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7 items tagged “arstechnica”

2024

Notes from Bing Chat—Our First Encounter With Manipulative AI

Visit Notes from Bing Chat—Our First Encounter With Manipulative AI

I participated in an Ars Live conversation with Benj Edwards of Ars Technica today, talking about that wild period of LLM history last year when Microsoft launched Bing Chat and it instantly started misbehaving, gaslighting and defaming people.

[... 438 words]

Ars Live: Our first encounter with manipulative AI (via) I'm participating in a live conversation with Benj Edwards on 19th November reminiscing over that incredible time back in February last year when Bing went feral.

A promotional image for an Ars Technica live chat event: NOVEMBER 19TH, 4:00 PM ET / 3:00 PM CT features the orange Ars Technica logo and event title Bing Chat: Our First Encounter with Manipulative AI. Below A LIVE CHAT WITH are headshots and details for two speakers: Simon Willison (Independent Researcher, Creator of Datasette) and Benj Edwards (Senior AI Reporter, Ars Technica). The image shows STREAMING LIVE AT YOUTUBE.COM/@ARSTECHNICA at the bottom.

# 12th November 2024, 11:58 pm / bing, generative-ai, arstechnica, ai, speaking, llms, benj-edwards

2023

The AI-assistant wars heat up with Claude Pro, a new ChatGPT Plus rival. I'm quoted in this piece about the new Claude Pro $20/month subscription from Anthropic:

Willison has also run into problems with Claude's morality filter, which has caused him trouble by accident: "I tried to use it against a transcription of a podcast episode, and it processed most of the text before—right in front of my eyes—it deleted everything it had done! I eventually figured out that they had started talking about bomb threats against data centers towards the end of the episode, and Claude effectively got triggered by that and deleted the entire transcript."

# 10th September 2023, 5:07 pm / claude, generative-ai, arstechnica, ai, llms, anthropic

An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban. I’m quoted in this piece by Benj Edwards about an Iowa school district that responded to a law requiring books be removed from school libraries that include “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” by asking ChatGPT “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?”.

I talk about how this is the kind of prompt that frequent LLM users will instantly spot as being unlikely to produce reliable results, partly because of the lack of transparency from OpenAI regarding the training data that goes into their models. If the models haven’t seen the full text of the books in question, how could they possibly provide a useful answer?

# 16th August 2023, 10:33 pm / ethics, generative-ai, openai, chatgpt, ai, llms, arstechnica, benj-edwards

2007

How Time Machine works. From John Siracusa’s Leopard review. The bad news is that Time Machine doesn’t deal well with huge files that have small changes made to them... such as Parallels VM images.

# 29th October 2007, 9:56 am / parallels, apple, osx, leopard, john-siracusa, timemachine, virtualisation, arstechnica

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review. John Siracusa’s 17 page review of Leopard, covering everything from UI tweaks to DTrace sample code. Smart use of embedded video and audio too—I suggest setting aside at least an hour to work through it all.

# 29th October 2007, 8:55 am / john-siracusa, arstechnica, leopard, osx, dtrace, apple

By picking up its marbles and going home, Google just demonstrated how completely bizarre and anti-consumer DRM technology can be.

Ken Fisher

# 14th August 2007, 12:41 pm / arstechnica, dontbeevil, drm, google, google-video, kenfisher