🤖 AI Brief: Nvidia's text-to-video, ChatGPT's GDPR woes, and AI music bans

Author

Michael Zhang
April 23, 2023

Wow. It’s been an action-packed week for AI news. I had over 500 saved tabs in a Chrome browser open at one point to track the flood of AI news heading our way.

A few cups of ☕️ and a brisk walk in the morning helped create clarity around the most important events of the week.

Let me know if you think I missed anything! (I respond to every reader email).

In this issue:

  • 📽️ Nvidia’s text-to-video model (a must see)

  • 🇪🇺 ChatGPT’s compliance challenges with GDPR

  • 🎤 AI music and a banned Drake AI song

  • 💰️ Companies want to charge for providing AI training data

  • 🏃‍♂️ Google’s “cringe-worthy” Bard still playing catchup

  • and more

📽️ Nvidia’s Text-to-Video Model

Credit: Nvidia

The mad scientists at Nvidia showed off their latest project this week: a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) capable of high quality videos (2048 × 1280) via a text-to-video model, up to 4.7 seconds long. 🤯 

Why does this matter? The scientists developed using open source Stable Diffusion model, then further tuned it on a set of images using DreamBooth, another framework for tuning text-to-image models. Open-source tech is enabling all kinds of innovation here, showing how we’ve only just begun to scrape the surface of what’s possible.

🇪🇺 ChatGPT’s EU GDPR Woes

It’s not just about ChatGPT’s ban in Italy, which is running short on time to resolve (they have until April 30).

Numerous legal experts are calling ChatGPT’s ability to comply with GDPR “next to impossible.” GDRP is the grounds on which Italy temporarily banned ChatGPT, and it’s the basis for investigations in France, Germany, and Ireland as well.

At the heart of the matter: training data, gathered without user consent, was used to generate the models that power the chatbot. But how can this training data be “removed” if users ask? Experts think that’s not quite possible as ChatGPT isn’t a Google search index.

Margaret Mitchell, an AI researcher and ethics lead at Hugging Face, asserts that "OpenAI is going to find it near-impossible to identify individuals' data and remove it from its models."

🎤 AI music bans

An AI-generated track mimicking Drake and The Weeknd’s voices has been taken down from numerous platforms. We reported on this issue here, but subsequent reporting by other publications has added great color and context.

Here is what you should know:

  • Universal Music Group (UMG) filed a complaint resulting in the removal of a viral AI-generated song that imitates the voices of Drake and The Weeknd from major streaming platforms, alleging copyright infringement.

  • UMG argued in a statement that training generative AI on artists' music constitutes "both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law."

The Verge did an excellent writeup as well that summarizes the legal conundrum here:

“The first legal problem with using AI to make a song with vocals that sound like they’re from Drake is that the final product isn’t a copy of anything. Copyright law is very much based on the idea of making copies — a sample is a copy, as is an interpolation of a melody. Music copyright [is] all based on copies of actual songs. Fake Drake isn’t a copy of any song in the Drake catalog, so there’s just no dead-ahead copyright claim to make. There’s no copy.”

This area is going to have a lot of developments in the coming months — so watch this space.

💰️ Pay us for using data to train AI, companies say

Reddit’s data, with its vast libraries of user-generated content, has formed the backbone of several AI training datasets, including ChatGPT.

Now Reddit and Stackoverflow want AI companies to pay for accessing their data. These APIs, which used to be free, will now cost money.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview with the NYTimes. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Look out for this to become the norm across many sites (Twitter is now a paid API as well).

But all this has some users asking: where’s our compensation for writing the content? Unfortunately, the terms of service with these sites leave users unlikely to see any monetary benefit.

🏃‍♂️ Google tries to play catchup

Google just can’t catch a break. Leakers from inside the company continue to share stories about how the company just isn’t getting its act together at a time when its future is under threat.

A report from Bloomberg with 18 employees calls out damning details:

  • AI ethics members felt “disempowered and demoralized” at Google’s rushed decision to launch Bard

  • Internal evaluations painted Bard as “cringe-worthy” and a “pathological liar”

To no one’s surprise, Bard’s unveiling stumbled out the gate, with basic facts incorrect in their preview video and journalists giving tepid reviews in their first takes.

Google’s now trying to course correct, going on the offensive with plans to add AI across their entire product suite. And the panic at Google has finally forced two competing AI teams to merge into Google Deepmind.

⭐️ Other headlines of note:

🧪 Science experiments and things to try:

📕 Notable research papers in the past week:

  • LLMs are learning to program with natural language [Link]

  • Analysis of why ChatGPT falls short in comprehension [Link]

  • Using LLMs to create data lakes [Link]

  • Just 51.5% of LLM search engine responses fully supported by citations [Link]

  • Gisting enables 26x compression of LLM prompts [Link]

And… that’s it for this week! Remember: your feedback is important and I respond to every email, so hit “reply” any time you have thoughts!

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