Learning Machines: Insights on AI from FT Strategies

Hello and welcome to Learning Machines, our monthly review of AI news that is most relevant, actionable and interesting for the media and publishing industry.

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Roses are red,

Violets are blue,?

A chatbot wrote this

Does it matter to you?

This month, we explore the question, “Should People Care if AI Writes the News?”. It’s already February, and a lot has happened in the world of AI. Last month, we wrote that the stakes for AI have never been higher in the context of a year of elections. Yet, technology continues to develop at pace, with several new product releases and signals of further investment. These two themes, misinformation and speed, collided in the recent Tucker Carlson / Vladimir Putin interview in which Putin said, “there’s no stopping Elon Musk”.?

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On misinformation, the UK’s AI Safety Institute has found that LLMs can deceive human users, produce biased outcomes and have inadequate safeguards against giving out harmful information. Part of the Institute’s research focuses on the ability of systems to create copies or upgraded versions of themselves. This research coincides with requests made to the UK government from some of the world’s biggest AI companies to speed up safety tests. Some tech companies are already attempting to reign in the dangers of deep fakes. Midjourney is considering banning people from using its software to make political images of Joe Biden and Donald Trump as part of an effort to avoid being used to distract from or misinform about the 2024 US presidential election. Meanwhile, Facebook said that it plans to label posts created using AI tools as part of a broader effort to combat election-year misinformation and OpenAI said it will add watermarks to images made with its platforms.

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Turning to the subject of rapid advancement, we saw OpenAI CEO Sam Altman signal an ambitious funding target of up to $7 trillion to boost chip-building capacity. At Davos, the FT reported last month that Altman was in talks with Middle Eastern investors to reduce reliance on Nvidia. The other AI company which was ‘the talk of Davos’ was Mistral. The FT reports that the French startup’s model is seen as one of the best available products in the market. That said, we are keeping our eye on the big players and Google recently launched Gemini, its latest generative AI solution. Its most advanced model, Gemini Ultra 1.0, will be offered as a chatbot, and integrated into the company’s suite of productivity tools such as Gmail, Docs and Sheets, through a premium subscription plan.

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Finally, some personal news. Next week, FT Strategies will launch a new programme in partnership with the Google News Initiative: AI Launchpad. Eight publishers from across the EMEA region will go on a five-month journey including identifying AI use cases across their business, launching live experiments and crafting a governance approach. We can’t wait to get started and will make sure to cascade any relevant learnings for the industry.?

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Thanks for reading,

Aliya

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