Academics work to detect ChatGPT and other AI writing

Today I met a class of English majors who love writing, and who expressed concern that AI writers will put them out of a job. Human- and machine-generated prose may one day be indistinguishable. But that does not quell academics’ search for an answer to the question “What makes prose human?” […] “Think about what…

A news site used AI to write articles. It was a journalistic disaster.

Artificial intelligence has been deployed to handle facial recognition, recommend movies, and auto-complete your typing. The news that CNET had been using it to generate entire stories, however, sent a ripple of anxiety through the news media for its seeming threat to journalists. The robot-brained yet conversational ChatGPT can produce copy without lunch or bathroom breaks and…

People Thought an AI Was Brilliantly Analyzing Their Personalities, But It Was Actually Giving Out Feedback Randomly

“To begin our hoax scenario, we intended to build participants’ trust in the machine by pretending that it could decode their preferences and attitudes,” the study authors wrote. “The system included a sham MRI scanner and an EEG system, that supposedly used neural decoding driven by artificial intelligence (AI).” […] In other words, participants were…

From this station on the bridge, the exposition officer can relay whatever random bit of information the plot requires, thanks to the multiple brass readouts on the curved wood consoles. #blender3dart #blender3d #steampunk #neovictorian

Get a load of the upholstery on that chair! This is a 3D visualization of the bridge of the fantasy interplanetary cruiser I created for an epic, interactive, episodic bedtime story I told my kids from about 2007-2012. Elsewhere the ship has more steampunk elements, but this part of the ship is more neo-Victorian. Something…

Distant Voices #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 3, Episode 18) Dr. Julian’s very Jungian 30th birthday

Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir is less than thrilled with Garak’s gift of a holographic adaptation of a Cardassian “enigma tale,” and explains he’s testy about his impending 30th birthday. Quark seems relieved when Bashir shoots down a shady client’s hopes of buying “biomemetic gel.” Bashir later finds that same customer (a bumpy-faced reptilian named Altovar) ransacking…

You can be a Trek fan without loving TOS. But if we think tolerance and empathy are good things, it makes sense to practice tolerating and empathizing with our own past.

I was born in 1968 and grew up with reruns of TOS. I can only remember seeing a handful of episodes for the first time (and those are some of my earliest memories). Some of the episodes are awful, and the third season is overall very weak. You can be a Trek fan without loving…