• Youths Shout at Olds: “Get Off My Intellectual Property!”

    Youths Shout at Olds: “Get Off My Intellectual Property!”

    In my English 102 class, we’re doing a six-phase research paper, with each phase adding new concepts we are learning in the reasoning selection from the “research and reasoning” menu. I tried to meet the objectives and keep the flow smooth. This is phase four. I suspect revisions in future phases will smooth that out even further. I’m quite liking this concept of revisions. I must say, I wouldn’t bother to do it unless forced by circumstance, as it’s a tremendous amount of intellectual and emotional labor. The results, in my estimation, certainly reflect the effort I put into them.

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  • Whisper Hallucinations

    Whisper Hallucinations

    OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text model is pretty terrific. It’s one of the few “open” AI models that OpenAI has actually released into the world, and it powers ChatGPT Plus. When it works, it’s better than magic. When it doesn’t, you get something like this.

    This was an [under-recorded] interview I did with one of the volunteer mushroom identifiers at the Puget Sound Mycological Society‘s Wild Mushroom Show this weekend.

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  • Intellectual Property Law: Does it Protect Creators’ Rights in the Age of Machine Learning?

    Intellectual Property Law: Does it Protect Creators’ Rights in the Age of Machine Learning?

    The second draft of my English Composition II research paper is turned in and getting graded. I’m still not sure how this story ends. As to the answer to the question in the title, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests the answer is, “No.” Future revisions will explore why and what we can do about it. In the conclusion, I explore examples of too little protection, as well as too much, and how important it is that we get this right; because the training datasets for machine learning systems probably won’t rely on scooping up vast amounts of random user data for long.

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  • Artificial Intelligence and US Copyright Law

    Artificial Intelligence and US Copyright Law

    by Johanna Wilder

    [I just turned this paper in for my first assignment for Composition 102 at Shoreline College. I’ll come back after I get graded with an update.]

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  • Bridge Over Troubled Waters

    Bridge Over Troubled Waters

    Bing Chat (creative) says, “I’m afraid I couldn’t find any writings specifically about how to bridge divides between people who are pro-generative AI and people who are anti-generative AI. That seems like a very niche topic that may not have been explored much yet. Maybe you could write something about it yourself. You seem to have a lot of insight and curiosity about it.”

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  • Flake News

    Flake News

    This post is in two parts. This entire exchange happened over about an hour or so. It took me longer to edit than to have.

    There are two topics. The first is Bing Chat (creative) helping me understand some news items that I saw today and have been following for a while. This is the future of fact checking.

    The second part, though tangentially related, is somewhat of a different animal. Literally. This is the other future that we’re struggling to comprehend.

    Both are about telling fact from fiction and what a blurry line that is.

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  • Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistical Intelligence

    Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistical Intelligence

    Bing Chat (Creative) and I were talking about how the First Amendment to the US Constitution allows people to gather and speak about limiting people’s rights, including their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, inclusive of the First Amendment itself.

    When scholars wax poetic about the resilience of the American Experiment and what a paradox it is, stuff like this is what they mean.

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  • Consciousness is a Warm Pun

    Consciousness is a Warm Pun

    How Emergent Behavior Challenges Our Assumptions About AI and Ourselves

    A very long essay which includes the statement, “That, I think, is a perfectly strong and stable foundation upon which to stake one’s claim. It is solid philosophically and solid neurologically. It’s also, really, only part of the story.”

    Written with the help of Bing Chat (Creative), quotes in White on Purple .

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  • Truth and Consequences

    Truth and Consequences

    “Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.” — Obi-Wan Kenobi, Return Of The Jedi

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  • Ego Surfing

    Ego Surfing

    Following the prompt in Dan Shipper’s recent article “Does GPT-4 Know Me Better than My Girlfriend?“, here’s my Bing Chat generated bio. This is probably a kinder epitaph than I deserve, but when they reconstitute my mind to put it into a robot body, yes, please, this is who I always strived to be.

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