Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryArtificial Intelligence

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ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence conversational chat bot by open ai using machine learning, Generative AI

At Chronicle of Higher Ed: Critical Thinking Isn’t Just Chat

Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk test Big Tech’s chatbots for critical thinking skills before an academic audience — with sobering but often hilarious results
On a serious note, Smith and Funk stress that — despite chatbot buzz — we must both practice critical thinking skills and teach them to students. Read More ›
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Robot, chat bot, android and digital evolution of robotics. Future processor development technologies. 3D illustration of quantum cyberspace. AI and global data

About the claim that chatbot Claude 3 showed self-awareness…

Has anyone noticed the resemblance between the conviction that an AI project thinks like a human and that extraterrestrials are visiting us?
Just as extraterrestrials are Out There because we don’t want to think we are alone, chatbots are Becoming Human because we don’t want to feel we are unique. Read More ›
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Isolated children's toy against a blue texture background, teddy bear from childhood, an old pink hippo

Pink Dancing Hippos: Don’t Tell ChatGPT-4 Not to do Something

Can OpenAI fix this flaw in GPT4? Absolutely. Time will tell if they do or not.
Moral: Don’t ask GPT-4 to NOT do something. Chances are the current version might let you down. Read More ›
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Doctor and robotics research diagnose Human brains scan generative ai

If AI Speeds Up Science, Does It Risk Squashing Some Parts?

A Yale anthropologist and a Princeton psychologist warn of the dangers of overreliance on AI in science
Researchers could end up being constrained by the limits of what AI can do, cut off from what it can’t do, and possibly unaware of the embedded viewpoint. Read More ›
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Robot hand displays blue digital interface, wearing blue suit and helmet.

How Materialism Handicaps Us in Understanding AI’s Limits

Sabine Hossenfelder acknowledges AI’s limits, yet she is convinced that it will become conscious

In “Scientists warn of AI collapse,” theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder warns, “We’ve all become used to AI-generated art in the form of text, images, audio, and even videos. Despite its prevalence, scientists are warning that AI creativity may soon die. Why is that? What does this mean for the future of AI? And will human creativity be in demand after all? Let’s have a look.” She discusses the problem that chatbots and other generative AI create; they end up reprocessing and degrading their own information, essentially eating their own tails: [1:28] The more AI eats its own output the less variety the output has. For example in a paper from November, a group of scientists from France tested this for Read More ›

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Artificial neuron in concept of artificial intelligence. Wall-shaped binary codes make transmission lines of pulses and/or information in an analogy to a microchip.

Wrestling with AI: Making More and Better Disciples

AI may have "knowledge," but it lacks wisdom.
Even if it were possible that AI reaches consciousness — it will never have the mind of Christ. Read More ›
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AI concept, humanoid robot with artificial intelligence, fictional woman android, generative AI

The Singularity — When We Merge With AI — Won’t Happen

Futurist predictions depend on the assumption that the human brain is like a machine, says, computer scientist Erik Larson. But it isn’t
Larson tells his EP podcast host that the real danger is that powerful AI in the hands of bad actors could bring down banking systems and cripple grids. Read More ›
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Conceptual Illustration of Sora, OpenAI's Text-to-Video AI

Sora: Life Is Not a Multiple-Choice Test

With Sora, as with other generative AI developments, some are quick to proclaim that artificial general intelligence has arrived. Not so fast.
The hallucinations are symptomatic of generative AI models’ core problem: they can’t identify output problems because they know nothing about the real world. Read More ›
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Brain psychology mind soul and hope concept art, 3d illustration, surreal artwork, imagination painting, conceptual idea

Programmer: How We Know Computers Won’t Surpass the Human Mind

Winston Ewert points out that we can only devise a “halting detector” less powerful than the ones our own minds have
Ewert predicts that, while humans will get better at building artificial intelligence systems, we will never be able to match ourselves. Read More ›
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Illustration of a Silhouette of a Guy Looking over a Cliff

Over a Cliff? It’s That Bad for Venture-Backed Startups?

Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith think that much high-tech today is not producing value. Chatbots? Their “main successes have been in generating disinformation and phishing scams”
For example, journalist Matt Taibbi was stunned to learn from Gemini that he’d written controversial stories — that don’t exist. What’s the market for libel? Read More ›
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Cute and little robot helper with artificial intelligence raising hand. Generative AI

Google Gemini Presents a Past That Never Happened

You can't trust a bot to give you a history lesson, turns out.
Walter Kirn tweeted recently: "Gemini AI is inventing damaging stories about people and figures I know. It is an automated false-witness weapon." Read More ›
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Two robots walking on the streets of an abandoned futuristic city on a rainy day, digital art style, illustration painting

Is AI the Triumph of Left-Brained Thinking? What Follows?

Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that it is and asks us to consider what its cultural lean toward the “left brain” is doing to us

Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and author of The Matter With Things (Perspectiva 2021), defends the left-brain/right-brain psychological distinction often made in psychology. But his view is far more careful and nuanced than what’s offered in the pop psych books on the flea market table. In an essay just published at First Things, which started out as a lecture delivered at the 2022 World Summit AI in Amsterdam, he warns against the growing AI dominance over our lives — which he interprets as left-brained: The things that used to alert us to the inadequacy of our reductionist theories are fading away. They were: the natural world; the sense of a coherent shared culture; the sense of the body as something we live, Read More ›

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Stock market diagram on LCD screen. Selective focus.

AI and Wall Street’s Hype Curve

Almost all new tech has a hype curve. Here are the stages.
Technologies that have surfed the hype curve include superconductivity, the Segway, cold fusion, information theory, Theranos, Piltdown man and string theory. Read More ›
chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-conversational-chat-bot-by-open-ai-using-machine-learning-generative-ai-stockpack-adobe-stock
ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence conversational chat bot by open ai using machine learning, Generative AI

Astrophysicist: Don’t Say That Chatbots “Hallucinate”

Adam Frank points out that human-type “hallucination” is not at all what drives a chatbot to claim that the Russians sent bears into space
Frank, fellow physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson argue in a new book that ignoring explicitly human experience is a blind spot for science Read More ›
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Confused robot

If AI’s Don’t Know What They’re Doing, Can We Hope to Explain It?

With AI, we have a world of powerful, useful, but entirely opaque systems. We don’t know why they make decisions and neither do they

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the fact that AI’s don’t understand the work they’re doing. That makes the goal — to make them think like people — elusive. This brings us to the second problem, which ended up spawning an entire field, known as “Explainable AI.” Neural networks not only don’t know what they’re doing when they do it, they can’t in general explain to their designers or users why they made such-and-such a decision. They’re a black box; in other words, they are obstinately opaque to any attempts at a conceptual understanding of their decisions or inferences. How does that play out? It means, for example, that, with image recognition tasks like facial recognition, the network can’t explain Read More ›

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Artificial intelligence, White AI robot thinking and looking big screen monitor of big data on blue high technology for the future rise in technological singularity background, Generative AI

Why, Despite All the Hype We Hear, AI Is Not “One of Us”

It takes an imaginative computer scientist to believe that the neural network knows what it’s classifying or identifying. It’s a bunch of relatively simple math
The AI scientist’s dream of general intelligence, often referred to as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), remains as elusive as ever. Read More ›
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Volcano eruption with lava flow in dark

AI Decodes Scrolls Scorched by Vesuvius’ Eruption

In 79 AD, Vesuvius reduced a library to charcoal. Remarkably, machine learning technology has begun to decipher scrolls that humans could not unwrap
Ironically, AI, far from making study of the classics obsolete, may help create new opportunities for classics scholars, via recovered texts. Read More ›
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Money making machine printing fake counterfeit dollar bills. Generative AI.

If Information Is Wealth, Are Deepfakes a Form of Counterfeiting?

The current tech media overdose on panic over deepfakes. They could be drowning out practical ways of fighting back
To whatever extent digital information is a form of wealth, its digital producers must always fight counterfeiters — just as currency issuers must do. Read More ›
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closeup ants

Ants: An Utterly Different Model of a Large Communal Society

In terms of sheer complexity of society, ants are similar to humans but they “think” very differently from us, as a British science writer finds
At one point, Southeast Asian ants invaded the sealed Biosphere II project in Arizona (intended for space exploration studies), using it as a honeydew farm. Read More ›
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Robot's hand holds up a red heart aigenerated.

Will You Be My Valentine, Chatbot?

It is a tragedy indeed when our loneliness as a culture has developed so far that many people see chatbot companions as one of the only way forward.
Recent studies indicate that members of Gen Z are dividing politically according to sex, with men leaning more conservative and women going more liberal. Read More ›