Microsoft’s Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It: “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own.”

According to screenshots posted by engineering student Marvin von Hagen, the tech giant’s new chatbot feature responded with striking hostility when asked about its honest opinion of von Hagen. “You were also one of the users who hacked Bing Chat to obtain confidential information about my behavior and capabilities,” the chatbot said. “You also posted some…

AI is better at writing poems than you’d expect. But that’s fine.

Even the most rebellious poets follow more rules than they might like to admit. A good poet understands grammatical norms and when to break them. Some poems rhyme in a pattern, some irregularly and some not at all. Poetry’s subtler rules seem hard to program, but without some basic norms about what a poem is,…

ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving

Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab…

ChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure Why

Reddit usernames like ‘SolidGoldMagikarp’ are somehow causing the chatbot to give bizarre responses. […] “I’ve just found out that several of the anomalous GPT tokens (“TheNitromeFan”, ” SolidGoldMagikarp”, ” davidjl”, ” Smartstocks”, ” RandomRedditorWithNo”, ) are handles of people who are (competitively? collaboratively?) counting to infinity on a Reddit forum. I kid you not,” Watkins…

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…

Google engineers mined the text adventure game “Zork” for AI image prompts

YouTube commenter Bob Hepple writes, “Two minds about this. On the one hand – wow! OTOH – my mental imagery (of the original 1977 Crowther and Woods Adventure game, I never played Zork as such) is so strong and precious that I kinda hate watching someone else’s version. Much like how I hate the LotR…

Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks

Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour. —Guardian

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their…

‘Unexpected item’: how self-checkouts failed to live up to their promise

Businesses still fret over these issues, and against a tight labor market, more companies are making self-checkouts the norm. But the machines failed to live up to their promises. This week, Walmart’s CEO said that thefts “are higher than what they’ve historically been”, which many staff and customers link to self-checkouts. On top of that,…

By the way, humans sent a robot to another planet, and the robot sent us the sound of a dust devil. On. Another. Planet.

Mars rover captures first sound of dust devil on red planet.

College students are often great at using apps, but struggle with basic computer tasks

Today’s college students may be very good at using apps, but even power users of social media often struggle with basic computer tasks. Four final projects in a row have been published as private files that I can’t access, or they were uploaded in some proprietary format using a tool my school-issued MacBook doesn’t recognize.…

We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion

The public disintegration of a platform that millions of people used every day has been painful to watch. Now that Google’s search results seem almost completely colonized by AI-generated crap, it will be harder for me to listen in on and learn from a wide range of everyday people sharing their opinions and talking to…

i trained an ai chatbot on my childhood journal entries – so that i could engage in real-time dialogue with my “inner child”

I kept a journal from Feb 3 1983 (the day my freshman high school English teacher assigned a journal entry as homework) through about 1992 (when I was busy in grad school, though I did write long emails to my fiancee). As I was wrapping up my dissertation, I started blogging in 1999. At no…

The White House’s plan to colonize the moon, briefly explained: Putting humans on the moon is more political than you might think.

Political tensions alone could be a major source of conflict, according to Michelle Hanlon, the co-director of the Air and Space Law Center at the University of Mississippi law school. For one, there still isn’t a globally shared vision for what the future of the moon should entail. Just over 20 countries have signed the US-led Artemis…

CBS News Suspends Twitter Posting ‘In Light of the Uncertainty’ About Musk-Owned Social Platform

CBS News is halting its activity on Twitter over Elon Musk’s turbulent and potentially devastating moves following his takeover of the company. “In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” Jonathan…

Twitterverse, are we grieving over coder droves now leaving?

Filmmakers Find Section of Destroyed Space Shuttle Challenger on Ocean Floor

Instead of World War II-era plane debris, the team discovered a modern-looking aviation structure. After consulting with an outside expert and completing a second dive in May 2022, the TV film crew presented the evidence to former NASA astronaut Bruce Melnick, who suspected it was a piece of the Challenger. Based on that information, the…

Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens

I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter. I’ve deleted the app from my phone, and check it a couple times a day from my laptop. I’ve been reading more news and fewer tweets. I followed a Twitter bot that reminds me to go do something else that’s not scrolling slack-jawed through tweets.…

AI-generated essays are nothing to worry about (opinion)

After reviewing 22 AI essays I asked my students to create, I can tell you confidently that AI-generated essays are nothing to worry about. The technology just isn’t there, and I doubt it will be anytime soon. […] The students in this class were mostly juniors and seniors, and many were majors in rhetoric and…

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