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oogle's Voice-Generating AI Is Now Indistinguishable From Humans
Anonymous Coward 6 hours ago 75
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A research paper published by Google this month -- which has not been peer reviewed -- details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text. The system is Google's second official generation of the technology, which consists of two deep neural networks. The first network translates the text into a spectrogram (pdf), a visual way to represent audio frequencies over time. That spectrogram is then fed into WaveNet, a system from Alphabet's AI research lab DeepMind, which reads the chart and generates the corresponding audio elements accordingly. The Google researchers also demonstrate that Tacotron 2 can handle hard-to-pronounce words and names, as well as alter the way it enunciates based on punctuation. For instance, capitalized words are stressed, as someone would do when indicating that specific word is an important part of a sentence. Quartz has embedded several different examples in their report that feature a sentence generated by AI along with a sentence read aloud from a human hired by Google. Can you tell which is the AI generated sample? |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| James Fallows |
The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like. |
| Lucy Hale |
I overanalyze things way too much, to the point where it affects my life. Like, when I'm talking to a boy, I'll overanalyze a text message he sent. And I have to think to myself, 'Just chill out. Some guy sent me a text message. That's all. Don't read something into it that's not there. Just be glad he sent you a text message!' |
| Charles Eames |
The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life. |
| Drew Gilpin Faust |
As a scholar, you don't want to repeat yourself, ever. You're supposed to say it once, publish it, and then it's published, and you don't say it again. If someone comes and gives a scholarly paper about something they've already published, that's just terrible. As a university president, you have to say the same thing over and over and over. |
| Robert Darnton |
Thanks to modern technology, we now can deliver every text in every research library to every citizen in our country, and to everyone in the world. If we fail to do so, we are not living up to our civic duty. |
| Shawn Fanning |
Nobody has ever built a reliable peer-to-peer service, where people can really access all the music they want in one location,... Once I got it into my head, I couldn't imagine the media space without one. |
| Lisa Gansky |
The mobile Web, location-based services, inexpensive and pervasive mobile apps, and new sorts of opportunities to access cars, bikes, tools, talent, and more from our neighbors and colleagues will propel peer-to-peer access services into market. |
| James Cameron |
I believe 3D is inevitable because it's about aligning our entertainment systems to our sensory system. We all have two eyes; we all see the world in 3D. And it's natural for us to want our entertainment in 3D as well. It's just getting the technology - it's really more the business model than the technology piece. We've solved the technology. |
| Gary Hamel |
A well-conceived product excels at what it does. It's close to being functionally flawless - like a Ziploc bag, a radio from Tivoli Audio, a Philips Sonicare toothbrush, a Nespresso coffee maker or Google's home page. |
| Pico Iyer |
The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. |
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Google Works Out a Fascinating, Slightly Scary Way For AI To Isolate Voices In a Crowd
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/google-works-out-a-fascinating-slightly-scary-way-for-ai-to-isolate-voices-in-a-crowd/
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Google researchers have developed a deep-learning system designed to help computers better identify and isolate individual voices within a noisy environment. As noted in a post on the company's Google Research Blog this week, a...
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Researchers Have Figured Out How To Fake News Video With AI
A team of computer scientists at the University of Washington have used artificial intelligence to render visually convincing videos of Barack Obama saying things he's said before, but in a totally new context. In a paper published this month, the researchers explained their methodology: Using a neural network trained on 17 hours of footage of the former U.S. president's weekly addresses, they were able to generate mouth shapes from arbitrary audio clips of Obama's voice. The shapes were then textured to photorealistic quality and overlaid onto Obama's face in a different "target" video. Finally, the researchers retimed the target video to move Obama's body naturally to the rhythm of the new audio track. In their paper, the res...
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Google's AI Now Creates Code Better Than its Creators
Google's mysterious AutoML program develops neural networks of its own. The company recently announced that the AI had duplicated itself with a more efficient code.
Google's automated machine learning system recently crafted machine-learning codes more efficient than the codes that built its own system. The (robot) student has now become the teacher. For the AutoML program, it seems as if humans are no longer a necessity.
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Contractors Lose Jobs After Hacking CIA's In-House Vending Machines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRepublic:
Today's vending machines are likely to be bolted to the floor or each other and are much more sophisticated -- possibly containing machine intelligence, and belonging to the Internet of Things (IoT). Hacking this kind of vending machine obviously requires a more refined approach. The type security professionals working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might conjure up, according to journalists Jason Leopold and David Mack, who first broke the story A Bunch Of CIA Contractors Got Fired For Stealing Snacks From Vending Machines. In their BuzzFeed post, the...
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Researchers Fool ReCAPTCHA With Google's Own Speech-To-Text Service
Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to trick Google's reCaptcha system by using Google's own speech-to-text service. "[The researchers] claim that their CAPTCHA-fooling method, unCaptcha, can fool Google's reCaptcha, one of the most popular CAPTCHA systems currently used by hundreds of thousands of websites, with a 90 percent success rate," reports Motherboard. From the report:
The researchers originally developed UnCaptcha in 2017, which uses Google's own free speech-to-text service to trick the system into thinking a robot is a human. It's an oroborus of bots: According to their paper, UnCaptcha downl...
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Is Google paying academics to only research topics it agrees with?
Google is being accused of using its funding power to push forward hundreds of research papers that support its agenda and business practices, particularly those that face criticism from regulators.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has seen thousands of emails detailing financial relationships between Google and at least a dozen university professors from top-ranking universities in the world.
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China Pilots a System That Rates Citizens on 'Social Credit Score' To Determine Eligibility For Jobs, Travel
Speculations have turned out be true. The Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens' social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used to create a so-called social credit score, which will determine whether individuals have access to services, from travel and education to loans and insurance cover. Some citizens -- such as lawyers and journalists -- will be more closely monitored. From a report on MIT Technology Review:
Planning documents apparently describe the system as being created to "allow the trustworthy to roa...
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Hundreds of Researchers From Harvard, Yale and Stanford Were Published in Fake Academic Journals
In the so-called "post-truth era," science seems like one of the last bastions of objective knowledge, but what if science itself were to succumb to fake news? From a report:
Over the past year, German journalist Svea Eckert and a small team of journalists went undercover to investigate a massive underground network of fake science journals and conferences. In the course of the investigation, which was chronicled in the documentary "Inside the Fake Science Factory," the team analyzed over 175,000 articles published in predatory journals and found hundreds of papers from academics at leading in...
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Google Says Almost All CPUs Since 1995 Vulnerable To 'Meltdown' And 'Spectre' Flaws
Google has just published details on two vulnerabilities named Meltdown and Spectre that in the company's assessment affect "every processor [released] since 1995." Google says the two bugs can be exploited to "to steal data which is currently processed on the computer," which includes "your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents." Furthermore, Google says that tests on virtual machines used in cloud computing environments extracted data from other customers using the same server. The bugs were discovered by Jann Horn, a security researcher with Google Project Zero, Google's elite security team. These are the ...
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This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-from-its-creators-to-cheat-at-its-appointed-task/
Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.” Clever girl!
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