The Artist is Stronger than the Censor
Salman Rushdie and standing up for free speechTalking about censorship, for Rushdie, is a conscious choice. We must talk about it too or we will find we can no longer take free speech for granted.
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Can We Trust Large Language Models? Depends on How Truthful They Are
Just because a piece of tech is highly sophisticated doesn't mean it's more trustworthyThe trust we put in Large Language Models (LLMs) ought to depend on their truthfulness. So how truthful are LLMs? For many routine queries, they seem accurate enough. What’s the capital of North Dakota? To this query, ChatGPT4 just now gave me the answer Bismarck. That’s right. But what about less routine queries? Recently I was exploring the use of design inferences to detect plagiarism and data falsification. Some big academic misconduct cases had in the last 12 months gotten widespread public attention, not least the plagiarism scandal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and the data falsification scandal of Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. These scandals were so damaging to these individuals and their institutions that neither is a university president any longer. When I queried Read More ›
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.”
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Postmodernism’s Steady Deconstruction of Reality
How can we find truth when nothing is reliable?Sometimes, you just have to try using college professors’ ideas in the real world. One such idea is “postmodernism.” Applied to communications, postmodernism teaches that whenever we read a written text, we should not try to discover what the writer intended. Instead of looking for an objective “meaning,” we should experience what the text means to us personally. The idea goes further, urging us to start by disbelieving the text and doubting our interpretations of it, too. People with the postmodern “deconstructionist” view say, “every text deconstructs” itself, and “every text has contradictions.” Deconstruction means “uncovering the question behind the answers already provided in the text.” Standing upon the ideas of the deconstructionist guru, Jacques Derrida, and his followers, one Read More ›
Tackling the Big Questions with Carver Mead
Mead said that COSM attendees argued in good faith in order to reach the truthDr. Carver Mead, Professor Emeritus and California Institute of Technology and recipient of the prestigious 2022 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology, gave the closing remarks for last year’s COSM conference. “We’ve tackled the big questions,” Mead said. Mead noted that in a system where free information is bountiful, our adversaries will try to set us at odds against each other. “That’s the one thing that can cripple us,” he said. “Is when we get at odds with each other. This COSM has been a wonderful example of us arguing over things not because we have a fixed idea and we don’t want to change because of some preconceived notion, but because we want to get to the truth.” You can Read More ›
Why ChatGPT Won’t Replace Google
With Google, the algorithm eventually leads you to content made by real people. With ChatGPT, you never leave the algorithmTo some extent, ChatGPT is a newer, easier-to-use interface than Google. Unlike Google, it doesn’t make you waste time by visiting those pesky websites. It not only looks into its database for content, but it also summarizes it for you as paragraphs. There is a problem lurking in there, however. Being computers, neither Google nor ChatGPT cares about the truth. They are algorithms, and they merely do as they are told. Additionally, you can’t code the human mind into algorithms. However, there is a fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what Google does that will prevent content generators like ChatGPT from displacing search engines like Google: Google eventually lets you out of its system. Ultimately, the goal of search Read More ›
How Does Worldview Differ From Cultural Environment?
Confusion about the difference between worldview and cultural environment has been a stumbling block for Christian apologetics5 Worldview vs. Cultural Environment By now it will be apparent that a cultural environment differs from a worldview. Let’s say a bit more about that difference, because it is important. A cultural environment applies corporately to the group or community in which one resides. On the other hand, a worldview is, in the first instance, held individually, though it can be shared and therefore held corporately. Thus we may speak of “the Christian worldview.” One’s worldview is the set of beliefs that one holds about what the world is like. As such, it doesn’t distinguish between beliefs that are held intensely and those that are held more lightly. It doesn’t distinguish between beliefs that are non-negotiable and those to Read More ›
Information Today Is Like Water in the Ocean. How Do We Test It?
Often, we must sort through many layers of bias in information to get at the facts that matterExamining specific types of bias in our thinking will help us evaluate the information on key issues that inundates us today.
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Research Showing That Fake News Easily Fools Us Collapses
A recent paper claiming that low-quality news (“fake news”) spreads as quickly on social media as accurate news has been retracted by its authors.A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy.”
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