My AI says it’s already too late.

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-skeptic-why-generative-ai-is-currently-doomed/

AI Skeptic – Why Generative AI is Currently Doomed

@The_AI_Skeptic – Long Post: Why Generative AI is Currently Doomed We’re so used to technology getting better. Every year there’s a new iPhone with a faster processor. It’s the way of the world… or so it seems. Sometimes, bigger doesn’t mean better. Take, for example, LLMs like ChatGPT. If you keep scaling them up, they eventually become worse. This inverse scaling leads to them becoming actively bad: (https://youtube.com/watch?v=viJt_DXTfwA&t=1705s ) (When @OpenAI were developing the highly anticipated ChatGPT-4, it seems they may have hit this problem already. Because instead of scaling up their training sets, like previous iterations of their model, leaks indicate that ChatGPT-4 may actually be 8 x ChatGPT3 models tethered together (https://thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com/p/gpt-4s-secret-has-been-revealed ), explaining why it was delayed and why the dataset size was not revealed.) But even if you believe they’ll find a way around that problem, there’s still plenty of others waiting for us. What if I told you that language model technology isn’t actually new? What if I told you it’s largely the same as it was in the 1980s, but the only thing that’s changed is the transformer technology, allowing for more efficient training, and the sheer size of the training data: The public internet. Yes, the thing that gives ChatGPT (and other LLMs) their “magic” is the fact that the internet exists now and can be scraped. (After it’s being manually catalogued by hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, of course (https://theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ai-data-gig-workers/ ).) 300 billions words from the internet were used to train ChatGPT-4. It’s the scale of this training dataset that allows it to sound so human and knowledgeable. There’s nothing else like it. Not only are major companies preventing their content from being used in future AI training datasets (https://deadline.com/2023/10/bbc-will-block-chatgpt-from-scraping-its-content-1235566868/ ) but there’s a lingering question on whether or not it was even legal for them to use their original datasets in the first place (https://theverge.com/2023/9/11/23869145/writers-sue-openai-chatgpt-copyright-claims ). But worse than that, the internet is increasingly being polluted with error-ridden AI generated content. So much so that it’s infecting search results (https://wired.com/story/fast-forward-chatbot-hallucinations-are-poisoning-web-search/ )…”

Of course they do. We keep coming back to the same ‘government wants’ at every opportunity. Would I be required to own a smartphone in order to drive a car?

https://www.pogowasright.org/the-tsa-wants-to-put-a-government-tracking-app-on-your-smartphone/

The TSA wants to put a government tracking app on your smartphone

Edward Hasbrouck writes:

Today the Identity Project submitted our comments to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on the TSA’s proposed rules for “mobile driver’s licenses”.

The term “mobile driver’s license” is highly misleading. The model Electronic Credential Act drafted by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) to authorize the issuance of these digital credentials and installation (“provisioning”) of government-provided identification and tracking apps on individual’s smartphones provides that, “The Electronic Credential Holder shall be required to have their Physical Credential on their person while operating a motor vehicle.”

So the purpose of “mobile driver’s licenses” isn’t actually licensing of motor vehicle operators, as one might naively assume from the name. Rather, the purpose of the “mobile drivers license” scheme is to create a national digital ID, according to standards controlled by the TSA, AAMVA, and other private parties, to be issued by state motor vehicle agencies but intended for use as an all-purpose government identifier linked to a smartphone and used for purposes unrelated to motor vehicles.

Read more at Papers, Please!

Because I’m interested in statistics…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/10/coin-flips-are-biased.html

Coin Flips Are Biased

Experimental result:

Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Persi Diaconis. The model asserts that when people flip an ordinary coin, it tends to land on the same side it started—Diaconis estimated the probability of a same-side outcome to be about 51%.

And the final paragraph:

Could future coin tossers use the same-side bias to their advantage? The magnitude of the observed bias can be illustrated using a betting scenario. If you bet a dollar on the outcome of a coin toss (i.e., paying 1 dollar to enter, and winning either 0 or 2 dollars depending on the outcome) and repeat the bet 1,000 times, knowing the starting position of the coin toss would earn you 19 dollars on average. This is more than the casino advantage for 6 deck blackjack against an optimal-strategy player, where the casino would make 5 dollars on a comparable bet, but less than the casino advantage for single-zero roulette, where the casino would make 27 dollars on average. These considerations lead us to suggest that when coin flips are used for high-stakes decision-making, the starting position of the coin is best concealed.

Boing Boing post.

Perspective. Can you remember what you spent 4.4 hours per day doing as a teen?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/512576/teens-spend-average-hours-social-media-per-day.aspx

Teens Spend Average of 4.8 Hours on Social Media Per Day

Just over half of U.S. teenagers (51%) report spending at least four hours per day using a variety of social media apps such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), a Gallup survey of more than 1,500 adolescents finds. This use amounts to 4.8 hours per day for the average U.S. teen across seven social media platforms tested in the survey.

Across age groups, the average time spent on social media ranges from as low as 4.1 hours per day for 13-year-olds to as high as 5.8 hours per day for 17-year-olds. Girls spend nearly an hour more on social media than boys (5.3 vs. 4.4 hours, respectively).

Perspective.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/16/1081149/ai-consciousness-conundrum/

Minds of machines: The great AI consciousness conundrum

… At the breakneck pace of AI development, however, things can shift suddenly. For his mathematically minded audience, Chalmers got concrete: the chances of developing any conscious AI in the next 10 years were, he estimated, above one in five.

… AI consciousness isn’t just a devilishly tricky intellectual puzzle; it’s a morally weighty problem with potentially dire consequences. Fail to identify a conscious AI, and you might unintentionally subjugate, or even torture, a being whose interests ought to matter. Mistake an unconscious AI for a conscious one, and you risk compromising human safety and happiness for the sake of an unthinking, unfeeling hunk of silicon and code. Both mistakes are easy to make. “Consciousness poses a unique challenge in our attempts to study it, because it’s hard to define,” says Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University who has researched consciousness since the early 2000s. “It’s inherently subjective.”

Tools & Techniques.

https://dataconomy.com/2023/10/16/best-ai-tools-for-teachers/

12 game-changing AI tools for teachers (free)

AI tools for teachers have surged in prominence, redefining the educational landscape. Thanks to artificial intelligence, educators can now amplify the impact of their pedagogical methods, ensuring that every moment in the classroom is optimized.

Commencing our exploration, we spotlight some standout AI tools for teachers that promise to be game-changers this 2023. We believe these innovations don’t just augment the teaching process; they also empower students, fostering an environment ripe for enriched learning experiences.