“Those are four essential characteristics of human intelligence — also animal intelligence, for that matter — that current #AI systems can’t do,” he said.
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#Languages: "Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of others in Benin and neighboring countries—as “a fictional language.”
This result, which I replicated, is not unusual. Dossou is accustomed to the feeling that his culture is unseen by technology that so easily serves other people. He grew up with no Wikipedia pages in Fon, and no translation programs to help him communicate with his mother in French, in which he is more fluent. “When we have a technology that treats something as simple and fundamental as our name as an error, it robs us of our personhood,” Dossou told me.
The rise of the internet, alongside decades of American hegemony, made English into a common tongue for business, politics, science, and entertainment. More than half of all websites are in English, yet more than 80 percent of people in the world don’t speak the language. Even basic aspects of digital life—searching with Google, talking to Siri, relying on autocorrect, simply typing on a smartphone—have long been closed off to much of the world. And now the generative-AI boom, despite promises to bridge languages and cultures, may only further entrench the dominance of English in life on and off the web."
"We were supposed to research #enshittification, not embrace it as a business model!" implored the DVC Research.
The Vice-Chancellor sighed audibly and exhaled.
"We're out of options."
She raised her hands, palms up, reminiscent of prayer.
"The research grants don't cover the research we do, much less the research we want to do.
International students have declined 20% year on year since India, China and Indonesia have on-shore partnerships with Deakin and Monash that still get the grads a permanent residency.
We have PhDs teaching most of the undergrad courses. The endowment took a major hit when the stock market crashed in '25.
Federation's gone bust, Adelaide's half the size it was before the merger, and you've seen CQ merge with SCU and James Cook and Charles Darwin just to be viable."
She took a sharp inhalation of burnt autumn air.
"It's tens of millions a year in recurring revenue. That's a School's worth of people."
#AI#GenerativeAI#News#Media#Journalism: "Journalists, academics and media executives gathered this week in Copenhagen for the Nordic AI in Media Summit. It was the second edition of the event, hosted by the Nordic AI Journalism Network. The initiative is led by Kasper Lindskow from JP/Politikens Media Group, Agnes Stenbom from Schibsted and Olle Zachrison from Swedish Radio.
The summit included keynote lectures by experts such as Nicholas Diakopolous from Northwestern University, Ezra Eeman from NPO and Melissa Heikkilä from MIT Technology Review, the presentation of AI projects and tools from many newsrooms, and talks targeting specific issues including transparency and regulation.
Among the many projects discussed at the conference, here are five that caught our eye."
Whenever I see OpenAI's Sam Altman with his pseudo-innocent glance, he always reminds me of Carter Burke from Aliens (1986), who deceived the entire spaceship crew in favor of his corporation, with the aim of getting rich by weaponizing a newly discovered intelligent lifeform.
Worth noting: AI is coming at fields with no life and limb jeopardy.
These systems can’t yet do things in solid, predictable or safe ways, and so they are trying to deploy them in contexts where they believe the consequences of things like “hallucinations” won’t end immediately in concretely disasterous ways.
I wrote more on this: A self-driving car getting things wrong immediately collapses into the tyranny of atoms… https://bit.ly/BeingHumanInAgeOfAI
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#Automation#Hallucinations: "The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.
But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at a robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.
Considering adding the following language to our guidelines for publishers whose titles we carry at Weightless:
"We don't knowingly sell titles that employ generative AI in any capacity. If we find out a particular title was created using AI, we reserve the right to remove AI-generated portions or delete the title from our offerings entirely."
Hey! I'm Melon Usk! I purchased Fossery Tech!
And now, I'm here to save the world from that evil ChatGPT, with my new open source, privacy focused AI tool!
A cybersecurity researcher finds that 20% of software packages recommended by GPT-4 are fake, so he builds one that 15,000 code bases already depend on, to prevent some hacker from writing a malware version.
Disaster averted in this case, but there aren't enough fingers to plug all the AI-generated holes 😬
#AI#GenerativeAI#USA#Misinformation#ChatGPT#LLMs: "The Pew Research Center—which did similar probes during the rise of the internet, social media, and mobile devices—released a study of how ChatGPT was being used, regarded, and trusted. The sample was taken between February 7 and 11 of this year.
Some of the numbers at first seem to indicate that the LLM controversy might be a parochial disagreement that most people don’t care about. A third of Americans haven’t heard of ChatGPT. Just under a quarter have used it. Oh, and for all the panic about how AI is going to flood the public square with misinformation about the 2024 election? So far, only 2 percent of Americans have used ChatGPT to get information about the presidential election season already underway.
More broadly, though, data from the survey indicates that we’re seeing a powerful technology whose rise is just beginning. If you accept Pew’s sample as indicative of all Americans, millions of people are indeed familiar with ChatGPT. And one thing in particular stands out: While 17 percent of respondents said they have used it for entertainment and an identical number says they’ve tried it to learn something new, a full 20 percent of adults say that they have used ChatGPT for work. That’s up dramatically from the 12 percent who responded affirmatively when the same question was asked six months earlier—a rise of two-thirds." https://link.wired.com/view/5fda497df526221fe830f4d4kr4to.j4/3764bd02