Naked Data

All the data you can eat

ROTM

How to report on AI

Is it possible for journalists to report accurately on matters of machine learning, when the question of how to audit decision making machines hasn't been completely resolved even by the people that build them? It's a toughie, and one that was tackled at this year's Centre for Investigative Journ...

10 days ago

The truth is out there

The machine-learning tool for our time, researchers form the University of California have developed an AI that can reportedly tell the difference between a Pizzagate and a Watergate when it comes to the quality of underlying facts. Worryingly, the authors do admit that "someone could use the too...

10 days ago

Check out my new (AI) logo

As an ex-journalist-turned-software developer, I am very aware that AI will one day take all my career options. But not today. Today, it's the turn of designers to get turfed out onto the street. Zyro is a Foursquare-ish website hosting company that has released some pretty nifty AIs to help you ...

Jason Norwood-Young

10 days ago

But is it art?

How much would you pay for a one-off, original artwork, framed and shipped? If you answered "As much as $119", then I've got some good news for you: The AI Gallery will ship you an original 22x22" framed canvas artwork of your choice, simply by removing the cost of those pesky artists and replaci...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Oh happy day. Everyday

The Decisive Moment died many years ago, but Adobe's latest will a little rotational velocity to Cartier-Bresson's post-mortal movements. Photoshop's newest AI powered filter is the Smart Portrait emotion editor, which can turn tears into joy (or vice versa) by changing the look on your face. It ...

a month ago

Sub-editors: learn to stop worrying and love the machine

Shane Creevy, head of editorial at journalism/AI company Kinzen, believes that the always-tenuous sub-editor role could be in for a revival, as they are perfectly positioned to act as the gatekeeper for the burgeoning machine learning in journalism sector. "The sub-editor is the sapien in the mac...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Bot-attack! GPT-3 sneaks onto Reddit, talks about suicide

"A GPT-3-powered bot has been caught posing as a human on Reddit after more than a week of rampant posting on one of the site’s most popular subreddits," reports The Next Web, churning out a post a minute on /r/AskReddit. Posting as thegentlemetre, it answered the question: "Elevator-maintenance ...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Goodbye, Philosopher AI

The robot-apocalypse has been put back a few years, fortunately, by the untimely closure of the free version Philosopher AI. The GPT-3-powered thinking engine was build to muse over important questions put to it by visitors to the website, such as "What would happen if a badger attacked a baboon"...

a month ago

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 months 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

3 months 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

3 months 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

3 months 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...

3 months 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

3 months 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

4 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...

4 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...

5 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...

8 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...

9 months ago