Via LLRX – Algorithms are moulding and shaping our politics. Here’s how to avoid being gamed – In a recent paper, Prof. Chantelle Gray coined the term “algopopulism”: algorithmically aided politics. The political content in our personal feeds not only represents the world and politics to us. It creates new, sometimes “alternative”, realities. It changes how… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: March 2023
Google’s Hot New Bard AI Is Already Spouting Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories
Futurism: “Google just released its much-anticipated rival to Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Bing AI — and it’s already churning out false information, complete with fake citations of news articles that look plausible, but don’t actually exist. While the system, called Bard and currently on a waitlist for early users, is impressive in similar ways to both Bing… Continue Reading
2022 Fossil Fuel Finance Report
Banking on Climate Chaos – Any bank supporting any company that is expanding fossil fuels is driving climate chaos: “Fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest banks has reached USD $4.6 trillion in the six years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, with $742 billion in fossil fuel financing in 2021 alone. This… Continue Reading
Create images with your words – Bing Image Creator comes to the new Bing
Microsoft Blogs: “Last month we introduced the new AI-powered Bing and Microsoft Edge, your copilot for the web – delivering better search, complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to create content. Already, we have seen that chat is reinventing how people search with more than 100 million chats to date. We’ve seen… Continue Reading
Good news: ChatGPT would probably fail a CFA exam
Financial Times: “It’s an algorithmic mystery box that inspires fear, awe and derision in equal measure. The simulacrums it creates are programmed to pass off retained information as knowledge, applying unwarranted certainty to assumptions born of an easily bypassed ethical code. Its output threatens to determine whether huge numbers of people will ever get a… Continue Reading
PBS – Age of Easy Money
PBS Frontline: This “new two-hour FRONTLINE special, Age of Easy Money, [read the transcript here] couldn’t come at a more appropriate time. It’s the story of an epic economic experiment that began in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and explains how we arrived at this unsettled moment. “If we hadn’t been driving our… Continue Reading
TSA confirms plans to mandate mug shots for domestic air travel
Papers Please: “In an on-stage interview [March 14, 2023] at South By Southwest by a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, the head of the US Transportation Security Administration made explicit that the TSA plans to make collection of biometric data mandatory for airline travel: According to a report in [March 15, 2023] of the… Continue Reading
Popular Political Podcasts Dataset
The Popular Political Podcast Dataset developed by Valerie Wirtschafter and Chris Meserole at the Brookings Institution: “Podcasts have exploded in popularity recently. Over the past decade, monthly podcast listeners have risen from just over 10% of the U.S. population to more than 40%—a reach on par with major social media platforms like Instagram. Yet for… Continue Reading
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan Issues Sweeping Subpoenas to Universities Studying Misinformation
Pro Publica: “In the subpoenas, Jordan asserted that the schools may have contributed to the Biden administration’s “censorship regime by advising on so-called misinformation. House Republicans have sent letters to at least three universities and a think tank requesting a broad range of documents related to what it says are the institutions’ contributions to the… Continue Reading
Incorporating AI-Powered Chatbots into Legal Research Exercises and Assignments
RIPS Law Librarian: Oh No, Another ChatGPT Post: Incorporating AI-Powered Chatbots into Legal Research Exercises and Assignments – Olivia Smith Schlinck – “Since it was launched at the end of November 2022, the discourse around ChatGPT and AI search tools has been unrelenting. What impact will AI-powered chatbots have on education? Will students submit ChatGPT-written essays and… Continue Reading
Civilian Harm in Ukraine – Russia’s Assault on Daily Life in Ukraine
Bellingcat – map and dataset of 1,000+ incidents [includes incident’s date, location, description, sources, type of area affected, and type of weapon system]: “This map plots out and highlights incidents that have resulted in potential civilian impact or harm since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. The incidents detailed have been collected by Bellingcat researchers.… Continue Reading
Google’s Bard lags behind GPT-4 and Claude in head-to-head comparison
TechCrunch: “Google has taken the wraps off Bard, its conversational AI meant to compete with ChatGPT and other large language models. But after its shaky debut, users may understandably be a bit wary of trusting the system — so we compared it on a few example prompts with its AI peers, GPT-4 and Claude. This… Continue Reading
