners call it, paragaussian — phenomena raise questions like these...
Illustration showing a witch cooking a copy of the Mona Lisa wearing a witch hat)
Oct 27, 2021

Artistry Is Obsolete: Is AI Making Human Artists Obsolete?

Is human creativity being replaced by the synthetic equivalent? The fear: AI is cranking out increasingly sophisticated visual, musical, and literary works. AI-generated media will flood the market, squeezing out human artists and depriving the world of their creativity.
Illustration showing a kid being followed during Trick-or-treating
Oct 27, 2021

Democracies Embrace Surveillance: AI Increasingly Spies on Citizens of Western Democracies

What if AI-enabled monitoring isn’t just for dictators and despots?The fear: Under the pretext of maintaining law and order, even countries founded on a commitment to individual rights allow police to take advantage of smart-city infrastructure and smart-home devices.
Halloween family portrait showing the inheritance of some spooky characteristics
Oct 27, 2021

New Models Inherit Old Flaws: Foundation models can pass along biases to their fine-tuned progeny.

Is AI becoming inbred? The fear: The best models increasingly are fine-tuned versions of a small number of so-called foundation models that were pretrained on immense quantities of data scraped from the web.
A group of bats throwing missiles from the night sky
Oct 27, 2021

Killer Robots Are Here: Are AI-Powered Weapons the Future of Warfare?

War is already bad enough. What happens when human combatants are replaced by machines?
Illustration of Thumbzilla destroying a city and shooting lightning from its mouth (T-Rex with Facebook thumbs up)
Oct 27, 2021

Don’t Be Evil?!: AI Could Tempt Corporations to Ignore Social Responsibility

Tech companies generally try to be (or to appear to be) socially responsible. Would some rather let AI’s negative impacts slide?

Subscribe to The Batch

Stay updated with weekly AI News and Insights delivered to your inbox