17th June 2024

The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation have published a comment piece on the use of AI for political polling:

"Researchers and firms are already using LLMs to simulate polling results. Current techniques are based on the ideas of AI agents. An AI agent is an instance of an AI model that has been conditioned to behave in a certain way. For example, it may be primed to respond as if it is a person with certain demographic characteristics and can access news articles from certain outlets. Researchers have set up populations of thousands of AI agents that respond as if they are individual members of a survey population, like humans on a panel that get called periodically to answer questions."

Source: Ash Center

"ChatGPT is bullshit" is an open access journal article written by three University of Glasgow researchers. Reflecting on so-called hallucinations, they argue that: "these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs."

Source: Ethics and Information Technology

Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism takes a look at a new report by Human Rights Watch which reveals that "a widely used, web-scraped AI training dataset includes images of and information about real children — meaning that generative AI tools have been trained on data belonging to real children without their knowledge or consent."

Source: Futurism; Human Rights Watch

TikTok ads may soon include AI generated avatars of creators.

Source: The Verge

OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors. Nakasone was appointed by President Trump in 2018 and will be tasked with contributing to OpenAI’s efforts to "better understand how AI can be used to strengthen cybersecurity by quickly detecting and responding to cybersecurity threats.”

Source: The Verge