Word of the year candidate: Angertainment
George Orwell predicted this. In 1984, the government imposed a daily Two Minute Hate. But in real life, online rage is an addiction and recovery is a choice.
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Researchers: Urgent! Math research fraud is widespread
The system became both mechanized and commercialized. No one was really reading what no one was really writing. Then the dam broke.
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California lawyer learns: AI hallucinations can harm a career
People whose lives are non-fiction — who must raise funds for a serious legal issue — will doubtless be glad to learn that the courts are still non-fiction too.
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Can we trust Darwin to fix the mess science publishing is in?
Humans can choose their incentives. Darwin’s wasps, by contrast, cannot have any goal other than survival. That’s why the analogy is not useful.
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The fundamental mistake programmers made in designing AIs
Is the error fundamental to that type of system? The company argues that the problem is fixable but just how easy will that be?
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Publishers suing Google over summarizing their stories
Offered summaries, many readers may not to go to the site, where they either pay or provide an audience for advertisers.
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Hundreds of Google workers fired after lodging complaints
This scenario (squabbling over low dollars) is consistent with the firm not making as much money off AI as it had hoped to.
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Flash!: Bigger computers do not just start acting like minds
If this trend continues, amid the nonsense, there will be more reality-based thinking about AI that is more easily accessible than it used to be.
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Anthropic agrees to pay authors for use of work to train chatbots
There will be many more battles but this ruling means that being an original creator remains a viable way to make a living.
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Court: Satire is not illegal, even in California
The Babylon Bee won but the battle is hardly over. Many governments have begun to see the internet as something that they should try to run … into the ground.
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Would the Fantastic Four adopt a ruthless theory of life?
Andrew McDiarmid argues that the lives of this remarkable family revolve around a universe teeming with intelligent design.
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Even in mice, decision-making involves complex brain activity
If it’s this complex in mice, what are we to make of simplistic representations of human thinking in pop psychology textbooks?
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Jay Richards: AI, Robots, and Moravec’s Paradox
Why is it comparatively easy to develop a program to play chess, as opposed to teaching a robot to walk freely?
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Lots of things are immaterial and we just don’t realize it
An entire business process is driven by immaterial assumptions about a source of payment based on electrons with no fixed location.
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Study: Ballooning science fraud abetted by editors
Part of the problem, the study authors say, seems to be that many honest scientists are sleepwalking around the seriousness of the situation.
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Albert Einstein: His mind was exceptional; his brain wasn’t
That was not what researchers expected. But the prior commitment to materialism in neuroscience makes the evidence difficult to accept and learn from.
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No wonder students “pretend to have” progressive views …
Researchers found that many students who claim to have progressive views are just pretending but Orwellian exclusions and firings may force conformity.
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Why do scientists lie? What changes would help stop it?
An economist argues that some of the institutions which enable science to be a successful endeavour also abet and encourage fraud.
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Warning signs that the AI bubble is due to collapse
As Jeffrey Funk notes, the extravagant hype is aimed at attracting investors, not describing the actual products.
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YouTube channels sold and repurposed? What next?
YouTube is one of the factors that is slowly killing network TV, which naturally makes its channels more valuable.
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