AI News Roundup: Bing surpasses 100 million active users, Discord to introduce AI Chatbot, and more

AI could help the IRS catch wealthy tax dodgers

• IRS has mainly targeted poor families with audits because doing so is easier and cheaper than pursuing the complicated tax matters of wealthy filers. However, technology could help level the playing field.


• Once IRS commissioner nominee Daniel Werfel is confirmed, one of his first orders of business should be dedicating some of the funding to tap AI to help revamp the entire audit process.


• The IRS is pretty tight-lipped about any AI or machine learning it’s currently using on the enforcement front, but during a webcast in 2018, the agency revealed that technology was helping it root out certain noncompliance in minutes. That used to take humans weeks or months.


• If AI is applied the right way and has proper oversight, it could go a long way toward making the IRS’s auditing fairer, better targeted and more profitable for the US government.

• Microsoft recently announced that its new Bing search engine has crossed 100 million daily active users. It has been little over a month since Microsoft introduced the AI-powered Bing Chat feature.


• The company is aware that the numbers are still small, particularly in comparison to Google, which currently has over a billion daily active users.


• Apart from the growth in new users, Microsoft is also seeing engagement grow as more people are conducting more searches daily.

Discord rolling out AI-powered chatbot 

• Discord is introducing new artificial intelligence features that can summarise long conversations or add decorations to a user's avatar, the latest move among tech companies to build generative AI tools.


• Discord users can invoke the AI-powered Clyde to answer trivia questions, help schedule meetings or recommend playlists, the company said.


• Another AI feature will let users "remix" their friends' avatars using generative image models.


• Discord said it will also experiment with OpenAI technology to improve an existing content moderation tool that helps automatically block harmful or unwanted messages from a Discord chat.

Risks and Rewards of AI-generated Photography

• What ChatGPT does with textual answers, a host of AI tools are doing in image generation. The quality and diversity of the output still has some way to go but there is no doubting the potency of the technology.


• But it also poses dangers to the authenticity and human creativity one associates with art and photography. AI image generators can be abused, like any technology. And they are already being used for illegality.


• Photographers need to evaluate the immediate and long-term effects of AI pictures and generators on their work and the industry as a whole. Photographers should be aware of the potential risks while employing AI pictures and generators to enhance their careers.