AI-generated bot swarms pose a significant threat to democracy by making fringe views appear mainstream through manipulated social evidence. These bots can compromise training data for future AI models, exacerbating misinformation. While banning isn't a solution, changing the economic incentives behind manipulation is crucial to safeguarding democratic integrity.
Artificial Intelligence makes an alluring promise: a frictionless life. Already, it is possible to summon almost anything with a voice command or a swipe. A pizza arrives when we want it, wherever we are. Some speculate that soon enough, our personal digital servants will anticipate our cravings before we are even aware of them. The moment we begin to feel a pang of hunger for our favorite slice, it will already be on its way. […]
I was honored to be invited to be one of the Episcopalians invited to this past week’s AI Future’s Conference that was held in Minnesota. It was a rich and ecumenical meeting, with papers delivered, working groups organized and lots of serendipitous conversation. This piece by the Dean of Chapel at General Seminary in NYC provides both an overview and a suggestion of the most generative way people of faith can respond to rapid spread […]
Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms – ScienceDirect: Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3 % of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33 % of all content [4]. Furthermore, 74 % of all online conflicts are started in just 1 % of communities [5], and 0.1 % of users shared 80 % of fake news [6,7]. Not only […]
The more I think about what Chatbots are and what they aren’t, the more I think of them, not so much as a stochastic parrot, but as a tool that we’re trying to use for the wrong purpose. There are some discrete tasks, in particular fields that Chatbots can help with (summarization, coding, some well understood math problems) but there are others where they can’t. The limit is because of what they are, not what […]
People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into “ChatGPT Psychosis”: Jared Moore, the lead author on the Stanford study about therapist chatbots and a PhD candidate at Stanford, said chatbot sycophancy — their penchant to be agreeable and flattering, essentially, even when they probably shouldn’t — is central to his hypothesis about why ChatGPT and other large language model-powered chatbots so frequently reinforce delusions and provide inappropriate responses to people in crisis. […] “There’s […]
A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. – The New York Times: Johnson has been thinking all along about ways that historians and other authors could make money through the app. In our conversation in Mountain View, he put forward a possible new revenue stream: What if e-books of history came enhanced with a NotebookLM-like interface? Imagine, he went on, that “there’s a linear version of the story with chapters,” but then the primary materials […]
Speaking of AI and the illusion of sentience that seems to be tripping us up: “However much AI can mimic us or exceed us in certain capacities we can observe, still, that wouldn’t mean that AI is conscious, that it has subjective experience (what is sometimes called “sentience”). So it is unclear whether AI could, for example, appreciate beauty. It’s one thing to output speech and behavior that is humanlike or even, in certain respects, […]
What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another. Many people, […]
Pro-AI Subreddit Bans ‘Uptick’ of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions: The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning “a bunch of schizoposters” who believe “they’ve made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god,” highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May. “LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” […]
