A whimsical fuzzy clock

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on · · 3 comments · 600 words · read ~159 times.
Beneath the moon's glow, secrets find their release. In this enchanted hour, let desires run wild. Tread lightly, for mischief lurks in every shadow. Oh, sweet temptation! Yield to its seductive call. In the realm of dreams, reality fades away. Embrace the whimsy that dances upon moonlit beams. Amidst the night's embrace, secrets are whispered.

I'm sure I remembered there once being a clock app for Linux which was deliberately vague. It would declare the time as "Nearly tea-time" or "A little after elevenses" or "Quite late" or "Gosh, that's early". But I can find no evidence that it ever existed and am beginning to wonder if I dreamt it. […]

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Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA?

By
on · · 2 comments · 600 words · read ~736 times.
A confused little cardboard robot is lost amongst the daisies

A group of authors are suing various vendors of Large Language Model AIs. The authors claim that the AIs are trained on material which infringes their copyright. Is that likely? Well, let's take a quick look at the evidence presented. First up, Meta's LLaMA Paper. It describes how the LLM was trained: We include two […]

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What obvious thing are we missing? And can AI help?

By
on · · 3 comments · 700 words · read ~123 times.
A robot with a backlit human face.

I'm obsessed with the idea that human progress could be accelerated - if only we realised how to properly combine existing technology. I don't want to go "Ancient Aliens" here - but even a cursory reading of scientific history will show you were humanity's progress could have been dramatically fast if only knowledge was more […]

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Addressing the Overlooked Non-Micropsychiatric Uses for Thiotimoline

By
on · · 2 comments · 700 words
A chair specifically designed to but awkward - it has a bowed seat and leans forward at an uncomfortable angle.

One of the (many) problems with AI is that training data usually needs to come from "natural" sources. If you want to emulate human-written text, you need to train something on human-written text. But with the proliferation of cheap and fast AI tools, it is likely that training data will unwillingly become contaminated with AI-written […]

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Why doesn't Alexa know that homonyms aren't homophones?

By
on · · 3 comments · 250 words · read ~174 times.
A confused little cardboard robot is lost amongst the daisies

As we head unto an AI dominated future, the Turing test will probably become less like a Voight-Kampff test and more like a warzone Shibboleth. Yesterday, I asked the Alexa to set a timer. "What do you want to name your timer?" She It asked. "Bow," I replied. "Bow timer set," it said. Except… that […]

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Silence Isn't Consent

By
on · · 11 comments · 800 words · read ~550 times.
A confused little cardboard robot is lost amongst the daisies

I was in one of those interminably dull video-conferences a few weeks ago. The presenter was pitching their grand vision of what our next steps should be. "So!" They said, "Any comments before we launch?" No one said anything. After half a minute the presenter said "As there are no objections, we'll proceed. Silence is […]

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Interview: Open source is good for AI but, is AI good for open source?

By
on · · 200 words
A confused little cardboard robot is lost amongst the daisies

I was recently interviewed in the BCS Magazine discussing the intersection of AI and Open Source. We're at a weird time with AI and Intellectual Property. Well, IP has been in a weird place since Napster launched at the turn of the century! None of the issues around sharing, remixing, and controlling have been properly […]

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Raster. Vector. Generative.

By
on · · 6 comments · 450 words · read ~159 times.
Ai generated image using the prompt "A photo of a painter painting a picture of a the Mona Lisa. The painter's head has been replaced with a laptop screen showing binary code."

When I was a kid, I "invented" a brilliant new compression format. Rather than sending a digital image of, say, the Mona Lisa a user could just send the ASCII characters "Mona Lisa". The receiving computer could look up the full image in its memory-banks and reproduce the work of art on screen. Genius! Of […]

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How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

By
on · · 3 comments · 450 words · read ~7,672 times.
A confused little cardboard robot is lost amongst the daisies

One of the things about AI is that it is brilliant at fooling us into seeing what we want to see. That's even more true when you're an investor who has poured millions into it. The journalist Martin Bryant has posted what Bing's A.I appears to know about him: My opinion of him is that […]

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Demonstrating a LLM using children

By
on · · 1 comment · 400 words · read ~137 times.
A confused little cardboard robot is lost amongst the daisies

There are many improvisational games which are great for improving creativity, helping a team bond, or simply having a lot of fun. But there's one which is perfect for demonstrating how things like ChatGPT work. The "Once. Upon. A. Time." game requires two or more people with a basic grasp of English. Even a small […]

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