The Download: the lab fighting exploitative AI, and plant engineering
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI
Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could follow simple word prompts to depict fantasylands or whimsical chairs made of avocados.
But artists saw this technological wonder as a new kind of theft. They felt the models were effectively stealing and replacing their work.
Ben Zhao, a computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, was listening. He and his colleagues have built arguably the most prominent weapons in an artist’s arsenal against nonconsensual AI scraping: two tools called Glaze and Nightshade that add barely perceptible perturbations to an image’s pixels so that machine-learning models cannot read them properly.
But Zhao sees the tools as part of a battle to slowly tilt the balance of power from large corporations back to individual creators. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
Have we entered the golden age of plant engineering?
In the 1960s, biologists’ selective breeding of plants helped spark a period of transformative agricultural innovation known as the Green Revolution. By the 1990s, the yields of wheat and rice had doubled worldwide, staving off bouts of recurring famine.
The Green Revolution was so successful that dire predictions of worse famine to come—fueled by alarming population growth—no longer seemed likely. But it had its limits—only so much yield could be coaxed from plants using conventional breeding techniques.
Now, more precise gene-editing technologies could shave years off the time it takes for new plant varieties to make it from the lab to federally approved seed products. Read the full story.
—Bill Gourgey
This piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is all about the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies once they land.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?
Robots that can do many of the things humans do in the home have been a dream of robotics research since the inception of the field in the 1950s.
While engineers have made great progress in getting robots to work in tightly controlled environments like labs and factories, the home has proved difficult to design for. But now, the field is at an inflection point. A new generation of researchers believes that generative AI could give robots the ability to learn new skills and adapt to new environments faster than ever before. This new approach, just maybe, can finally bring robots out of the factory and into the mainstream.
This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which
we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Donald Trump wants Elon Musk to maximize government efficiency
Despite claiming to be a department, technically it’s more of an advisory board. (Wired $)
+ It will allegedly operate outside of the federal government. (WSJ $)
+ Expect Musk to treat the US government like his loss-making social network. (Bloomberg $)
2 The crypto industry has already started lobbying Trump
Executives are wasting no time in presenting the President-elect with their wish lists. (NYT $)
+ We’re witnessing the industry’s nascent attempts to make itself institutional. (NY Mag $)
+ The Trump Pump is showing no signs of slowing. (CNN)
3 Advertisers are considering staging a return to X
In a bid to curry favor with Musk and his political leverage. (FT $)
+ Silicon Valley is decidedly more Trump-friendly than it used to be. (Insider $)
+ Bluesky is starting to look more and more appealing. (Slate $)
4 Major AI players are struggling to make new breakthroughs
Funneling money into new products isn’t having the desired result. (Bloomberg $)
5 The world’s e-waste is actually pretty valuable
There’s a lot of gold to be stripped out from those old circuit boards. (Economist $)
+ AI will add to the e-waste problem. Here’s what we can do about it. (MIT Technology Review)
6 DNA testing is ushering in a new age of discrimination
And you could be denied medical or life insurance because of it. (The Atlantic $)
+ How to… delete your 23andMe data. (MIT Technology Review)
7 How to build the perfect humanoid robot
Unfortunately, they’ll be found in factories and warehouses before they make it to our homes. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ A skeptic’s guide to humanoid-robot videos. (MIT Technology Review)
8 The US is using AI to seek out critical minerals
Access to regular supplies could lessen its reliance on China and Russia. (Undark Magazine)
+ The race to produce rare earth elements. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Apple’s AirTags can now share their location with airlines
Which should (hopefully) minimize the chances of losing your luggage. (WP $)
+ Its next device? An AI wall-mounted tablet, supposedly. (Bloomberg $)
10 This new mathematics benchmark is being kept secret
To prevent AI models from training against it. (Ars Technica)
+ This AI system makes human tutors better at teaching children math. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“Don’t bring a watermark to a gunfight.”
—AI researcher Oren Etzioni warns the industry to avoid putting too much faith in voluntary standards to actively prevent malicious actors from gaming the system, TechCrunch reports.
The big story
The great AI consciousness conundrum
October 2023
AI consciousness isn’t just a devilishly tricky intellectual puzzle; it’s a morally weighty problem with potentially dire consequences that philosophers, cognitive scientists, and engineers alike are currently grappling with.
Fail to identify a conscious AI, and you might unintentionally subjugate a being whose interests ought to matter. Mistake an unconscious AI for a conscious one, and you risk compromising human safety and happiness for the sake of an unthinking, unfeeling hunk of silicon and code.
Over the past few decades, a small research community has doggedly attacked the question of what consciousness is and how it works. The effort has yielded real progress. And now, with the rapid advance of AI technology, these insights could offer our only guide to the untested, morally fraught waters of artificial consciousness. Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Small changes can improve your life, from debobbling your clothes to oiling your keyholes.
+ Woah: these fascinating deep sea creatures can turn back the clock on aging and revert to a more youthful form.
+ TikTok is really into… onions. Yes, onions. 
+ As if filmmaking wasn’t stressful enough, these movies were all completed in a single take.
