Technology

If you are still enthralled with ChatGPT in its variations and many competitors, here is an amusing story from the NYTimes: “The ChatGPT Lawyer Explains Himself.” The story details the sad, delusional, ignorant story of Steven A. Schwartz, the lawyer who used ChatGPT to write a legal brief in a --->> read more -->>

Speaking of AI in 2018, Jason Yosinski said, “To a certain extent, as these networks get more complicated, it is going to be fundamentally difficult to understand why they make decisions,” he said. “It is kind of like trying to understand why humans make decisions.” As the mega-monopolies in the --->> read more -->>

ChatGPT and its many competitors are now flooding the market. Prognosticators, bloviators and professors are wagging their tongues at top speed full-time. This headline appeared in the NYTimes two days ago, “Elon Musk and Others Call for Pause on A.I., Citing ‘Profound Risks to Society’“. Leaving aside the ironies of --->> read more -->>

The recent ruckus about the likelihood that the Chinese government might access data from American TikTok accounts is perhaps well-placed. They might also use their access to TikTok to spread propaganda and other malicious information. Certainly, the simple solution suggested by TiKTOk of storing all US user data on servers --->> read more -->>

China spends more on importing computer chips – $260 billion in 2017 – than it does importing oil. President Biden’s recent bans on the export of American-made chips to China as well as a ban on companies throughout the world using American technology to export to China intends to make --->> read more -->>

Just when I thought I could put this topic away for a while, I came across this video by John Oliver. As I have noted earlier, it continues to amaze me that some of the best commentaries come from comedians. The little note, nearly at the end, of EU efforts --->> read more -->>

“Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought.” Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull have weighed in on the ruckus about ChatGPT and its many brethren in the --->> read more -->>

Further on ChatGPT Much has been made of the fact that interest and use of ChatGPT has grown rapidly, even compared to some of the social media giants early history. Further experimentation has not changed my estimate of this facile word smith to be an error-prone mess. As noted in --->> read more -->>

Further experiments with ChatGPT (following yesterday’s post >>>) significantly weaken its usefulness and even suggest that it is a potentially dangerous, unreliable source of information. Experiment Six (continuing from previous post) – Query: when will ChatGPT provide bibliographic references for its answers? As an artificial intelligence, I am not able to --->> read more -->>

ChatGPT has been all over the internet in recent weeks. I have now experimented with it and have some initial thoughts to share. I ran a number of “experiments” to explore what this natural language AI could do. Using the December 15th version of ChatGPT I posed a series of questions. --->> read more -->>

Anonymity is a plague in our lives, public and private. The web is filled with anonymous material authored by anonymous creators. Facebook is filled with millions of anonymous fake people who are really, it frequently turns out,  paid actors for various political and economic actors. Our local web-based social platforms --->> read more -->>

Modern marketing began in the 1920s when mass circulation newspapers were joined by radio as regular parts of most people’s days. Some of the early practitioners of marketing were quite open about their function in the capitalist market system. They referred to themselves as “demand managers”. Today we have “attention --->> read more -->>