Kemp’s vivid picture of Internet addiction is sadly accurate for many modern folks, especially those enmeshed in the superficial, image-driven economy of social media.
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GPT-3, released by OpenAI in November, swiftly undermined the integrity of many a student’s academic work. Professors across disciplines have had to contend with how to discern machine vs. human-generated work. Now, with a new school year underway, that challenge remains. Due to ChatGPT’s popularity, many schools are seeking ways to integrate the technology into their learning environments. But the question of how to do this remains murky. Bloomberg reports, But professors and administrators seeking to integrate generative AI into their curriculums are left with a big question: How? They need to find the right middle ground, said Steve Weber, vice provost of undergraduate curriculum and education at Drexel University. Educators can’t completely prohibit use of the tool and neglect to teach it, but Read More ›
Hirsen defended the human uniqueness of jazz music in particular, noting how in this musical genre, spontaneity and in-person experiences are essential.
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One non-computable aspect of great literature is evident: a personal consciousness was responsible for creating it.
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Sam Altman, the CEO of the AI company OpenAI, which was responsible for developing the Large Language Model ChatGPT, said in an interview with The Atlantic that AI will definitely be taking some jobs away, striking a blow to some AI optimists who claim that this won’t be the case. According to Business Insider, “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good; it’s only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced,” he said. “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.” –ChatGPT Creator Sam Altman Says ‘Jobs Are Definitely Going to Go Away’ (businessinsider.com) While certain jobs might go the wayside, it’s possible AI could introduce Read More ›
AI avatars are starting to flood the social media “influencing” sphere. Seeing how artificial and impersonal the influencer lifestyle already is, maybe it was inevitable. The “Instagram influencer” is a relatively new phenom: an attractive, usually young, person flaunts certain brands on social media for revenue. The phrase “digital creator” is a common tag on bios, and countless young women have made a living off of selling their looks on Instagram. So how might AI play into all this? Well, there are now hundreds of AI internet personalities flooding social media. And they look pretty convincing. Victor Tangermann reports, Thanks to the advent of AI-powered image generators like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, some are now fabricating entire feeds of internet Read More ›
Craig Mundie says that his dream is to make artificial intelligence one day rival human intellect.
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Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro, professor of English at Grove City College and an editor at The Front Porch Republic, wrote an article for Plough on what he regards as the primary weakness of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Bilbro comes to the issue from a literary background, which means he values the human element in language as a mode of communication. Literature is a “conversation,” requiring sentient minds. He sees ChatGPT as a soulless mechanism that will atrophy our ability to write and diminish our appreciation for good writing. Bilbro writes, LLMs are a technology suited to a decadent culture, one that chases easy profits rather than tackles the real challenges we face. It’s easier to make money rearranging words Read More ›
Sean McDowell of Biola University asked philosophers William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland what they thought of extraterrestrial life and its implications.
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A new article by AI researcher Arlie Coles at American Mind aims to “demystify” artificial intelligence, particularly the claim that AI creators have no idea what they’re creating. Coles says that we understand AI much better than the doomsdayers let on. Part of the reason for AI’s cloudy nature is due to its mathematical complexity, which Coles finds understandable. But that’s no reason not to try and understand what AI is and gauge its benefits and capacities in an accurate light. She writes, We do know what we’re building and how it works, and it’s not too late for us to speak forthrightly about AI so that the general public, not just those with math or computer science Ph.D.s, can Read More ›
We’ve cited the groundbreaking book Superabundance several times here at Mind Matters, mainly in connection to its co-author, Gale Pooley, a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty, and a speaker at the 2021 COSM conference, the yearly technology summit that has attracted speakers like Carver Mead, Peter Thiel, and others. Pooley’s co-author, Marian Tupy, who lectured at COSM 2022 on the book, does work on human progress at the Cato Institute, and published a post showing the many ways humanity has benefitted over the last century. He stands opposed to the mainstream approximations of doom that declare our world’s swift-approaching expiration date, writing, The chance of a person dying in a natural catastrophe — earthquake, flood, Read More ›
Dr. Jay Richards, a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and a friend of the Walter Bradley Center, which publishes Mind Matters, spoke recently at the Acton University conference, discussing both transhumanism and AI. Transhumanists, Richards notes, look at the scope of “cosmic evolution,” see a kind of increasing complexity among the human race, and speculate the next dramatic step: achieving immortality through a mixture of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Richards described the transhumanist ideology as “anti-human,” but cautioned against having a reactionary response to all new technologies that seem to be involved in transhumanism’s vision, noting that some of them, when analyzed specifically, could have benefits (such as AI). The underlying philosophy of transhumanism, however, should be rejected. Read More ›
I walked into the theater expecting a typical villain in the latest installment of Mission Impossible starring the inimitable Tom Cruise. And at the film’s beginning, you’re definitely led to believe that the pale, sour-faced Russians are behind yet another espionage program destined to thwart America and conquer the world. But that’s only a front. The real villain in the new blockbuster movie is an artificial intelligence known simply as “the entity.” The impossible mission, tasked to Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is to track down a mysterious key, made of two separate parts, that apparently can unlock the entity and reveal what it’s capable of. God in the Machine Hunt and his usual gang of expatriates find themselves at odds with Read More ›
Tech giant and billionaire Elon Musk is starting yet another company, and this one has to do with the talk of the town: artificial intelligence. The name of the venture is “xAI.” It’s been an interesting week in the tech and AI world. Meta released “Threads,” a Twitter alternative, and OpenAI is now under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, calling the AI company into question for its data scraping methods and ChatGPT’s tendency to spin false information. Now that AI is the apple in ever tech mogul’s eye at the moment, I guess it makes sense that Musk is reaching for the branch of temptation. He’s been teasing his hopes for his own AI company for a few months Read More ›
The Federal Trade Commission (F.T.C.) sent a letter to OpenAI, the San Fransisco company responsible for creating ChatGPT, the Large Language Model that captured the world’s imagination in November of 2022. Per the New York Times, the F.T.C. is investigating the AI company’s methods of data acquisition and also plans on measuring the potential harms of AI on society, citing concerns over false information and job replacement. Cecilia Kang and Cade Metz report: In a 20-page letter sent to the San Francisco company this week, the agency said it was also looking into OpenAI’s security practices. The F.T.C. asked the company dozens of questions in its letter, including how the start-up trains its A.I. models and treats personal data. The Read More ›
What is creativity? Where does it come from? Why are some things humans do considered creative, while other things mundane? Can AI be creative? To answer these questions, let’s come up with a definition. Creativity at least means something new has been done. No work that copies what has come before is considered creative. A Creativity Criteria Just doing something new is not enough either. If it were, then I can easily be creative by flipping a coin 100 times. That specific sequence of coin flips will only occur once in the entire history of humanity. But no one would say I was creative when I flipped a coin. This means creativity has to generate a new insight. However, these two criteria are not adequate, Read More ›
The writers’ strike in Hollywood continues. In May, the Writers Guild of America started protesting low wages and the potential threat of artificially generated scripts. Large Language Models (LLMs) have only improved in generating text, raising concerns among writers. However, according to an insightful article from Auguste Meyrat of the Acton Institute, Hollywood has been developing a culture that welcomes AI-generated content with its tendency to pressure writers to fit a formulaic narrative structure instead of encouraging them to pursue real creativity and collaboration. Meyrat writes, All this virtually guarantees the use of AI-generated screenplays. After all, if producing a movie is now effectively the same as producing a widget on an assembly line, the human element can be dispensed Read More ›
Robert J. Marks, director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, has a brand new article out over at Newsmax on the complexity of artificial intelligence and how, regardless of how many “band-aids” we put on its problematic outputs, it’s impossible to fully regulate a machine with this level of sophistication. Because AI is not a “slave to the truth,” it always needs improvement and correction by its human users. The problem is that we can’t avoid some of the damages until they’re already wrought. Marks writes, The more complex a system, the greater the number of ways it can respond and the more ways it can go wrong. The greater the number of possible responses, the Read More ›
Deepfakes are a growing threat to acting careers. It’s the other challenge posed by generative AI technologies. In early May, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) began a strike in Hollywood opposing both low wages and the intrusion of generative AI like ChatGPT, which critics purport will be used to replace human writers. The strike illustrates the current threat to the Hollywood writing industry, but the looming deepfake apocalypse calls the role of the actual actors into question, too. Tom Hanks jokingly noted that long after he’s gone, AI-generated versions of him will star in films far into the future. Maybe his remarks weren’t so comical after all. While deepfakes, upon close inspection, can be identified, they appear to be Read More ›
To anyone who’s been watching and considering the outcomes of the chatbot revolution, virtual sex has seemed all but inevitable. Meta’s AI chatbot LLaMA, which was controversially made open to the public earlier this year, is now being used to generate sex bots. Washington Post reported on the trend, with Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus writing, Allie is an 18-year old with long brown hair who boasts “tons of sexual experience.” Because she“lives for attention,” she’ll “share details of her escapades”with anyone for free. But Allie is fake, an artificial intelligence chatbot created for sexual play — which sometimes carries out graphic rape and abuse fantasies. -Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus, Meta’s new AI is being used to create sex chatbots – The Washington Read More ›