Weekly Review 12 April 2024

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

1. So Amazon's "AI" driven cashier-less supermarket was really run by remote workers in India: https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-abandons-ai-stores
2. The job cuts in New Zealand universities. Things won't get better under the new government, either: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350232254/numbers-which-jobs-have-been-cut-universities-and-which-are-yet-go
3. Generative AI can help workers be more productive, but most of those benefits go to new staff: https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/ai-in-the-workplace
4. AI voice cloning now needs only a 15 second sample to copy someone's voice: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/29/24115701/openai-voice-generation-ai-model
5. There is definitely an AI bubble, like there was with the Internet 25 years ago. The question is, when is the bubble going to burst? https://futurism.com/experts-signs-ai-bubble
6. I'm not so worried about using AI to catch Aucklanders putting the wrong things in their recycling bins, as I am about the recycling collection trucks blocking my driveway with the bins: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2024/03/auckland-waste-artificial-intelligence-to-help-find-people-putting-wrong-items-into-recycling.html
7. AI is the new Internet - tech execs want to put it into everything: https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-home-appliances
8. I'm not convinced how useful human business coaches are, I don't think an AI one would be any better or worse: https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/ai-coach
9. US$115 billion for a new data centre, consuming gigawatts of electricity, to run AI: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openai-and-microsoft-reportedly-planning-dollar100-billion-datacenter-project-for-an-ai-supercomputer
10. This trick for detecting students' use of AI to write their essays will only work if students don't read what they are pasting into the prompt, but if they were that attentive to detail they probably wouldn't have to use  AI: https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/184344i/cool_trick_i_saw_for_identifying_ai_essays/
11. Converting 2D synthetic aperture radar images of cities into 3D models using AI: https://spectrum.ieee.org/synthetic-aperture-radar
12. Generative AI have no grasp of reality, so what they come out with sometimes isn't very useful for businesses: https://futurism.com/the-byte/businesses-discovering-ai-sucks
13. AI enhanced video shouldn't be admissible in court. It's not an "enhancement", it's a guess made by a machine: https://dataconomy.com/2024/04/03/ai-enhanced-video-evidence-is-banned-by-court/
14. Two factors that affect the profitability of farming are weather and market volatility. AI can help with modelling both of these: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/precision-prediction-ai-forecasting-crop-yields-weathering-market-volatility/
15. What a organisation's Chief AI Officer (CAIO) might do: https://www.kdnuggets.com/the-rise-of-chief-ai-officer
16. Another condensed history of AI: https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/brief-history-of-ai
17. AI are built from data, so old media repositories like Photobucket are getting new life by selling the data they hold: https://www.reuters.com/technology/inside-big-techs-underground-race-buy-ai-training-data-2024-04-05/
18. Facebook and Instagram now require labelling of AI generated media-but how are they going to enforce this? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/05/facebook-instagram-ai-label-digitally-altered-media
19. I wonder if an AI would be better at detecting alien signals, because all of the aliens are AI? https://www.freethink.com/space/technosignatures-65842
20. A million hours of transcribed YouTube videos went into ChatGPT4. The hunger for data of generative AI is just insatiable: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/6/24122915/openai-youtube-transcripts-gpt-4-training-data-google
21. AI assistants will be an interface to existing application infrastructure, I don't think they will replace it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/31/wearable-ai-smartphones-fashion-ai-pin-rabbit-r1-meta-smart-glasses-pendant-tab
22. Contributions that AI could make to agriculture: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/significance-of-ai-in-agriculture/ I was working on AI in crop protection 20 years ago.
23. Scammers using AI generated lawyers to pump-up backlinks to websites: https://dataconomy.com/2024/04/05/fake-ai-lawyers-start-threatening-people/
24. Current watermarking of AI generated content is easy to defeat: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/29/1090310/its-easy-to-tamper-with-watermarks-from-ai-generated-text/