Interesting Links for 29-07-2023

[andrewducker]

1. "As We Go Now" - This was the song the children sang at Sophia's nursery graduation yesterday. There were a *lot* of crying parents (and carers)

(tags:music video )

2. Edinburgh public toilets: £1m is invested by Council

(tags:toilets Edinburgh )

3. Microsoft's AI shopping announcement contains hallucinations in the demo

(tags:ai fraud Microsoft )

Comments

[rhythmaning]

That song is rather lovely.

Can I suggest you get bagpipe lessons for Sophia?

What could possibly go wrong...

[andrewducker]

When the house is larger and I can exile her to the far reaches to practice...

[nancylebov]

That's a beautiful song, but did the kids sing at that tempo? I think I would have found something that slow painful at that age, though it's possible (certain!) that I'm weird.

[andrewducker]

They were singing along on top of that version of the song, so they didn't have any choice!

[movingfinger]

2. Presumably the new Edinburgh accessible toilets will not have stairs, unlike the ones in the photo...

3. Could we stop calling these things "AI" and start calling them BS generators, or "spicy autocomplete" as I saw somewhere?

[andrewducker]

I'm perfectly happy calling them AI. They produce complex models of language and then use them to make remarkably good predictions of what valid sentences look like. That matches my idea of what intelligence looks like.
What they haven't been trained in is "What facts look like". That looks to be a very long way away.

[nancylebov]

BSing is a human capacity. It's not like animals can do it.

I'm now imagining a cult where an AI generates the attractive nonsense.

[hairyears]

Arthur C Clarke (I think) was the first commentary to express his skepticism of AI by saying "I'll believe it when I see artificial stupidity".

That day has now come to Redmond.

[mtbc]

Yay for public toilets. I'm pleasantly surprised by something, however small, happening that reverses a consistent decline.