It's easy to feel a bit beset by doom these days. The other week, I watched the heinous AI-generated "Trump Gaza" video and was so appalled that I impulse-bought a kayaking guide book. It felt like the only sane response was to take to the water and paddle away. Video games are a reliable antidote to existential doom, but layoffs, corporate homogenisation and AI slop are all encroaching on my safe haven, making it more difficult to get a brief reprieve from what's happening in the outside world. Thank God, then, for the Bafta games awards nominations, which reliably remind me that video games are pretty great, actually.

Whether it's Tinder or Hinge, anyone with an online dating account will know that choosing the perfect pictures and words for your profile is a tricky business. From candid photos to funny jokes, it can be difficult to know what will help you bag the likes in a sea of profiles. But help is at hand, as scientists have revealed the one word you definitely should not include on your profile. According to researchers from the University of Warsaw, the word'vegetarian' will immediately put off potential dates. In a new study, the team found that being a vegetarian makes both women and men less attractive as potential partners.

Current pre-trained language models have enabled remarkable improvements in downstream tasks, but it remains difficult to distinguish effects of statistical correlation from more systematic logical reasoning grounded on the understanding of real world. We tease these factors apart by leveraging counterfactual conditionals, which force language models to predict unusual consequences based on hypothetical propositions. We introduce a set of tests from psycholinguistic experiments, as well as larger-scale controlled datasets, to probe counterfactual predictions from five pre-trained language models. We find that models are consistently able to override real-world knowledge in counterfactual scenarios, and that this effect is more robust in case of stronger baseline world knowledge -- however, we also find that for most models this effect appears largely to be driven by simple lexical cues. When we mitigate effects of both world knowledge and lexical cues to test knowledge of linguistic nuances of counterfactuals, we find that only GPT-3 shows sensitivity to these nuances, though this sensitivity is also non-trivially impacted by lexical associative factors.

Australian philosopher Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good.

When will artificial intelligence develop aspirations? When will a robot yearn to have its own apartment? When will an AI that invented technology want to re-invest its earnings into better marketing for its product? When will an AI providing value to a company desire the pay and benefits its co-workers are receiving? As far as I am concerned, until any of these things happen, we should not even be discussing the concept of granting legal rights to artificially intelligent beings of any type.

There is a little known philosophy called Sentientism that is well founded in reality, provides a strong basis for compassionate ethics and will eventually become our predominant way of thinking. It commits to using evidence and reason and grants moral consideration to all sentient beings. This philosophy also gives us the best chance to solve the world's problems. Most people disagree with it. Let's go on a philosophical journey We start with using evidence and reason as the basis of our beliefs -- because reality is all there is.

Conversational agents, also known as chatbots, are versatile tools that have the potential of being used in dialogical argumentation. They could possibly be deployed in tasks such as persuasion for behaviour change (e.g. persuading people to eat more fruit, to take regular exercise, etc.) However, to achieve this, there is a need to develop methods for acquiring appropriate arguments and counterargument that reflect both sides of the discussion. For instance, to persuade someone to do regular exercise, the chatbot needs to know counterarguments that the user might have for not doing exercise. To address this need, we present methods for acquiring arguments and counterarguments, and importantly, meta-level information that can be useful for deciding when arguments can be used during an argumentation dialogue. We evaluate these methods in studies with participants and show how harnessing these methods in a chatbot can make it more persuasive.

There is a little known philosophical position that, for me at least, is well founded in reality, provides a strong basis for compassionate ethics and will eventually become humanity's predominant way of thinking. Most people disagree with it and with me. Sentientism is an ethical philosophy that applies evidence and reason and grants moral consideration to all sentient beings. Sentient beings have sentience -- the capacity to experience -- both suffering and flourishing. Things that can't experience might be important in other ways, but they don't need our moral consideration.

Some players find the carnage of Monster Hunter: World distasteful. Mon 12 Feb 2018 08.48 EST Last modified on Mon 12 Feb 2018 08.51 EST I have an admission to make: I'm a vegetarian who enjoys big-game hunting. For the past several weeks I have been playing Monster Hunter: World, a PlayStation 4 video game in which you head out into the wilds and hunt down enormous dinosaur-like creatures, wearing armour fashioned from the bones, fur and scales of previous conquests. Monster Hunter: World is nothing like real-world hunting. For one thing, the monsters in question are hugely powerful and often eat me for dinner several times before I finally manage a victory, and for another I do most of my hunting with a lightning-infused axe that transforms into a sword.