Deeper Learning

Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook

Late last year, we published a bombshell story about how sensitive images of people collected by Roomba vacuum cleaners ended up leaking online. These people had volunteered to test the products, but it had never remotely occurred to them that their data could end up leaking in this way. The story offered a fascinating peek behind the curtain at how the AI algorithms that control smart home devices are trained. 

The human cost: In the weeks since the story’s publication, nearly a dozen Roomba testers have come forward. They feel misled and dismayed about how iRobot, Roomba’s creator, handled their data. They say it wasn’t clear to them that the company would share test users’ data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices’ front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. Read more from my colleague Eileen Guo.

Bits and Bytes

Alarmed by AI chatbots, universities have started revamping how they teach
The college essay is dead, long live ChatGPT. Professors have started redesigning their courses to take into account that AI can write passable essays. In response, educators are shifting towards oral exams, group work, and handwritten assignments.  (The New York Times) 

Artists have filed a class action lawsuit against Stable Diffusion
A group of artists have filed a class action lawsuit against Sta­bil­ity.AI, DeviantArt, and Mid­jour­ney for using Stable Diffusion, an open sourced text-to-image AI model. The artists claim these companies stole their work to train the AI model. If successful, this lawsuit could force AI companies to compensate artists for using their work.

The artist’s lawyers argue that the “mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion” of copyrighted works could be worth roughly $5 bil­lion. By way of comparison, the thieves who carried out the biggest art heist ever made off with works worth a mere $500 million. 

Why are so many AI systems named after Muppets?
Finally, an answer to the biggest minor mystery around language models. ELMo, BERT, ERNIEs, KERMIT — a surprising number of large language models are named after Muppets. Many thanks to James Vincent for answering this question that has been bugging me for years. ​​(The Verge)

Before you go… A new MIT Technology Report about how industrial design and engineering firms are using generative AI is set to come out soon. Sign up to get notified when it’s available.