Tag Archives: artificial intelligence
Using AI to fight misinformation
In his latest newsletter, Bruce Schneier springboarded off of articles in Washington Post and The Atlantic to write: There’s a balance between the cost of the thing, and the cost to destroy the thing, and that balance is changing dramatically. … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged artificial intelligence, Bruce Schneier, ChatGPT o3, disinformation, fake news, journalism, open source, science journalism
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Who funds quantum research?
An odd little detail in a Physics World piece on Microsoft’s claim to have made a working topological qubit: Regardless of the debate about the results and how they have been announced, researchers are supportive of the efforts at Microsoft to produce a … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Science
Tagged artificial intelligence, Bruce Schneier, Drew Weissman, drug development, Katalin Karikó, Majorana 1, Microsoft Research, mRNA vaccines, Nathan Sanders, Normal Eisen, Physical Review B, Physics World, public AI, public quantum, quantum computing, quantum technologies, topological qubit, Winfried Hensinger
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Learning with ChatGPT
I have access to the premium version of ChatGPT, and every day I ask it a few questions about concepts in physics that I’d like to know more about. Yesterday, for example, I learnt the difference between quenching and annealing … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged annealing, artificial intelligence, autonomous learning, bipolar junction transistors, ChatGPT, OpenAI, quenching, Weierstrass function
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Keep the crap going
Have you seen the new ads for Google Gemini? In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her sandwich, rushes to meet her … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Tech
Tagged advertisements, Apple Intelligence, artificial intelligence, Google Gemini
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Feel the pain
Emotional decision making is in many contexts undesirable – but sometimes it definitely needs to be part of the picture, insofar as our emotions hold a mirror to our morals. When machines make decisions, the opportunity to consider the emotional … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged +972 Magazine, Anna Mae Duane, artificial intelligence, Israel genocide, loneliness, The Conversation, Yuval Abraham
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The AI trust deficit predates AI
There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial … Continue reading
Posted in Tech
Tagged artificial intelligence, high tech, low tech, Mark Bailey, scrutability, self-driving cars, trolley problem, trust in AI
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AI v. our ability to build AI
A lot of this article, by Sean Ekins, Filippa Lentzos, Max Brackmann, and Cédric Invernizzi, published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on March 24, makes good sense – except the following two sentences: Nature took millions of years to … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged artificial intelligence, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, large language models, synthetic proteins
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Who are you, chatbot AI?
In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’ve used “AI” here, I’m yet … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged artificial intelligence, Ben Thompson, Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Donald Trump, large language models, robotic assistants, Sydney
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Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion
Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however incremental, as the … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged AI ethics, artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, autoencoder, DALL-E 2, deepfake, diffusion model, Emad Mostaque, Gaussian noise, Imagen, img2img, LAION, machine learning, OpenAI, Parti, Stability.ai, Stable Diffusion
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Injustice ex machina
There are some things I think about but struggle to articulate, especially in the heat of an argument with a friend. Cory Doctorow succinctly captures one such idea here: Empiricism-washing is the top ideological dirty trick of technocrats everywhere: they … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Tech
Tagged anti-intellectualism, artificial intelligence, capitalism, Cory Doctorow, Evgeny Morozov, globalisation, machine learning, middle-class aspirations, nationalism, populism, technological solutionism
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