Naked Data

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ROTM

These are not the robot overlords you are looking for

The Guardian mis-stepped slightly this week, with an op-ed purportedly written by GPT-3, an AI which has been the source of many a convincing robot-authored yarn of late. GPT-3 is impressive, but perhaps not as impressive as the Graun's headline led readers to believe. "A robot wrote this entire ...

2 weeks ago

AI’s coming for my job

Let's face it, most day-to-day coding is copying-and-pasting from StackOverflow into VSCode. Microsoft's new supercomputer skips out the middle bit -- the meaty bit doing the clicking -- and just writes code based on the very many previous examples for whatever you're hoping to achieve. Software ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Truth just about as strange as Orwellian fiction

When an 18-year-old Jessica Johnson won the Orwell Youth Prize last year for her story about a "Band system" for students, meant to promote on merit but in reality offering opportunities only to the rich and down-marking the poor, she didn't know that she would be the victim of such a system just...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Science backs down to the whims of Excel autocorrect

Guess what happens when genetic scientists put the gene name "MARCH1" into Excel: no prizes if you worked out that it changes it to a date, thus destroying data validity and some poor geneticist's groundbreaking paper along with it. The problem is so pervasive that a 2007 study found that one-fif...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

AI Dungeon is turning into a text-based Matrix

Bonkers text adventure game generator AI Dungeon has taken a step closer to sentience, with a new premium version based on OpenAI's too-clever-for-its-own-good GPT-3 personality engine (see ND passim). The good news is that it still seems to be as tripped and surreal as ever, just written by a hu...

a month ago

Superheroes fighting AI bias

In Better Off Ted, season 1, episode 4 (released in 2009), black workers at the Veridian corporation are left in the dark when the company installs motion sensors to turn off lights when no-one is in the room. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyXNmiTIupg Apart from being the best episode of anythi...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, ROTM

Smile! You’re on candid camera!

Coronavirus isn't the only reason to wear a facemask if you're protesting -- an increasing risk of facial recognition could see you targeted by police after the fact, as they did in Baltimore following protests over Freddie Gray's death. According to this article in The Guardian, Clearview AI has...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Facebook builds evil robots

If there's one thing we've learned from social media over the years, it's that when a few billion people gather in one place it's almost impossible to enforce any sort of value-based norms on them. Over the years, Facebook, Twitter et al have tried many different ways to clamp down on misinformat...

2 months ago

Oh expensive gruntbuggly…

There, in the wood, among trees,He sees shadows on the way, hears voices,hears the wind and the rustling of leaves;Through an open gladeHe sees a shape and the shape hears:It waits as he waits,Waits as the shadows wait,As the voices wait;Shadows on the way, voices in the wind. It's not going to f...

3 months ago

Marked for life

The parental wisdom that "you'll regret it when you're older" has saved many a young teen from an ill-advised tattoo, and probably pushed millions more to the needle, but it turns out your mum and dad may have been right. The other EFF has released an update on its investigation into the use of a...

6 months ago

The infernal machine

The tragedy of modern journalism is that so much effort often goes to waste. All writers know that all-too-often the story they have slaved over, crafted, cared for and meticulously researched will end up being one of the least read on the site. The pain of seeing exactly how many people preferre...

7 months ago

You can run, but you can’t hide

Today's terrifying Rise of the Machines story is about how us humans, cowering behind shattered walls and in concrete bunkers, will still not be safe from the Terminators, who -- thanks to machine learning and radio waves -- can now see us through walls. Thanks, science!

Jason Norwood-Young

11 months ago

Kenneth Graham got it wrong

As if traffic in Jo'burg isn't bad enough, there's a whole new problem which will soon be facing motorists. Researchers at the University of Virginia have been teaching rats how to drive tiny electric cars. Expect a dramatic rise in tail-backs.

11 months ago

Atlas shrugged, fell to his knees, front flipped, back flipped and did a handstand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E If you've not seen the video of Boston Dynamic's humanoid Atlas robot doing a passable impression of Jackie Chan acrobatics (Police Story Jackie Chan, not Kung Fu Yoga Jackie Chan, obvs), then you owe it to yourself to watch it now. In other news, the f...

11 months ago