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You answer a random call from a family member, and they breathlessly explain how theres been a horrible car accident. They need you to send money right now, or theyll go to jail. You can hear the desperation in their voice as they plead for an immediate cash transfer. While it sure sounds like them, and the call came from their number, you feel like somethings off. So, you decide to hang up and call them right back. When your family member picks up your call, they say there hasnt been a car crash, and that they have no idea what youre talking about.

Congratulations, you just successfully avoided an artificial intelligence scam call.

As generative AI tools get more capable, it is becoming easier and cheaper for scammers to create fakebut convincingaudio of peoples voices. These AI voice clones are trained on existing audio clips of human speech, and can be adjusted to imitate almost anyone. The latest models can even speak in numerous languages. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, recently announced a new text-to-speech model that could further improve voice cloning and make it more widely accessible.

Of course, bad actors are using these AI cloning tools to trick victims into thinking they are speaking to a loved one over the phone, even though theyre talking to a computer. While the threat of AI-powered scams can be frightening, you can stay safe by keeping these expert tips in mind the next time you receive an urgent, unexpected call.

Its not just OpenAI; many tech startups are working on replicating near perfect-sounding human speech, and the recent progress is rapid. If it were a few months ago, we would have given you tips on what to look for, like pregnant pauses or showing some kind of latency, says Ben Colman, cofounder and CEO of Reality Defender. Like many aspects of generative AI over the past year, AI audio is now a more convincing imitation of the real thing. Any safety strategies that rely on you audibly detecting weird quirks over the phone are outdated.

Security experts warn that its quite easy for scammers to make it appear as if the call were coming from a legitimate phone number. A lot of times scammers will spoof the number that they're calling you from, make it look like it's calling you from that government agency or the bank, says Michael Jabbara, global head of fraud services at Visa. You have to be proactive. Whether its from your bank or from a loved one, any time you receive a call asking for money or personal information, go ahead and ask to call them back. Look up the number online or in your contacts, and initiate a follow-up conversation. You can also try sending them a message through a different, verified line of communication like video chat or email.

A popular security tip that multiple sources suggested was to craft a safe word that only you and your loved ones know about, and which you can ask for over the phone. You can even prenegotiate with your loved ones a word or a phrase that they could use in order to prove who they really are, if in a duress situation, says Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at McAfee. Although calling back or verifying via another means of communication is best, a safe word can be especially helpful for young ones or elderly relatives who may be difficult to contact otherwise.

What if you dont have a safe word decided on and are trying to suss out whether a distressing call is real? Pause for a second and ask a personal question. It could even be as simple as asking a question that only a loved one would know the answer to, says Grobman. It could be, Hey, I want to make sure this is really you. Can you remind me what we had for dinner last night? Make sure the question is specific enough that a scammer couldnt answer correctly with an educated guess.

Deepfake audio clones arent just reserved for celebrities and politicians, like the calls in New Hampshire that used AI tools to sound like Joe Biden and to discourage people from going to the polls. One misunderstanding is, It cannot happen to me. No one can clone my voice, says Rahul Sood, chief product officer at Pindrop, a security company that discovered the likely origins of the AI Biden audio. What people dont realize is that with as little as five to 10 seconds of your voice, on a TikTok you might have created or a YouTube video from your professional life, that content can be easily used to create your clone. Using AI tools, the outgoing voicemail message on your smartphone might even be enough to replicate your voice.

Whether its a pig butchering scam or an AI phone call, experienced scammers are able to build your trust in them, create a sense of urgency, and find your weak points. Be wary of any engagement where youre experiencing a heightened sense of emotion, because the best scammers arent necessarily the most adept technical hackers, says Jabbara. But they have a really good understanding of human behavior. If you take a moment to reflect on a situation and refrain from acting on impulse, that could be the moment you avoid getting scammed.

Original post:

How to Protect Yourself (and Your Loved Ones) From AI Scam Calls - WIRED

Aboard is not an easy app to explain. It used to be easier: at first, it was a way to collect and organize information Trello meets Pinterest meets that spreadsheet full of links you use to plan your vacation. The companys founders, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade, are two longtime web developers and app creators (and, in Fords case, also an influential writer about the web) who previously ran a well-liked agency called Postlight. They did a bunch of interesting work on parsing websites to pull out helpful information, and they built a handy visual tool for displaying it all. People love to save links, Ziade says, and we love to make those links beautiful when they come in. Simple!

But now Im sitting here in a co-working space in New York City, a few minutes after an earthquake hit and a few days before Aboards biggest launch yet, and Ziade is showing me something very different. He opens up a beta version of the app and clicks a button, and after a second, the page begins to change. A database appears out of nowhere, with a bunch of categories Year, Title, Genre, and more that start to populate with a number of well-known movie titles. The board, as Aboard calls it, titles itself Movie Night. With one click, Ziade just built and populated a way to track your viewing habits.

Maybe the best way to explain the new Aboard is not as a Pinterest competitor but as a radical redesign of ChatGPT. When Ziade made that board, all he was really doing was querying OpenAIs GPT-3.5. The companys chatbot might have returned some of the same movies, but it would have done so with a series of paragraphs and bullet points. Aboard has built a more attractive, more visual AI app and has made it so you can turn that app into anything you want.

Ziade and Ford imagine three main things you might do with Aboard. The first, Organize, is closest to the original vision: ask the tool for a bunch of things to do in Montreal this summer, and itll populate a board with some popular attractions and restaurants. Ask Aboard to meal plan your week, and itll create a board segmented by day and by meal with nicely formatted recipes. The second, Research, is similar but a little more exploratory: ask Aboard to grab the most interesting links about African bird species, and itll dump them all into place for you to peruse at your leisure.

Like any AI product right now, this is sometimes cooler in theory than in reality. When I ask Ziade to make a board with important tech moments from 2004, it pulls a bunch of them into separate cards: Googles IPO, the launch of Gmail, the iPod Mini launch. And then the iPod Mini launch again and then another time and then three more times after that. Ziade and Ford both laugh and say this is the stuff they see all the time. A few times, a demo just fails, and each time, Ford says something to the effect of Yeah, that just happens when you ping the models. But he says its also getting better fast.

The third use case, which Aboard calls Workflow, is where Aboard figures its true business lies. Ziade does another demo: he enters a prompt into Aboard, asking it to set up a claims tracker for an insurance company. After a few seconds, he has a fairly straightforward but useful-looking board for processing claims, along with a bunch of sample cards to show how it works. Is this going to be perfect and powerful enough for an insurance company to start using as is? No. But its a start. Ford tells me that Aboards job is to build something good enough but also not quite good enough if the app can work just well enough to get you to customize it the rest of the way to fit your needs, thats the goal.

An Aboard board can be a table, a list, a gallery, and more

This is ultimately a very business-y use case and puts Aboard in loose competition with the Airtables and Salesforces of the world. Ziade and Ford are upfront about this. We want to be in professional settings, Ford says, thats a real thing were aiming for. Doesnt have to be for big enterprise, but definitely small teams, nonprofits, things like that. He figures Aboard can sell to companies by saving them a bunch of time and meetings spent figuring out how to organize data and just get them started right away. An Aboard board can be a table, a list, a gallery, and more; its a pretty flexible tool for managing most kinds of data.

I have no particular business use for Aboard, but Ive been testing the app for a while, and its a really clever way to redesign the output of a large language model. Particularly when its combined with Aboards ability to parse URLs, it can quickly put together some really useful information. Ive been saving links for months as I plan a vacation, and I had Aboard build me a project planner for managing a big renovation of my bathroom. (Its all very exciting stuff.)

Just before Aboards AI launch, I tried building another board: I prompted the AI to create a board of Oscar-winning movies, with stacks for each movie genre and tags for Rotten Tomatoes scores, and Aboard went to work. It came back with stacks (Aboards parlance for sub-lists) for six different movie genres, tags for various score ranges, plus runtimes, posters, and Rotten Tomatoes links for each flick. Were all the movies it selected Best Picture winners? Nope! Did it get the ratings right, like, ever? Nope! But it still felt like a good start and Aboard always gives you the option to delete the sample cards it generates and just start from scratch.

Aboard is just one of a new class of AI companies, the ones that wont try to build Yet Another Large Language Model but will instead try to build new things to do with those models and new ways to interact with them. The Aboard founders say they ultimately plan to connect to lots of models as those models become, in some cases, more specialized and, in others, more commoditized. In Aboards case, they want to use AI not as an answer machine but as something like a software generator. We still want you to go to the web, Ford says. We want to guide you a bit and maybe kickstart you, but were software people and we think the ability to get going really quickly is really, really interesting. The Aboard founders want AI to do the work about the work, so you can just get to work.

See more here:

Aboards AI-powered bookmarking and project app is a new spin on a chatbot - The Verge

Microsoft recently announced the creation of Microsoft AI, a newly formed organization to help advance our consumer AI products and research, including Copilot. Building on that news, Im thrilled to share that Microsoft AI is opening a new AI hub in the heart of London. Microsoft AI London will drive pioneering work to advance state-of-the-art language models and their supporting infrastructure, and to create world-class tooling for foundation models, collaborating closely with our AI teams across Microsoft and with our partners, including OpenAI.

The new AI hub will be led by Jordan Hoffmann, an exceptional AI scientist and engineer. Prior to joining Microsoft AI, Hoffmann distinguished himself as an AI pioneer at Inflection and DeepMind, based in London. Hoffmann will be joined by a talented group of Microsoft AI team members based in our London Paddington office.

There is an enormous pool of AI talent and expertise in the U.K., and Microsoft AI plans to make a significant, long-term investment in the region as we begin hiring the best AI scientists and engineers into this new AI hub.

In the coming weeks and months, we will be posting job openings and actively hiring exceptional individuals who want to work on the most interesting and challenging AI questions of our time. Were looking for new team members who are driven by impact at scale, and who are passionate innovators eager to contribute to a team culture where continuous learning is the norm.

This is great news for Microsoft AI and for the U.K. As a British citizen, born and raised in London, Im proud to have co-founded and built a cutting-edge AI business here. Im deeply aware of the extraordinary talent pool and AI ecosystem in the U.K., and Im excited to make this commitment to the U.K. on behalf of Microsoft AI. I know through my close work with thought leaders in the U.K. government, business community and academia that the country is committed to advancing AI responsibly and with a safety-first commitment to drive investment, innovation and economic growth. Our decision to open this hub in the U.K. reflects this ambition.

The Microsoft AI London hub adds to Microsofts existing presence in the U.K., including the Microsoft Research Cambridge lab, home to some of the foremost researchers in the areas of AI, cloud and productivity. At the same time, it builds off Microsofts recently announced 2.5 billion investment to upskill the U.K. workforce for the AI era and to build the infrastructure to power the AI economy, including our commitment to bring 20,000 of the most advanced GPUs to the country by 2026.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to push the boundaries of whats possible with AI and extend the benefits to every person and organization across the U.K.

Tags: AI, Microsoft AI

See the article here:

Announcing new Microsoft AI Hub in London - The Official Microsoft Blog - Microsoft