Weekly Review 27 October 2023

Some interesting links that I Tweeted about in the last week (I also post these on Mastodon and Threads):

1. Te Pukenga continues to have problems. It was clear from the beginning that this was a bad idea. The previous government has ruined tertiary education in this country and the sooner independence is returned to the individual polytechs the better:  https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/500442/te-pukenga-apprentice-training-a-disaster-trades-businesses
2. How postdocs can use chatbots to improve their work, and how generative AI is likely to affect their careers: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03235-8
3. How AI can reduce traffic jams and reduce the emissions associated with them: https://www.drivencarguide.co.nz/news/how-google-ai-is-curbing-traffic-jams-in-12-global-cities/
4. An AI assistance for school principals: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/abigail-bailey-schools-ai-principle-headteacher
5. This teenager uses AI to identify wallabies, which are an invasive pest in New Zealand: https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/300986840/meet-the-teenage-inventor-using-ai-to-save-aotearoas-forests
6. How Meta used striking actors to build their AI database: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/19/1081974/meta-realeyes-artificial-intelligence-hollywood-actors-strike/
7. How generative AI can help grant applicants with the donkey-work of writing: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03238-5
8. For the first time, an AI has detected a supernova: https://www.space.com/artificial-intelligence-spots-first-supernova
9. More on the supernova detected by AI: https://www.extremetech.com/science/astronomers-build-ai-that-can-detect-confirm-and-announce-new-supernovas
10. And this is why lawyers, at least, should not rely on generative AI: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/convicted-fugees-rapper-pras-michels-lawyer-used-ai-draft-bungled-clos-rcna120992
11. We're not quite at the point where we can trust AI with topics that can directly affect our physical health: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/10/1081351/are-we-ready-to-trust-ai-with-our-bodies/
12. Another lawsuit over the use of copyrighted material to train AI: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/19/music-lawsuit-ai-song-lyrics-anthropic
13. So AI talk to each other, and sometimes yell in all caps? They're getting more human than I expected: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/thanks-to-ai-the-future-of-programming-may-involve-yelling-in-all-caps/
14. IBM's new North Pole architecture promises huge gains in speed and efficiency in AI: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03267-0
15. A lot of AI and data science in general requires some understanding of statistics: https://www.kdnuggets.com/10-basic-statistical-concepts-in-plain-english
16. The USA is already behind most of the world with respect to privacy laws, will they also fall behind with regulation of AI? https://www.informationweek.com/machine-learning-ai/us-lawmakers-mull-ai-data-privacy-regulation
17. China's detailed regulations for AI: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/18/1081846/generative-ai-safety-censorship-china/ 
18. The IT and security threats of generative AI: https://www.informationweek.com/cyber-resilience/generative-ai-an-emerging-risk-as-cisos-shift-cyber-resilience-strategies
19. Microsoft is going hard for AI: https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/20/microsoft-would-like-to-remind-you-that-they-are-all-in-on-ai/
20. A concise and fairly readable history of Neural Networks: https://www.kdnuggets.com/a-brief-history-of-the-neural-networks
21. An overview of explainable AI: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/explainable-artificial-intelligence-xai-for-ai-ml-engineers/
22. An improved AI for packing objects: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/mit-develops-ai-to-make-robots-expert-packers
23. How ethical is DeepMind? https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/21/this-week-in-ai-can-we-trust-deepmind-to-be-ethical/
24. Code generating AI is not going to replace software developers anytime soon: https://www.informationweek.com/software-services/developers-and-the-ai-job-wars-here-s-how-developers-win
25. So basically, don't use AI generated extras in your movie unless you want it to look like crap: https://dataconomy.com/2023/10/18/disney-ai-extras-created-controversy/
26. Bad data results in bad AI models. Why is this news to anyone? I teach this principle to my first-year students: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/ais-kryptonite-data-quality/
27. How to prevent AI from becoming a threat: https://www.datanami.com/2023/10/16/keeping-a-eye-on-ai/