Overview: Science&Technology

"ChatGPT is not overly reliable... surprising how often ... right, but they can also be plausible and wrong a lot of the time, and downright obviously wrong some of the time... responding with errors of fact, ... responses that may only be true for certain (biased) contexts... wary of providing evidence or citations ... [but] happy to make up…

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…

"I spent a few minutes in conversation with ChatGPT."This was both me kicking ChatGPT's conversational tyres and exploring its limits, both those it admits to and those it does not.Key takeaways from a first reading:Many, but not all, content creators are screwedFor "writers, journalists, copywriters, consultants, and even publ…

"fine-tune GPT-3 on their own data, creating a custom version tailored to their application" improving reliability for more use cases and making the model cheaper and faster. Any dataset of any shape or size, plus "incrementally add data based on user feedback... less than 100 examples to start seeing the benefits ... doubling the n…

ChatGPT... is going to change our world much sooner than we expect, and much more drastically

Betaworx announcing "nine companies we selected and invested in for our THINKCamp accelerator program ... new technologies ranging from large language models and generative AI to graph databases and high-fidelity spatial user interfaces — to create tools for for how we may think."All probably worth checking out, ranging from Gordon Brand…

Discourse graph refers to an information model which represents scientific discourse by distilling "traditional publication down into more granular, formalized knowledge claims, linked to supporting evidence and context through a network or graph... knowledge claims ... as the central unit".Why? "Standardizing the representation of …

"I first decided to try scribing the Betaworx Render session on Plexus using Obsidian and try publishing it via GitHub (context). That didn't work, so when I saw [[rtnf md]] I thought I'd give it a whirl... the idea [of Plexus] is simple:post your thoughts into a defined shared brain on Plexus - eg : https://render.plexus.earth/the …

Another scribe of the Betaworx Render conference on Thinking Tools (context), this time in good old-fashioned blogpost form, with scans of handwritten notes to boot. Contrasting this with some of the other annotations, it's a good example of the difference between "someone else's notes" and "someone else's blog post&q;…

I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…

A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

Another example of topic-based aggregation being better at avoiding the toxic effects of a socially-based newsfeed (cf Reddit).Flipboard's new feature lets them quickly specify the subjects they care most about from among its 30,000-plus topics... "Flipboard uses AI to classify the articles and videos it’s aggregating and weave them into…

"forecasting the future is a complex and absolutely critical job. So how do you do it—and what comes next?"Fascinating series of short interviews with futurists. Some selected quotes:"When it comes to the future, you have two choices: ... build a great big wall to keep out all the bad news. Or you can build windmills and harness the…

German researchers studying "computational linguistics, hateful and oppressive speech and how social media exacerbates it studied ... five years of discussion between [Trump] supporters on Telegram, tracking how participants “gradually went from discussing governmental overthrow as a theoretical possibility to planning the January 6, 2021 Cap…

Facebook’s own recommendation algorithms have been inviting users to like pages that share pro-military propaganda that violates the platform’s rules... in 2018 the social media company admitted it could have done more to prevent incitement of violence in the run-up to a military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority ...hired more than 100…

Analysing the impact of cultural diversity on corporate performance by feeding half-million Glassdoor reviews through a "Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling" machine learning algorithm: "the “bag of words” approach... inductively infers categories... a statistical model that looks for words that tend to co-occur."Step 1:…

The “Brussels effect:... When the European Union comes up with some new tech regulation, it can quickly spread around the world"...To draft its proposed AI regulatory approach, the EC "created a 52-member “high-level expert group” ... collected further input via an “AI alliance” ... published a white paper" to which 1,250 groups a…

"AI Dungeon ... used text-generation technology ... OpenAI to create a choose-your-own adventure game inspired by D&D... algorithms crafting a personalized, unpredictable adventure".This is a huge creative playground: over 20,000 players each day; one player "claims to have written an estimated total of more than 1 million word…

"GPT-3 ... generates tweets, pens poetry, summarizes emails, answers trivia questions, translates languages and even writes its own computer programs, all with very little prompting"It's surprised a lot of AI researchers, but also "often spews biased and toxic language" and isn't always convincing. It's a univers…

roughly 1 of every 1,000 pieces of content ... violates ... rules on hate speech... even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was “deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook.”...civic integrity team... charged with protecting the democratic process and reducing misinformation ... recently dis…

Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control... exporting ... to regimes around the globe... all-seeing digital system of social control... precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time ... every person ... identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data..…

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…

Law enforcement, marketers, hospitals and other bodies apply artificial intelligence (AI) to decide ... who is profiled as a criminal... who gets medical treatment ... hired... often motivated by power and profit ... ‘fair’ and ‘good’ are infinitely spacious words ... question to pose...: how is AI shifting power? ...Researchers should listen t…

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?

For businesses, delivering good customer service is ... imperative... for government entities to enhance the “citizen experience”... may be just as important...Governments... empathy economy model ... put residents and citizens at the core ... empathy economy is based on ... value created by AI and other innovations detect and simulate human emoti…

The Syllabus collects the best articles, podcasts and videos about the political, economic and social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on a daily basis...world’s foremost technology critic... scans 100 pages per minute, 12 books in an hour, 100 in one day... can determine the relevance of every book in the world... all information and know…

Ali Aliev recently developed a method for creating Deepfakes in real-time. To test... pretended to be ... Elon Musk and ‘accidentally’ wandered into the wrong online meeting... might be the cutest Zoom-bombing ever made.

The von der Leyen Commission’s much anticipated White Paper ... sustained effort to forge a distinctive EU brand of AI... lack of focus ... on human rights... while there are multiple centres of engineering excellence... the raw investment numbers tell a demanding story...2016... EU investment was 3.2 bn euro. In North America, 12.1 bn... goal wit…

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