ai – Page 2 – News For Wombats

Hot takes on new things

Like pretty much everybody else, I’ve been thinking about chatbots and generative AI. Unlike other things I write about, like scurvy, this is a hot topic. It’s hard to keep up using my usual strategy of rambling here on the blog, ruminating, and letting ideas simmer. Nevertheless, there are these two papers:

Generative AI and photographic transparency: accepted and forthcoming at AI&Society
On trusting chatbots: a draft that riffs on my earlier work on Wikipedia to ask how we should think about claims that we read when interacting with chatbots

It took me years to write it

Fifteen years ago, I conducted a small study testing the error-correction tendency of Wikipedia. Not only is Wikipedia different now than it was then, the community that maintains it is different. Despite the crudity of that study’s methods, it is natural to wonder what the result would be now. So I repeated the earlier study and found surprisingly similar results.

That’s the abstract for a short paper of mine that was published today at First Monday. It is a follow-up to my earlier work on the epistemology of Wikipedia.

LLMs have the wrong ontology for scholarship

I have read suggestions that LLMs might help with the routine and tedious parts of writing, like a literature review. This is undermined by their failure to distinguish the literature (which is to be reviewed) from discourse in general.

Exchanging Marx for Lincoln

I just posted a draft of Generative AI and Photographic Transparency, a short paper that is about those things. It builds on two blog posts that I wrote a while ago, but fleshes out the discussion in several respects. Whereas the blog posts used pictures of Karl Marx as their specimen example, the paper instead considers pictures of Abraham Lincoln. The change lets me work in some quotes from William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

It is still a draft, so comments are welcome.

Generative AI and homogenization

Among the legitimate worries about Large Language Models is that they will homogenize diverse voices.¹ As more content is generated by LLMs, the generic style of LLM output will provide exemplars to people finding their own voices. So even people who write for themselves will learn to write like machines.

Generative AI and rapacious capitalism

Some people have claimed that Large Language Models like ChatGPT will do for wordsmiths like me what automation has been doing to tradesfolk for centuries. They’re wrong. Nevertheless, there will be people who lose their jobs because of generative algorithms. This won’t be because they can be replaced, but instead because of rapacious capitalism. To put it in plainer terms, because their management is a bunch of dicks.

Welcome, Alessandra!

I’m happy to announce that our search for a Philosopher of AI has concluded and that Alessandra Buccella will be starting at UAlbany Philosophy in the Fall.

The moving targets

Updates behind the scenes and new competitors make the conversations I’ve had before with LLMs yesterday’s news. Today’s topic is what today’s chatbots can say about books that I’ve written.

AI is a joke

The genre of post that echoes an interaction with ChatGPT is stale and tedious. As Tom Scott comments, “Telling someone about your fascinating AI conversation is like telling someone about your dreams. They don’t care, it just sounds like you’re hallucinating nonsense.” I swore back in December that I wouldn’t make another post like that, but this one has jokes.

Network theology

There’s a rush now at Google and Microsoft to incorporate chatbots into their search engines, which seems apt to undercut the usefulness of search engines.

Suppose you want a list of Ruben Bolling’s God-Man comics. The words that a large-language model will string together about God-Man, based on having taking the whole internet as its corpus, will be nonspecific, incomplete, and probably error-ridden. The best source on this topic would be an official webpage or a fan page. There is no official God-Man episode guide, but I happen to maintain what is probably the only God-Man fan page. The best answer to the query is not to digest my page along with ten thousand others, but just to link to my page.

For lots of perfectly ordinary queries, one wants a dedicated webpage or site rather than the word-salad gestalt of a general purpose tool. So a traditional search engine can provide answers that a chatbot will only obscure.

This post was prompted by OmnipotentFriends, the latest adventure of God-Man and the cause of an update to the fan page.