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Daily Archives: September 16, 2024

DuckDuckGo Joins AI Chat, Promises Enhanced Anonymity

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Tech Republic: “DuckDuckGo, a search company, launched a free and anonymous AI Chat service in June 2024. AI Chat joins DuckAssist, which generates answers based on Wikipedia, as a way to explore topics with AI. AI Chat operates with the widely used prompt-and-response process popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. But DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat seeks to minimize potential privacy concerns by design. AI Chat offers anonymous access: No account, username, email address, or password needed. DuckDuckGo promises that your prompts and information will not be used to train any of the AI models. This means you shouldn’t worry about content from your queries being embedded in a response delivered to other people. As of September 2024, AI Chat lets you choose to chat with any of four chat models:

  • GPT-4o mini from OpenAI.
  • Claude 3 Haiku from Anthropic.
  • Llama 3.1 70B, an open-source model from Meta.
  • Mixtral 8x7B, an open-source model from Mistral AI, a French company.

You may switch between models at any time, allowing you to compare responses. Overall, DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat provides a simple and free way to interact with four different large language models anonymously.”

(Dis)Information Wars

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(Dis)Information Wars. Adrian Casillas, Maryam Farboodi, Layla Hashemi, Maryam Saeedi, and Steven Wilson NBER Working Paper No. 32896 September 2024 Over the past decade, social media platforms have emerged as prominent vehicles for displaying dissent. In response, various actors have increasingly spread fake news on these platforms to impair the opposition—the (dis)information war. We analyze… Continue Reading

Scientists just figured out how many chemicals enter our bodies from food packaging

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Washington Post: “Shrink-wrap sealed around a piece of raw meat. Takeout containers filled with restaurant leftovers. Plastic bottles filled with soft drinks. These are just a few types of food packaging that surround humans every day. And a new study released Monday shows the chemical toll of all that wrapping — and how it might… Continue Reading

FBI Publishes 2023 Cryptocurrency Fraud Report

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“The FBI on September 9 released its Cryptocurrency Fraud Report for 2023. In 2023, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 69,000 complaints from the public regarding cyber-enabled crime and financial fraud involving the use of cryptocurrency, with over $5.6 billion in reported losses. Criminal actors exploit cryptocurrencies for all schemes, to include tech… Continue Reading

Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior

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Ars Technica: “On Thursday, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison shared his vision for an AI-powered surveillance future during a company financial meeting, reports Business Insider. During an investor Q&A, Ellison described a world where artificial intelligence systems would constantly monitor citizens through an extensive network of cameras and drones, stating this would ensure both police and… Continue Reading

Atlas of Intangibles

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“Atlas of Intangibles is a data experience designed to highlight the rich, interconnected web of sensory information that lies beneath our everyday encounters. Showcasing sensory data collected by me around the city of London through score-based data walks, the digital experience allows viewers to choose specific themes and explore related data as views — journeys,… Continue Reading

Google Serves AI Slop as Top Result for One of the Most Famous Paintings in History

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404 Media: “The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history. Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above the list of… Continue Reading

“Model collapse” threatens to kill progress on generative AIs

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Big Think: When AI eats its own product, it gets sick. Key Takeaways Generative AI exploded in popularity when OpenAI released ChatGPT. A paper published in Nature looked at what happens when AI is trained on “synthetic data,” or content created by an AI rather than humans. Flaws in the synthetic data led to even… Continue Reading