5 things about AI you may have missed today: Congress demands deepfake redressal, Google to invest in Character.AI, more

AI Roundup: Congress asks Maharashtra government to prepare legal, regulatory framework to deal with deepfakes. Google is in talks to invest in Character.AI, the popular chatbot platform.

Know what’s happening in the AI universe today, November 11. (Pixabay)

Diwali is almost here, and while India is all set to enter the festive weekend, the artificial intelligence space is ever so buzzing. In the first incident, Maharashtra Congress asked the state government to intervene and set up a committee to create a legal, regulatory framework to deal with the issue of deepfakes. In another incident, Google is currently in talks to invest capital worth hundreds of millions of dollars into the popular character-based AI chatbot platform Character.AI. This and more in today's AI roundup. Let us take a closer look.

Congress demands Maharashtra govt to deal with deepfakes

The Maharashtra Congress is urging the state government to establish a committee to develop a legal and regulatory framework for addressing deepfakes created by AI, reported PTI. The party emphasizes the need for a dedicated mechanism to identify and uncover deepfakes. This call comes in response to the circulation of a deepfake video featuring actress Rashmika Mandanna on social media, which has sparked criticism from various politicians and celebrities.

“Celebrities like Rashmika Mandanna and some international politicians have borne the brunt of deepfake attacks, and such a situation can also malign the common man and destroy him for life,” PTI translated the post by the Congress leader, which was written in Marathi.

Google may invest in Character.AI

Google is reportedly in discussions to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Character.AI, an AI chatbot startup that has become very popular, according to a report by Reuters. The investment, potentially structured as convertible notes, aims to support Character.AI in training models and meeting user demand. This investment would further enhance the existing partnership between Character.AI and Google, where the startup utilizes Google's cloud services and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for model training. Character.AI enables users to interact with virtual versions of celebrities and create their chatbots and AI assistants, offering a subscription model at $9.99 per month for priority access to chatbots.

A Chinese AI startup has hoarded 18 months of Nvidia chips

A China-based AI startup, 01.AI, went on a shopping spree of high-end Nvidia AI chips earlier this year to secure an ample supply before the US government imposed a ban on trade, a Bloomberg report revealed. The move was preemptive, ensuring access to Nvidia's advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI model training, despite the ban. 01.AI founder and CEO Kai-Fu Lee acquired enough Nvidia chips to sustain its needs for roughly the next 18 months. Lee, also the CEO of venture capital fund Sinovation Ventures, mentioned this during a Bloomberg Television interview, noting that the startup's valuation exceeded $1 billion in less than eight months since its founding earlier in the year.

AI protection was almost a 'deal breaker' in actors' strike, says SAG-AFTRA officials

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the chief negotiator for the SAG-AFTRA union, highlighted the battle for actor protection against generative AI was still being fought "literally the last day, in the final hours of the negotiations”, reports USA Today.

The negotiations for AI protections played a crucial role in reaching a three-year contract agreement between the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), revealed Crabtree-Ireland. The SAG-AFTRA national board has overwhelmingly approved the tentative deal, which now awaits final ratification through a vote by the union general membership within the next 21 days.

Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo on threats posed by AI

Writing in The Guardian, the 2019 Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo highlighted that the rapid development of ChatGPT and other similar AI models have raised concerns about its potential impact on the writing industry. Its ability to generate human-quality text has led to fears that writers may become obsolete, and this has prompted legal action from both the Writers Guild of America and a group of novelists. These AI models are producing “Imitation that appears to be original writing”, she said.

“From my experiments, it's obvious that ChatGPT's current level of literary sophistication is weak – it is cliche-prone and generally unconvincing – but who knows how it will develop? Copyright issues aside, we have to ask ourselves: what will be lost when algorithms replace human creativity?” Evaristo told The Guardian.