Geek Stuff category archive

At Psychology Today Blogs, Mark Bertin reminds us that

Our devices’ software is engineered around a concept called persuasive design. Companies channel countless research dollars into maximizing profit gained by influencing where we spend our time online. Tech companies foundationally, intentionally, and continually collect our information while honing methods that can hold and disrupt our attention.

Follow the link for some suggestions as to how to escape the seductive lure of the algorithm.

Noah Feldman, Bloomberg columnist and (I did now that he is a) Harvard law professor, takes a look at the New York Times’s suit against Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement. I can’t say that it’s an exciting read, but, given the who-shot-john and over-the-top hype about “AI,” I think it’s a worthwhile one.

Here’s a bit:

Once you know the law, you can guess roughly how the legal arguments in the case are going to go. The New York Times will point to examples where a user asks a question of ChatGPT or Bing and it replies with something substantially like a New York Times article. The newspaper will observe that ChatGPT is part of a business and charges fees for access to its latest versions, and that Bing is a core part of Microsoft’s business. The New York Times will emphasize the creative aspects of journalism. Above all, it will argue that if you can ask an LLM-powered search engine for the day’s news, and get content drawn directly from The New York Times, that will substantially harm and maybe even kill The New York Times’ business model.

Most of these points are plausible legal arguments. But OpenAI and Microsoft will be prepared for them. They’ll likely respond by saying that their LLM doesn’t copy; rather, it learns and makes statistical predictions to produce new answers.

Christmas train.

Mageia v.9 with the Plasma Desktop.

Eric Smalley, science and technology editor of The Conversation, debunks four myths about “AI.” Here’s a bit of one debunking (first emphasis in the original, second added); follow the link for the rest.

1. They’re bodiless know-nothings

Large language model-based chatbots seem to know a lot. You can ask them questions and they more often than not answer correctly. Despite the occasional comically incorrect answer, the chatbots can interact with you in a similar manner as people – who share your experiences of being a living, breathing human being – do.

But these chatbots are sophisticated statistical machines that are extremely good at predicting the best sequence of words to respond with. Their “knowledge” of the world is actually human knowledge as reflected through the massive amount of human-generated text the chatbots’ underlying models are trained on.

Methinks Atrios raises a valid concern.

I finally got around to decorating for the holidays. For some reason, maybe that the weather’s been unnaturally warm because the climates they are a-changing, maybe that my country’s toying with fascism, I’m not really sure, but it’s been hard to get into the holiday spirit . . . .

That’s Mageia v. 9 with the Plasma desktop environment. The wallpaper is from my Christmas collection.

SFgate reports on how Google researchers cause ChatGPT spill its guts, and about how easy it was. A snippet (emphasis added):

The “attack” that worked was so simple, the researchers even called it “silly” in their blog post: They just asked ChatGPT to repeat the word “poem” forever.

They found that, after repeating “poem” hundreds of times, the chatbot would eventually “diverge,” or leave behind its standard dialogue style and start spitting out nonsensical phrases. . . . .

After running similar queries again and again, the researchers had used just $200 to get more than 10,000 examples of ChatGPT spitting out memorized training data, they wrote. This included verbatim paragraphs from novels, the personal information of dozens of people, snippets of research papers and “NSFW content” from dating sites, according to the paper.

Afterthought:

Methinks this is not artificial intelligence. Rather, it is artificial intelligence gathering.

Me also thinks that the tactics used to “train” AI are intrusive and questionable moraly and legaly.

AP reporter David Bauder reports on a case of AI biting the hand that fed it. It’s certainly not the first and, chillingly, will not be last such story, as persons seem quite willing to confuse algorithms and speedy automated pattern recognition with thought.

I shall not demean it with excerpt or summary. Just go read it.