Group items tagged

"A POPULAR news outlet has been publishing articles written by AI since November, keeping it on the down low. Tech media site CNET has been publishing the articles since November, and lots of readers don't seem to have noticed."

"This is partially why online anonymity is so important - it gives people the grace of exploration and inquiry. It allows people to make choices, change their minds, learn, and grow. TikTok doesn't make room for this kind of internet exploration; it makes it impossible to have curiosity without consequence. TikTok isn't alone in using engagement and recommender algorithms to curate personalised content feeds, but it does take it to the extreme. This is profitable both because it keeps people scrolling and because there's very little difference between being able to personalise content and personalise ads."

"As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: "They don't want this product resold and competing against their new products, so they want it all destroyed." I'd expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain iFixit, tells me, these "must-shred" contracts are the "dirty secret" of the recycling industry. ("The recyclers are desperate for manufacturer contracts, so they'll do anything and keep their mouths shut," Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in the UK found Amazon was sending millions of new and returned items a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the practice.)"

""If we build highly advanced autonomous AI, we risk creating systems that autonomously pursue undesirable goals", adding that "we may not be able to keep them in check". Other policy recommendations in the document include: mandatory reporting of incidents where models show alarming behaviour; putting in place measures to stop dangerous models from replicating themselves; and giving regulators the power to pause development of AI models showing dangerous behaviours."

"Zuckerberg understands that well. As I wrote earlier this week, TikTok is growing at blinding speed, and that has Zuckerberg worried. And rightfully so. He knows more than anyone else that attention is fleeting; viewers are fickle. Same folks who like spending hours on Facebook and Instagram will jettison the platforms for TikTok in a jiffy. He needs to figure out a way to keep them corralled."

"As Redditor actual_hacker said in a thread, the big point of this article: "The US has built a SIM-card kill list. They're shooting missiles at cell phones without caring about who is holding the phone. That is why so many innocent people keep getting killed. That is what this story is about. The next time someone says "it's just metadata," remember this story. Innocent people die because of NSA's use of metadata: the story cites 14 women and 21 children killed in just one operation. All because of metadata.""

"TikTok faces questions over safeguards for child users after a Guardian investigation found that moderators were being told to allow under-13s to stay on the platform if they claimed their parents were overseeing their accounts."

"Could it be the phones? Absolutely! To be clear: the idea that phones are causing distraction both inside and outside of school hours, and this contributes to declining test scores, seems totally plausible to me-and preliminary cross-sectional data from the PISA report indicates the same. Might it be a good idea to keep phones out of the classroom? Definitely! But, as often happens when an excerpt of a larger study makes the rounds online, some nuance is missing. Let's talk about what the data actually show. "

"However, Ms Bower also noted Woolworths' AI technology is considerably less invasive than technology recently trialled and abandoned by Bunnings and Kmart. "The Woolworths cameras don't collect sensitive biometric data or any personal information," she said. "Woolworths has also taken steps to keep customers informed using a combination of in-store signage and public statements. Importantly, customers can opt-out by using the traditional checkout process. These are all consumer protections Bunnings and Kmart failed to implement.""

"Especially at voting time, fears grow of TikTok 'disinformation' threatening democracy. Politicians and their paymasters are terrified that they can no longer control the supply of information to the public, thanks to platforms like Facebook and TikTok. With Thailand's general election only a few months away, the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) is battling to take back control of information through self-censorship of the TikTok video-sharing platform. Ostensibly, this is to keep young voters on the government's straight and narrow path."

"Research suggests more than half of adolescents are on screens right before bedtime, and that can keep them from getting the sleep they need. Not only is poor sleep linked to all sorts of downsides, including poor mental health symptoms, poor performance in school and trouble regulating stress, Prinstein said, but "inconsistent sleep schedules are associated with changes in structural brain development in adolescent years. In other words, youths' preoccupation with technology and social media may deleteriously affect the size of their brains.""

"Just like Napster forced legal music streaming to advance, popular tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E2 will force us to establish AI best practices and ethical guidelines. The IP for Generative AI will continue to be debated in the culture and in the courts, and we will collectively come to agreements. The only issue is whether regulation will ever be able to keep up with the rapid pace of AI."

"But for many scientists, Twitter has become an essential tool for collaboration and discovery - a source of real-time conversations around research papers, conference talks and wider topics in academia. Papers now zip around scientific communities faster thanks to Twitter, says Johann Unger, a linguist at Lancaster University, UK, who notes that extra information is also shared in direct private messages through the site. And its limit on tweet length - currently 280 characters - has pushed academics into keeping their commentary pithy, he adds."

"And Israeli company Optimove is helping. It normally gathers customer data to create targeted online ads, but as a service to gambling companies it has trained its AI to flag the online players who are most at risk.  It analyzes the behavior patterns characteristic of gambling addicts, which include the hours of the day and night when they place bets, the time they spend on the betting site, and how much they keep on playing to 'chase their losses'."

"Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical. AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate. But that's not the AI business model. AI pitchmen are explicit on this score: The purpose of AI, the source of its value, is its capacity to increase productivity, which is to say, it should allow workers to do more, which will allow their bosses to fire some of them, or get each one to do more work in the same time, or both. The entire investor case for AI is "companies will buy our products so they can do more with less." It's not "business custom­ers will buy our products so their products will cost more to make, but will be of higher quality.""

"First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the "10%" expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI's are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach "a country of geniuses in a datacenter"."

"The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns - art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make. Therefore our task right now - as humans - is to make sure that in the following decades as our biological numbers start to shrink on this planet, that we can repopulate it with a sufficient number of synthetic agents, bots, and robots with sufficient intelligence, grit, perseverance, and moral training to take over the economy in time to keep our living standards rising. We are not replacing existing humans with bots, nor are we replacing unborn humans with bots. Rather we are replacing never-to-be-born humans with bots, and the relationship that we have with those synthetic agents and ems, will be highly mutual. We build an economy around their needs, and propelled by their labor, and rewarding their work, but all of this is in service of our own definition of progress and human success."

"In the short term, generative AI will replace a lot of people because productivity increases while demand stays the same due to inertia. In the long term, the creation of new jobs compensates for the loss of old ones, resulting in a net positive outcome for humans who leave behind jobs no one wants to do. The most important aspect of any technological revolution is the transition from before to after. Timing and location matters: older people have a harder time reinventing themselves into a new trade or craft. Poor people and poor countries have less margin to react to a wave of unemployment. Digital automation is quicker and more aggressive than physical automation because it bypasses logistical constraints-while ChatGPT can be infinitely cloned, a metallic robot cannot. Writing and painting won't die because people care about the human factor first and foremost; there are already a lot of books we can't possibly read in one lifetime so we select them as a function of who's the author. Even if you hate OpenAI and ChatGPT for being responsible for the lack of job postings, I recommend you ally with them for now; learn to use ChatGPT before it's too late to keep your options open. Companies are choosing to reduce costs over increasing output because the sectors where generative AI is useful can't artificially increase demand in parallel to productivity. (Who needs more online content?) Our generation is reasonably angry at generative AI and will bravely fight it. Still, our offspring-and theirs-will be grateful for a transformed world whose painful transformation they didn't have to endure. Certifiable human-made creative output will reduce its quantity but multiply its value in the next years because demand specific for it will grow; automation can mimic 99% of what we do but never reaches 100%. The maxim "AI won't take your job, a person using AI will; yes, you using AI will replace yourself not using it" applies more in the long term than the

"A new method to crack open locked iPhones is so promising that US government officials have classified it, the Guardian has learned."

""No-limit Texas Hold'em is a game of incomplete information where the AI must infer a human player's intentions and then act in ways that incorporate both the direct odds of winning and bluffing behaviour to try to fool the other player." The designers said their computer didn't "bluff" the human players. But by learning from its mistakes and practising its moves at night between games, the AI was working out how to defeat its human opponents."