Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"We submitted the grant on time. The next day, while speaking to a friend, I told him, "This week, I wrote my first ChatGPT grant." He replied that he had been doing it for months and that many other scientists are doing the same. A 2023 Nature survey of 1,600 researchers found that more than 25% use AI to help them write manuscripts and that more than 15% use the technology to help them write grant proposals. Some people might see the use of ChatGPT in writing grant proposals as cheating, but it actually highlights a much bigger problem: what is the point of asking scientists to write documents that can be easily created with AI? What value are we adding? Perhaps it is time for funding bodies to rethink their application processes."

"Racists on the notorious troll site 4chan are using a powerful new and free AI-powered image generator service offered by Microsoft to create antisemitic propaganda, according to posts reviewed by Bellingcat. Users of 4chan, which has frequently hosted hate speech and played home to posts by mass shooters, tasked Bing Image Creator to create photo-realistic antisemitic caricatures of Jews and, in recent days, shared images created by the platform depicting Orthodox men preparing to eat a baby, carrying migrants across the US border (the latter a nod to the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory), and committing the 9/11 attacks."

"I have been working with generative AI and, even though I have been warning that these tools are improving rapidly, I did not expect them to really be improving that rapidly. On every dimension, Bing's AI, which does not actually represent a technological leap over ChatGPT, far outpaces the earlier AI - which is less than three months old! There are many larger, more capable models on their way in the coming months, and we are not really ready."

"To find out, we searched Hansard for parliamentary speeches made by Australian MPs in 2020 and asked ChatGPT to opine on the same subjects - ranging from the role the arts play in society to the government's obligation to provide good dental care."

"Given that, isn't it interesting that the one thing nobody talks about at the moment is the environmental impact of the vast amount of computing needed to train and operate LLMs? A world that is dependent on them might be good for business but it would certainly be bad for the planet. Maybe that's what Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the outfit that created ChatGPT, had in mind when he observed that "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies"."

"To start we need a new human right to "cognitive liberty", which would come with an update to other existing human rights to privacy, freedom of thought and self-determination. All told it would protect our freedom of thought and rumination, mental privacy, and self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. It would change the default rules so we have rights around the commodification of our brain data. "

"My prediction failed. For a decade and a half, Facebook resisted the fate of all the social networks that preceded it. In hindsight, it's easy to see why: it cheated. The company used investor cash to buy and neutralize competitors ("Kids are leaving Facebook for Insta? Fine, we'll buy Insta. We know you value choice!"). It allegedly spied on users through the deceptive use of apps such as Onavo and exploited the intelligence to defeat rivals. More than anything, it ratcheted up "switching costs.""

"The specific engineering of ChatGPT has made it quite compelling. But ultimately (at least until it can use outside tools) ChatGPT is "merely" pulling out some "coherent thread of text" from the "statistics of conventional wisdom" that it's accumulated. But it's amazing how human-like the results are. And as I've discussed, this suggests something that's at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more "law like" in their structure than we thought. ChatGPT has implicitly discovered it. But we can potentially explicitly expose it, with semantic grammar, computational language, etc."

"In early December, Musk called ChatGPT "scary good" and warned, "We are not far from dangerously strong AI." But Altman has been warning the public just as much, if not more, even as he presses ahead with OpenAI's work. Last month, he worried about "how people of the future will view us" in a series of tweets. "We also need enough time for our institutions to figure out what to do," he wrote. "Regulation will be critical and will take time to figure out…having time to understand what's happening, how people want to use these tools, and how society can co-evolve is critical.""

"On Mar 16, 2023, The Copyright Office initiated an effort to investigate copyright law and policy concerns related to Generative AI. "This initiative is in direct response to the recent striking advances in generative AI technologies and their rapidly growing use by individuals and businesses. The Copyright Office has received requests from Congress and members of the public, including creators and AI users, to examine the issues raised for copyright, and it is already receiving applications for registration of works including AI-generated content.""

"The combination of ChatGPT with its Wolfram plug-in just scored 96% in a UK Maths A-level paper, the exam taken at the end of school, as a crucial metric for university entrance. (That compares to 43% for ChatGPT alone). If this doesn't shock you, it should. Maths A-level (like its equivalent in many other countries) is held up as the required and essential qualification for much of our populations-the way to be prepared for our upcoming AI age. And yet, here it is, done by those very AIs, better than most of our students."

"A fake, AI-generated image of Pope Francis stepping out in a stylish white puffer jacket and bejewelled crucifix racked up millions of views over the weekend - with many mistaking it for a real image. Experts fear the rapidly developing technology behind the image could soon undermine our ability to distinguish fake photos, which can be generated in seconds, from reality."

"Super-charged misinformation and the atrophy of human intelligence. By regurgitating information that is already on the internet, generative models cannot decide what is a good thing to tell a human and will repeat past mistakes made by humans, of which there are plenty."

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."

"According to the website Lexica, which tracks over 10 million images and prompts generated by Stable Diffusion, Rutkowski's name has been used as a prompt around 93,000 times. Some of the world's most famous artists, such as Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci, brought up around 2,000 prompts each or less. Rutkowski's name also features as a prompt thousands of times in the Discord of another text-to-image generator, Midjourney. Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn't his. "It's been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won't be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art," Rutkowski says. "That's concerning.""

"The question of why AI generates fake academic papers relates to how large language models work: they are probabilistic, in that they map the probability over sequences of words. As Dr David Smerdon of the University of Queensland puts it: "Given the start of a sentence, it will try to guess the most likely words to come next.""

"AI and the American Smile How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression."

"OpenAI has taken ChatGPT offline in Italy after the government's Data Protection Authority on Friday temporarily banned the chatbot and launched a probe over the artificial intelligence application's suspected breach of privacy rules."

"A Belgian man recently died by suicide after chatting with an AI chatbot on an app called Chai, Belgian outlet La Libre reported. The incident raises the issue of how businesses and governments can better regulate and mitigate the risks of AI, especially when it comes to mental health. The app's chatbot encouraged the user to kill himself, according to statements by the man's widow and chat logs she supplied to the outlet. When Motherboard tried the app, which runs on a bespoke AI language model based on an open-source GPT-4 alternative that was fine-tuned by Chai, it provided us with different methods of suicide with very little prompting. "

"Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether-and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill. If you're looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life-and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators-is about to drastically change."