NEW RESOURCES

WRAL: WRAL announces public preview of AI-powered archives platform. “WRAL Archives uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to automatically extract metadata from media assets, including facial sentiment, audio transcription, logo identification, subject demographics, object identification, weather conditions and much more.”

ESCAP: New index reveals increasing risk in food systems across countries in Asia and the Pacific. “ESCAP and the WFP Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific are launching the INsights on Food SystEm Risks (INFER) Framework, a data-driven approach for assessing multidimensional risks to food systems. INFER integrates up-to-date understanding of food systems with well-established concepts of risk based on three dimensions: hazard and exposure, vulnerability, and lack of adaptive capacity.”

EVENTS

Engadget: TikTok’s first live ‘global music event’ will feature Cardi B and Charlie Puth. “Dubbed as the platform’s first ‘live global music event,’ TikTok In The Mix will take place in Mesa, Arizona on December 10. The headliners are Cardi B, Niall Horan, Anitta and Charlie Puth, all of whom are popular figures on TikTok. The service says there will be surprise guests and performances by emerging artists, some of whom are involved in the TikTok Elevate program for up and coming musicians.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PetaPixel: Google’s New Image Verification Tool Can Help Spot AI Fakes. “Google’s ‘About This Image’ tool, announced last May during Google I/O, combs an image’s metadata to find context and identify if it’s an AI fake or not. The tool is now rolling out as part of Google’s updated search tools.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

MIT Technology Review: This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI. “The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to ‘poison’ this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth.”

TechCrunch: Google is actively looking to insert different types of ads in its generative AI search. “Google confirmed on its earnings call that it is working on different ad formats for its generative AI-powered search experience — Google shared some ideas earlier this year and the mention in the earnings call could indicate that a rollout could happen sooner rather than later.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai doesn’t understand Google’s privacy controls. “Like a lot of Google court cases, this case has most of the records sealed so that embarrassing comments and testimony about the reality of Google’s business don’t reach the public. The Register noticed that a transcript of the expert’s video deposition is public, though, so we can see just a glimpse of what is going on in this case.”

The Guardian: National Library of Australia says yes to Indigenous voice referendum memorabilia. “Australia’s national library is urging Australians not to dump the T-shirts, posters, badges, fridge magnets and other campaign material they acquired during the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum campaign, and consider donating the items to the national archives instead. The National Library of Australia is seeking material from both sides of the campaign, including examples of misinformation and images depicting the conflict in communities in the lead up to the 14 October poll.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Verge: Microsoft fixes the Excel feature that was wrecking scientific data. “In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Yesterday, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that.”

University of Copenhagen: Strong AI skills significantly raise salaries. “Some professional competencies and skills are worth more than others. A new study maps the value of 962 specific skills and shows that knowledge about artificial intelligence (AI) in particular is in high demand today. On average, AI skills increase remuneration by 21 percent.” (translated from Danish.) Good afternoon, Internet…

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