Interesting Links for 18-02-2024

[andrewducker]

1. A short comic about a mysterious creature living among the monks of a secluded abbey.

(tags:comic fantasy religion bigotry )

2. Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up

(tags:ai airplanes law travel Canada )

3. A Killer Disease Is Rampant In Hospitals Around The World

(tags:pandemic disease epicfail )

4. How the Starship Troopers movie brilliantly depicts an empire in fascist decline

(tags:StarshipTroopers movies fascism scifi robertheinlein )

5. The intersection of AI, racism, and academia

(tags:ai writing academia viaPatrickHadfield racism )

Comments

[armiphlage]

2. Air Canada routinely fails to comply with refund requirements set in legislation, and disavows advice given by human help desk staff, so I'm not surprised it tried this.

[dreamaastrid]

so glad they lost. Hopefully other cooperations will lose if their CHATbots don't agree with the policies and provide bad information to customers.

[simont]

#5: separately from the question of racism, I remember someone in the LLVM community saying that one actually good use for ChatGPT, if you were an ESL speaker trying to contribute docs-affecting code changes, was to give it prompts of the form

"Here is some documentation I've written for a new feature in LLVM's foo utility. Please edit for style and grammar. [text]"

It seemed plausible to me, on the grounds that if you'd provided source material that already contained all the necessary facts, then there wouldn't be any fact-shaped holes in the desired output that it might be tempted to fill with made-up nonsense.

But it sounds from this article as if even that would not produce good results!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, there doesn't seem to be a way to reliably produce good results.

[heron61]

4 was good, except that the comments about Israel in it verged on anti-Semitism.

[dreamaastrid]

#3 doesn't suprise me. Everyone is back to life as "normal" even though large number of people are still dying of COVID daily.