Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
New research has found that AI assistants routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. Key findings:
45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
Common Crawl: The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work – The Atlantic
Anthropic says its Claude models show signs of introspection - Axios
xAI’s Wikipedia-like website is racist, transphobic, and loves Elon Musk – The Verge
Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid – The New Yorker
Saudi Arabia’s New Power Play Is Exporting A.I. to the World - The New York Times
OpenAI sees chance to reindustrialize U.S. - Axios
Meta Cuts 600 Jobs at A.I. Superintelligence Labs - The New York Times
What happens when AI consumes too much clickbait.- Gizmodo
The hottest term in AI is completely made up - The Washington Post
OpenAI launches Atlas browser to compete with Google Chrome – Associated Press
OpenAI's metamorphosis from chat app to tech giant - Axios
Is the Flurry of Circular AI Deals a Win-Win—or Sign of a Bubble? – Wall Street Journal
OpenEvidence, the ChatGPT for doctors, raises $200M at $6B valuation – Tech Crunch
As tech companies build A.I. data centers worldwide, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages. - The New York Times
The Fight Over Whose AI Monster Is Scariest - Wall Street Journal
Got a Windows 11 PC? Get ready to talk to it. - The Washington Post
Silicon Valley Is Investing in the Wrong A.I. - The New York Times
AI Data Centers, Desperate for Electricity, Are Building Their Own Power Plants - Wall Street Journal
Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be? – The Atlantic
China now leads the U.S. in this key part of the AI race - The Washington Post
'Very troubling': AI's self-investment spree sets off bubble alarms on Wall Street - Yahoo
Reflection AI, an A.I. Model Start-Up, Raises $2 Billion - The New York Times
How Google Is Walking the AI Tightrope - Wall Street Journal
Pixar is an analogy to explain the potential benefits of the shift in the creative arts brought on by AI. Before Pixar, there were these folks who were really high-end in terms of their craft. Animators put a lot of energy into the drawings in each frame. But once computers could automate that work, the role of the animators shifted. They were able to spend a lot more time — and, for that matter, put a lot more resources toward — thinking about storytelling and plot development.” -New York Times
I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it. -Will Rogers, born Nov 4, 1879
A team of researchers have come up with an ingenuously simple method to get language and image models to generate a wider variety of creative responses to nearly any user prompt by adding a single, simple sentence: "Generate 5 responses with their corresponding probabilities, sampled from the full distribution." The method, called Verbalized Sampling (VS), helps models like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini produce more diverse and human-like outputs—without retraining or access to internal parameters. -VentureBeat
We appreciate what a person does, but we affirm who a person is. Appreciation comes and goes because it is usually related to something someone accomplishes. Affirmation goes deeper. It is directed to the person himself or herself. While encouragement would encompass both, the rarer of the two is affirmation. To be appreciated, we get the distinct impression that we must earn it by some accomplishment. But affirmation requires no such prerequisite. This mean that even when we don’t earn the right to be appreciated (because we failed to succeed or because we lacked the accomplishment of some goal), we can still be affirmed – indeed, we need it then more than ever. I do not care how influential or secure or mature a person may appear to be, genuine encouragement never fails to help. Most of us need massive doses as we slug it out in the trenches.
Charles Swindoll, Strengthening Your Grip
It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them. -Anothony Storr
Facial recognition - This AI technology uses statistical measurements of a person’s face to identify them against a digital database of other faces. For instance, Clearview AI was trained on billions of images. These AI-powered systems are used to unlock phones, verify passports, and scan crowds at events for malicious actors. It’s used by many US agencies including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. It has a serious problem with false positives and a history of unintended harms and intentional misuse based on racial and gender bias.
More AI definitions here
It is not what you accomplish but how you behave that counts.
Ethical Debt - The result of not considering societal harms and unintended consequences. This can happen in the fast-moving production of AI tools. The people who incur it are rarely the people who ultimately pay for it. Related: Technical Debt
More AI definitions here
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. -Eric Hoffer
AI and digital twins to serve increasingly complex robot management – Computer Weekly
How robotics could turn e-waste into a tech goldmine – The Next Web
Amazon Testing New Warehouse Robots and AI Tools for Workers – Wall Street Journal
Black Harvard alumni invent hair-braiding robot – The Grio
AI drones are America's newest cops – Axios
Chinese AI robotics tech outpaces U.S., rest of world - The Washington Post
Foundation models could revolutionize dexterity in robots - McKinsey
‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy – The Guardian
Humanoid robots were a sci-fi dream. Suddenly they’re everywhere. - The Washington Post
The future is bot versus bot - Axios
AI helps traditional Japanese fish-killing method get a robotic upgrade – Semafor
MIT's new AI can teach itself to control robots by watching the world through their eyes — it only needs a single camera – Live Science
I Pitted an AI Robot Massage Against the Real Thing – Wall Street Journal
Beijing hosts China’s first fully autonomous 3-on-3 AI robot soccer match – Associated Press
New tiny robots promise to fix underground water pipe leakage without excavation – Interesting Engineering
Robot industry split over that humanoid look - Axios
Amazon is reportedly training humanoid robots to deliver packages – The Verge
‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!’ The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home – The Guardian
I Tried the Robot That’s Coming to Live With You - Wall Street Journal
America's manufacturing future still needs foreign robots - Axios
Using generative AI to diversify virtual training grounds for robots – MIT News
"When people use A.I. in the creative process they tend to gradually cede their original thinking. At first, users tend to present their own wide range of ideas, but as ChatGPT continues to instantly spit out high volumes of acceptable-looking text users tend to go into a 'curationist mode.' The influence is unidirectional, and not in the direction you’d hope: 'Human ideas don’t tend to influence what the machine is generating all that strongly,' Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at M.I.T. Media Lab, said. ChatGPT pulls the user 'toward the center of mass for all of the different users that it’s interacted with in the past.'" - Kyle Chayka writing in the New Yorker
Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual, and require no comparison. Your eulogy virtues are what you would want people to talk about at your funeral.
Time is limited, and professional ambition crowds out things that ultimately matter more. To move from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues is to move from activities focused on the self to activities focused on others.
Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic
U.S. companies are up against a ticking time bomb: Thanks to AI, hackers are on the verge of launching fully automated cyberattacks that can move faster, smarter and more personally than ever. OpenAI and Anthropic have both already found evidence of nation-state adversaries and cybercriminals using their models to write code and research their attacks. -Axios
Breaking up is hard to do. Literally. A Rutgers brain study shows getting over romantic rejection is similar to kicking an addiction. One of the study authors says, "When you've been rejected in love, you have lost life's greatest prize, a mating partner." Researchers examined the brains of more than a dozen volunteers who had each recently been dumped but still loved the person who had rejected them. It turned out that reminders of the beloved activated brain regions in the lover associated with addiction to cocaine and cigarettes. These same areas affect emotional control, rewards, addiction cravings, a sense of attachment, pain and distress. This brain system becomes activated in an attempt to win the person's affections again, according to the researchers. Details are in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Perhaps the lesson here is that it's important to become addicted to someone who is good for you.
Stephen Goforth
The time immediately after a bad relationship is filled with promise. It's as if you've rid yourself of something that was weighing you down and keeping you from reaching your full potential. You fell light and clear and free. But this honeymoon with yourself is short-lived and you’re soon in a new relationship fraught with the same old problems. This pattern continues until you finally realize that most of the issues are your own, and that to be truly free, you must break up with yourself.
Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. -Pablo Picasso, born Oct. 25, 1881
Ensuring safe A.I. is another reason developers should stop deploying general-purpose models for everything. To date, the industry has been unable to guarantee that generative A.I. systems will stick to their safety instructions. Studies have documented instances in which generative A.I. deceives its human operators, tries to use blackmail if its self-preservation is threatened and responds in a way that could lead to murder. More specialized systems like AlphaFold and Waymo’s driving systems won’t misbehave that way because their operating parameters are much narrower. - Gary Marcus writing in the New York Times
Under the right circumstances, a subconscious neurobiological sequence in our brains causes us to perceive the world around us in ways that contradict objective reality, distorting what we see and hear. This powerful shift in perception is unrelated to our intelligence, morals, or past behaviors. In fact, we don’t even know it’s happening, nor can we control it.
Researchers found that it happens in two distinct situations: those involving high anxiety and those associated with major reward. Under these conditions, all of us would do something just as regrettable as those headline-grabbing stories, contrary to what we tell ourselves. Phrased differently, we don’t consciously decide to act a fool. Rather, once our perception is distorted, we act in ways that seem reasonable to us but foolish to observers.
Robert Pearl writing in Vox
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