Environment Animals Wildlife A professor kept a pet worm for 20 years. It just set a record. Baseodiscus the Eldest lives a chill life in Virginia. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Jonathan Allen, a biology professor at The College of William & Mary in Virginia, has a very strange pet: a very long ribbon worm () named Baseodiscus the Eldest, or just B for short.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for tasks like fact extraction in support of knowledge graph construction frequently involves computing accuracy metrics using a ground truth benchmark based on a knowledge graph (KG). These evaluations assume that errors represent factual disagreements. However, human discourse frequently features metalinguistic disagreement, where agents differ not on facts but on the meaning of the language used to express them. Given the complexity of natural language processing and generation using LLMs, we ask: do metalinguistic disagreements occur between LLMs and KGs? Based on an investigation using the T-REx knowledge alignment dataset, we hypothesize that metalinguistic disagreement does in fact occur between LLMs and KGs, with potential relevance for the practice of knowledge graph engineering. We propose a benchmark for evaluating the detection of factual and metalinguistic disagreements between LLMs and KGs. An initial proof of concept of such a benchmark is available on Github.

Have you ever heard of Midjourney? Well, in case you did not know, it's a standalone research laboratory responsible for developing an AI program of the same name. This program generates pictures based on textual descriptions, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. You probably don't know a lot about this, but today my aim is to change that. According to the company's founder (David Holz) the company was already profitable in August 2022.

There's a hilarious illustration from Paris in late 1839, mere months after an early type of photograph called a daguerreotype was announced to the world, that warned what this tiny picture portended. In Théodore Maurisset's imagination, the daguerreotype would bring about a collective hysteria, La Daguerréotypomanie, in which crazed masses arrive from the ends of the earth and overrun a small photo studio. Some in the crowd want pictures of themselves, but, mon Dieu, others demand cameras to take their own pictures--Maurisset shows them loading the machines like contraband onto steamships bound for foreign ports--and still others throng simply to ogle at this newfangled thing and all the lunatic proceedings surrounding it. The clamor is so feverish that it brings about a mass hallucination, in which nearly everything else in the landscape around the studio, including railroad cars, a clock tower, a basket for a hot air balloon, indeed anything remotely boxy in shape, morphs into cameras. As they march to the studio, the crowds pass by half a dozen gallows, where in response to the daguerreotype's appearance artists have hung themselves.

Despite the justified controversy surrounding AI art, architects need not worry about being usurped by software that can generate images of buildings, argues Will Wiles. These are uncertain times, but we can be sure of two things. The first is that art made by artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. Please feel free to imagine those marks if you prefer.) The second is that AI art will remain controversial, and rightly so. Human artists fear, quite reasonably, that it will consume much of the bread-and-butter work on which they depend.

The AI community has a new obsession. It's called'generative artificial intelligence', and it refers to the idea of having computers take over creative tasks such as writing, filmmaking, and graphic design. AI art generators are paving a new path towards the freedom of artistic expression. In an extremely short period, they've allowed everybody with internet access and a keyboard to generate incredible art from simple text prompts. Considering the current state of things, it's too early to tell whether this new wave of apps will end up costing artists and illustrators their jobs. What seems clear though is that these tools are already being used in creative industries.

Video game designer Jason Allen made headlines this year with Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, his submission to the Colorado State Fair's digital arts competition. Judges awarded him first place and $300 prize, but the artwork also received a sudden flurry of global attention when it was discovered Allen had used AI-powered image generator Midjourney to create the work of art. Midjourney, DALL-E and DALL-E 2 have brought a wealth of weird and wonderful images to the world as users type in natural language descriptions and share the dream-like results. DALL-E 2 uses a "diffusion model", which attempts to take the input text in its entirety and generate an image from that. But the output becomes less accurate as that text becomes more complex; the existing model appears to struggle to understand composition of concepts, and confuses attributes and relations between different objects.

In the world of Frank Herbert's Dune, the "Butlerian Jihad" led to the destruction of "thinking machines" across the known universe, and the birth of a civilisation that focused on enhancing human intellect. In the online community on the subreddit of r/Dune, the birth of AI art has led to a similar, albeit smaller, war on technology. There, users who number almost a quarter of a million fans of the novel series, as well as its two film adaptations, moved to ban AI-generated art this week, after a wave of automatically generated content flooded the boards. The ban "applies to images created using services such as DALL-E, Midjourney, StarryAI, WOMBO Dream, and others," the moderators wrote in a post announcing the decision. "Our team has been removing said content for a number of months on a post-by-post basis, but given its continued popularity across Reddit we felt that a public announcement was justified. "We acknowledge that many of these pieces are neat to look at, and the technology sure is fascinating, but it does technically qualify as low-effort content – especially when compared to original, 'human-made' art, which we would like to prioritize going forward." In the Dune series, the destruction of thinking machines led to the rise of the "navigators", humans specifically bred and raised to perform the complex calculations required for interstellar travel. In the r/Dune community, the ban has led to similar proposals. "We just need to do some freaky genetics that create an animal whose sole purpose and feature is to make Dune fan art," one user proposed. The growth of AI-generated art has caused disruption other communities as well. In August, a painting created by the AI tool Midjourney, titled Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, took first prize in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair. In a post announcing the victory, Midjourney user Jason Allen said: "I have created hundreds of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my [generations], I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after upscaling with Gigapixel AI … I set out to make a statement using Midjourney in a competitive manner and wow!" In a follow-up interview with Vice Magazine, Allen defended his decision to enter without explicitly labelling the artwork as AI generated. "What if we looked at it from the other extreme, what if an artist made a wildly difficult and complicated series of restraints in order to create a piece, say, they made their art while hanging upside-down and being whipped while painting," he said. "Should this artist's work be evaluated differently than another artist that created the same piece'normally'?

AI art tools like Craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini) and Midjourney have been making waves on the internet over recent months. But are these artificial intelligence tools exhibiting creativity, or just clever mimics? And how can machine learning be effectively used in artistic, creative and design endeavours most effectively? Cosmos science journalist Evrim Yazgin tackles these questions and speaks with AI expert Professor Jon McCormack, Director of Monash University's SensiLab, in the article "Creativity and AI" in Cosmos Magazine #96. At this year's Colorado State Fair's annual art competition awarded its prize to an AI-generated piece entitled "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" by Jason M. Allen.

A piece of digital art that won a prize at the Colorado State Fair has reignited an old furor over what art is and how artists create in an authentic way. Jason Allen used an artificial intelligence program to generate an image titled, "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial," that evokes an opera scene in a science fiction setting. Several Bloomington-Normal artists do not seem to view the debate in an especially sanguinary way. The AI program artist in game designer Allen used doesn't involve any hands-on technique at all. The AI operates by turning words and text into image.