One unexpected consequence of AI is that its rise could revive demand for a liberal arts education. AI’s propensity for errors or hallucinations means an increase in demand for prompt engineers. They determine the best way to frame a question when interacting with AI-powered systems. This requires people with strong language and creative thinking skills. Like previous technologies, AI is creating new roles as well as revamping old ones."
“To the extent that #generativeAI progress rests on partnerships with large partners, the precise contours of any deal between #Apple and #OpenAI are unclear. Whether the two companies make a cultural fit, and how long the marriage can last, is an open question.” https://on.ft.com/4e8YcPD
#Apple#AI#GenerativeAI#Siri: "One concrete step Apple can take to show it is serious about the potential of generative AI is by using it to enhance Siri, the digital voice assistant it introduced in 2011.
The initial wave of AI chatbots led by ChatGPT, while catching the eye of consumers, is only one application of the technology — with the input and output both being text. An enhanced Siri might be attuned to user preferences and capable of carrying out a specific set of tasks very well, such as sorting through emails.
Within the limits of its existing hardware, Apple can use personal data kept locally on the device to craft these kinds of personalised experiences for its users, says Tim Bates, a professor at the University of Michigan-Flint College of Innovation & Technology. “I talk about this as ‘narrow AI’,” he says.
This so-called “on-device” premise has the added benefit of protecting user safety and privacy, as consumers are unlikely to want AI applications training themselves on their personal information and exporting it to the cloud. Running features locally also cuts out the lag involved in generating responses from a remote server.
“Siri is really the perfect ‘flavour’ of interactive AI,” Bates adds. “An individual can control their data, talk to the AI, and get things done, and not be afraid it’s going to be sucked out of the device.”"
#AI#GenerativeAI#Hallucinations#ChatGPT#Bullshit: "Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems."
#AI#GenerativeAI#Religion#AIHype: "Society is supposed to be filled with those who are supposed to know: teachers, the clergy, leaders, experts, all of whom function as figures of authority who give stability to structures of meaning and ways of thinking. But when the systems that give shape to things start to fade or come under doubt, as has happened to religion, liberalism, democracy, and more, one is left looking for a new God. There is something particularly poignant about the desire to ask ChatGPT to tell us something about a world in which it can occasionally feel like nothing is true. To humans awash with a sea of subjectivity, AI represents the transcendent thing: the impossibly logical mind that can tell us the truth. Lingering at the edges of Clarke’s short story about the Tibetan monks was a similar sense of technology as the thing that lets us exceed our mere mortal constraints.
But the result of that exceeding is the end of everything. In turning to technology to make a deeply spiritual, manual, painstaking task more efficient, Clarke’s characters end up erasing the very act of faith that sustained their journey toward transcendence. But here in the real world, perhaps meeting God isn’t the aim. It’s the torture and the ecstasy of the attempt to do so. Artificial intelligence may keep growing in scope, power, and capability, but the assumptions underlying our faith in it—that, so to speak, it might bring us closer to God—may only lead us further away from Him."
#AI#GenerativeAI#AITraining#Copyright#FairUse: "Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition whose members include Amazon, Apple and Meta, is launching a campaign to defend the legality of using copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence systems.
The group says the campaign, called “Generate and Create” and unveiled on Thursday, will aim to highlight “how artists use generative AI to enhance their creative output” and “showcase how AI lowers barriers for producing art” as part of an initiative to “defend the longstanding legal principle of fair use under copyright law.”
Without intervention from Congress, the legality of using copyrighted works in training datasets will be decided by the courts. The question will likely be answered in part on fair use, which provides protection for the use of copyrighted material to make a secondary work as long as it’s “transformative.” It remains among the primary battlegrounds for the mainstream adoption of AI, with some companies putting guardrails on use due to legal ambiguity.
“The principle of fair use is well established over decades of copyright law,” says chief executive Adam Kovacevich, who’s a former Google executive. “All art has responded to what’s come before.”"