(Atlantic Tech) – Matteo Wong:
The resources needed to build generative AI have allowed the tech industry to warp what the public expects from the technology. …
But that would also be a very narrow way to build and use generative AI. … People might also be willing to sacrifice performance for a more fair and transparent chatbot — benefiting from open AI will require not just redefining open-source, but reimagining what AI itself can and should look like. …
(Atlantic Tech) – Damon Beres:
Tech companies say AI will expand the possibilities of searching the internet. So far, the opposite seems to be true. …
(Guardian Comments) – Evgeny Morozov:
Let’s retire this hackneyed term: while ChatGPT is good at pattern-matching, the human mind does so much more. …
(Atlantic Tech) – Matteo Wong:
Microsoft and Google believe chatbots will change search forever. So far, there’s no reason to believe the hype. …
They announced that they would incorporate AI programs similar to ChatGPT into their search engines—bids to transform how we find information online into a conversation with an omniscient chatbot. One problem: These language models are notorious mythomaniacs. …
(FTB stderr) – Marcus Ranum:
AI are going to have (for now) a problem with being right about things, in fields where there is an objective criterion for right or wrong. An AI cannot bloviate about the nature of dark energy or the volume of a rotational curve: there are verifiable answers. But I hypothesize that fields lacking objective criteria are going to be very easy for AIs to fudge responses into: marketing, psychology, philosophy, MilSF, screenplays, presidential speech-writing, on and on. A friend of mine and I have been playing with asking ChatGPT to write code for us, and have been enumerating the critical mistakes it makes. Perhaps ChatGPT can design a website that looks interesting, but when I asked it to write a C function that added a struct Node to the end of a linked list, it appears to have assumed I meant a struct Node * and accessed its member fields via pointers (instead of allocating memory and initializing a copy) C has objective criteria for good code and bad code, but speechwriting and MilSF do not. …
AI can be used as a tool for elevating mediocrities and, as such, it’s not just a threat to the mediocre, it’s a source of infinite noise. …
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