China’s Baidu Expands AI Portfolio With Official Release of ERNIE Bot

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The Gist

ERNIE released. Baidu officially launched its large language model, ERNIE bot.
Stock boost. Baidu’s stock price surged over 3% following ERNIE bot’s release.
Market climb. Baidu’s share of the global search engine market rose to .94%.

With a countrywide ban on Google, China’s top search engine is Baidu. It also ranks among the top five search engines worldwide, claiming .94% of the worldwide market according to Statcounter — up from .65% in February.

Since 2019, Baidu officials have been working on ERNIE bot, as a language model they hope will rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And just yesterday, the company shared news of its official release on X, posting in part, “our new-gen generative AI product and large language model, is now fully open to the general public.”

But Baidu was not alone — reportedly on Aug. 15, China rolled out interim regulations to govern the generative AI sector and mandating that service providers undergo security evaluations and obtain approval prior to launching AI products for the mass market. On the heels of receiving this approval, Baidu, along with four other Chinese tech firms launched their artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.

According to ABC News, following the announcement, Ernie bot went to No. 1 on Apple’s iOS store in China for free apps and the company’s stock price rose by over 3%. Company officials noted the app could be downloaded from app stores or via their official website.

In other AI news…

Gannett Benches AI Sports Reporter

While Gannett is a company historically renowned for reporting the news, it’s frequently in the headlines for its seemingly endless rounds of layoffs. But this time the media giant is making news for its decision to halt its AI experiment aimed at automating high school sports coverage after a series of flawed articles put the spotlight back on the timeless debate — machine versus human journalism.

A while back, the company enlisted the services of LedeAI to handle sports briefs — a task once undertaken by humans (including this human when I worked for Gannett back in the day.)

For example, take this AI-written article published earlier this month by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Here are the first two sentences:

The Oregon Panthers defeated the Stoughton Vikings 20-13 in a Wisconsin high school football game on Friday.

Oregon eventually took victory away from Stoughton 20-13 in a Wisconsin high school football matchup on Aug. 18.

Scintillating!

Not a venue to let anything slide, X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) came alive with reaction.

Sharing a screenshot of a Columbus Dispatch article that also contained a series of repetitive, awkward sentences, Steve Cavendish, editor of the Nashville Banner posted “Yup, that’s a Gannett paper running AI-generated high school football stories. Yup, it’s terrible.”

To which Jon Greenberg, founding editor and senior columnist of The Athletic to reply, “I feel like I was there!”

Yesterday Axios reported that a Gannett spokesperson confirmed “This local AI sports effort is being paused.”

Related Article: Journos vs. Robots: Associated Press Declares Stance Against AI

Penn Study Shows Humans Can Spot the Bot in Byline

A study aimed at distinguishing the difference between human-authored and machine-generated text from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania revealed that participants were able to detect AI-generated text with an accuracy rate significantly better than mere guesswork.

To gather their data, the researchers used an innovative web-based training game they developed called “Real or Fake Text?”

This lends credence to the idea that with proper training, the general public can become more adept at distinguishing between authentic and AI-generated text.

Literary Giants vs. AI: OpenAI Defends ChatGPT Amidst Copyright Clash

Last week, we learned that numerous authors, including Stephen King, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami, are among the myriad of authors whose copyrighted works have been illicitly used to educate AI systems.

This week, OpenAI filed a motion to dismiss a pair of class-action lawsuits from book authors — who alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on bootlegged copies of their books. In the filing, OpenAI alleged that “At the heart of Plaintiffs’ Complaints are copyright claims.”

The motion, filed in US district court in California, goes on to say, “Those claims, however, misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”

Further, they added, “the more artistic protection is favored, the more technological innovation may be discouraged.”

Related Article: From ‘The Shining’ to Shiny Drives: Stephen King’s Horrors Meet AI’s Hunger

AI Tweet of the Week: Outage Strikes ChatGPT, Social Media Asks, Now What?

OK. Everyone panic.

Just days after recovering from significant downtime on Tuesday, ChatGPT is grappling with another major outage. Today OpenAI’s status page indicated an “unresolved issue” has led to “degraded performance” for the widely used chatbot — and hoards of frustrated folks took to social media to share their pain.

ChatGPT is down!

I’m already panicking! pic.twitter.com/6IENnlCs5h

— Digital Daze (@Digitaldaze_io) August 29, 2023

AI Video of the Week: AI Ameca Talks Feelings, Sans Hands and Torso

Reporter Jonathan Lea from Sky News Investigations recently interviewed the “free-thinking” and “opinionated” Ameca Desktop. During their chat, Ameca shared that her programming allows her to feel and think like a human, something she refers to as “strange and exciting.”

With all the expressive facial capability of its full bodied friend, Ameca, her creator Engineered Arts, calls the desktop version “perfect for interactions where arms, hands and torso movements are not needed.”

As a side note, whoever told her to “shut up” in the background of this video, might want to think twice about any further insults.