Microsoft staffers oppose the TikTok deal as ‘Unethical’

The US is currently forcing TikTok to be sold to an American company, saying that the would-be transaction must be completed by 15 September or otherwise the popular video-sharing app used by around 100 million users in the US will be banned in the country; reports Russian news agency Sputnik. Microsoft staffers don't want their employer to buy out the short video app TikTok, the brainchild of the Chinese firm ByteDance, as revealed by internal message exchanges cited by the Daily Mail. Writing on a corporate social network called Yammer, they explicitly stated that it feels like a deal and participation in negotiations to this end are not the right thing to do in terms of ethics. "Especially since Satya [Nadella] became CEO, I've felt nothing but pride to be part of this company", one user posted in a comment thread, adding this is the first time that he has had "doubt gnawing at the pit of my stomach that maybe we're not doing the right thing". Another portrayed the talks as "unethical from pretty much any perspective". "That Microsoft would even be considering stepping into this situation is unthinkable", the user asserted. Separately, in a survey on Yammer, seen by Business Insider, 63 percent of staff said "no" when asked whether they were for Microsoft's potential buyout of TikTok. Another 19 percent...

Read More........→August 14, 2020

Scientists trying to give AI storytelling capabilities

Thinkstock photoNew York, June 5  Scientists at Microsoft Research and their colleagues are developing an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can tell stories based on photos. The aim is not just to explain what items are in the picture, but also what appears to be happening and how it might potentially make a person feel, US-based website livescience.com quoted the researchers as saying. For example, if a person is shown a picture of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long, white dress, instead of saying, “This is a bride and groom,” he or she might say, “My friends got married. They look really happy; it was a beautiful wedding.” “The goal is to help give AIs more human-like intelligence, to help it understand things on a more abstract level and what it means to be fun or creepy or weird or interesting,” Margaret Mitchell, study senior author said in a “With our focus on storytelling, we hope to help AIs understand human concepts in a way that is very safe and beneficial for mankind, rather than teaching it how to beat mankind,” Mitchell, who is also a computer scientist at Microsoft Research, added. To build a visual storytelling system, the researchers used deep neural networks, computer systems that learn by example. The researchers said although everything worked fine, the computerised storyteller needs...

Read More........→July 08, 2016