Weekly Review 2 February 2024

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

1. Content generated by AI is gradually ruining the value of Google search results: https://futurism.com/ai-garbage-destroying-google-results Are other search engines also being affected this way?
2. One way AI is making its way into medicine: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-doctor 
3. One reason AI isn't going to take our jobs just yet-it's actually more expensive than using people: https://futurism.com/replacing-workers-ai-expensive-mit 
4. More academics in AI - especially new PhDs - are going into industry. Not surprising really, there are not enough spaces in academia for all the PhD grads and the pay is not great: https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/theres-an-ai-brain-drain-in-academia/ 
5. More and more AI girlfriends in the ChatGPT store: https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ai-girlfriend-onslaught 
6. I take issue with the assertion that AI can understand the intent of any code while translating from COBOL to Java: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-ai-solve-legacy-tech-problems-companies-are-putting-it-to-the-test-36d9c490 
7. Democratizing access to (some of) the resources needed to build AI: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3712580/national-ai-research-resource-pilot-program-to-democratize-generative-ai.html 
8. Legislators seem to be dragging their feet on this problem, it's been known for several years that deepfaked images could cause problems: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/jan/26/taylor-swift-deepfake-pornography-sparks-renewed-calls-for-us-legislation 
9. Half of game developers polled say that their studios are already using generative AI: https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/half-of-game-developers-work-at-studios-already-using-generative-ai-survey 
10. A customer service AI chatbot that happily criticised the company it was representing: https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-bot-disabled-dpd 
11. Coding is a skill, and like every other skill it must be practiced if you wish to improve. Leaning on Copilot to write your code for you means that you aren't getting that practice: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/27/ai_coding_automatic/ 
12. Code generated by AI is of a lower quality than that written by people: https://devclass.com/2024/01/24/ai-assistance-is-leading-to-lower-code-quality-claim-researchers/ Not surprising, AI imitate while people innovate. 
13. It turns out that an AI is not really very intelligent: https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-researchers-test-ai-intelligence-stupid Who knew?
14. No, do not use a workout routine designed by ChaptGPT. You will hurt yourself. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/26/1067299/chatgpt-workout-plans/ 
15. Another tool to protect artists' work from being used to train AI: https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/23/kin-art-launches-free-tool-to-prevent-genai-models-from-training-on-artwork/ 
16. Just because someone is smart in one area does not mean they're smart in another area. This seems to have been the case when Geoff Hinton opined that radiologists were obsolete: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/the-ai-radiologists-replacement-saga-dont-be-misled-by-the-scaremongering-science-v-s-science-fiction/ 
17. An AI called Baldur that can generate proofs for formal verification of software: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-debug-software Of course, in the old stories Baldur died in a plot by Loki... 
18. Writers want to get paid for the material used to train AI. Is this unreasonable? Or is it fair use? https://www.computerworld.com/article/3712540/openai-copy-steal-paste.html 
19. AI companies are hiring writers to make the prose generated by their AI better: https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-companies-hiring-authors-poets-fix-writing
20. AI probably won't cause mass unemployment. But in my opinion, now would be a good time to start bringing in a universal basic income: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/27/1087041/technological-unemployment-elon-musk-jobs-ai/ 
21. Election interference using AI generate fake phone calls has already begun: https://dataconomy.com/2024/01/24/ai-deepfake-biden-calls-target-voters/  Who's behind this, Russians or Republicans? Not that there's that much difference between those two groups...
22. Using machine learning to search for alien megastructures: https://www.space.com/alien-megastructure-search-life-beyond-earth 
23. How to fake sounding knowledgeable about AI: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/30/1073680/how-to-talk-about-ai-even-if-you-dont-know-much-about-ai/ 
24. Using AI to improve EV charging grids: https://www.kdnuggets.com/leveraging-ai-to-design-fair-and-equitable-ev-charging-grids 
25. Ten issues that can get in the way of an effective generative AI project: https://www.datanami.com/2024/01/22/top-10-challenges-to-genai-success/