Weekly Review 21 February 2025

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

1. One of the first court cases over copyright infringement in the harvesting of AI training data has ended in a loss for the harvester: https://www.theverge.com/news/610721/thomson-reuters-ross-intelligence-ai-copyright-infringement
2. AI needs to be democratised to fully realise its benefits: https://www.kdnuggets.com/bridging-gap-democratizing-ai
3. Short sighted and ignorant national self-interest will only lead to more abuse of AI: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/02/us-and-uk-refuse-to-sign-ai-safety-declaration-at-summit/
4. Distributed training of AI can reduce the need for data centres:  https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/deepmind_distributed_model_training_research/
5. Yes, AI chatbots are wrong so often they are now distorting reality: https://www.theverge.com/news/610006/ai-chatbots-distorting-news-bbc-study
6. The three business processes a company must perform before it implements generative AI: https://www.informationweek.com/machine-learning-ai/genai-implementation-3-boxes-retailers-must-check
7. UK is rushing through infrastructure to support AI: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/12/uk_gov_ai_datacenters/
8. The potential misuse of generative AI to cause real harm cannot be understated: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/13/former-google-ceo-warns-ai-could-be-used-by-rogue-states-to-harm-people
9. Just because you call it AI doesn't make it so: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/google-chrome-may-soon-use-ai-to-detect-leaked-passwords-and-replace-them/
10. An AI insurance agent is more humane than human agents: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/allstate_insurance_ai_rep/
11. Physicians using AI can diagnose patients more accurately: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3823233/ai-chatbots-outperform-doctors-in-diagnosing-patients-study-finds.html
12. Everyone needs to have some skills with AI for the future job market: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/02/11/three-things-know-about-ai-and-future-work-opinion
13. AI can lead to greater access to knowledge. At least if it stops hallucinating: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/will-ai-lead-to-the-disintermediation-of-knowledge/
14. How AI is being used in hunting technologies: https://dataconomy.com/2025/02/13/precision-in-the-wild-ai-powered-tools-redefining-hunting-practices/
15. Estimating users' age using AI: https://www.theverge.com/news/610512/google-age-estimation-machine-learning
16. The quality of non-English AI is so low that companies should be paying less for them: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3822069/will-the-non-english-genai-problem-lead-to-data-transparency-and-lower-costs.html
17. AI affects mid to high-level jobs the most: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/ai_impact_hits_midtohigh_wage_jobs/
18. Two points: 1) Don't use AI to write your research papers, they will put some weird stuff in them, and 2) Elsevier continues to suck as a publisher: https://retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/vegetative-electron-microscopy-fingerprint-paper-mill/
19. People let AI do the thinking for them too much: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/microsoft_study_ai_critical_thinking/
20. The ways in which AI can be used for precision agriculture: https://www.datasciencecentral.com/precision-agriculture-powered-by-ai-for-climate-resilient-crops/
21. So far it appears that the biggest threat to generative AI is not hallucinations but legal action from publishers: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/13/publishers-sue-ai-startup-cohere-over-alleged-copyright-infringement/
22. The UK is using AI to spot anomalies at vehicle testing centres: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/ai_tools_mot_testing/
23. Yes, AI is making us dumb. And in my experience, it is making more work than it is saving: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/10/is-ai-making-us-dumb/
24. Neuromorphic chips could reduce the power demands of AI: https://spectrum.ieee.org/neuromorphic-computing-2671121824