🥸 Artificial Imposter

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Happy Thursday, fellow humans. 👋

Today, we’re talking about AI’s potential to be misused & throwing it back to 2022 with some exciting Web3 news.

Let’s dive straight into it.

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🧵 In today's edition:

• 💥 AI and Web3, sitting in a tree…

• 🥸 Artificial Imposter

• 🤫 A quiet place

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

🤖 Top AI News

💥 AI and Web3, sitting in a tree…

Web3 is back! (powered by AI).

Microsoft and Aptos Labs join forces to explore the AI-Blockchain frontier, combining Aptos' fast blockchain with Microsoft's AI capabilities.

This relationship makes sense for a couple of reasons:

1. Microsoft’s AI models can be trained on Aptos’ verified data. Plus, Blockchain-based solutions can help with “verifying, time-stamping and attributing content to its source, thereby improving credibility in a distributed digital economy.”

2. Aptos can host its validator nodes on Microsoft Azure, making the system more reliable and secure.

Overall: Microsoft is looking to the future and predicts that AI will be infused into web3 solutions at a greater scale in the coming months and years.

The partnership aims to provide transparency, trust, and verification of AI-generated content, with blockchain-based solutions helping to improve credibility in a distributed digital economy.

Web3 alone couldn't generate much traction, but marrying it with AI could be a match made in heaven.

Read more: TechCrunch

🥸 Artificial Imposter

Jane Friedman is an experienced writer with numerous pieces on the media and publishing industry.

But recently, she found a stack of eBooks masquerading as her work on Amazon and Goodreads.

How did that happen? After being trained on years of her content, an AI system replicated her voice, producing counterfeit work indistinguishable from the real Jane. An Artificial Imposter, if you will 😏

The worst part? It was done without her consent.

News like this raises serious concerns about AI-generated content because it can potentially:

1. Damage one’s brand and mislead readers expecting one’s expertise.

2. Cost someone money (sponsorships, deals) for having their name on content they don’t stand by.

What’s the solution to AI pilfering someone’s persona?

According to Friedman, popular book sites like Amazon and Goodreads must:

• Establish guardrails

• Verify legitimacy before cataloging AI-generated books

• Allow authors to block fraudulent works

• Not force writers to police ceaseless AI infringement alone

Overall: Friedman won this round, leveraging her visibility to beat the bot. But countless other authors lack the influence to fight against AI's misuse.

This should be a cautionary tale for everyone, revealing the vulnerabilities in this chaotic AI era.

From music to art and now books, is anything safe from AI's appetite?

Read more: Mashable

🤫 A quiet place

A new study revealed that researchers were able to use an AI system to decrypt passwords by listening to keystrokes over Zoom.

Absolutely wild.

How did they do this?

1. Researchers first recorded laptop keyboard sounds on Zoom and smartphones, using different fingers and varying pressure.

2. They fed the data into a machine learning system to recognize each key's acoustic fingerprint.

The result? The AI identified keys correctly 95% of the time from smartphone recordings and 93% on Zoom.

Don’t worry - this is just a proof-of-concept and hasn’t been used by anyone to crack passwords (as far as we know 👀 ).

But as video conferencing and built-in microphones become ubiquitous, the acoustic eavesdropping threat rises exponentially.

Simple mitigation tactics we can use include biometric passwords, two-factor authentication, mixing upper and lower case letters, and avoiding typing passwords altogether.

AI has an immeasurable upside but can also be incredibly harmful in the wrong hands.

Stay safe, folks!

Read more: The Guardian

🤑 AI Fundraising News

Nuclearn.ai Raises $2.5M in Seed Funding to determine how to strategically deploy AI across its entertainment and media empire, focusing on improving in-person experiences at theme parks and reducing costs related to digital entertainment and filmmaking.

Cube3.AI Secures $8.2M in seed funding to Launch AI-Powered Blockchain Security App

🗞️ AI Quick-Bytes

What else is going on?

1. WeWork could head to the scrapyard of American dreams. There's a stark warning in there for AI.

2. Google says it will scrape publishers’ data for AI unless forced not to

3. Google’s redesigned Arts & Culture app includes an AI-generated postcards feature, Play tab

4. GoodNotes’ biggest update in four years brings AI-powered handwriting features and a digital marketplace

5. Amazon Is in talks to become an anchor investor in Arm IPO

6. Disney has a new Task Force to spread AI throughout its not-so-magic kingdom

🐦️ Tweet of the day

👂️ If you have some spare time, give this a listen!

And that does it for today's issue.

As always, thanks for reading. Have a great day, and see you next time! ✌️

— Haroon: (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

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