Nightshade, le logiciel qui « empoisonne l’IA » est désormais disponible. Destiné aux artistes qui en ont ras la banane que les modèles d’IA s’entraînent sur leurs œuvres, la logique de Nightshade est très simple : retourner l’IA contre l’IA.Développé par des chercheurs de l’Université de Chicago, le logiciel modifie subtilement l’image au niveau du pixel pour embrouiller complètement la machine.
▻https://venturebeat.com/ai/nightshade-the-free-tool-that-poisons-ai-models-is-now-available-for-ar
Oui, alors gaffe : ça installe 5,7Go de modèles au premier démarrage, sans que la documentation n’indique où on les retrouvera (sur mon Mac, c’est dans mon dossier d’utilisateur, dans un dossier masque .Glaze). Et traiter une seule image prend entre 30 minutes et 3 heures.
J’ai pas eu la patience de voir à quoi ressemblait le résultat.
NetEase has acquired Detroit: Become Human maker Quantic Dream | VentureBeat
▻https://venturebeat.com/games/netease-has-acquired-detroit-become-human-maker-quantic-dream
Chinese game publisher and internet firm NetEase has agreed to acquire Quantic Dream, the maker of narrative games such as Detroit: Become Human, Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain.
The purchase price was not disclosed. The deal is a follow-up to a minority investment that NetEase made in Quantic Dream in 2019.
#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #bussiness #netease #netease_games #quantic_dream #rachat #jeu_vidéo_detroit_become_human #jeu_vidéo_beyond_two_souls #jeu_vidéo_heavy_rain #david_cage #guillaume_de_fondaumière #chine #europe #william_ding #culture_toxique #jeu_vidéo_star_wars #ressources_humaines #minorités
Blizzard acquires Spellbreak studio Proletariat to bolster World of Warcraft | VentureBeat
▻https://venturebeat.com/2022/06/29/blizzard-acquires-spellbreak-studio-proletariat-to-bolster-world-of-war
Blizzard Entertainment has acquired Spellbreak maker Proletariat to beef up the staff on its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.
Under the deal, Boston-based Proletariat will become part of Blizzard, and its team of 100 people will begin working on World of Warcraft, including the Dragonflight expansion coming later this year. Spellbreak, a battle royale game where wizards and witches cast spells at each other, will be sunset. (The company announced this news yesterday.)
Le développeur Proletariat va fermer son jeu vidéo de type Battle Royale dans un univers d’Heroic Fantasy au profit de développements avec Blizzard :
On the future of Spellbreak — Spellbreak
▻https://go.playspellbreak.com/blog/spellbreak-future
After more than four years of elemental magic and spell combinations, we’ve made the decision to end development of Spellbreak. The servers will be shut down as of early 2023. Thank you to the millions of players who have joined us in the Hollow Lands since 2018; it’s been an amazing journey.
TEST SPELLBREAK : un BATTLE ROYALE qui vaut le détour ? ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwpdNKK6TY8
8 sept. 2020 Près de 2 ans après son annonce et de longues phases d’alpha et de beta fermée, Spellbreak débarque finalement sur toutes nos machines. Ce Battle Royale free-to-play, mettant en scène des sorciers se tirant la bourre à coup de boules de feu ou de projections de rocher, a de quoi attirer le quidam lassé des pétoires traditionnelles. Le concept est séduisant, mais au-delà de ses joutes usant du maniement des éléments, qu’apporte Spellbreak à la formule éprouvée du BR ? Notre critique !
#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #activision_blizzard #blizzard #proletariat #jeu_vidéo_world_of_warcraft #jeu_vidéo_spellbreak #acquisition #business #finance #vicarious_visions #jeu_vidéo_diablo
Despite its beautiful Ori games, Moon Studios is called an ’oppressive’ place to work | VentureBeat
▻https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/18/despite-its-beautiful-ori-games-moon-studio-is-called-an-oppressive-pla
Gaming fans know Moon Studios for its amazing Ori games with beautiful art and emotional stories. But a number of current and former employees consider the Ori studio an oppressive place to work. That is according to GamesBeat’s interviews with Moon developers.
Franciska Csongrady sur Twitter :
▻https://twitter.com/TigrMoth/status/1505276733771112449
I worked at Moon Studios for two years. I was the only woman on the story team. I struggle to find the words to express what a soul-destroying experience it was to work with the heads of the studio, Thomas and Gennadiy.
The whole studio is built on the lie that Quality justifies everything. Verbal abuse. Crunch. Public humiliation. But it just wears you down, and burns you out. Burnt out people do not produce quality.
Anything good that you had made before they had killed your creative spark was used to lure new, unwitting devs in, to fill the places of the friends you watched leave, one by one.
Please, don’t be fooled. Don’t perpetuate the problem by working for places like Moon. We have to stop the defeatist mentality that this is just what the industry is like. There are better places out there. You deserve better.
#jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo #moon_studios #jeu_vidéo_ori #culture_toxique #ressources_humaines #encadrement #turnover #jeu_vidéo_blind_forest #jeu_vidéo_ori_and_the_will_of_the_wisps #thomas_mahler #gennadiy_korol #oppression #activision_blizzard #riot_games #ubisoft #ea #electronic_arts #microsoft #succès #violence_verbale #micromanagement #crunch #glassdoor #cd_projekt_red #jeu_vidéo_cyberpunk_2077 #sean_murray #hello_games #jeu_vidéo_no_man_s_sky #salaires #rémunération #primes #royalties #crédits #santé_mentale #santé_psychique #stress_post_traumatique #viol
Amazon shifts Lumberyard to open source 3D game engine supported by 20 companies | VentureBeat
▻https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/06/amazons-lumberyard-becomes-an-open-source-3d-game-engine-with-support-f
The Open 3D Foundation will support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is contributing an updated version of the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.
#open_3D_engine #o3de #open_3d_foundation #amazon_lumberyard #logiciel_libre #open_source #développement_informatique #jeu_vidéo #jeux_vidéo
“I started crying”: Inside Timnit Gebru’s last days at Google | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/16/1014634/google-ai-ethics-lead-timnit-gebru-tells-story
By now, we’ve all heard some version of the story. On December 2, after a protracted disagreement over the release of a research paper, Google forced out its ethical AI co-lead, Timnit Gebru. The paper was on the risks of large language models, AI models trained on staggering amounts of text data, which are a line of research core to Google’s business. Gebru, a leading voice in AI ethics, was one of the only Black women at Google Research.
The move has since sparked a debate about growing corporate influence over AI, the long-standing lack of diversity in tech, and what it means to do meaningful AI ethics research. As of December 15, over 2,600 Google employees and 4,300 others in academia, industry, and civil society had signed a petition denouncing the dismissal of Gebru, calling it “unprecedented research censorship” and “an act of retaliation.”
The company’s star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models, which are key to Google’s business.
Gebru is known for foundational work in revealing AI discrimination, developing methods for documenting and auditing AI models, and advocating for greater diversity in research. In 2016, she cofounded the nonprofit Black in AI, which has become a central resource for civil rights activists, labor organizers, and leading AI ethics researchers, cultivating and highlighting Black AI research talent.
Then in that document, I wrote that this has been extremely disrespectful to the Ethical AI team, and there needs to be a conversation, not just with Jeff and our team, and Megan and our team, but the whole of Research about respect for researchers and how to have these kinds of discussions. Nope. No engagement with that whatsoever.
I cried, by the way. When I had that first meeting, which was Thursday before Thanksgiving, a day before I was going to go on vacation—when Megan told us that you have to retract this paper, I started crying. I was so upset because I said, I’m so tired of constant fighting here. I thought that if I just ignored all of this DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] hypocrisy and other stuff, and I just focused on my work, then at least I could get my work done. And now you’re coming for my work. So I literally started crying.
You’ve mentioned that this is not just about you; it’s not just about Google. It’s a confluence of so many different issues. What does this particular experience say about tech companies’ influence on AI in general, and their capacity to actually do meaningful work in AI ethics?
You know, there were a number of people comparing Big Tech and Big Tobacco, and how they were censoring research even though they knew the issues for a while. I push back on the academia-versus-tech dichotomy, because they both have the same sort of very racist and sexist paradigm. The paradigm that you learn and take to Google or wherever starts in academia. And people move. They go to industry and then they go back to academia, or vice versa. They’re all friends; they are all going to the same conferences.
I don’t think the lesson is that there should be no AI ethics research in tech companies, but I think the lesson is that a) there needs to be a lot more independent research. We need to have more choices than just DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] versus corporations. And b) there needs to be oversight of tech companies, obviously. At this point I just don’t understand how we can continue to think that they’re gonna self-regulate on DEI or ethics or whatever it is. They haven’t been doing the right thing, and they’re not going to do the right thing.
I think academic institutions and conferences need to rethink their relationships with big corporations and the amount of money they’re taking from them. Some people were even wondering, for instance, if some of these conferences should have a “no censorship” code of conduct or something like that. So I think that there is a lot that these conferences and academic institutions can do. There’s too much of an imbalance of power right now.
From whistleblower laws to unions: How Google’s AI ethics meltdown could shape policy | VentureBeat
▻https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/16/from-whistleblower-laws-to-unions-how-googles-ai-ethics-meltdown-could-
Chowdhury said it’s now going to be tough for people to believe any ethics team within a Big Tech company is more than just an ethics-washing operation. She also suggested Gebru’s firing introduces a new level of fear when dealing with corporate entities: What are you building? What questions aren’t you asking?
What happened to Gebru, Chowdhury said, should also lead to higher levels of scrutiny or concern about industry interference in academic research. And she warned that Google’s decision to fire Gebru dealt a credibility hit to the broader AI ethics community.
(...) collective action is required to address violence found in the tech supply chain, ranging from birth defects experienced by cobalt miners in central Africa to algorithmic bias and misinformation in social media.
What’s needed, she said, is a movement that cuts across class and defines tech workers more broadly — including researchers and engineers, but also Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, and content moderators. In an interview with VentureBeat, she said, “There should not be some lone martyr going toe-to-toe with [Big Tech]. You need a broader coalition of people who are funding and working together to do the work.”
il faut lire tout l’article
Watchdog group sues NYPD over sentiment data-tracking records
▻https://venturebeat.com/2020/10/06/new-york-police-department-sued-over-sentiment-data-tracking-tool
The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a nonprofit hosted by the Urban Justice Center that is dedicated to advocating against state-sponsored surveillance, today filed suit with Debevoise & Plimpton against the New York Police Department (NYPD). The suit alleges the NYPD refused to disclose records from surveillance it used to track public sentiment about the department. STOP claims the lawsuit, which was filed in the New York State Supreme Court, comes over 10 months (...)
#Elucd #algorithme #SentimentMeter #police #consentement #reconnaissance #vidéo-surveillance #surveillance (...)
Stanford lab envisions delivery drones that save energy by taking the bus
▻https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/03/stanford-lab-envisions-delivery-drones-that-save-energy-by-taking-the-b
Researchers from Stanford University have devised a way for hundreds of drones to use the bus or trams in an effort to redesign how packages are distributed in cities. Should such a solution ever scale, it could reduce delivery van congestion and energy usage while extending the distance a drone can travel to deliver a package. There’s a reason most delivery drones we’ve seen thus far are dropping packages off in the suburbs. Urban centers can be dynamic environments, full of unexpected (...)
U.S. Senators propose facial recognition moratorium for federal government | VentureBeat
▻https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/12/u-s-senators-propose-facial-recognition-moratorium-for-federal-governme
Two Democratic U.S. Senators today proposed legislation that requires a moratorium on facial recognition use by federal agencies, government employees, and law enforcement without a warrant until a Congressional commission can act to recommend guidelines and place limits on use of the technology. The bill, named the Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence Act, is being introduced today by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). It would establish a 13-member Congressional (...)
#algorithme #CCTV #biométrie #facial #reconnaissance #vidéo-surveillance #frontières #surveillance (...)
##_
AI Weekly : In China, you can no longer buy a smartphone without a face scan
▻https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/11/ai-weekly-in-china-you-can-no-longer-buy-a-smartphone-without-a-face-sc
Picture a world in which the baseline requirement for a new smartphone is a facial recognition test. You needn’t imagine it — in China, beginning December 1, that’s the scrutiny to which the country’s over 850 million internet users will be subject, without exception. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said in a late September statement that the rule, which will also prevent people from exchanging their mobile numbers, was necessitated by an uptick in phone and internet (...)
What Uber’s layoffs tell us about its changing vision | VentureBeat
▻https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/16/what-ubers-layoffs-tell-us-about-its-changing-vision
Die zentralen Botschaften dieses Artikels: Das Management der Firma erklärt, dass der Uber-Konzern als Ganzes wahrscheinlich nie Gewinn machen wird. Die einzige Konzernsparte, die heute Gewinne verzeichnet ist der Essenlieferant Uber Eats . Dessen Wachstums- und Gewinnaussichten sind dabei sehr unsicher.
This year, it’s been all eyes on Uber. The ride-sharing company went public in May, unveiled bold growth plans, and then posted its biggest ever net loss, $5.2 billion, in the second quarter of 2019.
This week we’re hearing Uber has had another round of layoffs in a desperate attempt to cut costs ahead of its Q3 results due in early November. This latest news is an unfortunate but unsurprising development in the company’s bumpy journey to become the Amazon of transportation.
Under the intense scrutiny of frustrated investors and against a backdrop of slumped shares, the seemingly unstoppable beast has finally realized it can’t keep churning through the cash. With the increasing threat of competition from the likes of Lyft in the US and Bolt in UK, it’s been aggressively spending with the view to expand into new territories, product, and service offerings, including Uber choppers, self-driving technology, and food delivery. In fact, Uber’s costs rose 147% to a staggering $8.7 billion in the second quarter, which included a sharp rise in spending for research and development.
Ahead of its Wall Street listing in May, the company, under Dara Khosrowshahi’s leadership, admitted it may never make a profit. However, six months on, Uber is frantically trying to convince investors that revenue growth will come from a wide range of products and services alongside it’s ride-hailing heritage – the core of its business that it has struggled to make profitable. The most promising of these is Uber Eats, which at just three years old brought in $1 billion in the first half of this year with a rising revenue of 80% year-over-year. Rides, by comparison, grew just a fraction at 6%. Unlike the driverless car plan, Uber Eats could likely grow profit in the near term. Done right, food delivery is a lucrative business. However, competition in this space is fierce, and once again promotional costs will be high in order to win majority market share.
The fundamental trouble with Uber, as with many Unicorns, is that it tried to run before it could walk. With lofty ambitions and stars in its eyes (flying cars, anyone?), it tried to do too much too soon, innovating in multiple areas to open up additional revenue streams without having first put in place a robust organizational structure fit for future success. They’ve focused too much on scaling and growing in the short term while developing a long-term strategy that isn’t likely to be viable for years due to factors beyond their control. Driverless cars for example, whilst widely considered the future of automotive, isn’t yet supported by the required global infrastructure to make these an imminent reality. The fact that this department was not immune to the cuts speaks volumes.
It’s time the startup grew up. What we’re seeing now with 1% of its workforce having been laid off or relocated, is Uber’s lightbulb moment; it needs to focus and shed less profitable parts of its business that don’t align with its purpose, including streamlining staff, as a final attempt to balance its books.
Khosrowshahi’s pursuit of Uber’s “new normal” comes at an unfortunate but necessary cost. The strategic redundancies in the spotlight today show the company is taking accountability and correcting the accidental repetition of work that came about due to a lack of rigor in its structure. Whilst grand aspirations and zealous innovation are commendable, without the proper business configuration and stringent medium-term planning, those ideas are going to be difficult to implement. In short, Uber grew too big too soon, hiring, and expanding without consideration of business consequence, and has now finally recognized it needs to go back to basics and ask the simple question, “If we were to start from scratch, what would we look like?”
However, the fact Uber is finally coming of age is likely little consolation to those now unemployed. And we can only hope the layoffs haven’t been in vain. Restructuring will inevitably contribute to cutting down the bottom line, but Uber needs to remember that its product is only as good as its people. If it wants to maintain its growth, it needs to start prioritizing its staff. The previous (and public) lack of consideration for its workforce is not only demotivating for current employees but a potential barrier to hiring the very best new talent that can help make the company’s vision a reality.
In short, Uber needs to remove its rose-tinted glasses and reign in its excessive spending before more of its people – and inevitably its products — become further collateral damage in its quest to be the “operating system of our daily lives.” It’s clear Uber has a vision for the future. Whether or not it’s a profitable one is still to be confirmed.
Alyssa Altman is Transportation Lead at Digital Consultancy Publicis Sapient.
Amazon scrapped a secret AI recruitment tool that showed bias against women | VentureBeat
▻https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/10/amazon-scrapped-a-secret-ai-recruitment-tool-that-showed-bias-against-w
Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”
But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.
That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.
In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.
Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said.
The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said.
Their goal was to develop AI that could rapidly crawl the web and spot candidates worth recruiting, the people familiar with the matter said.
The group created 500 computer models focused on specific job functions and locations. They taught each to recognize some 50,000 terms that showed up on past candidates’ resumes. The algorithms learned to assign little significance to skills that were common across IT applicants, such as the ability to write various computer codes, the people said.
Instead, the technology favored candidates who described themselves using verbs more commonly found on male engineers’ resumes, such as “executed” and “captured,” one person said.
Gender bias was not the only issue. Problems with the data that underpinned the models’ judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs, the people said. With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said.
Some activists say they are concerned about transparency in AI. The American Civil Liberties Union is currently challenging a law that allows criminal prosecution of researchers and journalists who test hiring websites’ algorithms for discrimination.
“We are increasingly focusing on algorithmic fairness as an issue,” said Rachel Goodman, a staff attorney with the Racial Justice Program at the ACLU.
Still, Goodman and other critics of AI acknowledged it could be exceedingly difficult to sue an employer over automated hiring: Job candidates might never know it was being used.
#Intelligence_artificielle #Amazon #Ressources_humaines #Recrutement #Gender_bias #Discrimination
Workplace flexibility is the way to win the war for talent (https:/...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/5934647
Workplace flexibility is the way to win the war for talent
Hacker News Comments: ▻https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15059879
Source: ▻https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/20/workplace-flexibility-is-the-way-to-win-the-war-for-talent
L’intelligence artificielle reproduit aussi le sexisme et le racisme des humains
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2017/04/15/quand-l-intelligence-artificielle-reproduit-le-sexisme-et-le-racisme-des-hum
Une nouvelle étude montre qu’un programme d’analyse de texte se montre aussi biaisé que les humains, qui lui ont servi de modèle. Un problème bien connu des spécialistes de l’IA.
En fait, des humains qui programment. Si le milieu de la #programmation n’était pas tant sexiste et raciste, il est probable que les IA iraient mieux !
Il n’y a pas que ceux qui programment.
Il y a aussi ceux qui « entrainent » les IA sans le savoir en alimentant la base des cas sur lesquels les programmes d’apprentissage (plutôt que IA, terme assez impropre) s’appuient. Cet entrainement se fait sur la base de micro-tâches que les plateformes présentent à leurs utilisateurs dans le cadre de leurs services (comme les CAPTCHA, même si elles sont de moins en moins utilisées, de nouveaux dispositifs bien plus efficaces et profitables sont mis en œuvre)
Il est inévitable dans ce contexte de reproduire les biais déjà présents dans la société... et improbable que les « IA » aillent mieux
Attention aux mots et à leur sens : les programmeurs (codeurs) n’ont rien à voir avec le contenu de l’IA...
C’est ceux qui conçoivent l’IA, qui en sélectionnent les données et les contenus, qui l’entraînent qui sont en cause, me semble-t-il.
Sinon, qu’il y ait su sexisme chez les programmeur est probable (milieux très masculin oblige), que ce soit un repère de raciste cela se discute.
On tourne en rond. Et on risque de se couper la possibilité de sortir du cercle.
L’automatisation colonise la créativité :
▻https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/15/the-art-of-algorithms-how-automation-is-affecting-creativity
The art of algorithms : how automation is affecting creativity.
1 : nous sommes sexistes (c’est l’info que bouffe l’IA)
2 : nous le resterons (ceux qui construisent l’IA nient majoritairement la virulence de ce fléau, le sexisme.)