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Tech Republic: “DuckDuckGo, a search company, launched a free and anonymous AI Chat service in June 2024. AI Chat joins DuckAssist, which generates answers based on Wikipedia, as a way to explore topics with AI. AI Chat operates with the widely used prompt-and-response process popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. But DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat …
(Dis)Information Wars. Adrian Casillas, Maryam Farboodi, Layla Hashemi, Maryam Saeedi, and Steven Wilson NBER Working Paper No. 32896 September 2024 Over the past decade, social media platforms have emerged as prominent vehicles for displaying dissent. In response, various actors have increasingly spread fake news on these platforms to impair the opposition—the (dis)information war. We analyze …
NewsGuard’s Reality Check Special Report: “In tech lingo, “garbage in, garbage out” means that if bad data goes into a system, expect bad results. The same holds true for the accuracy of AI chatbots. A NewsGuard analysis found that 67 percent of the news websites rated as top quality by NewsGuard block access to their …
Journalist’s Toolbox AI Mike Reilley – “I post this here as a warning. There are tools such as AI Undetect and Humanize AI Text, rewrite tools that offer an AI detection remover service. They can fool GPTZero, ZeroGPT, Copyleak, etc. There also have been isolated reports that the detection tools may have a bias against …
Big Think: When AI eats its own product, it gets sick. Key Takeaways Generative AI exploded in popularity when OpenAI released ChatGPT. A paper published in Nature looked at what happens when AI is trained on “synthetic data,” or content created by an AI rather than humans. Flaws in the synthetic data led to even …
Experimental Living with A.J. Jacobs: “I came up with a lot of these strategies a couple of years ago while working on a book called Factchecking My Life. The book was a reaction to the knowledge crisis we’re facing now: People don’t agree on basic facts. The media has splintered into different realities. Trust in …
Te Hedgehog Review. Dispatches from the telephone reference desk. Stephen Akey: “How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google …
MIT Technology Review: “As long as chatbots have been around, they have made things up. Such “hallucinations” are an inherent part of how AI models work. However, they’re a big problem for companies betting big on AI, like Google, because they make the responses it generates unreliable. Google is releasing a tool today to address …
“U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Chairwoman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, along with Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Tina Smith (D-MN) sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter and Federal Trade Commission …
PC Mag: “Technology is weird sometimes. I can control my thermostat with my voice, but sometimes my printer can feel just as confusing and unreliable as they were 15 years ago. If your printer is throwing you an error (or just ignoring your demands entirely), there can be any number of reasons. Unfortunately, just figuring out the …
MakeUseOf: “Calls from unknown numbers are frustrating, especially when they don’t seem to stop. Using a reverse phone number lookup tool, you can take power back from anonymous callers. Here are some of the best free tools you can use to identify these callers.”
FactCheck.org: “In their first debate, and first meeting, the presidential candidates attacked each other on the economy, taxes, immigration and abortion. By Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, D’Angelo Gore, Lori Robertson, Jessica McDonald, Saranac Hale Spencer, Alan Jaffe, Kate Yandell, Ben Cohen, Logan Chapman, Sarah Usandivaras and Ian Fox. Posted on September 11, 2024. The highly …
