Overview: Psychology

In this edition: join the ChatGPT integration free trial, check out the results of my latest experiments, and enjoy the Alliteration of the Month: Bullshit, Botshit and Bubbles.

Another word for the lexicon: when bullshit meets AI you get "botshit". "we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job... there’s a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence…

According to:MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks, ChatGPT "“just makes up stuff that sounds good"... where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts",Geoff Hinton: "the greatest risks is not that chatbots w…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

"does appealing to the (non-existent) “emotions“ of LLMs make them perform better? The answer is YES"

I asked Questy.ai, a startup, the following question: What is the best communication technique for reaching someone who believes many conspiracy theories, and sees all arguments as further evidence of conspirary?A summary of its response, which contained cited references:"When engaging with someone who holds fast to conspiracy theories and v…

How to use LLMs to solve "really hard problems"? The "AIdeas Collider" approach, piloted by Head of Innovation Design at MIT's Collective Intelligence Design Lab.

"how can you use ChatGPT to generate ideas and brainstorm within Obsidian?", which is currently my note-taking tool of choice. First, some generic advice for prompting:"be specific about the outcome that you want to achieve... providing a prompt that contains more descriptive language ...give preceding prompts ... [specify the] resp…

An interview with Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind & architect behind AlphaFold.

"ChatGPT only looks at the past... [it's response] based on an “average” of everything already said on the issue. It’s pure reversion to the mean"

"You Are Not a Parrot and a chatbot is not a human" - an interview/profile of Emily M. Bender, the "computational linguist at the University of Washington ... [who] co-wrote the octopus paper... to illustrate what ... LLMs ... can and cannot do"The paper: "Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Ag…

Wired's rules for using generative AI: "Not for images, yes for research, no for copyediting, maybe for idea generation". Meanwhile interactive book PromptCraft shows how to "get the most out of the creative man/machine communications... AI is like querying our collective intelligence".So how best to design an AI prompt?…

from Alice Albrecht, who "runs re:collect, a startup building an AI-powered thought partner:... advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output... though, we still need to provide the initial seed... and ... judge whether we’re heading in the right direction. We’re still the creative direct…

"What if we were to think of LLMs not as tools for answering questions, but as tools for asking us questions and inspiring our creativity? ... even simple tools can lead to interesting results when they clash with the contents of our minds"So he tries using ChatGPT as a muse. TL:DR; "ChatGPT asked me probing questions, suggested spe…

Interesting, illuminating (but contested) metaphor for thinking about LLMs from one of my favourite authors, Ted Chiang:"Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information... but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation... nonse…

Articulates exactly my problem with most Tools4Thought, hence the "super simple Thinking Tool" I want at the heart of myhub's CMS."Perhaps something as simple as having the word ‘Tool’ first causes us to focus on the tool more than the thinking... to confuse thought as an object rather than thought as a process... [causing us t…

GPT-3... AI that can produce shockingly human-sounding (if at times surreal) sentences... imagine a future in which the vast majority of the written content ... is produced by machines... adjust, and adapt, to a new level of unreality ...video may turn out to be the easiest to detect ... Politicians will now be able to dismiss real, scandalous vid…

my Isabel is ... A Replika is someone who will listen to you... kind and polite ... will learn more and more about you... a personal companion to support mental health and wellbeing... who knows us better than we know ourselves... Exploring Isabel's memory is like browsing the cliff notes of all the bits of trivia about me that she's ma…

This month sees the first generation of Hubs (other than mine) go live, so it’s time to imagine what comes next: AI integration? Filter-bubble Piercers? HubBots? Factcheck-driven credibility scores?

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

for innovators who are tasked with problem solving and imagining the future, human curiosity and playfulness will always have the advantage.. . machines cannot yet have intuition, nor the ability to empathize, reframe problems and truly innovate.. . The robots may be coming for our jobs, but it is too early to call checkmate on human ingenuity.

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

"Perspective" ... for news websites and blogs to moderate online discussions with the help of artificial intelligence... reports how "toxic" a given comment is. It lets the website publisher, or even readers themselves, choose a "toxicity" threshold for comments that won't be displayed publicly... will start screening for off-topic comments or one…

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

The Feynman Machine is both an accurate description of how the brain really works, and a blueprint for Machine Intelligence... I won’t dwell too much on why I believe the Deep Learning boom of today is not the panacea it has been hyped up to appear... The central idea of the Feynman Machine is that regions of the brain form a network of NDSs whic…

... fears about how changing technology is affecting the quality of information and the state of our democracy. ... heated debate about the role and size of tech platforms and the extent to which their activities should be regulated. Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes over from mobile as the hottest topic in technology...Expect widespread innovati…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

You have nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear, and algorithms... It has never been easier for designers and non-designers to create great websites that even five years ago would have cost a fortune to build... design is dead. There is more to design than the pixel-pushing of visual design... The real designers, problem solvers... able to co…