By @edent · AI govenment Open Source · 13 comments · 850 words · read ~180 times.
Last week I attended an unofficial discussion group about the future of AI in Government. As well as the crypto-bores who have suddenly pivoted their "expertise" into AI, there were lots of thoughtful suggestions about what AI could do well at a state level. Some of it is trivial - spell check is AI. Some […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI Book Review · 1 comment · 250 words
A week is a long time in politics and a couple of years is an aeon in AI. Published in 2019, just before the dawn of the LLM, this is an overview of all the weird and charming ways Artificial Intelligence can go wrong. It is fully of delightfully silly examples and rather charming illustrations. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI · 6 comments · 500 words · read ~1,144 times.
There's a popular saying; "No One Wants a Drill. What They Want Is the Hole". It's a pithy (and broadly) correct statement. But I don't think it goes far enough. Let's apply the Five Whys method to the issue: No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole. No one wants a hole. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI linux watchy · 3 comments · 600 words · read ~180 times.
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. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI legal · 2 comments · 600 words · read ~774 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI · 3 comments · 700 words · read ~127 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI schema.org · 2 comments · 700 words · read ~105 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI alexa · 3 comments · 250 words · read ~193 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI ethics · 11 comments · 800 words · read ~563 times.
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 […]
Continue reading →By @edent · AI Open Source · 200 words
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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