Mitch's Blog

ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law professor as the accused. What happens when ChatGPT lies about real people?

Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus at The Washington Post:

One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.

The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.

‘Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers. Research suggests bees have emotions, dreams, and even PTSD, raising ethical concerns. (The Guardian)

Gruesome cache of severed hands is evidence of trophy-taking in ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptian warriors took enemies’ hands as trophies, using them to account for battle casualties, and often presenting them to the Pharoah. (Ars Technica / Jennifer Ouellette)

Was this week’s “Picard” the first time “Star Trek” dropped an F-bomb? Did they boldly go where they’d never gone before?

The gambler who beat roulette. For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game. (Bloomberg / Kit Chellel, with Vladimir Otasevic, Daryna Krasnolutska, Peter Laca and Misha Savic)

Smart glasses developed by Cornell researchers can read silent speech, tracking lip and mouth movements, to control smartphones and other devices. (Cornell Chronicle / Louis DiPietro)

I remember technology like this featured in science fiction by John Varley in the 1970s, and have wondered why it doesn’t exist in real life.

Cardboard drones running open source software take flight

Here’s What Retirement With Less Than $1 Million Looks Like in America (WSJ / Veronica Dagher and Anne Tergesen). Five retirees open up about their financial lives and how they spend their time and money.

The poop emoji: a legal history (The Verge / Sara Jeong). Amusing story about a serious problem: Emoji are used in mainstream communications. Those communications are cited in lawsuits. Judges are often confused about what they mean; they’re now taking emoji classes. And legal databases can’t manage them.

… the only rational explanation for why he bought Twitter in the first place — aside from possible market manipulation — is because he’s a pathologically divorced dweeb that became so obsessed with online popularity during the COVID-19 lockdown that it scrambled his brain.

— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, “There’s always some idiot ruining your favorite website.”