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ComputerWorld: “Market research firm Gartner [requires fee but this article sums up the report well] yesterday published its 2024 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, and the study revealed that generative AI (genAI) has passed the “peak of inflated expectations” and is now sliding down into the “trough of disillusionment.”Along with genAI, AI-augmented software engineering is …
ChatGPT is bullshit – Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. Dr. Michael Townsen Hicks, Dr. James Humphries and Dr. Joe Slater argue that …
Fortune [no paywall]: “Meta has quietly unleashed a new web crawler to scour the internet and collect data en masse to feed its AI model. The crawler, named the Meta External Agent, was launched last month according to three firms that track web scrapers and bots across the web. The automated bot essentially copies, or …
Mark Scott, Digital Bridge, Politico: “After years of tracking online disinformation, propaganda and other digital nastiness, Renée diResta sees patterns where others see chaos. In her new book, “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality,” the former Stanford University researcher tries to parse together a theory about why, seemingly out of the blue, …
The Verge: “…Reimagine is a logical extension of last year’s Magic Editor tools, which let you select and erase parts of a scene or change the sky to look like a sunset. It was nothing shocking. But Reimagine doesn’t just take it a step further — it kicks the whole door down. You can select …
Via LLRX – Is Your Firm Disclosing the Risks Associated to Using AI? Patrick J. McKenna calls out to the legal community the importance of a new public database, the AI Risk Repository, that lists ALL the ways AI could go wrong. Its creators hope their work could lead to further research to determine which …
VentureBeat: “A new report from Deloitte sheds light on the complex landscape of generative AI adoption in the enterprise, revealing both significant progress and persistent challenges. The survey, titled “The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise: Now decides next,” gathered insights from 2,770 business and technology leaders across 14 countries and six industries. The …
Even laypeople use legalese Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson – MIT. Published August 19, 2024. PNAS 121 (35). “Why are laws so complicated? Across two preregistered experiments, we found that people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual …
Via LLRX – Rejecting Dogmas Around AI, User Privacy, and Tech Policy – The Markup’s Ross Teixeira had a virtual discussion with Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist at DataBricks, about the the ethics of companies using customer data to train models, the growing trend of integrating AI models into our personal devices and lives, and how people can …
Axios: “The Washington Post on Sunday published its first-ever story built on the work of a new AI tool called Haystacker that allows journalists to sift through large data sets — video, photo or text — to find newsworthy trends or patterns. Why it matters: In an interview, the Post’s chief technology officer, Vineet Khosla, …
Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5. Full text available free. “Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are …
Krebs on Security: “New details are emerging about a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a consumer data broker that recently spilled hundreds of millions of Americans’ Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker which shares access to the same consumer records inadvertently published the passwords …
