Researchers

Researchers Say the Deepfake Biden Robocall Was Likely Made With Tools From AI Startup ElevenLabs

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Last week, some voters in New Hampshire received an AI-generated robocall impersonating President Biden, telling them not to vote in the state’s primary election. It’s not clear who was responsible for the call, but two separate teams of audio experts tell WIRED it was likely created using technology from voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs markets its … Read more

Dogs wag their tails. Humans might be the reason, researchers say.

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Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave Taylor Hersh was watching a YouTube video of wolves a few years ago when the animal researcher noticed something curious. The wolves hardly wagged their tails. It was a stark difference to the frequent wagging she saw in most pet dogs, which made her curious about what … Read more

Anthropic researchers find that AI models can be trained to deceive

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Most humans learn the skill of deceiving other humans. So can AI models learn the same? Yes, the answer seems — and terrifyingly, they’re exceptionally good at it. A recent study co-authored by researchers at Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, investigated whether models can be trained to deceive, like injecting exploits into otherwise secure computer … Read more

Researchers Uncover the ‘Most Sophisticated’ iPhone Exploit Ever

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What happens when you hack a cybersecurity researcher? Kaspersky, a Moscow-based security firm, presented new details regarding zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple products on Wednesday. Kaspersky researchers are calling this the most sophisticated attack they’ve ever seen, exposing a previously unknown hardware feature. The attack has been front of mind for Kaspersky researchers because it’s been … Read more

Researchers say Bing made up facts about European elections

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Researchers found Microsoft’s chatbot on Copilot provided false and misleading information about European elections.  Human rights organization AlgorithmWatch said in a report that it asked Bing Chat — recently rebranded as Copilot — questions about recent elections held in Switzerland and the German states of Bavaria and Hesse. It found that one-third of its answers … Read more

Researchers Made an IQ Test for AI, Found They’re All Pretty Stupid

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There’s been a lot of talk about AGI lately—artificial general intelligence—the much-coveted AI development goal that every company in Silicon Valley is currently racing to achieve. AGI refers to a hypothetical point in the future when AI algorithms will be able to do most of the jobs that humans currently do. According to this theory … Read more

Vietnam ramps up South China Sea island expansion, researchers say

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HANOI (Reuters) – Vietnam has been ramping up its dredging and landfill work in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, creating another 330 acres of land since December last year, a U.S. think tank said in a report. The expansion, much larger than 120 acres it had created between 2012 and 2022, made … Read more

Security researchers observed ‘deliberate’ takedown of notorious Mozi botnet

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Security researchers say they have observed what they believe is a takedown of the notorious Mozi botnet that infiltrated more than a million Internet of Things devices worldwide. In research shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication on Tuesday, researchers at cybersecurity company ESET say that they witnessed the “sudden demise” of Mozi during an investigation … Read more

Google researchers use off-the-shelf headphones to measure heart rate

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Typical heart rate monitoring in wearable tech, like smart watches or wireless earbuds, relies at least partially on photoplethysmography (PPG), which uses light pulses to measure blood activity. It works generally well, but it has its limitations. Google scientists wrote in a new research blog spotted by 9to5Google yesterday that they had tried a different … Read more

AI titans throw a (tiny) bone to AI safety researchers

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The Frontier Model Forum, an industry body focused on studying “frontier” AI models along the lines of GPT-4 and ChatGPT, today announced that it’ll pledge $10 million toward a new fund to advance research on tools for “testing and evaluating the most capable AI models.” The fund, says the Frontier Model Forum — whose members … Read more