A lengthy overview of the implications of ML/AI to biology and drug discovery came out yesterday, and while I appreciate its enthusiasm and breadth, the answer to the question posed in the summary — What if this time is different? — is, sadly, no, probably not.

From my inbox, regarding enterprise software with enterprise price:

The Zoom link is now in the meeting workspace and you will need to copy and paste it into your web browser. Company name redacted is working on a hyperlink but that functionality is not yet available.

!?!

The great/scary thing about the internet is that for any fleeting thought I have, there is somone who has ruminated on the matter long and hard and made their ruminations available online. Gwern comes to mind, but also Gellman on statistics, and many others. Time for a blogroll?

I am sure that Sofa is a fine, artisanal app, lovingly crafted by the best designers and software engineers, and I would never ever fault anyone for using it…

…but I get an allergic reaction when someone suggests I “organize my downtime”, and a strong urge to say Organize this!

Finding an article about AI in a major news publication that sticks to facts and makes sense has become an event worth celebrating, so here is a recent one by Tatum Hunter of the Washington Post.

Unmodified ChatGPT output, if it were produced by a human, would precisely fit the definition of bullshit BS from Harry Frankfurt’s essay — words meant to persuade without regard for truth. We can debate whether an algorithm can have intent or not, I’d say not, so on its own the output would not qualify as BS but it definitely has no regard for truth because predictive AIs don’t have a concept of anything other than the probability of one word coming after the other.

So, if people are worried about ChatGPT or any other predictive AI replacing them, or passing the Turing test, that is only to the extant that their work was BS anyway and that, as Frankfurt predicted, we are awash with BS and have become desensitized to it, almost expecting it.

With that in mind, I find it amusing that reporting on ChatGPT — some of which I commented on — misses the BS-ness of predictive AIs while itself being BS. Well, amusing and terrifying at the same time.

This is in response to a question.

Feeling sad for Twitter app developers and, considering there will be some delay between the fit hitting the shan and it spreading all around, even sadder for the inevitable hardship of anyone who depended on a Twitter audience for their livelihood. Castles out of sand…

Reporter Holly Else in a news article for Nature:

An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December.

So far so good. Per the preprint, researches collected 50 real abstracts, 10 each from JAMA, NEJM, BMJ, Lancet, and Nature Medicine, then asked ChatGPT to generate a new abstract out of each article’s title and journal name. They ended up with 100 abstracts, half of them AI-generated, that they were able to analyze using 3 methods: a plagiarism detector, an AI detector Or, to be more precise, the GPT-2 Output Detector. Note that ChatGPT is based on GPT-3., and blinded The preferred term nowadays seems to be masked over blinded, but either way you are bound to have funny-slash-distrubing associations pop into your head. human reviewers.

You can click through the link to read the outcomes, but per the pre-print’s own conclusion:

The generated abstracts do not alarm plagiarism-detection models, as the text is generated anew, ⊕ Emphasis mine. but can often be detected using AI detection models, and identified by a blinded human reviewer.

So the “can often be detected” from the preprint itself becomes “often unable to be spotted” in the hands of a crafty human reporter. Gotcha.

Of course, no alarmist article is complete without some color comentary:

“I am very worried,” says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and was not involved in the research. “If we’re now in a situation where the experts are not able to determine what’s true or not, we lose the middleman that we desperately need to guide us through complicated topics,” she adds.

We have always and forever will be in a situation where everyone — expert or not — had to engage their critical thinking to determine whether data presented are true and important, true but unimportant, true but misinterpreted, fragile, exagerated, overblown, or just plain fake. AI making it easier for the unscrupulous to do what they would have done anyway does not change the equation by an Earth-shattering amount.

Look, some people can’t handle a blank page but are good at editing, even if it means completely replacing the original text. In the olden days of 6 months ago trainees had no other recourse but to grind their teeth and just get on with it, hoping that at some point in their careers they will have trainees of their own writing those pesky first drafts. ChatGPT seems like a godsend for them. Whether what’s sent to journals for publication or posted on a pre-print server is real, fake, nonsense or profound still depends on the person doing the submitting.

Some side observations in no particular order:

• I have no issue with the pre-print itself, which I hope and trust will find a good home.
• Why does Nature deem the work important enough to cover in a news article, but not important enough to publish in one of its own journals?
• For an online news article, it is sadly lacking in that great breakthrough from six decades ago, the hyperlink. Even the URL for the pre-print itself is given as an un-clickable footnote. And no mention of the online and freely accessible plagiarism and AI detection tools.
• Nature’s news department is on a roll.

If ChatGPT and other predicitive AIs kill Google, it won’t be because they are better at search, but because the loads and loads of inane content they generate make search results unusable.

Back to human-curated website lists it is.

Craig Hockenberry:

A lot of folks appreciated the visual design of our Twitter app. And we are proud of that.

We’re equally proud of the things you don’t see.

Which reminds me of why Frasier was so good: for all the jokes they didn’t make.