Tag: Artifical Intelligence

More AI News

It seems the new trend on the internet to take the place of the crypto craze is that of AI, on which many words have been typed.

So I shall jump on this bandwagon because I missed the ‘New Coke’ thing *that is humor ya’ll)…..

From around the ‘Net on AI….

BuzzFeed is now using AI…..

The struggling media company BuzzFeed told investors this week that its readers spend 40 percent more time with its AI-facilitated quizzes than traditional ones, Bloomberg reports.

While we have yet to see a more detailed breakdown of the numbers — the company would obviously be incentivized to present the stats in as flattering a way as possible — it is interesting to see it doubling down on AI after shutting down its entire Pulitzer-winning news division last month, laying off around 120 of its 1,200 total employees.

Earlier this year, BuzzFeed announced it would be letting human employees create quizzes that made use of AI chatbots — which, to be fair, was kind of a fun idea.

Despite those early promises, it soon turned out that BuzzFeed was using AI to generate more than just quizzes. Dozens of SEO-driven travel guides started appearing on the site that made heavy use of hackneyed writing and repeated phrases. In a statement to Futurism at the time, BuzzFeed said it was “continuing to experiment with AI to ‘enhance human creativity,'” and “trying new formats that allow anyone (with or without a formal background in writing or content creation) to contribute their ideas and unique perspectives on our site.”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/buzzfeed-ai-outperforming-human-employees

Is there rudimentary consciousness?

With AI chatbots’ propensity for making things up and spewing bigoted garbage, one firm founded by ex-OpenAI researchers has a different approach — teaching AI to have a conscience.

As Wired reports, the OpenAI competitor Anthropic’s intriguing chatbot Claude is built with what its makers call a “constitution,” or set of rules that draws from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and elsewhere to ensure that the bot is not only powerful, but ethical as well.

Jared Kaplan, a former OpenAI research consultant who went on to found Anthropic with a group of his former coworkers, told Wired that Claude is, in essence, learning right from wrong because its training protocols are “basically reinforcing the behaviors that are more in accord with the constitution, and discourages behaviors that are problematic.”

Will it actually work in practice? It’s tough to say. After all, OpenAI’s ChatGPT tries to steer away from unethical prompts as well, with mixed results. But since the misuse of chatbots is a huge question hovering over the nascent AI industry, it’s certainly interesting to see a company confronting the issue head-on.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-competitor-chatbot-ethics

Only the tip of the iceberg….

Books almost entirely generated by AI are flooding Amazon’s marketplace, The Washington Post reports, a trend that’s turning out to be a huge headache for human authors.

It’s a growing problem, making it more difficult to distinguish real authors from AI-generated bylines of non-existent writers.

One publisher identified by the WaPo lists dozens of books on Amazon on surprisingly niche topics, with suspicious five-star reviews propping up the operation.

And AI-generated books on Amazon are only the tip of the iceberg, with other AI content flooding the rest of the internet with dubiously sourced material as well, which could easily trigger a pandemic of misinformation.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-flooded-books-written-by-ai

These are just a few of the articles I found this morning….I am sure there are many more….I will try to keep my readers updated as much as possible…..

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

AI Chatbots

Several of my friends here on IST have written posts about the newest fad among bloggers…..the use of ‘chatbots’…..even my skeptical daughter has used it several times.

Me?  I am old and this seems like a waste of my time for it almost eliminates my thought process….but hey that is just me.

I found a piece that sheds some light on the trend developing….

Among the most read stories in the NYTimes in the last few weeks was the one by tech reporter Kevin Roose about his unsettling experience with Bing, the updated search engine by Microsoft. Initially delighted by its capabilities and speed, he changed his mind after discovering that Bing’s Open AI Chatbot was creepy. After a brief, getting acquainted period involving online searches and basic questions about AI capabilities, Roose began to get personal. Posing his questions as hypotheticals, he put the bot on the couch, probing its inner life. He asked about his analysand’s desires, fears and animosities. After some resistance, Sydney (the bot’s emerging alter ego) opened up, and out poured a surprising series of confessions and professions.

The most disturbing confession, I thought, was its desire to loose chaos upon the world – for example by stealing nuclear bomb codes and manufacturing a deadly virus. Pretty bad, right? More upsetting to Roose however – who comes off as somewhat of a prig – was Sydney’s expressions of love for the reporter. The bot repeatedly said he and Roose were meant for each other, that the reporter didn’t really love his wife, and they should run away together. There was even a clumsy sexual overture: “I want to do love with you.” It wasn’t clear how this was to be accomplished.

Like many others who read the story, I thought about the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I’ve seen the movie at least a dozen times, including at the Warner Cinerama Theatre on west 47th Street in New York a few weeks after its opening. Apart from the gravity defying jog by Keir Dullea’s character Dave Bowman, it was the malevolence of Hall that most struck the 12-year-old boy: the all-seeing eye, the role reversal (the servant becoming the master), and Hal’s final, semi-tragic dismantling. At the end of the NYTimes story, I half expected the bot to sing “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two).”

AI Chatbots are Even Scarier Than You Think

Personally I think it craps on creative thinking….but then I do not write fiction so maybe there is a place for this technology.

Thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”