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Daily Archives: March 19, 2023

Is ChatGPT Closer to a Human Librarian Than It Is to Google?

Gizmodo, Chirag Shah: “A search engine researcher explains the promise and peril of letting ChatGPT and its cousins search the web for you. The prominent model of information access and retrieval before search engines became the norm – librarians and subject or search experts providing relevant information – was interactive, personalized, transparent and authoritative. Search engines are the primary way most people access information today, but entering a few keywords and getting a list of results ranked by some unknown function is not ideal…A new generation of artificial intelligence-based information access systems, which includes Microsoft’s Bing/ChatGPT, Google/Bard and Meta/LLaMA, is upending the traditional search engine mode of search input and output. These systems are able to take full sentences and even paragraphs as input and generate personalized natural language responses.At first glance, this might seem like the best of both worlds: personable and custom answers combined with the breadth and depth of knowledge on the internet. But as a researcher who studies the search and recommendation systems, I believe the picture is mixed at best…”

Live stream of IPCC press conference to launch the Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will hold a hybrid press conference to present the Summary for Policymakers of Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, subject to approval by the Panel. The press conference is scheduled to start at 14.00 CET (13.00 GMT) on Monday, 20 March 2023. It will follow the closure of the… Continue Reading

Internet Archives – Here’s how to participate in Monday’s oral arguments

“We’re standing up for the digital rights of all libraries in court! On Monday at 1pm ET, the Southern District of New York will hear oral argument in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the lawsuit against our library and the longstanding library practice of controlled digital lending, brought by 4 of the world’s largest publishers. Here’s… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 18, 2023

Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 18, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the… Continue Reading

Microsoft 365’s AI-powered Copilot is like an omniscient version of Clippy

ars technica: “Today Microsoft took the wraps off of Microsoft 365 Copilot, its rumored effort to build automated AI-powered content-generation features into all of the Microsoft 365 apps. The capabilities Microsoft demonstrated make Copilot seem like a juiced-up version of Clippy, the oft-parodied and arguably beloved assistant from older versions of Microsoft Office. Copilot can… Continue Reading

Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine to the Human Rights Council

President of Human Rights Council appoints members of investigative body in Ukraine English | 30 March 2022 Infographic – Main Findings – Report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, March 2023 War crimes, indiscriminate attacks on infrastructure, systematic and widespread torture show disregard for civilians, says UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine… Continue Reading

Was this written by a human or AI?

HAI – Stanford University: “New research shows we can only accurately identify AI writers about 50% of the time. Scholars explain why (and suggest solutions)…AI-generated text is increasingly making its way into our daily lives. Auto-complete in emails and ChatGPT-generated content are becoming mainstream, leaving humans vulnerable to deception and misinformation. Even in contexts where… Continue Reading

Decentralized Social Media Rises as Twitter Melts Down

IEEE Spectrum: “Mastodon is just the start—here comes the Fediverse.Is the future of social media decentralized? That question might’ve felt absurd a few years ago, but the Fediverse is challenging long-held assumptions about how social media should work. The Fediverse, unlike the social networks that rose to dominance over the last two decades, is a… Continue Reading

Microsoft’s new share button makes it easy to show people what Bing AI is saying

The Verge: “The company also said it’s made the chatbot’s ‘Balanced’ mode faster. Microsoft is trying to make it easier to share your experiences with its GPT-4-powered Bing Chat by adding a button that lets you post the AI’s response to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. People have already been sharing the interesting (and sometimes upsetting)… Continue Reading

Artifical Intelligence and Climate Change

Quoted from: Couillet, Romain, Denis Trystram, and Thierry Ménissier. “The submerged part of the AI-ceberg.” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, September 2022. Via No Tech Magazine – “The energy consumption of a single training run of the latest (by 2020) deep neural networks dedicated to natural language processing exceeds 1,000 megawatt-hours (more than a month of… Continue Reading