AI’s Spin on Robot Learning

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Artists’ New Tool to Fight Image Generators

Cyanide and ricin won’t poison AI models, but a new tool called Nightshade can—and it could change the way big AI companies interact with artists.

Nightshade—introduced on Monday by the MIT Technology Review—is a tool intended to help artists fight back against AI image generators that were trained on their artwork without permission.

How it works: Prior to uploading their art online, an artist can use Nightshade to add invisible pixels to their image. When AI models (like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, or Midjourney) are trained on data sets which include these “poisoned” samples, they get seriously confused—and believe that images depict things they actually don’t (i.e. “poisoned” data sets can trick models into learning, for instance, that images of dogs depict cats).

Because the corrupted images look identical to benign images with matching text prompts, Nightshade “attacks” disable image generators’ ability to generate meaningful images (e.g. prompting a model to generate an image of a cat will result in one of a dog instead). 

Big impact: In the absence of AI copyright regulation, Nightshade is a tool artists can use to fight back against AI companies. If enough artists engage in data poisoning, the power could shift in favor of artists—and AI companies may have to start coughing up some royalties.

Apple’s AI Plans

While OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google have been busy rolling out new AI innovations, Apple’s been quietly sitting on the sidelines. But a new Bloomberg report reveals that Apple may be cooking up some generative AI plans.

The TL;DR:

• Apple executives were caught off guard by last year’s AI wave, a fact that’s widely considered “a pretty big miss internally”, according to Bloomberg.

• Scrambling to make up for lost momentum, Apple plans to ramp up its spendings on AI development—to $1 billion a year.

• AI integrations into Siri, Apple Music playlists, auto-complete features in Messenger, and developer tool Xcode are also in the works.

Zoom out: Unlike other Big Tech titans who are focusing on building foundational models, Apple’s approach to AI is product-focused. The company keeps emphasizing its goal of running AI on-device (eliminating the need for expensive cloud servers that raise privacy concerns). iOS 17’s new autocorrect feature, which runs directly on the iPhone, gives a small taste of how Apple plans to embed AI into its hardware.

Either way, Apple already lost first-mover advantage in the AI race, which begs the question: When Apple’s AI products finally do hit the market, will they make up for the lag?

Everything else:

• Chinese researchers developed Woodpecker, a solution to AI’s hallucination problem.

• OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft are teaming up on AI safety. 

• Google Pixel’s new face-altering AI photo editing tool is sparking serious controversy.

• Bill Gates believes that generative AI has reached its ceiling.

• YouTube now lets you make your own playlist art with the help of AI.

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