Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

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Meta Fined Over 1.3 Billion

The EU is penalizing the tech giant for shipping data across the Atlantic

European Union regulators have fined Meta over a billion dollars for sending users’ data to the United States. Many companies operate using a free flow of data across the Atlantic, so the ruling will complicate other companies’ modes of business. Sam Schechner reports, The steep fine represents a step change from EU privacy regulators, who are increasing their enforcement of the GDPR, the bloc’s privacy law, some five years after it came into effect. A board of EU regulators has taken more control over cross-border decisions—and has insisted on bigger fines, people familiar with the deliberations say.  -Sam Schechner, Facebook Owner Meta Fined $1.3 Billion Over Data Transfers to U.S. – WSJ Meta is not pleased with the decision, unsurprisingly, Read More ›

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Art collage. Businessman with a laptop instead of a head. Online research concept.

The Need for Accountability in AI-Generated Content

Just because we live in a world of AI does not mean we can escape responsibility

AI-generated content has become increasingly common on the web. However, as we enter this new era, we will need to think through the moral and social ramifications of what we are doing, and how we should negotiate the new ethical landscape. But first, a brief recap of recent history. The first major player to pioneer AI-generated content was the Associated Press. AP realized that many market-oriented articles were pretty monotonous and read like templates anyway, so they decided to fully commit and auto-generate many of them. If you read an AP story about a company’s earnings report and it sounds eerily like every other story about other companies’ earnings reports, there’s a reason for that. Templated content, while annoying, provides window-dressing to raw Read More ›

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Is It Worth Having ChatGPT Janitors to Clean Up Its Toxic Content?

This piece by Mathew Otieno originally appeared at MercatorNet (February 8th, 2023) and is republished here under a Creative Commons License. Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot burst out into the limelight late last year, its popularity has grown by leaps and bounds. By the end of January 2023, according to a report from UBS, a bank, ChatGPT had garnered over 100 million monthly active users, beating all social media sites as the fastest consumer internet service to achieve that distinction. Unsurprisingly, in lockstep with its growing popularity, controversies have also started dogging the company. For instance, in mid-January, Time magazine published a bombshell report about how OpenAI sub-contracted Kenyan workers earning less than US$2 per hour to label toxic content, like violence, sexual abuse and hate speech, to be used to train Read More ›

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Modern art collage of a hand holding a mobile phone. News concept. True or fake. Copy space.

Utopia’s Brainiac? ChatGPT Gives Biased Views, Not Neutral Truth

Look at what happens when you try to get ChatGPT to offer unbiased responses about political figures

Do you trust your pocket calculator? Why?  Maybe you’re using the calculator app on your phone. Enter: 2 + 2. You get an answer: 4. But you knew that already. Now enter 111 x 111. Do you get 12,321? Is that the correct answer? Work it out with a pencil. That answer is correct. Try 1234 x 5678.  My calculator app returns 7,006,652. Correct? I’m not going to check it. I’m going to trust the calculator. And so it goes. The harder the problem, the more we trust the computer. That’s one reason why many people trumpet the powers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Those systems can give answers to problems we individuals couldn’t solve in a lifetime.  But are the AI “answers” correct?  Read More ›

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Technical price graph and indicator, red and green candlestick chart on blue theme screen, market volatility, up and down trend. Stock trading, crypto currency background.

Detecting BS Research: If It Seems Too Good to be True…

A recent Wall Street Journal article shows a near-perfect link between inflation and money. But a link that near-perfect raises suspicions

Two Johns Hopkins economists recently wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled, “Jerome Powell Is Wrong. Printing Money Causes Inflation.” Their argument is that Federal Reserve chair Powell is mistaken in his assertions that there is not a close relationship between money and inflation. As evidence, they offer the chart below, showing that the rate of inflation can be predicted almost perfectly from the rate of increase of M2, a broad measure of money. The authors explain: The theory rests on a simple identity, the equation of exchange, which demonstrates the link between the money supply and inflation: MV=Py, where M is the money supply, V is the velocity of money (the speed at which it circulates relative to total spending), P Read More ›

China stock market exchange / Shanghai stock market analysis forex indicator of changes graph

China’s Crackdown on Big Tech: Didi Global Inc.

In an authoritarian government, data is power

The Chinese Communist Party is on a campaign to reign in the private sector and some analysts say it is just the beginning. According to Wall Street Journal: Investors, analysts and company executives believe the government is just getting started in its push to realign the relationship between private business and the state, with a goal of ensuring companies do more to serve the Communist Party’s economic, social and national-security concerns. Jing Yang, Keith Zhai, and Quentin Webb, “China’s Corporate Crackdown Is Just Getting Started. Signs Point to More Tumult Ahead” at Wall Street Journal. Last November, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reined in Ant Group, Ltd. which was poised to open on the Shanghai and Hong Kong index with Read More ›

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Nerd with glasses hacking websites

Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas—It’s Often Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience based on data without theory and theory without data undermine the credibility of real science, which is the key to human progress

Elsewhere I have warned of the perils of making decisions based on data without theory. For example, the patterns discovered by data-mining computer algorithms are often nothing more than meaningless coincidences. It is also perilous to go to the opposite extreme—to make decisions based on theory without data. Once upon a time, for example, economists were fond of sketching labor demand and supply curves and assuming that the economy was at their intersection. That is, labor demand is equal to supply, so that everyone who wants to work is working. The unemployed have chosen to be unemployed because they value leisure more than income. True believers were fond of this theory and little troubled by reality. Between 1929 and 1933, Read More ›

COSM-3296

Your smartphone will disappear, says AT&T CTO

New 5G computing will introduce an era of ever smarter wearable devices, according to Andre Fuetsch

Fuetsch asks us to think of 3G (2001) and 4G (2010) internet as the difference between a junior high school rock band and a high school rock band: “The high school band is a lot louder and a lot faster.” And 5G? “It is a 40-piece orchestra. A wide spectrum of abilities but tight structure and control.”

Read More ›
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You Think You Have Nothing To Hide?

Then why are Big Tech moguls making billions from what you and others tell them?

The bottom line is this: if you think you don’t have anything to hide, then you don’t understand how the modern data economy really works, nor the impact of being caught in a riptide of public opinion.

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Gary Smith: The AI Delusion

“When I Nod My Head, Hit It!” And Other Commands that Confuse AI.

Pablo Picasso said “Computers Are Useless. They Can Only Give You Answers.”  Picasso didn’t go far enough. The answers that computers give must themselves be questioned. This is especially true of AI. Questioning AI is the topic today on Mind Matters. Show Notes 01:27 | Introduction to Gary Smith 02:40 | The AI Delusion 04:50 | Stocks and Data 07:00 Read More ›