On the last day of February, NYU professor Gary Marcus published an essay entitled "The threat of automated misinformation is only getting worse." He warned about the easiness with which you can create misinformation backed by fake references using Bing "with the right invocations." Shawn Oakley, dubbed by Marcus as a "jailbreaking expert" said that "standard techniques" suffice to make it work, providing evidence that the threat of automatic AI-generated misinformation at scale is increasing. Marcus shared his findings on Twitter and FoundersFund's Mike Solana responded: My interpretation of Solana's sarcastic tweets is that claiming that an AI model is a dangerous tool for misinformation (or, more generally, harm of some kind) isn't a good argument if you've consciously broken its filters--he implies the problem isn't the tool's nature but your misuse, and thus you're to blame and not the company that created the tool. His "analogy" between Bing Chat and a text editor misses the point (i.e., language models can generate human-sounding misinformation at scale--you can't do that with Microsoft Word but can with Microsoft Bing) but, even if Marcus is right, there's some truth in Solana's implied stance.

I was recently recommended to watch an interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky created by YouTubers and all-round crypto smart guys David and Ryan from "Bankless", a crypto and blockchain education company. Here's the link if you have a spare two hours, it's an equally scary and fascinating watch: I used to obsessively watch Bankless videos back in 2021 during the last crypto/NFT boom, but since the bear market of 2022 set in, I kind of lost some of my mojo for crypto. Anyhow, this video, was a dramatic departure from the Bankless crew's regular weekly roundup of the crypto markets, where they get deep into the weeds of the latest developments in the space. Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

In this article I'm going to share with you a flexible text prompt to feed into an AI Chat application that will generate random Midjourney Prompts for any subject you choose. Prompt Hackers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I can be pretty lazy sometimes. There, I said it, but don't tell my wife (although after 35 years, she probably already knows).

A black and white stylized illustration of a guitar player in front of a wall of amplifiers, with smoke rising up behind them, as if they are playing a concert at an underground club. The player's outfit and guitar should be sleek and stylish, while the amplifiers are large and imposing, creating a sense of raw power. Use a combination of line drawings and shading to create a graphic novel-style image, with a pop of bright red on the guitar to add emphasis.

An unsurprising side-effect of ChatGPT going viral is that generative AI has become an attractor for people who care about it exclusively as a means to gain money, social media presence, or business opportunities: The new class of AI influencers. Let me start by making it clear that I don't think there's anything wrong with using what's hot to grow a business. As the space of AI influencers grows, they give the field more visibility to people who would've never heard of it otherwise (as incredible as it sounds, most people are unaware of how AI is changing the world). That's great--more people knowing about AI means fewer consequences due to ignorance. AI influencers' incentives to talk, write, and inform about AI are not always aligned with people's desire to know what AI is, how it works, or what makes sense to use it for.

Today I bring you a fresh perspective on a topic I've written about a lot on TAB: AI imperfection. But, instead of enumerating the ways in which AI systems fail, as I typically do, I'm going to change my point of view to give you a new--and rather convincing--argument that I haven't seen written anywhere else. Let's start from the beginning. A few days ago, before ChatGPT was a thing, I was scrolling Twitter and saw this picture (try to recognize what you're looking at): It took me a whole minute to realize it's just a little doggy. Then it struck me: humans are nowhere near perfect.

Interactive internet-based technologies are transforming the way in which we understand death, grieving, and coping with loss. Online communication together with changes in social and religious attitudes in western society has created a space where the individual is part of the collective. The transition from analog to digital combines the private with the public and the real with the virtual. Feeding the digital afterlife zeitgeist are tech giants who are eager to build a synthetic heaven where big egos go to die. The idea of a synthetic heaven is offensive to many with long-standing religious beliefs even though those same beliefs are as synthetic as digital data. GLIU AI and Visual Arts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. We are living in an AI-powered Matrix future and the richest man in the world agrees.

OpenAI has released ChatGPT, a new dialogue language model (LM) based on the GPT-3.5 family series (trained on text and code) and similar to InstructGPT (aligned with reinforcement learning through human feedback). The company set up an online demo and people are losing their minds over it. In a nutshell, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can "answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests." This nicely encapsulates the reason why ChatGPT is so special: "admit", "challenge", and "reject" are unusual verbs to describe the behavior of an LM. However, it isn't an exaggeration in ChatGPT's case (countless examples that I'll share soon assert it).

I want to share an experiment with you. The latest posts have been a streak of not-so-good news, non-optimistic takes, and anti-hype arguments. I think it's paramount to talk about all that, but it's as important to let a positive vibe out every so often. Otherwise, we risk burning out--and I don't want that! That's why today I bring you a different perspective on AI.

AI language models (LMs) have recently gotten so skilled as to be believable--even deceptive. Not in the sense of intentionally fooling people, but in the sense of being capable of generating utterances that would make us imagine a mind behind the screen. We--gullible humans with a tendency to anthropomorphize non-living objects--are the perfect victims of this trap. As access to LMs becomes widespread, many will start doubting. Some will even claim certainty: "AI is alive and sentient."