Burials from 120,000 years ago: Was it Neanderthals vs. others?
Did ancient peoples believe that the spirits of the dead were protecting the caves they were buried in?
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Move to strip Elon Musk of U.S. citizenship
He is accused of working illegally in the United States before becoming a citizen; the US Attorney’s office has broad discretion about whether to prosecute.
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Can we save science from fools and knaves?
National Association of Scholars sees room for hope if federal funding policy can be reformed, to reward research that can be reproduced by other scientists.
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Are human news readers useless? Can AI just replace them?
Possibly, the main thing that the advance of AI in newsrooms will do is make clear how much of current news broadcasting is mere showmanship or partisanship.
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Cancel Culture IS free speech, Harvard prof claims
As his debate opponent pointed out, Harvard was dead last in a recent FIRE survey of free speech at universities.
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Despite OpenAI’s warnings, AI transcription use grows in medicine
One difficulty is that a tendency to hallucinate may be baked into the way AI models operate.
Read More ›Seasonal AI-generated freakout: Halloween Egg! Attack
Concerns around deepfakes and AI-generated bilge can be exploited to give government and other big actors what they most covet: control over information.
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AI analyst Gary Marcus calls out Elon Musk on AI hokum
Gary Marcus dismisses Musk’s hype about billions of humanoid robots: investment managers and media like to hear it, he explains, but the economics don’t work.
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Washington Post owner defends his refusal to endorse Harris
He sees media endorsing a candidate as part of the declining trust problem. That’s likely true but for more trust, the Post also needs to be closer to readers.
Read More ›How to poison an algorithm while misdirecting a tourist
Reddit users are said to be writing rave reviews of a less favored restaurants – to be scraped by Google’s AI – to direct tourists away from a better one.
Read More ›Philosopher: Deepfakes less of a threat than feared
We do not see panic legislation promoted around photoshopping or fictionalized accounts these days, perhaps because we are used to the risks.
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Philosopher: Human language is too entangled for computers
Noë takes issue with the approach advocated by Alan Turing where we can follow certain steps to have a thinking computer. He doubts such steps are possible.
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UK Labour-linked group seeks to “kill” X; X threatens lawsuit
The big story is the extent to which traditional media, including traditional tech media, hate and fear X — most likely because it is a new way of doing media.
Read More ›Hidden watermarks may help detect AI-written texts
Of course, the system can be hacked, evaded, or used fraudulently. A better mousetrap breeds a smarter mouse.
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Why Google Search does not sum up the world’s knowledge
Search engines are not much help when the topic is, in principle, murky, as with Wired’s IQ and race search. Anyway, use several search engines and rotate them.
Read More ›OpenAI disbands team that was preparing for human-level AI
Significantly, the departing team leader, Miles Brundage, advocates co-operation with China, whose main interest in AI seems to be mass surveillance
Read More ›Humanoid robot’s painting up for auction at Sotheby’s October 1
The project is inspired by the 1985 Cyborg Manifesto, which urges rejection of “rigidly defined conceptual boundaries between humans, animals, and machines.”
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Will the AI bubble pop louder than the dot-com bubble?
Perhaps the basic problem is that it’s not clear what chatbots and generative AI produce other than private entertainment.
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Researchers: Chatbots just don’t DO formal reasoning
If the formal reasoning problem is as broad as they say, it may be that some kinds of thinking just can’t be mechanized.
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AI-using artist who claimed “art is dead” seeks copyright anyway
Maybe art isn’t dead; it is just going online. In that case, new payment structures and, as a last resort, data poisoning may be part of the mix.
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