AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning

My Sunday essay, "ChatGPT In Its Own Words," was mostly written by ChatGPT. It's impressive by every measure. I was remiss, though, in not reminding everyone that the system is designed as a research tool and that it is also in "free" pre-release mode. Continue Reading →

ChatGPT has been all over the news. Last week, I asked it to help me write a blog post about Facebook – it did a very good job. Yesterday, just for fun, my son Brent and I asked it for 250 word answers to questions about history and philosophy. ChatGPT returned college-level answers. What exactly is ChatGPT? I asked it. Here's its answer to the input "a five paragraph essay describing ChatGPT in your own words." Continue Reading →

AI is experiencing a very visible growth spurt. At the moment, only a handful of companies have the computational power to deal with large models. Is there a plateau coming? And, if so, will it advantage big tech or will AI tools evolve to democratize the industry? Continue Reading →

This morning, I asked ChatGPT to "write 200 words about why Facebook is warning it could ban news in the U.S. if Congress passes a bill that would require the platform to negotiate with and compensate publishers for their content – in the style of Shelly Palmer." Here's what it wrote. Continue Reading →

Let's imagine the fan experience of the future. If there were no technological or financial restrictions, how would you want to attend a sporting event or a concert? What will "attending" evolve to mean? Continue Reading →

At a dinner party the other night, a very accomplished business person told a story about how he and his wife were certain that their devices were listening to their conversations. “I was talking to my wife about a pair of designer shoes that she wanted to purchase, and not 10 minutes later while she was doing some online research for work, she saw an ad for that exact pair of shoes. She hadn’t searched for the shoes; the ad just appeared. Clearly, our computers or our phones are listening.” Some people nodded in agreement, and others began to chime in. Continue Reading →

CNN obtained an internal memo to Meta's (formerly Facebook's) content moderation team that noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.” The memo was in direct response to requests for guidance from Meta's internal and external fact checkers. Continue Reading →

DeviantArt, the "largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts," announced DreamUp, an AI-powered text-to-image generator service powered by Stable Diffusion. The new service has seriously angered some members of the community, so much so that DeviantArt announced that all hosted images will be "automatically labeled as NOT authorized for use in AI datasets." Continue Reading →

When dealing with evil robots or rogue AI, one of the most common science fiction plot devices is for the human hero to do or think of something that the machine couldn't understand – something only a human would do. It's about as cliché and formulaic as cliché and formulaic gets. Here's a plot twist. Continue Reading →

I've been joking that my blog has become the "Elon Channel," where it's "All Elon, All the Time." In case you missed it, the organization we knew as Twitter is gone. It took Elon less than a week to fire half the staff and demolish years of goodwill. All that remains is a tech stack and a skeleton crew. Oh, and the threat of thermonuclear name & shame. Continue Reading →