Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagAI

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Closed up image of a Female using TikTok application on a smartphone in home. 5 September, 2022. ChiangMai, Thailand.

Escaping the Dopamine Cartel

We can't even be bothered with "entertainment" anymore.
Ted Gioia investigates the impact of the "dopamine culture," our modern tendency to flit among tabs and scroll endlessly through fifteen-second-long video clips Read More ›
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Isolated children's toy against a blue texture background, teddy bear from childhood, an old pink hippo

Pink Dancing Hippos: Don’t Tell ChatGPT-4 Not to do Something

Can OpenAI fix this flaw in GPT4? Absolutely. Time will tell if they do or not.
Moral: Don’t ask GPT-4 to NOT do something. Chances are the current version might let you down. Read More ›
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robot learning or solving problems

Can AI Ever Be Sentient? A Conversation with Blake Lemoine

AI can mimic sentience, but can it ever be sentient? On this episode, we return to our conversation with former Google engineer Blake Lemoine. Host Robert J. Marks has a lively back and forth with Lemoine, who made national headlines when, as an employee of Google, he claimed that Google’s AI software, dubbed LaMDA, might be sentient. Lemoine recounts his experience at Google and Read More ›

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Cute and little robot helper with artificial intelligence raising hand. Generative AI

Google Gemini Presents a Past That Never Happened

You can't trust a bot to give you a history lesson, turns out.
Walter Kirn tweeted recently: "Gemini AI is inventing damaging stories about people and figures I know. It is an automated false-witness weapon." Read More ›
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Stock market diagram on LCD screen. Selective focus.

AI and Wall Street’s Hype Curve

Almost all new tech has a hype curve. Here are the stages.
Technologies that have surfed the hype curve include superconductivity, the Segway, cold fusion, information theory, Theranos, Piltdown man and string theory. Read More ›
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webinar, education online concept, video tutorial

Online Training: Real Education or Going Through the Motions?

Not all online trainings are bad. But many are procedural and pointless.
In some cases, I was convinced that the goal of the training was to pretend to convey information while not actually doing so.  Read More ›
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Robot's hand holds up a red heart aigenerated.

Will You Be My Valentine, Chatbot?

It is a tragedy indeed when our loneliness as a culture has developed so far that many people see chatbot companions as one of the only way forward.
Recent studies indicate that members of Gen Z are dividing politically according to sex, with men leaning more conservative and women going more liberal. Read More ›
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NFL Superbowl stadium at night.American football .

Taylor Swift and the Looming Threat of Deepfakes

According to an attorney, Swift should probably go after the AI companies themselves if she decides to sue.

The country-turned-pop star Taylor Swift has commanded headlines for well over a year now with her record-breaking “Eras Tour” as well as her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce. Unfortunately, her image has also made the rounds in AI engines. Deepfake pornography is already an emerging problem, but its seriousness resurfaced when explicit, AI-generated images of Taylor Swift went viral in late January. Only ten states currently have laws prohibiting deepfake pornography, but legislation is underway to ban it in several others, including Swift’s home state, Tennessee. According to attorney Carrie Goldberg, if Swift were to sue anyone, it would probably have to be focused on the AI companies themselves. USA Today reports, It’s possible that the faked Read More ›

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Man is using virtual reality headset. Image with glitch effect.

The Apple Vision Pro is Here

What exactly is the point of this new, painfully expensive piece of gadgetry?
Given what we've seen so far, it seems like this new release from one of the world's foremost technology companies is more of a fancy toy than a genuine tool. Read More ›
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Servers data center room with bright bokeh light going through the corridor 3D rendering

The Allure of General Purpose Technologies

Generative AI is merely the most recent one.

The printing press, steam engine, electricity, mass production, the computer, the micro-chip, and the Internet are some of the biggest examples of general-purpose technologies (GPTs) over the last five hundred years, with an increasing number of them appearing over the last two centuries. Touted by economists, they define GPTs as those technologies that have impacted on many economic sectors and thus ended up changing the world, mostly for the good. Some of the world’s most valuable companies have succeeded with these GPTs most recently on the Internet. The so-called magnificent seven — Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Netflix, Nvidia, and Amazon — all succeeded on the Internet, and investors are looking for the next GPTs, most recently in generative AI of Read More ›

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Robot hand typing on the computer. The concept of artificial intelligence replacing a human in dealing with another human. Ai generative

Human Impersonation AI Must Be Outlawed

I didn't used to think that AI systems could threaten civilization. Now I do.

(Previous version first appeared at theepochtimes.com on 1/12/2024) In 15 minutes of techno-evolutionary time, artificial intelligence-powered systems will threaten our civilization. Yesterday, I didn’t think so; I do now. Here’s how it will happen. The AI Human Impersonation Danger Recall how in 2023 criminals used an artificial intelligence (AI) system to phone an Arizona mother and say they were holding her daughter for ransom. The AI system mimicked perfectly her daughter’s voice down to the word choices and sobs. The terrified mom found her daughter safe at home, only then to determine the call was a scam. That crime showed the power of AI audio alone to deceive and defraud people. Today, Mom gets a text message demanding a ransom, Read More ›

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Earphones and mobile phone with podcast app on screen

Napster, Spotify, and AI: How Will AI Escape Copyright Woes?

Robert J. Marks on AI and learning from past copyright cases.

Copyright lawsuits are abounding against generative AI. Since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, various companies, artists, and writers have raised concerns over AI’s plagiaristic tendencies. Robert J. Marks, host of the Mind Matters podcast, has the story over at Newsmax. Marks recalls the debacle of Napster, a music streaming service that provided music for “free” without payment to the artists. Not surprisingly, it was soon shut down. So how will it fare with generative AI? What’s the solution to all the impending legal woes in the realm of AI? Marks writes, Today’s Spotify keeps automatic records of song frequency and, from subscriber’s payments, distributes royalties accordingly. Similar methods could be applied to compensate content creators by generative AI. It’s not Read More ›

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graduation

Artificially Smart: Artificial Intelligence and Higher Education

Understanding needs to remain the metric by which students are evaluated

Artificial Intelligence tools like Copilot and ChatGPT can increase productivity. They speed up workflows and can be used to automate freeing people to spend their time on creative tasks. Advances in artificial intelligence technologies had a significant impact on the economy in 2023. Fortune magazine attributes AI-related economic growth as having helped “saved the economy” because growth in this sector offset disappointing returns in other sectors.  But with great power comes great responsibility. The tools of AI allow freshman college students to do what a year ago would have required a decade of professional experience. Educational institutions must carefully consider where and how these tools can be used without undermining the quality of education. Otherwise, overreliance on artificial intelligence will Read More ›

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Communication technology for internet business. Global world network and telecommunication on earth cryptocurrency and blockchain and IoT. Elements of this image furnished by NASA

Is Tech Still Innovating?

Is it just me, or is the world of technology feeling a bit … stale?

After the last thirty years of working in technology, innovation in these last few years seems a tad underwhelming. Is it because governments are starting, for the first time, to seriously consider regulating social media and other IT companies? At least some authors think serious regulation will end the rapid innovation of previous years.   This doesn’t seem like the right answer — information technology, and social media in particular, remains one of the most unregulated markets on Earth. The understanding, based on Section 230, that social media companies are passive platforms when they publish user content, and yet have all the rights of a publisher when filtering content, is still the “law of the land.” Very few information technology Read More ›

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Copyright symbol. The word 'Copyright' typed on retro typewriter. Business, copyright concept. Beautiful background.

Does ChatGPT Depend on Copyright Violation to Function?

Without copyrighted material, ChatGPT has slim pickings to go on.

ChatGPT, the large language model developed by OpenAI, might seem like it generates novel content, but of course we know that it partakes in what’s generally called “scraping.” It takes pre-existing material on the Internet in response to the prompt a human user inserts. Not surprisingly, the folks who put things on the Internet for a living, like writers and artists, haven’t taken so kindly to AI’s online sleuthing. In fact, a number of artists, writers (including George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and John Grisham) and even news outlets have sued OpenAI over copyright infringement allegations. What’s fascinating, though, is that OpenAI hasn’t tried to dodge the allegation but freely admits that ChatGPT depends on copyrighted material to function. Read More ›

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A vibrant blue programming code background represents the intricate work of software developers and the art of computer scripting

Computers Still Do Not “Understand”

Don't be seduced into attributing human traits to computers.

The subtitle of a recent New Yorker article was: “Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.” I respectfully disagree. As I’ve repeatedly argued, the real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us but that we think computers are smarter than us. Hinton is extremely intelligent, but he is not the first, and will not be the last, extremely intelligent person to be seduced by a full-blown Eliza effect, attributing human traits to computers. Consider Hinton’s argument about large language models (LLMs): People say, It’s just glorified autocomplete . . . Now, let’s analyze that. Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the Read More ›

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When it Comes to New Technologies Like AI, Tempers Run Hot

So far, the most tangible LLM successes have been in generating political disinformation and phishing scams.

Ask an AI-enthusiast how big AI is and how big AI will become, and the answer is likely to be that it is already enormous and that we haven’t seen anything yet. Our enthusiasm is more nuanced. We gave Microsoft’s Bing with ChatGPT-4 the prompt, “How big is AI?,” and received some very specific numbers, along with helpful references: I assume you are asking about the size of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry. According to a report by Grand View Research, the global AI market size was valued at USD 136.55 billion in 2022 and is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030. Another report by Precedence Research estimates that the Read More ›

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Man in desert

Copyright in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

What exactly is a human and how does a human differ from a computer?

On December 27, The New York Times Company sued Microsoft and OpenAI for violations of their copyright. The Times contends that training chatbots on its content in order to create an information competitor is a violation of its copyright. This suit is sure to bring up a number of old copyright issues that were never resolved, plus some new that need to be worked through. The fact is, the big search engines have been violating copyright from the very beginning. All search engines are in fact derivative works of the sites that they crawl, index, and dish out. Most search engines even provide excerpts from the sites they scan. However, most copyright holders have turned a blind eye to this for two main Read More ›

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Robot hands point to laptop button advisor chatbot robotic artificial intelligence concept.

ChatGPT: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby  

Reviewing the bot's progress (and problems) from over the last year

ChatGPT is an example of “large language model” (LLM) generative artificial intelligence. LLMs like ChatGPT[i] have come a long way this year. Many writers, including me, have previously identified hurdles thought too high for AI to jump in the near future. In some cases, we were wrong.  Let’s review some of these claims and see how LLM’s have broken through. Can ChatGPT write jokes? Like Commander Data on Star Trek, AI doesn’t understand humor.  Joke writing is hit-or-miss with ChatGPT. I wrote about this in May 2023 where I became impressed with ChatGPT’s hits. I started all my joke writing queries with: “Complete the following to make it funny.”  Here are some of the more jocular responses with Q for Read More ›

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3d illustration futuristic background with large sphere and neon dots

The Two Visions of AI Technology

Competing views of AI's potential comprise a new struggle in Silicon Valley.

A month ago, one of the most dramatic power struggles in Silicon Valley’s corporate history took place in the offices of OpenAI. The board of the tech company suddenly ousted CEO Sam Altman for not being consistently “candid” in his communication. Days later, Altman was back at the helm of OpenAI and the board that canned him got the favor returned. In the following weeks, speculation has swirled over the real reasons Altman and his board butted heads so significantly. Altman, although he’s pushing ahead with AI technologies like ChatGPT and DALL-E, also appeared before members of congress earlier this year and recommended AI be regulated. However, he’s much more on the side of “acceleration,” rolling out AI aggressively and Read More ›