Welcome to the Era of ‘Deep Doubt’
AI has scrambled our ability to tell what’s real and what’s synthetic. But there are tools and techniques to help stay grounded in truth.
AI has scrambled our ability to tell what’s real and what’s synthetic. But there are tools and techniques to help stay grounded in truth.
Late last month, Meta quietly announced the results of an ambitious, near-global deliberative “democratic” process to inform decisions around the company’s responsibility for the metaverse it is creating. This was not an ordinary corporate exercise. It involved over 6,000 people who were chosen to be demographically representative across 32 countries and 19 languages. The participants…
That sounded to me like he was anthropomorphizing those artificial systems, something scientists constantly tell laypeople and journalists not to do. “Scientists do go out of their way not to do that, because anthropomorphizing most things is silly,” Hinton concedes. “But they’ll have learned those things from us, they’ll learn to behave just like us…
For bookworms, reading a headline like “School District Uses ChatGPT to Help Remove Library Books” can be blood boiling. As Vulture put it earlier this week, it creates the sense that the artificial intelligence tool is once again “[taking] out its No. 1 enemy: original work.” And it is. Using ChatGPT’s guidance, the Mason City…
Even on Zoom, Martin Scorsese knows how to frame the shot. Ostensibly he’s dialed in to talk about his new Super Bowl ad for Squarespace, but as he’s settling in, he adjusts the iPad he’s calling from to make sure his face is framed perfectly by the bookshelves behind him. It’s not so much vanity…
This week, New York City’s comptroller published a similar audit of the city’s ShotSpotter system showing that only 13 percent of the alerts the system generated over an eight-month period could be confirmed as gunfire. The auditors noted that while the NYPD has the information necessary to publish data about ShotSpotter’s accuracy, it does not…
Like a lot of people, Alex Woolner was instantly fascinated by ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot which took the internet by storm when it launched in November 2022. But instead of asking it to write screenplays or satirical poetry or magazine articles (OK, not really), she turned it toward her hobby: making cute crochet animals called…