aifaq.wtf

Dr. Gupta is a medical-advice-dispensing AI chatbot from Martin Shkreli, who is best known for... being very good at Excel, maybe? Buying a Wu Tang album?

I think "benchmarks are not equivalent to "human ability" and it's foolish to equate them" is a good line to use on people in the future.

Which makes me wonder what LocalLens might look like in the near future once they’ve expanded to “cover what’s happening in every community in America.” Do the founders of LocalLens see themselves as something akin to a bot-driven version of Documenters that supplies much-needed notetaking and documentation of public meetings and records? Or will this eventually just become yet another “good enough” source of local news and information for residents in communities that have either lost or abandoned their own local news organizations?

More to come on this one, pals.

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I think this applies to journalism, too.

This isn't specifically about AI, but the article itself is really interesting. At its core is a theory about the role of information-related technologies:

I have a theory of technology that places every informational product on a spectrum from Physician to Librarian:

The Physician saves you time and shelters you from information that might be misconstrued or unnecessarily anxiety-provoking.

In contrast, the Librarian's primary aim is to point you toward context.

While original Google was about being a Librarian and sending you search results that could provide you with all sorts of background to your query, it's now pivoted to hiding the sources and stressing the Simple Facts Of The Matter.

Which technological future do we want? One that claims to know all of the answers, or one that encourages us to ask more questions?

But of course those little snippets of facts Google posts aren't always quite accurate and are happy to feed you pretty much anything they find on ye olde internet.

As the race heats up between IRL significant others and digital ones, Tinder's going to need all the AI help they can get.

In another tweet Hannah says:

Match Group says on its earnings call that it's working on a feature for Tinder that would have AI help pic the best photos for user profiles

Which I swear to god is like 1996-era machine learning, do they not do this already??? The possibilities for completely unhinged uses of generative AI on dating apps are boundless, can't wait for the Good Stuff to show up.

A common refrain about AI is that it's a useful helper for humans to get things done. Reading x-rays, MRIs and the like is a big one: practically every human being who's worked with machine learning and images has worked with medical imagery, as it's always part of the curriculum. Here we are again, but this time looking at whether radiologists will take AI judgement into account when analyzing images.

They apparently do not. Thus this wild ride of a recommendation:

Our results demonstrate that, unless the documented mistakes can be corrected, the optimal solution involves assigning cases either to humans or to AI, but rarely to a human assisted by AI.

And later...

In fact, a majority of radiologists would do better on average by simply following the AI prediction.

It's in stark contrast to the police, who embrace flawed facial recognition even when it just plain doesn't work and leads to racial disparities.

My hot take is the acceptance of tool-assisted workflows depends on accomplishing something. The police get to accomplish something extra if they issue a warrant based on a facial recognition match, and the faulty nature of the match is secondary to feeling like you're making progress in a case. On the other hand, radiologists just sit around looking at images all day, and it isn't a case of "I get to go poke around at someone's bones if I agree with the AI."

But a caveat: I found the writing in the paper to be absolutely impenetrable, so if we're being honest I have no idea what it's actually saying outside of those few choice quotes.

Forget subtitles: YouTube now dubs videos with AI-generated voices – the background to know for this one is the role of dubbing in YouTube fame, featuring MrBeast conquering the world through the use of localized content.

There's definitely a need, as "as much as two-thirds of the total watch time for a creator’s channel comes from outside their home region." But what's the scale look like for those who make the transition?

The 9-year-old Russian YouTuber, Like Nastya, has created nine different dubbed channels, expanding into Bahasa Indonesia, Korean, and Arabic to reach over 100 million non-Russian subscribers

To make things personal: my boring, mostly-technical English-language YouTube channel has India as its top consumer, currently beating out the US by just under one percentage point (although India was twice as common as the US a couple years ago).

Although I realize that yes, that's cheating, since almost 90% of those with a Bachelors degree in India can speak English.

(Don't get scared, it's a joke.)

Many, many, many of the papers that I link to here are about how a model is performing. But unless it's the ones where GPT got into MIT or became king of doctors or masters of all law, most of the more fun recent papers have been about "self-report studies," where polls typically given to humans are given to LLMs instead:

I will discuss three high-profile papers that I believe might have some of these problems. I am not saying that everything about these papers is wrong or that these papers are bad overall (at least not all of them). Especially the first paper is quite good in my opinion. But I have my doubts about some of their findings and I think that pointing them out can illustrate some of these pitfalls.

This is great! This is how it should be!!! And what's that? You want sass?

I find the use of this tool to be a shaky idea right out of the gate. The authors of the paper claim that their work is based on the political spectrum theory, but I am not aware of any scientific research that would back the Political Compass. To my knowledge, it really is merely a popular internet quiz with a rather arbitrary methodology.

Go forth and read the paper itself (which I guess technically isn't a paper, but it's basically a paper)

I was really surprised – "with a minimum of math and jargon" means "actually a really solid bunch of technical stuff," not "this is baby talk for baby infants." There're plenty of places where I feel like it goes a little too deep, but this piece is a great second-level introduction beyond the basics.

I would I could tag this "hallucinations" but it's... it's a much different kind of hallucination.

It's from a TikTok account that is being used to make weird stuff go viral and get people to sign up for a newsletter. Check the quote tweets for discussions of racism and just... a lot of takes. A lot. Many.