“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

How will AI change medicine?

Doctors have been understandably skeptical of claims that artificial intelligence will transform medicine. Recall the misleading claims that radiologists might soon be obsolete, years of annoying automated pop ups in electronic health records, and the deployment of IBM’s near-useless Watson. But the development of new large-language models may actually live up to the hype. GPT-4, the latest, largest, and most capable such model developed by OpenAI, aces many AP exams and passes various professional certification exams—even tests for sommeliers—without having been trained for any of them.

Automation is coming, and this time it’s for the white collar workers.

Artificial intelligence will likely impact every profession, experts tell the Star, and office workers are first in line. But don’t go looking for a new area of employment just yet.

The rise of powerful generative AI programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney means robots can now write sonnets, draw portraits, code programs and much more in seconds, far outpacing humans in certain cognitive tasks.

At a congressional hearing this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a stark reminder of the dangers of the technology his company has helped push out to the public.

He warned of potential disinformation campaigns and manipulation that could be caused by technologies like the company’s ChatGPT chatbot, and called for regulation.

AI could “cause significant harm to the world,” he said.

BuzzFeed intends to use AI to generate headlines, quizzes and identity-based content to help it reach multicultural audiences in an “authentic voice”, an investor call revealed. During a conference with potential investors on May 11th, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti argued that AI was an “exciting new creativity tool” that could be used for “imagination, storytelling and entertainment”.

Autonomous vehicles are wreaking havoc. So why are our elites so committed to their rollout?

On Christmas Eve 1801, people in Camborne in Cornwall were treated to an extraordinary sight. Through the market town and up a hill rolled a carriage that was powered entirely by itself, for almost a mile. This was the first ‘self-driving’ vehicle, where the source of the propulsion was on board. No one had ever seen anything like it.

If a chatbot can churn out hard-hitting think-pieces about why everything on Earth is racist, they’ll soon be out of a job

Last week The Irish Times fell victim to a cruel hoax. On its website it published an opinion column which argued that wearing fake tan is racist. The column attracted a huge volume of traffic, swiftly becoming the second most-read piece on the site. It then emerged, however, that the article had been submitted by a pseudonymous prankster, who reportedly created it using AI.

Humanity’s third major technological revolution is leading us into a future more promising and also more dangerous than any since the dawn of history. It’s coming faster than you think.

The COVID pandemic and the rise of AI have something in common. Between them, they have upended one of the most consequential debates among American tech analysts, and largely refuted the claim that progress in America was coming to an end—that the Adams curve was flattening out as a Great Stagnation cooled the dynamism of American life.

The case for stagnation was a strong one. Current technologies, advocates warned, were providing diminishing returns, and productivity growth in American life was slowing. The regulatory burden on innovation in the United States inexorably grew. Compared with the optimism that accompanied earlier innovations like electricity, indoor plumbing, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, refrigeration, and mass communications, Americans in the internet age seemed noticeably more risk averse and pessimistic about the future.

In Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, a lonely, recently-divorced ghostwriter falls in love with his artificially intelligent virtual assistant Samantha. In another twist of life imitating art, you now can too — except she’s called CarynAI.