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Category Archives: AI

The Verge’s guide to the 2024 presidential election

The Verge: “A presidential campaign is an expression of ideology, often vocalized as a number of promises. Sometimes, those promises are made even when they’re outside the scope of what a president can enact. With Vice President Kamala Harris taking on former President Donald Trump, The Verge’s election guide attempts to cut through the noise… Continue Reading

LinkedIn launches its first AI agent to take on the role of job recruiters

TechCrunch: “LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy… Continue Reading

Generative AI Will Increase Misinformation About Disinformation

LawFare – Speculation about disinformation by users and the media can generate harmful political effects, amplifying existing biases. “…AI is about to significantly increase uncertainty in disinformation research, in an already highly uncertain field. Disinformation operations will be harder to identify, harder to map out, and harder to attribute. People have a tendency to interpret… Continue Reading

Questionable practices in machine learning

Academic paper: “Evaluating modern ML models is hard. The strong incentive for researchers and companies to report a state-of-the-art result on some metric often leads to questionable research practices (QRPs): bad practices which fall short of outright research fraud. We describe 43 such practices which can undermine reported results, giving examples where possible. Our list… Continue Reading

AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

AP: “Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts… Continue Reading

VISA Biannual Threat Report Fall 2024

This report provides an overview of the top payments ecosystem threats within the past six-month period (January – June 2024) as identified by Visa Payment Fraud Disruption (PFD). In the December 2023 Biannual Report, Visa PFD noted an interesting shift in threat actors’ organization, access to tools, and target choice, with threat actors increasing in… Continue Reading

The National Security Case for Public AI

Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator:  In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posed a simple but striking question: “Who will control the future of AI?” Altman frames the choice as between two futures: “Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the… Continue Reading

Google Scholar is not broken (yet) but there are alternatives

London School of Economics: “…Google Scholar has advantages over traditional academic databases like Scopus and Web of Science: it’s free to use, requires no log in for searching, and has more comprehensive coverage, especially of non-journal sources such as books and theses. These benefits are particularly important for unaffiliated scholars without institutional access to resources,… Continue Reading

Anthropic’s new AI model can control your PC

TechCrunch: “In a pitch to investors last spring, Anthropic said it intended to build AI to power virtual assistants that could perform research, answer emails, and handle other back-office jobs on their own. The company referred to this as a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching” — one it believed that could, if all goes according… Continue Reading