No human being can keep up with the daily torrent of intriguing/scary AI news, but we'll try anyway, at least until the machines render us obsolete...
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The AI can probably crack your password, and faster than you think
For every beautiful life-affirming AI app, there is at least one that is confrontational. This is the last one.
Cybersecurity firm Home Security Heroes put out an AI-powered password cracking tool called PassGAN to the test against more than 15 million passwords.
- He cracked 51% of them in less than a minute.
- By the end of the month, he had solved 81% of the list.
- Uh oh.
Before you reset all the passwords you've ever had, remember that PassGAN is not widely used, and it could also be used to generate crack-proof passwords.
Still, Home Security Heroes recommends stronger passwords with more than 15 characters that avoid patterns like "1234."
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Can AI see what your brain sees?
A team at Osaka University used a deep learning AI model called Stable Diffusion (SD) to analyze brain scans after people were shown images inside an MRI machine.
The AI was asked to "translate" the subjects' brain activity into a readable format.
- That did it; SD generated faithful reproductions of the original images.
- Also oh-oh.
According to the Osaka team, this is not "mind reading," it simply means that the AI can reproduce images that a person has seen. Which is nothing, according to every tense muscle in our bodies.
Practical applications are minimal today, but SD research (and subsequent ethical debates) will continue.
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AI Brings a Creative Crisis to the Fortune Cookie Industry
Every year, around 3 billion fortune cookies are made around the world. Most of them house a message written by a real life human.
A startup called OpenFortune Inc. can ditch that human touch, using ChatGPT to generate new messages at rates no copywriter could match.
By The Wall Street Journalto split he's building himself in the fortune business between embracing AI's time and cost-saving ways and staying true to his own penned lore.
… But who provides wisdom to the makers of wisdom?
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