Month: April 2023

Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Stable Diffusion)

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new controls for ChatGPT users that allow them to turn off chat history, simultaneously opting out of providing that conversation history as data for training AI models. Also, users can now export chat history for local storage.

The new controls, which rolled out to all ChatGPT users today, can be found in ChatGPT settings. Conversations that begin with the chat history disabled won't be used to train and improve the ChatGPT model, nor will they appear in the history sidebar. OpenAI will retain the conversations internally for 30 days and review them "only when needed to monitor for abuse" before permanently deleting them.

However, users who wish to opt out of providing data to OpenAI for training will lose the conversation history feature. It's unclear why users cannot use conversation history while simultaneously opting out of model training.

Enlarge / Screenshot from RNC's "Beat Biden" ad. (credit: Republican National Committee)

Shortly after US President Joe Biden announced his 2024 presidential run—asking Americans to re-elect him so he can “finish the job!”—the Republican National Committee (RNC) responded with a 100 percent AI-generated video. The 30-second RNC ad urged voters to “Beat Biden,” or else suffer disastrous consequences that the RNC suggests would likely come to pass if Americans voted to re-elect “the weakest president we’ve ever had.”

The RNC video opens with a fake news announcer calling the 2024 presidency for Biden. On the screen flashes a dark, AI-generated image of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, smiling and waving in front of a sea of American flags. From there, a series of AI-generated scenes show the faked future that the RNC imagines that this election result would bring, depicting banks closing, China invading Taiwan, San Francisco crime skyrocketing, and 80,000 “illegals” overwhelming the border.

“Who’s in charge here?” the RNC’s video asks. “It feels like the train is coming off the tracks.” The video then concludes with an image of Biden bent over his desk, appearing worried as he faces down the RNC’s slogan, “Beat Biden.”

Enlarge / Electron micrograph of herpesviruses. (credit: Callista Images)

Double-stranded DNA viruses come in two main flavors, classified by their shapes. One contains large and giant DNA viruses that attack complex cells but also includes some viruses that are much smaller and infect bacteria. These viruses are shaped like soccer balls. The other flavor has tails and primarily infects bacteria and archaea but also contains the herpesvirus family, which infects animals.

The disparate properties of these viruses have raised some questions that have been plaguing virologists: Where did herpesviruses come from? And how are the large and giant DNA viruses related to the smaller viruses within their realm?

Tara Oceans is “an international, multidisciplinary project to assess the complexity of ocean life across comprehensive taxonomic and spatial scales.” Researchers with the project sail around all five oceans and two seas (the Red and the Mediterranean), sampling plankton to try to understand the ocean ecosystem. In new work reported in Nature, a team pulled plankton from the sunlit oceans (it’s a technical term: only down to 200 meters below the surface, where light penetrates and photosynthesis happens). They surveyed all the planktonic DNA viruses by comparing a single hallmark gene among them.

Enlarge / Google's booth at the Integrated Systems Europe conference on January 31, 2023, in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | Cesc Maymo )

The European Commission will require 19 large online platforms and search engines to comply with new online content regulations starting on August 25, European officials said. The EC specified which companies must comply with the rules for the first time, announcing today that it "adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act."

Five of the 19 platforms are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon's online store, Apple's App Store, Microsoft's Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

These platforms were designated because they each reported having over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17. The other listed platforms are Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and German online retailer Zalando.

Enlarge / Fossil of Tullimonstrum gregarium ("Tully's common monster"). Its discovery in the 1950s sparked a long-running scientific debate as to whether the creature should be classed as a vertebrate or invertebrate. (credit: Ghedoghedo/CC BY-SA 3.0)

The state fossil of Illinois is a strange creature with stalked eyes and a long nose-like appendage with teeth, dubbed the "Tully monster." Specimens typically measure just 15 centimeters (about 6 inches), but the tiny creatures sparked a major decadeslong scientific debate over whether they should be classed as vertebrates or invertebrates. That mystery may now have been solved, according to a team of Japanese scientists who claim their 3D scans of a generous sampling of fossils rule out the vertebrate hypothesis. They described their findings in a recent paper published in the journal Nature.

The fossil gets its name (Tullimonstrum gregarium, or "Tully's common monster") from Francis Tully, an amateur fossil collector who discovered the specimen in 1955 while scouring the Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois—the only site where Tully monster fossils have been found. He had never seen anything like this "torpedo"-shaped fossil and brought it to paleontologists at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for identification. But the paleontologists there couldn't figure out how to classify it.

While it might resemble a slug at first glance, Tully monster fossils have several unique features, most notably an elongated, flexible proboscis (long nose with teeth) and outward-protruding eyes on stalks, similar to those of a hammerhead shark. Tully has been compared to gastropods (slugs and snails), conodonts (an extinct group of jawless vertebrates), polychaetes (segmented marine worms), nemerteans (ribbon worms), and nectocarids (a squid-like Cambrian organism) in the ensuing decades. If it was a vertebrate, then the Tully monster would fill a critical gap in evolutionary history, connecting jawless fish (such as lampreys and hagfish) to jawed fish.

Enlarge / Rather than app-by-app permissions that are set once, ChromeOS will soon offer universal mic and camera toggles that should help prevent accidental exposure of messy bedrooms, running children, penguins, and other objects. (credit: Google)

Chromebooks will become a better place to take a video call or audio huddle soon, as Google is giving all users the ability to universally control access to their video cameras and microphones.

As part of a wider announcement of business data and security improvements, Tony Ureche, head of security, identity, and privacy for ChromeOS, writes that Chromebooks will get a space in Settings for toggling camera and microphone access. If an app tries to access either device upon launching or after a button tap, you'll get a notice saying, "Your mic is muted by your system settings," with a prompt to click the button to learn more (at least in Google Meet). The setting is coming "later this year."

Having a default-off option for Chromebooks adds security to an already fairly secure platform, both by obscurity and design. It's also helpful for users, as it's a good idea to have to affirmatively enable a camera every time it wants to turn on rather than remembering whether or not you previously gave permission to Zoom, Meet, Slack, Skype, Teams, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Discord, or other apps.