I just published “Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley”
4700 words on the biggest risk of generative AI: believing in the myth of AGI
“A Short History of Eugenics: From Plato to Nick Bostrom - Truthdig”
“The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust”
Given these many concerns about the use of new AI tools, it’s perhaps not the best time for firms building or deploying them to remove or fire personnel devoted to ethics and responsibility for AI and engineering
I just published “Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley”
It’s a 4700 word extract from my book. Probably the most important part as it tackles the AGI myth and how falling for it clouds your judgement
I haven’t read the “AI does mind-reading! Hyperventilate!” survey. But it should be noted that MRI/fMRI research studies are notoriously unreliable to begin with and I can’t imagine adding AI into the mix is an improvement.
“Users demand X! Any business that doesn’t do X will fail!”
“Do you have data to support that? Is this something you’ve found with your own users?”
“No, but everybody knows it’s true.”
Every time
“Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?”
This is an interesting preprint arguing that the so-called “emergent” abilities of LLMs are, basically, benchmarking artifacts. So much of what’s wrong in AI is down to crap benchmarks
“AI Chatbots Have Been Used to Create Dozens of News Content Farms”
“Rise of the Newsbots: AI-Generated News Websites Proliferating Online”
This is an improvement over other models. Still the wrong metaphor. Tech only deals in systems, which don’t have momentum or direction, just order vs entropy
Entropy always wins in the long run
If you want to make a grown Icelandic socialist cry, this’d do it
Maístjarnan, “The May Star”. Lyrics by Halldór Laxnes. Song by Jón Ásgeirsson. Sung by the attendees at the Icelandic Confederation of Labour centennial in 2016
Obligatory, international workers day post
“A research team airs the messy truth about AI in medicine”
In some instances, an AI could lead to faster tests, or speed the delivery of certain medicines, but still not save any more lives.
Common types of “AI beats humans at X” studies
“We compared ChatGPT to a bunch of reddit trolls!”
“We measured the productivity of people who do stuff for $5 at tasks nobody ever does then generalise that to everything”
“We benchmarked the AI on tests in its training data”
“Deno KV - Simon Willison’s TILs”
This looks really interesting. Looks like you could use the open source version with litestream or litefs
“Stanford Professor: Mass Tech Layoffs Caused by ‘Social Contagion’”
It’s becoming quite clear that many—if not most—people working in AI believe that language models are better at writing than people, diffusion models are better at art, and that their models display near-human behaviour.
I honestly don’t know what to do with this
“AI in News Reporting: A Test Is Coming for Journalism Ethics - Bloomberg”
The signal-to-noise ratio of the web, esp. on any kind of commercial website, is about to drop like a stone. This isn’t likely to end well for them
“EU proposes new copyright rules for generative AI - Reuters”
Companies deploying generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, will have to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems
“The Intelligence Illusion: A practical guide to the business risks of Generative AI”
I’ve never before experienced such a disparity between how much potential I see in a technology and how little I trust those who are making it
“A Photographer Tried to Get His Photos Removed from an AI Dataset. He Got an Invoice Instead.”