AI Misrepresentation of News

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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20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.

More at BBC News

24 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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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 

New AI battle: White House vs. Anthropic - Axois

The shift in the creative arts brought on by AI

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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

AI Prompts & Verbalized Sampling

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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 

Encouragement

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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

AI Definitions: Facial recognition

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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

21 Recent Articles about AI & Robotics

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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

The Gradual Effect of AI on Creativity

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"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

AI Definitions: Deep Learning

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Deep Learning – A popular type of machine learning that’s especially useful when the data is a mess—such as with natural language processing. This method of training computers uses neural networks. The word “deep” means that the composition has many “blocks” of neural networks stacked on top of each other, and the trick is adjusting the blocks that are far from the output, since a small change there can have outsized effects on the output. It is the dominant way to help machines sense and perceive the world around them. It powers the image-processing operations of firms like Facebook and Google, self-driving cars, and Google’s on-the-fly language translations. Deep learning algorithms need vast amounts of data to perform tasks that humans learn easily with a few examples. 

More AI definitions here

Résumé virtues & Eulogy virtues

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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

19 Articles about AI & Coding

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Addicted to Love

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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