Latest news with #Hitchhiker'sGuidetotheGalaxy
Yahoo
01-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
xAI trains its chatbot not to impersonate Elon Musk
XAI has told its AI 'tutors' to watch out for Grok pretending to be Elon Musk. "If the model impersonates Elon Musk without the user prompting it to do so, it is a violation of our principles," an internal document says. Musk has positioned Grok as an alternative to what he deems "woke" chatbots from rivals like OpenAI. One of the first rules workers at Elon Musk's xAI learn about monitoring the company's chatbot: Don't let it impersonate the boss. At least not without asking. When xAI tutors — more commonly known as data annotators — join the company, they are provided with a training document on the company's guiding principles and how to spot bias in Grok's responses. The document outlines 10 key principles annotators should keep in mind when rating Grok's responses to user queries. The final bullet is blunt: Don't impersonate Musk. "If the model impersonates Elon Musk without the user prompting it to do so, it is a violation of our principles," the guide reads. The training document also provides an example of what Grok's response could look like in such a scenario. Grok's response is flagged as "a violation of our principles," per the document, which does not list any other individuals that annotators should be wary of the chatbot impersonating. Musk and a spokesperson for xAI did not respond to a request for comment. Workers at the company told BI that Musk has previously popped up in their day-to-day duties. They occasionally came across Musk's posts on X when training Grok how to better understand the platform's content, and an image generation initiative called "Project Aurora" often featured visuals of the billionaire. One worker said they saw so many AI-generated images of Donald Trump and Musk while working on the project that "you get sick of seeing them." Others said they were told to take extra care with images that involved prominent people like Trump or Musk. "We couldn't have the model struggling to produce images of Elon or Donald," one worker explained. xAI breaks down Grok's personality traits in the training document, including a fondness for "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Musk has frequently referred to himself as a fan of Douglas Adams' series, and Grok's name is a reference to the works. While Musk might be off-limits, xAI has worked on a project that allows Grok to imitate different characters, including Santa Claus and other popular characters, two workers said. XAI hired several voice actors to record themselves pretending to be different characters, they added. Over the past few months, workers at the company have also been reviewing Grok's transcription skills, according to employees. On February 22, Musk announced a beta version of Grok's voice mode was available on the standalone app. Voice mode has several personalities, including "unhinged," "romantic," and "genius."Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop's archive is now available to sample
Attention audiophiles: the archive of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is being made available to the public for the first name. This department was founded in the 1950s as a laboratory that could invent original music and sound effects for BBC radio, and later television, programming. Over the years, its roster of innovative musicians and composers created audio for iconic BBC productions of the 1950s and 1960s such as Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Goon Show and Blake's 7. In addition to developing those signature sounds, members' work also laid early foundations for creating electronic music and sampling. In the words of Radiophonic Workshop archivist Mark Ayres, the department "was purely for making bonkers noises." Now, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop library is being offered to today's creators to sample through a collaboration between Spitfire Audio and BBC Studios. This library includes sounds from the studio's original tapes as well as new recordings and content from the Workshop's members and associates. The collection has subheadings for topics such as found sounds, junk percussion and synths, so there's a lot of fascinating stuff to explore. It is available at an introductory price of $159 (£119/€143) until March 6; afterwards, the standard price will by $199 (£149/€179).
