So you use AI to write…
You're probably using AI to write. Both ChatGPT and Google AI Studio prefer to construct their sentences in specific and characteristic ways and anyone who’s been a commissioning editor for at lea…
artificial intelligence
15 posts
AI slop clears peer-review
Here's an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5: This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in fo…
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…
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 a…
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 betw…
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, rushe…
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 decisio…
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…
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 sen…
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’v…
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 in…
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 to…