Another week, more AI angst. While the Meta AI scandal is not going away any time soon, this week it is AI translation that’s causing the issues—specifically, academic publishing giant Taylor & Francis’s decision to use AI translation to bring research to an English-language audience.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
While the technical aspects of this fascinate me (Taylor & Francis offers more detail here)—getting the subtle differences between carefully chosen technical terms exactly right is somewhat different from choosing the right adjective for describing sunrise, you might think—it is the use of AI by large firms that has again angered writers’ groups.
You will remember that last year, a survey by the Society of Authors in the UK found that four out of ten translators said AI had reduced their income. And that was a year ago.
Musk Merges Platforms
Other AI news includes the announcement that xAI has bought the social media platform X, bringing the two under Elon Musk’s same umbrella. The intention is perfectly clear: the constantly updating social media feed from the platform formerly known as Twitter will become a constantly updating data feed for the Grok AI platform.
The price paid was $33 billion in stock. This retained a valuation similar to Musk’s original purchase price, with that $33 billion figure made up of $45 billion in company value and $12 billion in debt.
Ghibli-Style Images Spark Concern
And we finish this triptych with questions being asked about how OpenAI’s new image generator is able to produce such perfectly realized pictures in the style of beloved Japanese animator Studio Ghibli. The internet has been flooded with images made in the likeness of the iconic studio. Interestingly, “in the style of” AI generation is not against copyright law. But how that generation is possible raises questions.
This comes as OpenAI has relaxed its guardrails around what kinds of images it will allow to be created. Prompts involving hateful symbols and certain physical characteristics are no longer being refused.
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