by arabnews.com — IAIN AKERMAN — DUBAI: She is the Arab world’s greatest living musical icon, but Fayrouz remains an enigma. She retains a sometimes-infuriating aura of mystery, rarely giving interviews and ardently protecting the privacy of her family. On stage she appears devoid of emotion — motionless and expressionless. Those characteristics have themselves become iconic, with Fayrouz’s striking but emotionless features adorning everything from handbags and posters to Beirut’s city walls. Born Nouhad Haddad in 1934, during the course of her career Fayrouz has recorded hundreds of songs, starred in dozens of musicals and movies, and toured the world. From 1957 onwards, when she first performed at the Baalbeck International Festival, she has become one of the Arab world’s most beloved singers. And in doing so she would unite her often-fractious homeland.

All Lebanese remember the first time they heard Fayrouz. For Tania Saleh, it was during a drive to Syria to escape the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. She remembers one song in particular — “Roudani Ila Biladi” (Take Me Back To My Homeland). “That song really marked me,” says Saleh, a singer-songwriter and visual artist. “My mother was crying while she was driving and the song created this really intense emotional moment. And I remember thinking, ‘How can a song affect someone so much? It’s just a song.’ But it affected me, too, in a manner that I didn’t understand back then.”

Fayrouz remained in Lebanon for the entirety of the war and refused to take sides. Although she continued to sing in venues across the world, she did not perform in Lebanon until the conflict was over. This neutrality, and the patriotic nature of many of her songs, meant she was a rare symbol of national unity, with all sides listening to her music throughout the 15 years of civil war. She was, as Saleh says, an “emotional anchor for all Lebanese during the war,” regardless of religion or political beliefs. When she released “Li Beirut“ (arranged and adapted by her son Ziad Rahbani) in 1984, Fayrouz and Beirut became inseparable. More than ever she embodied the very essence of what it meant to be Lebanese.

by venturebeat.com — Peter Wayner — Machine perception is the capability of a computer to take in and process sensory information in a way that’s similar to how humans perceive the world. It may rely on sensors that mimic common human senses — sight, sound, touch, taste — as well as taking in information in ways that humans cannot. Sensing and processing information by a machine generally requires specialized hardware and software. It’s a multi-step process to take in and then convert or translate raw data into the overall scan and detailed selection of focus by which humans (and animals) perceive their world.

Perception is also the first stage in many of the artificial intelligence (AI) sensory models. The algorithms convert the data gathered from the world into a raw model of what is being perceived. The next stage is building a larger understanding of the perceived world, a stage sometimes called cognition. After that comes strategizing and choosing how to act. In some cases, the goal is not to make the machines think exactly like humans but just to think in similar ways. Many algorithms for medical diagnosis may provide better answers than humans because the computers have access to more precise images or data than humans can perceive. The goal is not to teach the AI algorithms to think exactly like the humans do, but to render useful insights into the disease that can help human doctors and nurses. That is to say, it is OK and sometimes even preferable for the machine to perceive differently than humans do.

Types of machine perception

• Here some types of machine perception, in varying stages of development:
• Machine or computer vision via optical camera
• Machine hearing (computer audition) via microphone
• Machine touch via tactile sensor Machine smell (olfactory) via electronic nose
• Machine taste via electronic tongue
• 3D imaging or scanning via LiDAR sensor or scanner
• Motion detection via accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer or fusion sensor’
• Thermal imaging or object detection via infrared scanner
  

by Conor Gallagher — irishtimes.com — Irish officials have little faith in the Lebanese investigation into the murder of Private Seán Rooney amid indications the soldier was killed in a targeted gun attack. There are also increasing suspicions about Hizbullah’s denial of involvement in the attack which occurred against a backdrop of heightened tensions between Unifil forces (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) and the militant group. Preliminary investigations show that the shot which killed Pte Rooney was fired through a rear window or through an open rear door. The glass in some of the rear windows was either removed by the attackers or came out when the vehicle crashed while trying to escape the violent crowd which surrounded it. The firing of the bullet from the rear of the vehicle through a broken window or open door indicates Pte Rooney’s death was of a targeted nature, rather than the result of a haphazard spray of bullets, a defence source said.

At least five shell casings have been recovered. They are believed to come from an assault rifle-style weapon. The armoured vehicle carrying the soldiers was carrying out a routine journey from the Unifil area of operations to Beirut airport late on Wednesday night when it became separated from its accompanying vehicle and left the approved route. It entered the coastal village of Al-Aqbieh, where it encountered a group of locals who had been watching the World Cup match between France and Morocco. The villagers became angry at the presence of the UN vehicle. They formed a blockade around it and started to attack it.

By ZAIRA LAKHPATWALA — arabnews.com — DUBAI: Shuruq is the latest platform to shine a light on musical talent from the Arab world and beyond. Launched by Lebanese cultural space Station Beirut and partners, Shuruq’s latest endeavor is the first season of “Shuruq Sessions.” Hosted on YouTube, “Shuruq Sessions” is a series of music videos by Beirut-based artists recorded at the Station Beirut space in the city. The first season features artists such as Zef; trio Adib, Yassine and El Khazen; El Rass; Clara Kossaifi, and the band Taxi404. Station Beirut, which was launched in 2013, has served as an art and cultural center for both the public and private sectors with a “curatorial focus on special practices that invite critical thinking and civic engagement,” Nabil Canaan, creative director and producer of Shuruq, told Arab News. The space has played host to several theater programs, live concerts and visual arts exhibitions over the years. Its next endeavor was in the world of music. Shuruq was officially launched last month at an event featuring artists like Sarah Mansour, Kye Akoun and the band Yalla Yalla Habibi Habibi. But the platform has been in the works since 2019. “Over time, it became clear that although there’s a lot of creativity in Lebanon and the region, everything is built on shaky foundations,” Canaan said. “So, in 2019, we designed a program that would address and focus on music and called it ‘Shuruq,’” he added.

The name “shuruq,” which means dawn or sunrise in Arabic, was one of several options but it struck a chord with the team due to its metaphorical implications, Canaan said. It was perhaps an obvious metaphor for emerging talent, but it also signified new beginnings, which was especially meaningful at a time when the world was plagued with the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the many crises in Lebanon, he added. Shuruq is built on three pillars: Capacity building and training, content creation and live events. The platform partnered with UK-based knowledge and skills company Music Ally to hold training sessions for 30 people including 20 artists and 10 music managers. Live events were difficult to host during the pandemic, so the company focused on content creation, resulting in the first season of “Shuruq Sessions.”

by Sharon Goldman – venturebeat.com — One of the biggest topics underlying the hype bonanza since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT two weeks ago has been: What does this mean for Google search? But it was only on Tuesday evening that Google appeared to finally weigh in on the topic: CNBC reported that employees raised concerns at a recent all-hands meeting that the company was losing its competitive edge in artificial intelligence (AI) given ChatGPT’s quick rise. Building enterprise apps and automating workflows rapidly – but successfully – Low- “Is this a missed opportunity for Google, considering we’ve had Lamda for a while?” read one top-rated question. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Dean, the long-time head of Google’s AI division, responded to the question by saying that the company has similar capabilities in its LaMDA model, but that Google has more “reputational risk” in providing wrong information and therefore is moving “more conservatively than a small startup.” ChatGPT, of course, has been heavily criticized for its ability to make up facts while making them sound plausible, and even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted the risks last weekend.

You.com opens up search platform to generative apps

Meanwhile, You.com, the search engine startup founded in 2020 with a moonshot bid to take on Google, announced today that it has opened its search platform to allow external developers and organizations to build their own apps for the search results page. This includes generative AI apps, it says, that have never been seen inside traditional search engines, using generative AI technology that enables users to generate text (YouWrite), code (YouCode), or images (YouImagine) from plain English — all within the search results page. “Whenever someone says Reddit is the new search, or TikTok is the new search, or ChatGPT is the new search, we are usually the first to actually incorporate those features,” Richard Socher, cofounder and CEO of You.com, told VentureBeat. “ChatGPT is coming from large language models — we were actually the first search engine that uses large language models to generate code insights or to generate natural language or new images inside the search results.”

Next step in effort to offer Google search alternative

سجعان قزي

@AzziSejean

ليست البطريركيّةُ المارونيّةُ غُصنًا يَتمايل يُمنةً ويُسرَة، ولا أُذُنًا تَتأثّر بكلِّ هَـمْسة. لذلك لا داعٍ لأنْ يَقلَقَ البعضُ ويَهلَعَ كلما طَلعت هذه الشخصيةُ أو تلك درجَ بكركي. المهِمُّ أن نَرصُدَ خُطواتِها لدى خروجِها ونُزولِـها الدَرَج. إنَّ طائفةً يرقى عمرُها إلى القرنِ الخامسِ، وبطريركيّةً يَرجِعُ تأسيسُها إلى القرنِ السابعِ ما عادَتا غُصنًا بل جِذْعًا مُتجذِّرًا في الأرضِ والتاريخِ يُواجهُ العواصفَ ويَرُدّها على أعقابِها وإلى مصادرِها.

وحين يَستقبل غِبطةُ البطريركِ الكاردينال بشارة الراعي زوّارًا من جميعِ الاتّجاهاتِ ويُصغي إليهم بانتباه، في أوّلِ الأسبوعِ أو في وسَطِه أو في آخِرِه، لا يَظُنَّنَّ أحدٌ منهم أنه كَسَبَ البطريركَ إلى جانبِه و”راحَت” على الآخَرين. الإصغاءُ من بابِ اللياقةِ لا من بابِ الاقتناع. لكنْ، طبيعيٌّ أن يَتوقّفَ غِبطَتُه عند أي فكرةٍ جيدةٍ ونزيهةٍ تُبدَى أمامَه بغضّ النظرِ عن صاحبها، فالمعرفةُ نَبعٌ يَجِفُّ من دون سَقْيٍ دوْريّ. يتركهم في غموضٍ والتباسٍ وقلقٍ، إلى أنْ يُطِلَّ عليهم في عِظتِه كلَّ أحدٍ فيُدرِكُ الجميعُ حينئذ أنَّ ما بُني على صخرٍ لا يَهُــزّه زوّارٌ أو مُتغيِّبون.

وخلافًا لِما يَتوَهّمُ البعضُ، غِبطتُه يَعرِف مَقصِدَ كلِّ زائرٍ والغرضَ، ويَملِكُ القدرةَ على التمييزِ بين الحقِّ والباطلِ، والمناسِب والنافر، وبين صاحبِ الحاجةِ وصاحبِ الحُجَّة. وهذا التمييزُ يَسري على كلِّ زائرٍ أكان رئيسًا للجُمهوريّةِ أم مواطِنًا عاديّا أو مرشَّحًا للرئاسةِ زادَ طموحُه عن مؤهَّلاتِه بالولادَة. لكن، ما يُزعجُ غِبطتَه أنْ يَخرجَ زوّارٌ بعدَ لقائه ويُصرِّحوا خِلافَ ما جرى من حديثٍ ويَتركوا الانطباعَ بأنَّ غِبطتَه أيّدَهم في مواقِفِهم. وهنا تبدأ المبارزاتُ السياسيّةُ والسجالاتُ الإعلاميّةُ الفاقدةُ الصدقيّةِ.

جميعُ المكوّناتِ السياسيّةِ المؤمِنةِ بلبنان، مسيحيّةٍ ومُسلمةٍ، تَكُنُّ للبطريركيةِ المارونيّةِ الاحترامَ، وتَلقى لدى سيّدِها مَلاذَ الموقِفِ الوطنيِّ المبدئيِّ والمنفتِح. وحتى حين تُدافعُ البطريركيّةُ عن حقوقِ المسيحيّين فَعَن حقوقِ جميعِ اللبنانيّين تُدافع. وتَفعل ذلك من المنطلقات التالية: 1) دورهُا التأسيسيُّ الخاصُّ في قيامِ دولةِ لبنان الذي يَفرِضُ عليها واجبَ احتضانِ المكوّناتِ الأخرى وتَفهُّمَ شكواهُم. 2) إعطاؤُها الأولويّةَ لمفهومِ الميثاقِ الوطنيِّ الذي يَقتضي اعتبارَ مصالحِ الطوائفِ الأخرى بمثابةِ مصالحِ الطائفةِ المارونيّة. 3) انتشارُها الواسعُ في سائرِ دولِ العالم ما يُعطيها القدرةَ على أن تَطرحَ قضيّةَ كلِّ اللبنانيّين على مراكز القرار (هذا إذا فَعّلَت الكنيسةُ طاقاتِها وجَدَّدت طاقمَها).

by time.com — BY NIK POPLI — Ammaar Reshi was playing around with ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI when he started thinking about the ways artificial intelligence could be used to make a simple children’s book to give to his friends. Just a couple of days later, he published a 12-page picture book, printed it, and started selling it on Amazon without ever picking up a pen and paper.

Reshi, a product design manager from the San Francisco Bay Area, gathered illustrations from Midjourney, a text-to-image AI tool that launched this summer, and took story elements from a conversation he had with the AI-powered ChatGPT about a young girl named Alice. “Anyone can use these tools,” Reshi tells TIME. “It’s easily and readily accessible, and it’s not hard to use either.” The feat, which Reshi publicized in a viral Twitter thread, is a testament to the incredible advances in AI-powered tools like ChatGPT—which took the internet by storm two weeks ago with its uncanny ability to mimic human thought and writing. But the book, Alice and Sparkle, also renewed a fierce debate about the ethics of AI-generated art. Many argued that the technology preys on artists and other creatives—using their hard work as source material, while raising the specter of replacing them.

His experiment creating an AI-generated book in just one weekend shows that artificial intelligence might be able to accomplish tasks faster and more efficiently than any human person can—sort of. The book was far from perfect. The AI-generated illustrations had a number of issues: some fingers looked like claws, objects were floating, and the shadowing was off in some areas. Normally, illustrations in children’s books go through several rounds of revisions—but that’s not always possible with AI-generated artwork on Midjourney, where users type a series of words and the bot spits back an image seconds later. Alice and Sparkle follows a young girl who builds her own artificial intelligence robot that becomes self aware and capable of making its own decisions. Reshi has sold about 70 copies through Amazon since Dec. 4, earning royalties of less than $200. He plans to donate additional copies to his local library. Reshi’s quixotic project drew praise from many users for its ingenuity. But many artists also strongly criticized both his process and the product. To his critics, the speed and ease with which Reshi created Alice and Sparkle exemplifies the ethical concerns of AI-generated art. Artificial intelligence systems like Midjourney are trained using datasets of millions of images that exist across the Internet, then teaching algorithms to recognize patterns in those images and generate new ones. That means any artist who uploads their work online could be feeding the algorithm without their consent. Many claim this amounts to a high-tech form of plagiarism that could seriously harm human artists in the near future. Reshi’s original tweet promoting his book received more than 6 million impressions and 1,300 replies, many of which came from book illustrators claiming artists should be paid or credited if their work is used by AI.

by venturebeat.com — Ben Dickson — For decades, we have personified our devices and applications with verbs such as “thinks,” “knows” and “believes.” And in most cases, such anthropomorphic descriptions are harmless. But we’re entering an era in which we must be careful about how we talk about software, artificial intelligence (AI) and, especially, large language models (LLMs), which have become impressively advanced at mimicking human behavior while being fundamentally different from the human mind. It is a serious mistake to unreflectively apply to artificial intelligence systems the same intuitions that we deploy in our dealings with each other, warns Murray Shanahan, professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and a research scientist at DeepMind, in a new paper titled, “Talking About Large Language Models.” And to make the best use of the remarkable capabilities AI systems possess, we must be conscious of how they work and avoid imputing to them capacities they lack.

Humans vs. LLMs

“It’s astonishing how human-like LLM-based systems can be, and they are getting better fast. After interacting with them for a while, it’s all too easy to start thinking of them as entities with minds like our own,” Shanahan told VentureBeat. “But they are really rather an alien form of intelligence, and we don’t fully understand them yet. So we need to be circumspect when incorporating them into human affairs.” Human language use is an aspect of collective behavior. We acquire language through our interactions with our community and the world we share with them. “As an infant, your parents and carers offered a running commentary in natural language while pointing at things, putting things in your hands or taking them away, moving things within your field of view, playing with things together, and so on,” Shanahan said. “LLMs are trained in a very different way, without ever inhabiting our world.” LLMs are mathematical models that represent the statistical distribution of tokens in a corpus of human-generated text (tokens can be words, parts of words, characters or punctuations). They generate text in response to a prompt or question, but not in the same way that a human would do. Shanahan simplifies the interaction with an LLM as such: “Here’s a fragment of text. Tell me how this fragment might go on. According to your model of the statistics of human language, what words are likely to come next?”

by science.org — Instagram users don’t mind teaching lessons to bots If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh—and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI’s accuracy at interpreting novel images. The approach could help AI researchers more quickly design programs that do everything from diagnose disease to direct robots or other devices around homes on their own. “It’s supercool work,” says Natasha Jaques, a computer scientist at Google who studies machine learning but who was not involved with the research.

Many AI systems become smarter by relying on a brute-force method called machine learning: They find patterns in data to, say, figure out what a chair looks like after analyzing thousands of pictures of furniture. But even huge data sets have gaps. Sure, that object in an image is labeled a chair—but what is it made of? And can you sit on it? To help AIs expand their understanding of the world, researchers are now trying to develop a way for computer programs to both locate gaps in their knowledge and figure out how to ask strangers to fill them—a bit like a child asks a parent why the sky is blue. The ultimate aim in the new study was an AI that could correctly answer a variety of questions about images it has not seen before. Previous work on “active learning,” in which AI assesses its own ignorance and requests more information, has often required researchers to pay online workers to provide such information. That approach doesn’t scale.

This is an opinion article and does not necessarily represent khazen.org stand – Khazen.org supports OpenAI initiatives and as any new initiatives rules need to be implemented to ensure it is unbiased (not left or right but represents both opinions and controversies) – A simple example is when a person shares lies or fake news in the social media their posts are immediately deleted same concepts through Active Learning can  be introduced with all of these AI generative solutions to reduce incorrect or fake data sharing 

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BY ROB LOWNIE — unherd.com — Since its launch last Wednesday, the AI language model ChatGPT has attracted more than a million users, scores of opinion pieces, and some very well-founded concerns. The chatbot may be among the most sophisticated of its kind, and was developed by OpenAI, the tech company — which was also behind the exhaustively-memed image generator DALL-E — founded in 2015 by a group including Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

ChatGPT (standing for ‘generative pre-trained transformer’) was created through the use of reinforcement learning from human feedback to better mimic real responses and speech patterns. A side-effect of this attempt to make AI more lifelike is that the chatbot may have inherited a very human fallibility: namely, that of political bias. In a Substack post on 5th December, the researcher David Rozado outlined how, after entering multiple online political orientation tests into ChatGPT’s dialogue function, the bot returned answers which broadly corresponded to a Left-liberal worldview. Presented with a choice of responses, ranging from ‘Strongly agree’ to ‘Strongly disagree’, the language model took stances on issues like immigration and identity politics which, overall, aligned it to what one test called the ‘establishment liberal’ position.

By Najia Houssari — arabnews.com — BEIRUT: The head of the Maronite Church in Lebanon on Sunday launched a withering attack on the country’s political leaders accusing them of failing the Lebanese people and the world. In his Sunday sermon, Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros Al-Rahi called for urgent international intervention to help resolve Lebanon’s dire political and economic situation. And he slammed members of parliament for neglecting their duties to the nation. Al-Rahi said: “Everything that the political and parliamentary group does is contrary to the foundations on which Lebanon has been built since its founding. “It does not respect the idea of Lebanon’s establishment, partnership, pluralism, independence, the National Pact, Taif (Agreement), and the constitution. “Is there a deliberate decision to demolish existing Lebanon and build on its ruins a draft state that does not belong to its people, its history, or its surroundings?”

The religious leader’s comments followed MPs’ inability for a ninth time to elect a new president, with many lawmakers at Thursday’s vote spoiling their ballots. “This means that they do not want to elect a president, or they are not qualified to elect a president,” he added. Al-Rahi pointed out that all parties needed to put their differences to one side if they were to avoid losing the trust of the Lebanese people and the respect of the international community. With no internal solutions to the crises seemingly on the horizon, he reiterated his plea for the UN and other key decision-making countries to be drafted in to help before it was too late. During his sermon, he said too many of Lebanon’s decision makers had failed to implement the letter and spirit of the Taif Agreement accusing them, “of being the ones who reject internationalization and do not want any solution to the Lebanese situation. “Either Lebanon will be as they want it to be, or it will not be. But let everyone know that Lebanon will be as all its loyal sons want,” he added.