Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryArtificial Intelligence

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side view of cyborg robot writing a story using old typewriter and looking at paper laying next to it on table, generative AI

Evolution Journal Editors Resign After AI Takes Over

Publisher Elsevier seems to have created a lot of extra work for the editors by introducing AI-generated errors into the publishing process
Was a journal that tries to explain the origin of the unique human mind without any reference to the Mind that created the universe bound to end up here? Read More ›
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Bubbles

Another Warning That the AI Bubble Is Near Bursting…

AI analyst Gary Marcus: There is no principled solution to hallucinations in systems of this type
Maybe the reason there is no principled solution to AI hallucinations is that we cannot create artificial human minds. Read More ›
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Industry

In Machines We Trust

In an age of AI, who stands up for humans?

If you believe the media, AI has made both of us obsolete. We need to resign ourselves to an age of “thinking machines” in which human guidance and creativity are superfluous. This kind of thinking is false — and dangerous. AI will never become conscious. It will never truly be autonomous. It will always require human input and control. But if we treat AI as if it can be autonomous, we will open the door to the kind of manipulation and tyranny warned about by C.S. Lewis in his classic book The Abolition of Man. Unfortunately, there are few voices in the public square right now offering a sane assessment of both the capabilities and limits of AI. As a Read More ›

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Modern dark drone in flight over the city.

First Federal Report on Drone Sightings Flunks Credibility Test

Whether reports are human- or AI-generated, they need careful scrutiny
The December 16 report raised more questions than answers. The December 17 report offered more information but there was still too much “Take our word for it!” Read More ›
Business concept for group of stacked paperclip with another one red plane paperclip is point to another direction as a team leadership

A Thought Experiment on the Mind, the Brain — and AI

In a crowded AI marketplace, a nerd confronts a philosopher on subject of the human mind
Question: If thoughts can only be copied — and copied badly — by AI, which is quite unlike the brain. then how can they be generated by the brain? Read More ›
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Businessman working on a laptop in an office, with a transparent overlay showing a modern cityscape of buildings and skyscrapers. Ideal for themes of technology, business, and urban life. Ai Generate.

AI Adoption is Slowing Amidst the “Biggest Gamble in Business History”

Workers and companies aren't buying the AI hype
In the case of AI, knowledge workers are trying to tell us something. They don’t like AI as much the top managers do, and their excitement is falling. Read More ›
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Concept of artificial general intelligence achieving human-level understanding

Machine Intelligence and Reasoning: We Are Not on a Path to AGI

AI guru François Chollet’s Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) proves we’re not on a path to AGI
A reality check for LLMs is inevitable, and with OpenAI, “Project Strawberry,” and the new hype cycle — thanks to Chollet and others — it’s already here. Read More ›
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large language model AI machine learning concept brain business

From Data to Thoughts: Why Language Models Hallucinate

The limits of today’s language models and paths to real cognition
We’ll need an architectural approach that can handle propositions—thoughts, judgments, reasoning structures—as first-order objects. Read More ›
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Blue and green turf meets futuristic stadium lights as football players clash, pixelated projectiles in flight, technology merging with old-school gridiron glory.

Do Fantasy Sports Tell Us Something About Artificial Intelligence?

My biggest takeaway from my own involvement is how well fantasy football illuminates some weaknesses of artificial intelligence (AI)
AI models are really good at finding patterns in data but they are bad at deciding whether these spotted patterns can be used to make reliable predictions. Read More ›
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industry 4.0, Factory Industrial Engineer working with automation robot arms machine in intelligent factory, generative ai

Why Human Intelligence Thrives Where Machines Fail

We're worried about AI and trust. We should be worried about something deeper
Our intelligence interacts dynamically with our environment in a way that machine intelligence doesn’t. Read More ›
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Modern health care a robot hand holding a love symbol concept, with awesome-looking, nice color combination

As AI Bots Hit the Scene, What Will Happen to Romance and Marriage?

How fares romance and marriage in the 21st century? In America, at least, it's not looking good

In decades past, people tended to meet each other in their local communities through church, school, family friends, and so on. Go back further and it was common for marriages to be arranged solely for economic purposes. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen was subversive because Elizabeth Bennett risks her family’s economic security by marrying Mr. Darcy purely for love. But, I digress. Trae Stephens writes for Pirate Wires on how the marriage rate has gone down alongside the advent of digital technologies, and how this is, more than likely, not coincidental. Particularly with the rise of AI bots, like the ones published by Character.AI, millions of people are living out romances with digital avatars perfectly tailored to their whims Read More ›

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iPhone

Report: Large Language Models Don’t “Think”

Also, Apple Intelligence might not be so intelligent after all

A research team at Apple is now sharing that “state-of-the-art” AI bots are failing basic arithmetic problems according to Los Angeles Times. Michael Hiltzik writes, The Apple team found “catastrophic performance drops” by those models when they tried to parse simple mathematical problems written in essay form. In this example, the systems tasked with the question often didn’t understand that the size of the kiwis have nothing to do with the number of kiwis Oliver has. Some, consequently, subtracted the five undersized kiwis from the total and answered “185.”  Human schoolchildren, the researchers posited, are much better at detecting the difference between relevant information and inconsequential curveballs. Apple has recently been rolling out tons of new advertisements promoting the iPhone Read More ›

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Beautiful girl, child, sportswoman cheerleader in uniform dancing, showing the bridge, showing the elements of gymnastics in the gym at the competition. The concept of sports, cheerleading.

Are We Now Giving Nobel Prizes to Cheerleaders?

Even though both John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton are brilliant researchers, there were much more obviously deserving recipients
I still find it hard to see the connection between physics and neural networks but if it's there, Paul Werbos and Bernie Widrow should have won the Nobel Prize. Read More ›
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Illustration of a depressed person using a smartphone in bed at night - generative ai

How To Sue A Chatbot For Causing Suicide

If your child committed suicide because an online chatbot effectively encouraged him to do so, could you sue the chatbot makers?
Sewell killed himself at the urging of a speaking and texting chatbot. The next gen is nearly flawless human impersonation video bots. Protect your children. Read More ›
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Futuristic meeting between humans and a robot at a glowing digital table symbolizing the collaboration between humanity and technology in decision making

John Stuart Mill: Humans Are Not Automatons

Making rational decisions takes a lot of thought and hard work, says Mill.
Mill uses a beautiful contrast in metaphor to show how human nature is qualitatively different from machines. Read More ›
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stone cloister

The Tolkien Test vs. the Turing Test

Could AI create Middle-earth?
AI can regurgitate but can't create. It can reflect verbiage but can never reflect on the substance or meaning of the words themselves. Read More ›
phone in the dark
Asian woman playing game on smartphone in the bed at night,Thailand people,Addict social media

The Tragic Case of Teen’s Death and Character.AI

From the perspective of friends and family, it looked like Sewell just got mired in his phone. They weren’t aware he “fell for a chatbot.”
Sewell spiraled farther down an AI vortex until he fantasized about "joining" the chatbot in some kind of postmortem union. Read More ›
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Close portrait of british furry cat in fashion sunglasses. Funny pet on bright yellow background. Kitten in eyeglass. Fashion style, cool animal concept with copy space

AI is the New Political Irony Machine 

We live in a world inundated with fakery and irony. Are we losing our interest in the truth?

I never saw any news reports of Haitian migrants allegedly eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. At least, not for the first couple of days after the “news” hit the social media headlines.  I did see, however, an AI-generated video of a kitten cradled in the arms of Donald Trump with a caption along the lines of “save the cats!” The Haitians chased him with weaponry in the background. I saw another AI video of a cat at a construction site just working to feed the family, praying that he’d live to see another day without the Haitians trying to nab his skin as a rug.   The event was a meme before it was a story. It wasn’t until after I’d Read More ›