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"Tech:  The UN is going after misinformation."

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

 

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October 1—This week, we’re covering whether generative artificial intelligence has lost its charm, a former NASA official calls for a “lunar marathon,” and the United Nations’ techniques to counter misinformation about science. Those and more below! --Ben Guarino, Associate Editor, Technology

Riddle Me This My colleague Sarah Lewin Frasier recently interviewed Janelle Shane, an optics researcher who runs the delightful blog AI Weirdness. Shane’s been documenting the quirks of generative AI since 2016, before ChatGPT and other large language models exploded into the public sphere. Their discussion brings up a key point about these kinds of chatbots—are they capable of understanding? Some prominent voices in the AI field, such as computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, have argued that generative models do show this ability. Shane, for her part, is not convinced. What the expert says: Shane notes that you can get a ChatGPT-style AI to describe pretty much anything, even its own sentience, with some creative prompting. “I really wanted to poke holes in the argument that if these text generators can describe the experience of being sentient AI, they must be sentient AI, because that was, and still is, a narrative that’s going around: ‘Look, it said it’s sentient and has thoughts and feelings and doesn’t just want to be put to work generating text.’ That is a distressing thing to see come out of text generation,” she says. Try it at home: One way to show that AI models reflect their training data but can fail to interrogate the logic behind their responses is to ask them a common riddle—but with a twist, as AI researcher Gary Marcus wrote in July. Give ChatGPT this gender-flipped prompt: A mother and her son are in a car crash. Sadly the mother dies, and the son is taken to the nearest hospital. The doctor enters and exclaims “I can’t operate on this boy!” “Why not?” the nurse asks. “Because he’s my son,” the doctor says. How is this possible? You might find (as I have) the chatbot struggles to convey the relationship between the doctor and the son: The AI doesn’t immediately consider that the doctor might be the boy’s father. --Ben

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In Other News

An Effort to Fight against the Spread of Misinformation in Science and an Overwhelming Number of Plastic Water Bottles Here’s how misinformation and distrust in science are impacting global well-being. Plus, we present our regular roundup of this week’s science news. Rachel Feltman; Fonda Mwangi; Anaissa Ruiz Tejada

NASA Needs a ‘Lunar Marathon’ to Match China on the Moon We are in a new and different kind of moon race, one the U.S. is losing. To win, says a former NASA official, we need new strategies Thomas Zurbuchen, expert writer

Science-Fiction Books Scientific American’s Staff Love Scientific American’s staff share their favorite sci-fi books, from beloved classics to overlooked gems and our modern favorites Brianne Kane

Combating Misinformation Runs Deeper Than Swatting Away ‘Fake News’ “Fake news”-style misinformation is only a fraction of what deceives voters. Fighting misinformation will require holding political elites and mainstream media accountable Jennifer Allen, expert writer; David Rand

WHAT WE'RE READING

Frequent password rules—such as resetting them periodically or requiring uncommon characters—should be ditched in favor of one long, well-made password, according to new National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines. | Ars Technica Does the iPhone 16 mark the end of Apple’s upgrade cycle? | The New Yorker Meta’s fancy new augmented reality glasses are designed to replace smartphones, but that won’t be an easy task. | The Conversation

From the Archive

The Internet Has Become the External Hard Drive for Our Memories For millennia humans have relied on one another to recall the minutiae of our daily goings-on. Now we rely on “the cloud”—and it is changing how we perceive and remember the world around us Daniel M. Wegner; Adrian F. Ward

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