Worldcoin ignored initial order to stop iris scans in Kenya, records show

The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Kenya first instructed Worldcoin to stop collecting personal data in May.

I don’t know what to think about Worldcoin. Is it one more crypto project doomed to disappear or could it be a nasty exploitive project designed to corner identity by starting starting in Kenya. Imagine having to get orbed just to use local government services online! Fortunately Kenya is now ordering them to stop their exploitation; see the TechCrunch story, Worldcoin ignored initial order to stop iris scans in Kenya, records show.

He Created the Katamari Games, but They’re Rolling On Without Him – The New York Times

The New York Times has a nice story about Keita Takahashi. He Created the Katamari Games, but They’re Rolling On Without Him. Like many Japanese game designers he gets no royalties and has little say in the future of the game associated with him, Katamari Damacy.

The game itself is collection game where you roll a ever growing ball of things that you might see in a typical Japanese house. The balls will allow a prince to rebuild the stars accidentally destroyed by his father, King of All Cosmos. (The image above is of Takahashi as the King.) Rachael Hutchinson has a chapter in her book Japanese Culture Through Videogames about the game and Japan.

Takahashi has a new game coming out soon, to a T.

 

‘It was as if my father were actually texting me’: grief in the age of AI

People are turning to chatbot impersonations of lost loved ones to help them grieve. Will AI help us live after we’re dead?

The Guardian has a thorough story about the use of AI to evoke the dead, ‘It was as if my father were actually texting me’: grief in the age of AI. The story talks about how one can train an artificial intelligence on past correspondence to mimic someone who passed. One can imagine academic uses of this where we create clones of historical figures with which to converse. Do we have enough David Hume to create an interesting AI agent?

For all the advances in medicine and technology in recent centuries, the finality of death has never been in dispute. But over the past few months, there has been a surge in the number of people sharing their stories of using ChatGPT to help say goodbye to loved ones. They raise serious questions about the rights of the deceased, and what it means to die. Is Henle’s AI mother a version of the real person? Do we have the right to prevent AI from approximating our personalities after we’re gone? If the living feel comforted by the words of an AI bot impersonation – is that person in some way still alive?

The article mentions some of the ethical quandaries:

  • Do dead people have rights? Or do others have rights related to a dead person’s image, voice, and pattern of conversation?
  • Is it healthy to interact with an AI revivification of a close relative?

 

40 years of the Nintendo Famicom – the console that changed the games industry

Entering a crowded field, the Nintendo Famicom came to dominate the market in the 1980s, leaving a family orientated legacy that continues to be felt today

The Guardian has a good story on the 40th anniversary of the Nintendo Famicom, 40 years of the Nintendo Famicom – the console that changed the games industry The story quotes James Newman and also mentions Masayuki Uemura who Newman and I knew through the Replaying Japan conferences. Alas, Uemura, who was at Ritsumeikan after he retired from Nintendo, passed in 2021.

The story points out how Nintendo deliberately promoted the Famicom as a family machine that could be hooked up to the family TV (hence “Fami – com.) In various ways they wanted to legitimize gaming as a family experience. By contrast, when Nintendo brought the machine to North America it was remodelled to look like a VCR and called the Nintendo Entertainment System.

How Canada Accidentally Helped Crack Computer Translation

A technological whodunit—featuring Parliament, computer scientists, and a tipsy plane flight

Arun sent me a link to a neat story about How Canada Accidentally Helped Crack Computer Translation. The story is by Christine Mitchell and is in the Walrus (June 2023). It describes how IBM got ahold of a magnetic reel tape with 14 years of the Hansard – the translated transcripts of the Canadian Parliament. IBM went on to use this data trove to make advances in automatic translation.

The story mentions the politics of automated translation research in Canada. I have previously blogged about the Booths who were recruited by the NRC to Saskatchewan to work on automated translation. They were apparently pursuing a statistical approach like that IBM took later on, but their funding was cut.

Speaking of automatic translation, Canada had a computerized system, METEO for translating daily weather forecasts from Environment Canada. This ran from 1981 to 2001 and was an early successful implementation of automatic translation in the real world. It came out of work at the TAUM (Traduction Automatique à l’Université de Montréal) research group at the Université de Montréal that was set up in the late 1960s.

Bridging Divides – Research and Innovation

Thanks to my colleague Yasmeen, I was included in an important CFREF, Bridging Divides – Research and Innovation led by Anna Triandafyllidou at Toronto Metropolitan University. Some of the topics I hope to work on include how information technology is being used to surveil and manage immigrants. Conversely, how immigrants use information technology.

Auto-GPT

An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous. – Auto-GPT/README.md at master · Torantulino/Auto-GPT

From a video on 3 Quarks Daily on whether ChatGPT can prompt itself I discovered, Auto-GPT. Auto-GPT is powered by GPT-4. You can describe a mission and it will try to launch tasks, assess them, and complete the mission. Needless to say it was inevitable that someone would find a way to use ChatGPT or one of its relatives to try to complete complicated jobs including taking over the world, as Chaos-GPT claims to want to do (using Auto-GPT.)

How long will it be before someone figures out how to use these tools to do something truly nasty? I give it about 6 months before we get stories of generative AI being used to systematically harass people, or find information on how to harm people, or find ways to waste resources like the paperclip maximizer. Is it surprising that governments like Italy have banned ChatGPT?

 

U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers on virtual reality game to get people out of their seats

U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers to refine a virtual and mixed reality video game that can improve motor skills for older adults and sedentary people.

The Folio of the University of Alberta published a story about a trip to Japan that I and others embarked on, U of A computing scientists work with Japanese researchers on virtual reality game to get people out of their seats. Ritsumeikan invited us to develop research collaborations around gaming, language and artificial intelligence. Our visit was a chance to further the collaborations, like the one my colleagues Eleni Stroulia and Victor Fernandez Cervantes are developing with Thawmas Ruck around games for older adults. This inter-university set of collaborations build on projects I was involved in going back to 2011, including a conference (Replaying Japan) and a journal, the Journal of Replaying Japan.

The highlight was the signing of a Memorandum Of Understanding by the two presidents (of U of A and Ritsumeikan). I was also involved as was Professor Nakamura. May the collaboration thrive.

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

The Future of Life Institute is calling on AI labs to pause with a letter signed by over 1000 people (including myself), Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter – Future of Life Institute. The letter asks for a pause so that safety protocols can be developed,

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.

This letter to AI labs follows a number of essays and opinions that maybe we are going too fast and should show restraint. This in the face of the explosive interest in large language models after ChatGPT.

  • Gary Marcus wrote an essay in his substack on “AI risk ≠ AGI risk” arguing that just because we don’t have AGI doesn’t mean there isn’t risk associated with the Mediocre AI systems we do have.
  • Yuval Noah Harari has an opinion in the New York Times with the title, “You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills” where he talks about the dangers of AIs manipulating culture.

We have summoned an alien intelligence. We don’t know much about it, except that it is extremely powerful and offers us bedazzling gifts but could also hack the foundations of our civilization. We call upon world leaders to respond to this moment at the level of challenge it presents. The first step is to buy time to upgrade our 19th-century institutions for a post-A.I. world and to learn to master A.I. before it masters us.

It is worth wondering whether the letter will have an effect, and if it doesn’t, why we can’t collectively slow down and safely explore AI.

Signing of MOU

See https://twitter.com/PTJCUA1/status/1630853467605721089

Yesterday I was part of a signing ceremony for a Memorandum of Agreement between Ritsumeikan University and the University of Alberta. I and the President of the University of Alberta (Bill Flanagan) signed on behalf of U of A. The MOU described our desire to build on our collaborations around Replaying Japan. We hope to build collaborations around artificial intelligence, games, learning, and digital humanities. KIAS and the AI4Society signature area have been supporting this research collaboration.

Today (March 2nd, 2023) we are having a short conference at Ritsumeikan that included a panel about our collaboration, at which I talked, and a showcase of research in game studies at Ritsumeikan.