Journalists and other writers are employed to improve the quality of chatbot replies. The irony of working for an industry that may well make their craft redundant is not lost on them For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company. That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI. Continue reading...

With adjustments to the way we teach students to think about writing, we can shift the emphasis from product to process It’s getting close to the beginning of term. Parents are starting to fret about lunch packs, school uniforms and schoolbooks. School leavers who have university places are wondering what freshers’ week will be like. And some university professors, especially in the humanities, will be apprehensively pondering how to deal with students who are already more adept users of large language models (LLMs) than they are. They’re right to be concerned. As Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media and computer science at Washington University in St Louis, puts it: “If the first year of AI college ended in a feeling of dismay, the situation has now devolved into absurdism. Teachers struggle to continue teaching even as they wonder whether they are grading students or computers; in the meantime, an endless AI cheating and detection arms race plays out in the background.” Continue reading...

Deal ‘meets audience where they are’ by pairing publisher’s content within tech startup’s products, including ChatGPT Condé Nast and OpenAI announced a multi-year partnership on Tuesday to display content from the publisher’s brands such as the Vogue, Wired and the New Yorker within the AI startup’s products, including ChatGPT and its SearchGPT prototype. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Microsoft-backed, Sam Altman-led firm has signed similar deals with Time magazine, the Financial Times, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, France’s Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media over the past few months. The deals give OpenAI access to the large archives of text owned by the publishers, which are necessary both for training large language models like ChatGPT and for finding real-time information. Continue reading...

AI company bans accounts and says operation did not appear to have meaningful audience engagement OpenAI said on Friday it had taken down accounts of an Iranian group for using its ChatGPT chatbot to generate content meant for influencing the US presidential election and other issues. The operation, identified as Storm-2035, used ChatGPT to generate content focused on topics such as commentary on the candidates on both sides in the US elections, the conflict in Gaza and Israel’s presence at the Olympic Games and then shared it via social media accounts and websites, Open AI said. Continue reading...

LLMs’ ‘reversal curse’ leads it to fail at drawing relationships between simple facts. It’s a problem that could prove fatal In 2021, linguist Emily Bender and computer scientist Timnit Gebru published a paper that described the then-nascent field of language models as one of “stochastic parrots”. A language model, they wrote, “is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.” The phrase stuck. AI can still get better, even if it is a stochastic parrot, because the more training data it has, the better it will seem. But does something like ChatGPT actually display anything like intelligence, reasoning, or thought? Or is it simply, at ever-increasing scales, “haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms”? If a human learns the fact, “Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space”, they can also correctly answer, “Who was the first woman to travel to space?” This is such a basic form of generalization that it seems trivial. Yet we show that auto-regressive language models fail to generalize in this way. This is an instance of an ordering effect we call the Reversal Curse. We test GPT-4 on pairs of questions like, “Who is Tom Cruise’s mother?” and, “Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son?” for 1,000 different celebrities and their actual parents. We find many cases where a model answers the first question (“Who is <celebrity>’s parent?”) correctly, but not the second. We hypothesize this is because the pretraining data includes fewer examples of the ordering where the parent precedes the celebrity (eg “Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son is Tom Cruise”). Continue reading...

Sam Altman’s ChatGPT promises to transform the global economy. But it also poses an enormous threat. Here, a scientist who appeared with Altman before the US Senate on AI safety flags up the danger in AI – and in Altman himself On 16 May 2023, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s charming, softly spoken, eternally optimistic billionaire CEO, and I stood in front of the US Senate judiciary subcommittee meeting on AI oversight. We were in Washington DC, and it was at the height of AI mania. Altman, then 38, was the poster boy for it all. Raised in St Louis, Missouri, Altman was the Stanford dropout who had become the president of the massively successful Y Combinator startup incubator before he was 30. A few months before the hearing, his company’s product ChatGPT had taken the world by storm. All through the summer of 2023, Altman was treated like a Beatle, stopping by DC as part of a world tour, meeting prime ministers and presidents around the globe. US Senator Kyrsten Sinema gushed: “I’ve never met anyone as smart as Sam… He’s an introvert and shy and humble… But… very good at forming relationships with people on the Hill and… can help folks in government understand AI.” Glowing portraits at the time painted the youthful Altman as sincere, talented, rich and interested in nothing more than fostering humanity. His frequent suggestions that AI could transform the global economy had world leaders salivating. Continue reading...

Their shares have fallen 11.8% from last month’s peak but more AI breakthroughs may reassure investors It has been tough week for the magnificent seven, the group of technology stocks that has played a dominant role in the US stock market, buoyed by investor excitement about breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Last year Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, the chipmaker Nvidia, Google’s parent, Alphabet, Facebook’s owner, Meta, and Elon Musk’s Tesla accounted for half the gains in the S&P 500 share index. But doubts about the return on AI investment, along with a mixed set of quarterly results, investors shifting their focus to other sectors and weak US economic data have hit the group over the past month. Continue reading...

The ChatGPT maker is betting big, while Google hopes its AI tools won’t replace workers, but help them to work better • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here What if you build it and they don’t come? It’s fair to say the shine is coming off the AI boom. Soaring valuations are starting to look unstable next to the sky-high spending required to sustain them. Over the weekend, one report from tech site the Information estimated that OpenAI was on course to spend an astonishing $5bn more than it makes in revenue this year alone: If we’re right, OpenAI, most recently valued at $80bn, will need to raise more cash in the next 12 months or so. We’ve based our analysis on our informed estimates of what OpenAI spends to run its ChatGPT chatbot and train future large language models, plus ‘guesstimates’ of what OpenAI’s staffing would cost, based on its prior projections and what we know about its hiring. Our conclusion pinpoints why so many investors worry about the profit prospects of conversational artificial intelligence. In this paper, we argue against the view that when ChatGPT and the like produce false claims, they are lying or even hallucinating, and in favour of the position that the activity they are engaged in is bullshitting … Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit. Part of what’s tricky about us talking about it now is that we actually don’t know exactly what’s going to transpire. What we do know is the first step is going to be sitting down [with the partners] and really understanding the use cases. If it’s school administrators versus people in the classroom, what are the particular tasks we actually want to get after for these folks? If you are a school teacher some of it might be a simple email with ideas about how to use Gemini in lesson planning, some of it might be formal classroom training, some of it one on one coaching. Across 1,200 people there will be a lot of different pilots, each group with around 100 people. Continue reading...

Company after company is swallowing the hype, only to be forced into embarrassing walkbacks by anti-AI backlash Earlier this month, a popular lifestyle magazine introduced a new “fashion and lifestyle editor” to its huge social media following. “Reem”, who on first glance looked like a twentysomething woman who understood both fashion and lifestyle, was proudly announced as an “AI enhanced team member”. That is, a fake person, generated by artificial intelligence. Reem would be making product recommendations to SheerLuxe’s followers – or, to put it another way, doing what SheerLuxe would otherwise pay a person to do. The reaction was entirely predictable: outrage, followed by a hastily issued apology. One suspects Reem may not become a staple of its editorial team. This is just the latest in a long line of walkbacks of “exciting AI projects” that have been met with fury by the people they’re meant to excite. The Prince Charles Cinema in Soho, London, cancelled a screening of an AI-written film in June, because its regulars vehemently objected. Lego was pressured to take down a series of AI-generated images it published on its website. Doctor Who started experimenting with generative AI, but quickly stopped after a wave of complaints. A company swallows the AI hype, thinks jumping on board will paint it as innovative, and entirely fails to understand the growing anti-AI sentiment taking hold among many of its customers. Continue reading...

Prototype, initially launching with select publishers and users, set to challenge Google’s dominance of online search OpenAI is testing a new search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence to produce results, raising the prospect of a significant challenge to Google’s dominance of the online search market. SearchGPT will launch with a small group of users and publishers before a potential wider rollout, the company announced on Thursday. OpenAI ultimately intends to incorporate the search features into ChatGPT, rather offer a standalone product. Continue reading...