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...
Tag - ChatGPT
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...
Victor Miller proposed customized ChatGPT bot to govern Cheyenne, Wyoming – but
fared badly at the ballot box
A mayoral candidate in Wyoming who proposed letting an artificial intelligence
bot run the local government lost his race on Tuesday – by a lot.
The candidate, Victor Miller, announced his run for mayor of Cheyenne earlier
this year, and quickly made headlines after he decided to run with his
customized ChatGPT bot, named Vic (Virtual Integrated Citizen), and declared his
intention to govern in a hybrid format, in what experts say was a first for US
political campaigns.
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...
The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked a panic about computers gaining
power over humankind. But the real threat comes from falling for the hype
In Arthur C Clarke’s short story The Nine Billion Names of God, a sect of monks
in Tibet believes humanity has a divinely inspired purpose: inscribing all the
various names of God. Once the list was complete, they thought, he would bring
the universe to an end. Having worked at it by hand for centuries, the monks
decide to employ some modern technology. Two sceptical engineers arrive in the
Himalayas, powerful computers in tow. Instead of 15,000 years to write out all
the permutations of God’s name, the job gets done in three months. As the
engineers ride ponies down the mountainside, Clarke’s tale ends with one of
literature’s most economical final lines: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars
were going out.”
It is an image of the computer as a shortcut to objectivity or ultimate meaning
– which also happens to be, at least part of, what now animates the fascination
with artificial intelligence. Though the technologies that underpin AI have
existed for some time, it’s only since late 2022, with the emergence of OpenAI’s
ChatGPT, that the technology that approached intelligence appeared to be much
closer. In a 2023 report by Microsoft Canada, president Chris Barry proclaimed
that “the era of AI is here, ushering in a transformative wave with potential to
touch every facet of our lives”, and that “it is not just a technological
advancement; it is a societal shift”. That is among the more level-headed
reactions. Artists and writers are panicking that they will be made obsolete,
governments are scrambling to catch up and regulate, and academics are debating
furiously.
Continue reading...
Analysis of more than 200,000 chatbot conversations shows how the new tech is
actually being used. Turns out quite a lot of it is ‘racy role play’ ...
Name: AI dirty talk.
Age: Since 2022.
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...