Digit_al Society

"In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. "It makes my writing look fancy," one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text. My students also relied heavily on AI-powered paraphrasing tools such as Quillbot. Paraphrasing well, like drafting original research, is a process of deepening understanding. Recent high-profile examples of "duplicative language" are a reminder that paraphrasing is hard work. It is not surprising, then, that many students are tempted by AI-powered paraphrasing tools. These technologies, however, often result in inconsistent writing style, do not always help students avoid plagiarism, and allow the writer to gloss over understanding. Online paraphrasing tools are useful only when students have already developed a deep knowledge of the craft of writing."

"It seems pointless to ask whether the spreadsheet is a good or a bad thing. But one prominent contrarian, the technology columnist John C Dvorak, had no doubts last week as he contemplated VisiCalc's 30th anniversary. 'The spreadsheet', he fumed, 'created the "what if" society. Instead of moving forward and progressing normally, the what-if society that questions each and every move we make. It second-guesses everything'. Worse still, he thinks, the spreadsheet has elevated the once-lowly bean-counter to the board and enabled accountants to run the world."

"Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called "AI hallucinations". We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems."

"'You could single-handedly push it to extinction': how social media is putting our rarest wildlife at risk"

"That's why the best systems may come from a combination of AI and human work; we can play to the machine's strengths, Ilievski says. But when we want to compare AI and the human mind, it's important to remember "there is no conclusive research providing evidence that humans and machines approach puzzles in a similar vein", he says. In other words, understanding AI may not give us any direct insight into the mind, or vice versa."

"As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI's benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we'll run out of things to do (even if they don't look like "real jobs" to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games. Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable."

"On a zoomed-out time scale, technological progress follows an exponential curve. Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture). The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason. To the three great technological revolutions-the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational-we will add a fourth: the AI revolution. This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly. The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we've made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear."

"One of the key features introduced is a "Correction" capability in Azure AI Content Safety. This tool aims to address the problem of AI hallucinations - instances where AI models generate false or misleading information. "When we detect there's a mismatch between the grounding context and the response… we give that information back to the AI system," Bird explained. "With that additional information, it's usually able to do better the second try.""

"To find more glyphs, researchers led by archaeologist Masato Sakai of Yamagata University trained an AI program to identify relief-type glyphs in high-resolution drone images taken of the entire region. The program identified 1309 possible geoglyphs, and the team confirmed 303 of them with on-the-ground surveys, almost doubling the number of known geoglyphs of this type, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

"research consistently shows that social media is exploited to facilitate political intimidation and violence. What's more, certain features of social media platforms make them particularly susceptible to such exploitation, and some of those features can be changed to reduce the danger. "

"Russia propaganda group behind fake Kamala Harris hit-and-run story, says Microsoft Microsoft researchers found that the group created a video, paid an actor to appear as the alleged victim, and spread the claim through a fake website"

"But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally - and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days. However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy - many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion."

"Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse? Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than official tally"

"National police agency says it is investigating 513 cases of deepfake pornography as a new scandal grips the country Raphael Rashid in Seoul and Justin McCurry in Tokyo Fri 13 Sep 2024 21.00 BST Share The anger was palpable. For the second time in just a few years, South Korean women took to the streets of Seoul to demand an end to sexual abuse. When the country spearheaded Asia's #MeToo movement, the culprit was molka - spy cams used to record women without their knowledge. Now their fury was directed at an epidemic of deepfake pornography."

"Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students who had access to ChatGPT while doing practice math problems did worse on a math test compared with students who didn't have access to ChatGPT. Those with ChatGPT solved 48 percent more of the practice problems correctly, but they ultimately scored 17 percent worse on a test of the topic that the students were learning. "

"The world's most important knowledge platform needs young editors to rescue it from chatbots - and its own tired practices"

"Australia plans to ban children from social media. Is checking and enforcing an age block possible? As the Albanese government pledges a ban, age verification trials in the UK and US show possible hurdles and privacy concerns"

"The internet, including social media, was not made with children and young people in mind. This is why online experiences are not always good for children and sometimes even exploitative, risky, and deeply problematic. No wonder parents are worried, educators are at a loss and the government feels compelled to act. But banning children from social media is not the answer."