Fear of AI kills a useful tool

Hey folks,

In today’s update:

📰 News: Fear of AI kills a useful tool

🛠️ Tools: Multi-document data extraction tool

🎲 Misc: Driverless cabs get approval for 24/7 operations in San Francisco

Reading time is 4 minutes. Let’s dive in 🤿

 Startups

Fear of AI kills a useful tool

Prosecraft, a tool designed to statistically analyze the language of books, was recently shut down due to backlash from authors concerned about AI usage.

Originally, Prosecraft had scraped data from over 27,000 books online to develop a set of lexicographic tools. These tools were intended to provide basic information about a book, such as word count and vividness.

However, earlier this week, a group of prominent authors voiced their objections on social media, protesting against the unauthorized scraping of their books.

As AI models such as ChatGPT near human-like capabilities in writing tasks, sensationalist media often conflates traditional machine learning sentiment analysis with generative AI.

Leverage AI Tools

• PDFChat: A tool that helps you get answers from your documents along with OCR that enables data extraction from complex PDFs.(link)

• Pykoi: Open-source python library for LLMs providing UI & code for data & feedback collection, fine-tuning (RLHF & RAG), and model comparisons. (link)

• PCBuilderAI: AI assistant recommends the best hardware for your usage (gaming or work) within budget constraints (link)

 Today in Tech

• Robo-taxis in San Francisco : After a contentious public hearing, California allows Waymo and Cruise to operate driverless cabs 24/7 throughout San Francisco (link)

• Amazon’s AI for sellers: Amazon is rolling out an artificial intelligence tool for sellers on its marketplace that will write copy for product listings (link)

• Artists using AI: Meet the artists reclaiming AI from big tech – with the help of cats, bees and drag queens (link)

• AI regulation: US Federal Election Commission could limit AI deepfakes in political ads ahead of 2024 elections (link)

• Don’t rush In: Morgan Stanley just compared the ‘bubble-like euphoria’ over A.I. to the investing manias of the past century. The lesson for investors: Don’t ‘rush in’ (link)