21 Articles about AI & Politics

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Tech Titans Amass Multimillion-Dollar War Chests to Fight AI Regulation – Wall Street Journal

Fears About A.I. Prompt Talks of Super PACs to Rein In the Industry – New York Times

Georgia Rep.’s campaign uses AI-generated deepfake of opponent in tight Senate showdown – CBS News  

Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy - Wall Street Journal 

Trump’s attempt to block states from regulating AI sparked pushback from Republicans – Washington Post

AI Is Transforming Politics, Much Like Social Media Did - TIME 

How the U.S. Economy Became Hooked on AI Spending - Wall Street Journal

In the A.I. Race, Chinese Talent Still Drives American Research – New York Times

White House pulls back on AI laws executive order – Mashable

Four ways AI is being used to strengthen democracies worldwide – The Guardian

An Economist Asked, How Much Should We Spend to Avoid the A.I. Apocalypse? – New York Times

Chinese hackers used Anthropic's AI agent to automate spying – Axios

The Politics of AI Are About to Explode - Bloomberg 

The AI Cold War That Will Redefine Everything - Wall Street Journal

Exploring AI's role in democracy: Here are 5 essential insights – Fast Company

The UK’s fact-checkers are sending their AI to help Americans cover elections – Poynter

How Trump Is Using Fake Imagery to Attack Enemies and Rouse Supporters – New York Times

Political consultant defies court order in lawsuit over AI robocalls that mimicked Biden – AP

Is it ok for politicians to use AI? Survey shows where the public draws the line – The Conversation  

Saudi Arabia’s New Power Play Is Exporting A.I. to the World - The New York Times 

AI comes to local elections. Fake videos hit contentious school board races – Columbus Dispatch

LLMs & Retracted Research Papers

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Large language models should not be used to weed out retracted literature, a study of 21 chatbots concludes. Not only were the chatbots unreliable at correctly identifying retracted papers, they spit out different results when given the same prompts. On average, the 21 chatbots correctly identified fewer than half of the retracted papers. More at Retraction Watch

An experimental mock trial at the UNC School of Law raises questions about AI's role in criminal justice

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In a simulated trial, three AI systems acquitted a Black teenager of robbery charges. However, in the real case on which the mock trial was based, the judge quickly found the defendant guilty. The real conviction was appealed, but the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. More info

Video of the mock trial

An AI to Diagnose Your Sniffles

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Google has built an AI model that uses sound signals to "predict early signs of disease." It can identify subtle changes in your coughs, sniffles, breathing, and more. In places where there is difficulty accessing quality healthcare, this technology can step in as an alternative where users need nothing but their smartphone's microphone. For instance, it has been trained on 100 million cough sounds that help detect tuberculosis. More at Mashable

AI Definitions: Vector databases

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Vector databases – Raw data is converted into lists of numbers (word vectors) so that machine learning models can use them. The vectors are grouped together if they relate to one another. For instance, the word "king" would relate to a man, while "queen" would relate to a woman. A deep learning model (typically a transformer model) will use these vectors to "understand" the meaning of words and their relationships. More than 1,000 numbers can be used to represent a single word. If there are many numbers, then the word vector has a high dimension, making it nuanced. A low dimension for a word vector means the list of numbers is low. While not as nuanced, a low-dimensional vector is easier to work with. Vector data bases is what allows a language model to “recall” previous inputs, draw comparisons, identify relationships, and understand context.

More AI definitions

22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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Trump orders wide-ranging "Genesis Mission" to boost AI research – Axios

AI Investors Want More Making It and Less Faking It – Wall Street Journal

The Biggest AI Companies Met to Find a Better Path for Chatbot Companions – Wired

Major music studios strike licensing deals with AI firms - Semafor 

In the A.I. Race, Chinese Talent Still Drives American Research – New York Times 

How the U.S. Economy Became Hooked on AI Spending – Wall Street Journal 

Are we in an AI bubble? Eight charts will help you decide. – Washington Post  

The AI boom isn't going anywhere – Axios  

How Trillions in New AI Debt Will Test the Bond Market – Wall Street Journal

OpenAI tests ChatGPT in group chats - Axios 

Balance sheets, cash flows are showing the strain of AI investments and forcing investors to think about companies differently – Wall Street Journal

When AI Hype Meets AI Reality: A Reckoning in 6 Charts – Wall Street Journal

OpenAI fights order to turn over millions of ChatGPT conversations – Reuters

The risks of giving ChatGPT more personality - Axios

The AI Cold War That Will Redefine Everything – Wall Street Journal

Google, the sleeping AI giant, awakens - Axios

OpenAI Wants Brands to Allow Their Mascots to Appear in Gen AI Videos – Wall Street Journal

AI stocks waver as ‘Big Short’ investor bets against Palantir, Nvidia - Washington Post

Stability AI largely wins landmark UK intellectual property lawsuit brought by Getty Images – Associated Press

Who Will Pay for the AI Revolution? Retirees – Wall Street Journal

A.I. Is a Bubble. Maybe That’s OK. - New York Times

Hundreds of thousands of videos from news publishers like The New York Times and Vox were used to train AI models – Harvard’s Nieman Lab

And how are you mad?

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All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’ 

Book of Life

AI Definitions: Test-time training (TTT)

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Test-time training (TTT) – Instead of being given truthful data to get an LLM model started in the right direction, TTTs learn by performing a task with the data. An alternative to transformers (which have high energy demands), TTTs only process more data faster, they can do so without consuming nearly as much computing power. Instead of growing as it processes data, like a transformer, it encodes the data into representations called weights. No matter how much data it processes, a TTT model won’t grow and become unwieldy.

More AI definitions 

26 Recent Articles about the Dangers of AI

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Judge Horrified as Lawyers Submit Evidence in Court That Was Faked With AI - Futurism

Ontario man alleges ChatGPT drove him to psychosis, leading him to the delusion that he could save the world. – CTV

How would-be authors were fooled by AI in suspected global publishing scam - The Guardian

Report finds some AI-enabled toys shared inappropriate content or collected data – NPR

AI-designed viruses raise fears over creating life. - The Washington Post

An Economist Asked, How Much Should We Spend to Avoid the A.I. Apocalypse? - New York Times 

Is AI dulling our minds? Experts weigh in on whether tech poses threat to critical thinking, pointing to cautionary tales in use of other cognitive labor tools – Harvard

AI is reinventing crime and cops aren't ready – Axios  

AI’s infinite memory could endanger how we think, grow, and imagine - Amy Chivavibul 

Chinese hackers used Anthropic's AI agent to automate spying – Axios  

How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’ - New York Times 

It’s Easier to Cheat When You Can Blame AI – Wall Street Journal

A.I. is making death threats more realistic, enabling online harassers to generate images showing their victims in imagined violent situations. – New York Times 

US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for gun – The Guardian

Woman sent husband AI photos of intruder as a prank. He called 911. – Washington Post  

As tech companies build A.I. data centers worldwide, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages. – New York Times

The Fight Over Whose AI Monster Is Scariest - Wall Street Journal 

‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder – The Guardian 

ChatGPT Is a Fictional Character What makes OpenAI’s chatbot so dangerous? It’s a character without an author. – The Atlantic  

The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World - New York Times

How AI-powered hackers are stealing billions – The Economist

ChatGPT’s new parental controls failed my test in minutes - The Washington Post  

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce – Futurism  

AI can design toxic proteins. They’re escaping through biosecurity cracks. - The Washington Post

When I played doctor with the chatbot, the simulated patient confessed problems that are real—and that should worry all of us  - New Yorker

A stunning scientific accomplishment: Computers can now design new viruses that can then be created in the lab - The Washington Post

Seeking the Best is a Trap

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We have this sense that there is an objective best, and in virtually no area of life is that true. It’s not even that, “Well, there’s the best for me, and then there’s the best for you.” It isn’t even clear that there is a best for me. There’s a whole set of things that are probably more or less equivalent.

If you have this mindset that says, “I have to get the best,” it’s so hard to figure out what that is that you end up looking in panic around you at what other people are choosing as a way to help you figure out what is the best. I think it’s partly because they are struggling to define the best, and they can’t do it on their own, so they’re madly checking out other people’s decisions as a way of figuring out what really is the best. It’s extremely destructive.  

Barry Schwartz quoted in Vox