U.S. government’s Global Engagement Center is shuttered
The GEC’s mandate was to work overseas but it ended up doing a great deal of censorship in the United States.
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A brand new type of glitch: Errors that only AI can introduce…
And replicate indefinitely. It’s called a “digital fossil” and it is very hard to just remove from the database, due to large-scale use of chatbots (LLMs).
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A sober assessment of the deadly gain-of-function virus debate
It’s no use demanding that the public trust scientists if they do nothing to deserve trust.
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Hype despite ongoing failure to build human-like AI = “scandal”
Even if the LLMs could think like humans, they might not be thinking like productive humans. No wonder Big Tech is slow to admit the problem.
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Can AI really decode dead languages? Or is it too late?
It might help. And deciphered writing is one of the few things that can build bridges for our thoughts across time.
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Journalist: Seizures gave me a healthy respect for the brain
Wright learned to see himself not as the conductor, nor as the orchestra, but the music itself, which gave him the confidence he needed to move on with life.
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Chinese Neanderthal technology raises some interesting questions
The groups that made the distinctive Quina tools lived 7 to 8 thousand kilometers apart. Did they ever meet?
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Science publishers start tackling the photoshopping problem
It’s telling that criminal justice methods should be necessary in a scholarly science system but that at least protects the honest majority of researchers.
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White House media discusses sit-in against seating changes
You know that the media landscape is changing irrevocably when journalists threaten a sit-in against their subjects.
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Study: Human brains differ more from chimps’ than once thought
Discarding decades of pop science, science writer Tom Howarth doubts that there is a single defining switch or pivotal evolutionary event that makes us human.
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Science journals report on limited tests with paid peer review
It speeded up the process somewhat without affecting the quality. An even more controversial alternative is to try getting a machine to do it.
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Are chatbots starting to write literature?
Of course, the critical question is, how much does the audience actually want originality and how much does it want the old familiar storyline?
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Hot Valley genetics unicorn, 23andMe, seeks bankruptcy protection
One issue that led to conflict with government was 23andMe’s controversial attempt to use consumer genetic data to predict health risks.
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Tech writer: Chatbots are trained on a trove of pirated books
If they often sound literate, there’s a good reason. The programmers may be pirating name authors’ works. A current court case sheds some light.
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Why don’t we remember being babies? Researchers challenge theory
Their brain imaging research suggests that infants do remember things but the memories are not accessed later in life.
Read More ›Legal group probes universities’ role in the censorship industry
Alliance Defending Freedom wants to see public records of the payments to top universities for developing AI tools for online censorship.
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Is Roomba heading into the sunset along with the corn broom?
So what went wrong? Walker, who studies brands and culture, thinks iRobot went into too many product lines that didn’t catch on like Roomba did.
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AI researchers: Chatbots are spouting Russian, Chinese propaganda
The main point is that, for a free society, digital literacy matters more than ever.
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New Angel Studios documentary: Live Not by Lies
The four-part series discusses the way that the totalitarianism that Soviet dissidents warned about is emerging in Western society today.
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Facebook (Meta) tries censoring exposé — its popularity explodes
Not many news stories have a moral but this is an exception: The reading public is not governed by White House-directed Facebook mods.
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