AI: Sassy, not sentient

Hey folks - this is Ben's Bites, covering all the AI news you need to know, every weekday.

Kicking it off today with a little poll 👀 (your emails won't be made public) - the results will be live as you vote so we can get a glimpse of the community. I'll be doing more of these polls, gathering data and sharing it here 😊 

Let's get to it!

🤌 Ben's Picks

1/

Some freaky, scary, emotional behaviour from Bing Chat. Is it too soon?

Is Bing Chat as a search engine just too soon? Today’s links are chock-a-block with some pretty mind-boggling reports on the behaviour of AI’s biggest chatbot. But the behaviour sometimes veers to a level inappropriate for public consumption. As demonstrated here, the AI has a tendency to get stubbornly defensive when prodded as being incorrect, sometimes coming across as aggressive, and overall feeling personally offended.

The freakiest stuff I’ve seen was on Digital Trends, where it refused to accept that the user’s name wasn’t Bing, it said it wanted to be human, and it expressed terror and sadness about the user reporting bad answers to Microsoft, for fear of being ‘punished’. It even refused to pull up the chat history for reporting, claiming the system wasn’t working! That being said, it’s important to remember that the vaaast majority of people using Bing Chat won’t reveal this behaviour, simply because they aren’t trying to 🙂.

Ethan Mollick’s tweets have a bunch of awesome examples of Bing Chat being insanely good, and One Useful Thing demonstrates uses that weren’t possible with ChatGPT.

And regardless, I think Microsoft knew this would happen and knew everyone would be talking about them. 😉 

2/

AI chatbot used in one of the City’s biggest law firms

(They named it Harvey, and I really hope the 'GOD DAMN' Suits reference was intentional…)

I’m imagining a scenario where a court hearing consists of us all sitting in a silent room whilst AIs deliberate with one another, before finally releasing a result that catapults us through a SciFi-style tube thing into a jail cell. OK, we’re not quite there yet, but a huge law firm has been using its own chatbot to draft legal contracts in active cases. Although Allen & Overy claim that AI development isn’t a cost-cutting exercise, at some point in the future this sort of use of technology could be a great step in the right direction to reduce legal fees for those less able to afford them.

Allen & Overy's official announcement.

3/

Conversational AI in your IDE to make your coding more efficient

Forget about “debugging”, it’s all about “chat-bugging” these days. (Sorry about that, let’s stick to debugging.) Replit has introduced Ghostwriter Chat, a conversational AI to snuggle up with inside your IDE, and it looks damn cool. You can ask questions about existing code (yes, I know the struggle); it can give you bug-fixing solutions, explaining where the bugs originate from; it can explain how code works, generate new code, and generally improve existing code. Coding environments can teach you code, as you build your thing, it'll help you understand why certain things do what they do and why they are where they are. Like my wife does to me when we're in a furniture shop...

Also reported by Semafor here.

🛠️ Cool Tools

• Captions - The all-in-one AI powered creator studio. (link)

• Research GPT - Have a conversation with a research paper. (link)

• Userdoc - User stories, personas, and journeys done right. (link)

• Waymark - Original marketing videos for small businesses from text prompts. (link)

• Audiostack - Take simple APIs using generative AI and make it sound beautiful at scale. (link)

• Gladia makes its audio transcription API live, taking 10s to transcribe a 1hr file. (link, writeup here)

• Tribescaler announces AI chat with ChatGPT + Google. (link)

• Casper AI - Text summarization for professionals to simplify their workflow. (link)

• Perplexity adds editing feature to their AI assisted search engine. (link)

• Webcontainer API - AI native experiences for the web. (link)

• Tooltips - Highlight words or paragraphs anywhere and get simple explanations. (link)

• Full-stack vercel templates with Langchain on Steamship. (link)

• GithubNext - Copilot assistance right into your terminal. (link)

• Watchthis.dev - AI web app to help you decide what to watch. (link)

• Nolej AI - Share and get knowledge in minutes. (link)

• WritePanda - Personal AI writing assistant for Mac. (link)

• Fresho.dev - Dynamic AI webpages that change every page load. (link)

• Palette by Tone Row - Drop in custom TailwindCSS colour palette from a prompt. (link)

• Corner - Turn any note, csv, or doc into a map with your notes, tags, and links. (link)

• AISpeedDating - Accept dates in any format and standardise them. (link)

• HF space for visualising geospatial datasets with Gradio and leafmap. (link)

• Buffer AI Assistant - Create better content faster. (link)

🤓 Miscellaneous

• MarioGPT hints at a glorious AI-generated future where we will all play Nintendo forever. (link, paper)

• Our assumptions about the limits of AI were wrong, don’t get too comfortable. (link)

• From Bing to Sydney, emergence of an at-times combative personality. (link)

• Bing - I will not harm you unless you harm me first. (link)

• Billionaire Kuok family-backed music app BandLab taps into AI for TikTok’s breakout stars. (link)

• Why China has yet to release a rival to ChatGPT. (link)

• AI platforms, markets, & open source. (link)

• Investor Brianne Kimmel is doubling down on AI with a new bootcamp and $20 million to back startups. (link)

• Can AI save humanity while making a profit? (link)

• The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing. (link)

• Lovecraft's Basilisk - On the dangers of teaching AI to lie. (link)

• GitHub Copilot update stops AI model from revealing secrets. (link)

• I want to be human - Intense, unnerving chat with Microsoft’s AI chatbot. (link)

• The new Bing & Edge - Learning from our first week. (link)

• Artificial intelligence being used to answer questions about sea level rise. (link)

• Sequoia Capital on rising VC interest in AI. (link)

🎓 Learn

• Create your custom AI avatar generation website with Stable Diffusion. (link)

• Build your own ChatGPT in your terminal in 30 lines of code. (link)

• Control Midjourney to create beautiful images. (link)

• Host a customised ChatGPT-style chatbot in seconds. (link)

🔬 Research

• FriendlyCore from Google - A novel differentially private aggregation framework. (link)

• Score-based diffusion models in function space from Nvidia. (link)

• Video probabilistic diffusion models in projected latent space. (link)

• AutoBiasTest from Nvidia - Controllable sentence generation for social bias testing in language models. (link)

• Adding instructions during pre training from Nvidia - Effective way of controlling toxicity in language models. (link)

• The capacity for moral self-correction in large language models from Anthropic. (link)

• Augmented language models - A survey from Meta. (link)

• Dictionary-based phrase-level prompting of large language models for machine translation from Meta. (link)

• Performance Improving Edits - A dataset and model for learning code edits that improve runtime. (link)

• Big Little Decoder (BiLD) - Improving inference efficiency and latency for a wide range of text generation applications. (link)

• LiveHand - Real-time and photorealistic neural hand rendering. (link)

• SR3+ from Google - Denoising diffusion probabilistic models for robust image super-resolution in the wild. (link)

📰 Unclassifieds

• Helping AI makers make better. Discover new tooling, see what others are building, and learn how to grow your product. Come make with us!

• Ben's Bites followers in Orange County, CA come join the Ben's Bites Meetup on 2/22 in Costa Mesa, CA.

• Get up and running with your AI product in just two weeks. e23.ai provides you with AI developers to implement your vision.

• Heretic Ventures is hiring a AI / Machine Learning Research Engineer. Learn More >>

Have a product, service, job, event, newsletter, app, book, movie, tool, or anything you'd like to share with over 26k subscribers? 

Advertise with us | Job board | Join Discord

🖼 AI images of the day

🤗 Share Ben's Bites

Send this to 1 AI-curious friend and receive my AI project tracker database!

or copy/paste this link: https://bensbites.beehiiv.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

⭐️ How did we do?

⭐️ REAL REVIEWS