Jonathan May, University of Southern California It doesn’t take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I’d help him out by looking up a few biographies. I tried asking for a list of books about Abraham Lincoln and it did a pretty good job: A reasonable list of books about Lincoln. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND Number 4 isn’t right. Garry Wills famously wrote “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it’s not a bad start. Then I…

It doesn't take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on US presidents, so I figured I'd help him out by looking up a few biographies. Garry Wills famously wrote "Lincoln at Gettysburg," and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it's not a bad start. Then I tried something harder, asking instead about the much more obscure William Henry Harrison, and it gamely provided a list, nearly all of which was wrong. Numbers 4 and 5 are correct; the rest don't exist or are not authored by those people.

It doesn't take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I'd help him out by looking up a few biographies. Garry Wills famously wrote "Lincoln at Gettysburg," and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it's not a bad start. Then I tried something harder, asking instead about the much more obscure William Henry Harrison, and it gamely provided a list, nearly all of which was wrong. Books about Harrison, fewer than half of which are correct.

The ETC Press and its Signature imprint are proud to announce the release of Pamela McCorduck's latest book, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia. In 1979 Pamela McCorduck published the first modern history of artificial intelligence, Machines Who Think. But as This Could Be Important shows, she'd been intrigued by AI for nearly twenty years before that. She'd first met AI when she was an undergraduate English major at Berkeley, and became steeped in the culture at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon Universities. While she couldn't judge whether AI was sound science, or would ever move from the fringes to scientific respectability, she was confident that the people who pursued AI were some of the most intelligent human beings she'd ever had the joy to meet.

The need for technology to catch up to our imaginations has been a constant feature of AI since the first spark of an idea flickered into existence. This is because no matter how far it comes, there will always be a new generation for whom it is still inadequate. Sam Zimmerman, CTO & Co-founder at Freebird and another one of our speakers, describes the immense amount of progress which has been made since he entered the machine learning world less than 8 years ago. "When I first entered the field in 2011, machine learning was just beginning to extend outside of advertising and finance into domains like sentiment analysis and computer vision. Largely this was a migration from quite clear optimizations of well-defined outcome variables (like click-through-rates and PnL) to much more abstract, subjective, and ill-defined outcome variables (like the "sentiment" of a sentence or the "setting" of a photo)."