Daniel Rourke /stream

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It is estimated that one language dies every 14 days, with it a world of concepts and ideas that could only be expressed in its words. Most of the languages at…

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If you plug “AI” or “artificial intelligence” into Google Image Search, here’s what you get. Electric brains firing blue with neurons. Translucent robots and robot heads, code dribbling down their foreheads…

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And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this. This article was featured in One Great…

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Workers hired via crowdsource services like Amazon Mechanical Turk are using large language models to complete their tasks – which could have negative knock-on effects on AI models in the future.…

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On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and…

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On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and…

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The thing to know about the AI lan­guage mod­els, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fun­da­men­tally bull­shit­ters. The bull­shit has got­ten better and bet­ter, but at the core … well,…

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The first social media — blogs — were built on the idea of “user-pull” (users would decide which creators to follow) and “reverse chrono” (users received the most recent posts first).

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To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold…

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To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold…

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Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

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The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I…

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RISING Dispatches from the New American Shore By Elizabeth Rush Illustrated. 299 pp. Milkweed Editions. $26. A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story.

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On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence, head of the National Space Council, outlined plans for creating the “Space Force” that President Donald Trump envisions as a space-dedicated military branch, complete with…

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We have entered a post-truth, post-authenticity era, in which dichotomies like true/false or real/fake no longer serve us very well, especially on social media platforms.

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This particular terminological game is just about up, I think, and it's no surprise that Anthropos has won again. I don't think we'll be using any word but Anthropocene to describe…

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Memes and social networks have become weaponized, while many governments seem ill-equipped to understand the new reality of information warfare. How will we fight state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda in the future?

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“It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been…

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Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of…

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Ever since Microsoft's chatbot Tay started spouting racist commentary after 24 hours of interacting with humans on Twitter, it has been obvious that our AI creations can fall prey to human…

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Memes, as any alt-right Pepe sorcerer will tell you, are not just frivolous entertainment. They are magic, the stuff by which reality is made and manipulated.

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By the time she started saying “Hitler was right I hate the jews,” people had started to realize that there was something wrong with Tay.

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Really, really racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far…

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The aim of this project is to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherit in all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation. The follow-falsifications to be deleted from…

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It is estimated that one language dies every 14 days, with it a world of concepts and ideas that could only be expressed in its words. Most of the languages at…

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If you plug “AI” or “artificial intelligence” into Google Image Search, here’s what you get. Electric brains firing blue with neurons. Translucent robots and robot heads, code dribbling down their foreheads…

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Inside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”.

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Workers hired via crowdsource services like Amazon Mechanical Turk are using large language models to complete their tasks – which could have negative knock-on effects on AI models in the future.…

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On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and…

Bookmark

The thing to know about the AI lan­guage mod­els, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fun­da­men­tally bull­shit­ters. The bull­shit has got­ten better and bet­ter, but at the core … well,…

Bookmark

The first social media — blogs — were built on the idea of “user-pull” (users would decide which creators to follow) and “reverse chrono” (users received the most recent posts first).

Bookmark

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold…

Bookmark

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold…

Bookmark

Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

Bookmark

In 2003, a team of scientists in China managed to create embryos containing a mix of rabbit and human DNA. Most of the biological matter was human, while the rabbit DNA…

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RISING Dispatches from the New American Shore By Elizabeth Rush Illustrated. 299 pp. Milkweed Editions. $26. A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story.

Bookmark

We have entered a post-truth, post-authenticity era, in which dichotomies like true/false or real/fake no longer serve us very well, especially on social media platforms.

Bookmark

If you plug “AI” or “artificial intelligence” into Google Image Search, here’s what you get. Electric brains firing blue with neurons. Translucent robots and robot heads, code dribbling down their foreheads…

Bookmark

Memes and social networks have become weaponized, while many governments seem ill-equipped to understand the new reality of information warfare. How will we fight state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda in the future?

Bookmark

“It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been…

Bookmark

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of…

Bookmark

Ever since Microsoft's chatbot Tay started spouting racist commentary after 24 hours of interacting with humans on Twitter, it has been obvious that our AI creations can fall prey to human…

Bookmark

By the time she started saying “Hitler was right I hate the jews,” people had started to realize that there was something wrong with Tay.

Bookmark

The aim of this project is to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherit in all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation. The follow-falsifications to be deleted from…

Bookmark

A conversation on a 1996 Internet newsgroup questioned the existence of science-fiction reading protocols. Up to that point I hadn't thought they needed explanation, since they seemed self-evident when Samuel R.…