In Minnestoa, the Birkebeiner cross-country ski race used to be a predictable winter fixture. Now the warming climate has made it uncertain. CC-licensed photo by _ Kripptic on Flickr.
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A selection of 12 links for you. Believe it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
ChatGPT meltdown: users puzzled by bizarre gibberish bug • Mashable
Mike Pearl:
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ChatGPT hallucinates. We all know this already. But on Tuesday it seemed like someone slipped on a banana peel at OpenAI headquarters and switched on a fun new experimental chatbot called the Synonym Scrambler.
Actually, ChatGPT was freaking out in many ways yesterday, but one recurring theme was that it would be prompted with a normal question — typically something involving the tech business or the user’s job — and respond with something flowery to the point of unintelligibility. For instance, according to an X post by architect Sean McGuire, the chatbot advised him at one point to ensure that “sesquipedalian safes are cross-keyed and the consul’s cry from the crow’s nest is met by beatine and wary hares a’twist and at winch in the willow.”
These are words, but ChatGPT seems to have been writing in an extreme version of that style where a ninth grader abuses their thesaurus privileges. “Beatine” is a particularly telling example. I checked the full Oxford English Dictionary and it’s not in there, but Wiktionary says it relates to the theologian Beatus of Liébana, a scholar of the end times who died in the year 800, so maybe “beatine” meant “apocalyptic” at some point in the first millennium CE. Or, judging from how it’s used in dusty old books, maybe it’s just another way of saying “beatific” which one would think is already an obscure enough word. In other words, ChatGPT was giving new meaning to the term “esoteric.”
The chatbot was briefly doing things like this to tons of its users. One Redditor, homtanksreddit, noted that ChatGPT 3.5 — the one available to free users — was apparently unaffected, so the bug may have only affected paying users.
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Perhaps in retrospect it was a mistake to expand its training data with those James Joyce books.
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Apple’s new Sports app for the iPhone is all about the scores • Fast Company
Harry McCracken:
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Since the day the iPhone first went on sale, it’s come with Apple’s apps for checking the weather and monitoring stock prices. Now the company is finally getting around to offering an app that delivers timely information of a different sort with at least as much mass appeal: sports scores.
Named (probably inevitably) Apple Sports, the app is available in the App Store starting today. It features schedules of upcoming games, real-time play-by-play details on ones in progress, player stats, links to broadcasts on Apple TV where applicable, and (though they can be turned off) betting odds. Leagues currently covered include NBA, men’s and women’s NCAA basketball, NHL, MLS, Bundesliga, LaLiga, Liga MX, Ligue 1, Premiere League, and Serie A, with MLB, NFL, NCAAF, NWSL, and WNBA on the way when their seasons start.
Apple has already offered a way to keep tabs on schedules, scores, and stats in the form of My Sports, a feature in Apple News and Apple TV. But in those apps, scores are just one part of the sports experience, and sports are just one slice of the overall mission, albeit an important one. Apple Sports, which will sync with favorites users have already selected in My Sports, doesn’t do anything but sports. And it isn’t even trying to be the ultimate hub for fans.
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It’s pretty dull, and in the UK doesn’t have much (yet). But you can see this as a pathway to much bigger things – particularly pushing immersive video of sports for the Vision Pro. Speaking of which..
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Apple teases MLS playoffs Immersive Video for Vision Pro coming soon, shot in 8K 3D • 9to5Mac
Chance Miller:
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As this year’s MLS season kicks off, Apple is promoting its MLS Season Pass subscription service in full-force. Hidden in today’s launch, however, is a tidbit for Vision Pro users for the “first-ever sports film captured in Apple Immersive Video.”
In a press release today, Apple says that a new film showcasing the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs is coming soon for all Vision Pro users. The film was captured in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view with Spatial Audio, according to Apple:
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Coming soon, all Apple Vision Pro users can experience the best of the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs with the first-ever sports film captured in Apple Immersive Video. Viewers will feel every heart-pounding moment in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio that transports them to each match.
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Apple doesn’t have any additional details to share on this right now. It’s the first sports-related content announcement we’ve seen for Apple Vision Pro. Apple has shown off things like MLS, NBA, and MLB games in their promotional material for Vision Pro, but nothing had been formally announced until now.
Vision Pro users won’t need an MLS Season Pass subscription to watch this film.
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Now things begin to get interesting.
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Adobe brings conversational AI to trillions of PDFs with the new AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat • Adobe
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Today, Adobe introduced AI Assistant in beta, a new generative AI-powered conversational engine in Reader and Acrobat. Deeply integrated into Reader and Acrobat workflows, AI Assistant instantly generates summaries and insights from long documents, answers questions and formats information for sharing in emails, reports and presentations. AI Assistant is bringing generative AI to the masses, unlocking new value from the information inside the approximately 3 trillion PDFs in the world.
AI Assistant leverages the same artificial intelligence and machine learning models behind Acrobat Liquid Mode, the award-winning technology that supports responsive reading experiences for PDFs on mobile. These proprietary models provide a deep understanding of PDF structure and content, enhancing quality and reliability in AI Assistant outputs.
“Generative AI offers the promise of more intelligent document experiences by transforming the information inside PDFs into actionable, knowledge and professional-looking content,” said Abhigyan Modi, senior vice president, Document Cloud. “PDF is the de facto standard for the world’s most important documents and the capabilities introduced today are just the beginning of the value AI Assistant will deliver through Reader and Acrobat applications and services.”
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So basically it’s a TL;DR machine. What’s the point of having a long document if it just gets summarised? Is this a modern version of “if I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter letter”?
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AI search is a doomsday cult • Garbage Day
Ryan Broderick:
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Generative AI, where it is right now, is not totally dissimilar from what happened during the cryptocurrency bubble during the height of the pandemic: Hundreds of startups, flush with cash from a bull market, started trying to build crypto-backed consumer products after they had already decided the technology was the future — not the other way around.
Case in point: the Arc Browser.
For years, The Browser Company has been promising to save the internet. Its Arc Browser is a smart refresh of what a modern gateway to the web should look and feel like and it generated a lot of goodwill with early users. And then, earlier this month, they released their AI-powered search app, which “browses the internet for you.”
The Browser Company’s new app lets you ask semantic questions to a chatbot, which then summarizes live internet results in a simulation of a conversation. Which is great, in theory, as long as you don’t have any concerns about whether what it’s saying is accurate, don’t care where that information is coming from or who wrote it, and don’t think through the long-term feasibility of a product like this even a little bit.
But the base logic of something like Arc’s AI search doesn’t even really make sense. As Engadget recently asked in their excellent teardown of Arc’s AI search pivot, “Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?” But let’s take a step even further here. Why even bother making new websites if no one’s going to see them? At least with the Web3 hype cycle, there were vague platitudes about ownership and financial freedom for content creators. To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist.
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Broderick is really good at putting his finger on the flaws of these ideas amid all the noise.
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Dynabook Americas recalls 15.5m Toshiba laptop AC adapters due to burn and fire hazards • CPSC.gov
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Hazard: the laptop AC adapters can overheat and spark, posing burn and fire hazards.
This recall involves AC adapters sold with Toshiba brand personal laptop computers as well as sold separately. They have date codes between April 2008 through December 2012 in either a year month, date format, i.e. April 2008 is 0804, or year week, date format, i.e. week 15 of 2008 is 0815.
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Are there really 15.5 million of these still in use? The oldest is going to be 16 years old, the youngest 12 years old. Though some people might have kept the chargers just to use on newer machines, perhaps.
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Putting your wet iPhone in rice to dry it is a bad move, Apple warns • Macworld
Michael Simon:
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For years, we’ve turned to a simple household staple when we need to save our iPhones from a liquid death: a bag of rice. The method is decidedly low-tech. Just pop your phone in a bag of rice, seal it up, and wait for a day or so. The idea is that the rice will draw the water out from inside the phone before it can fry any internal parts. People who have experienced waterlogged phones swear by it, and there’s tons of anecdotal evidence to show that it does indeed work.
However, researchers have been claiming for years that it’s all a myth and rice doesn’t actually dry your phone faster and could slow down the process, leaving your logic board susceptible to further damage. And a new 2024 support document from Apple actually advises against using rice to dry out your iPhone since it could make matters worse, as “doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.”
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Basically, the phones now are (quick dunk) waterproof; the only place where you might have a problem is the connector, which means the support document is all about dealing with that.
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The death of snow in America: winters are getting permanently warmer • Business Insider
Alexandria Herr:
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Jocie Nelson has been cross-country skiing for as long as she can remember. When she was growing up, the sport was her way of connecting with nature during the long, harsh Minnesota winters, where temperatures often reach the minus 30s Fahrenheit. Thousands of Americans share her enthusiasm: Since high school, Nelson has joined nearly 15,000 other skiers in the American Birkebeiner, a 50km cross-country ski race through the small town of Hayward, Wisconsin. The crowds of spectators line several people deep.
“Everybody is cheering like crazy,” Nelson said of her first time crossing the finish line, “and it seems like they’re all cheering for you.”
Nelson is now approaching her 25th race, but this year, the event is facing major roadblocks. “We’re looking at a low-snow year. These bands of snow just completely have missed Hayward,” Shawn Connelly, the Birkebeiner Ski Foundation’s marketing and communications director, said. Despite worries around cancellation, the Birkebeiner is moving forward, albeit with a shortened and altered course.
Across much of the upper Midwest, last December was the warmest ever recorded. In Minneapolis, it was a tropical 54ºF (12ºC) on Christmas. Minnesota’s State Climatology Office dubbed this year “The Lost Winter.” While the warm weather is in part exacerbated by this year’s El Niño weather pattern, it’s also a sign of what’s to come as the climate warms. February marked the first time Earth warmed 1.5ºC over the prior 12 months, a milestone long dreaded by climate scientists. In other words, this isn’t just a fluke; it’s the beginning of a new normal.
The climate crisis is altering our winters forever — making them warmer, shorter, and less predictable. As a result, communities around the world are hurtling toward what the researchers Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin have dubbed “the snow-loss cliff.” Their research has found that once temperatures reach a certain threshold, snow disappears faster and faster. The magic number, it turns out, is an average winter temperature of 17ºF (-8ºC). After that, the warmer a region gets, the more rapidly it shifts toward a snow-free future.
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To me, that’s a low average temperature, but it’s in the research.
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Google to fix AI picture bot after ‘woke’ criticism • BBC News
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Google is racing to fix its new AI-powered tool for creating pictures, after claims it was over-correcting against the risk of being racist.
Users said the firm’s Gemini bot supplied images depicting a variety of genders and ethnicities even when doing so was historically inaccurate. For example, a prompt seeking images of America’s founding fathers turned up women and people of colour. The company said its tool was “missing the mark”.
“Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here,” said Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini Experiences. “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” he added.
It is not the first time AI has stumbled over real-world questions about diversity. For example, Google infamously had to apologise almost a decade ago after its photos app labelled a photo of a black couple as “gorillas”.
Rival AI firm, OpenAI was also accused of perpetuating harmful stereotypes, after users found its Dall-E image generator responded to queries for chief executive, for example, with results dominated by pictures of white men.
Google, which is under pressure to prove it is not falling behind in AI developments, released its latest version of Gemini last week.
The bot creates pictures in response to written queries. It quickly drew critics, who accused the company of training the bot to be laughably woke.
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AI your home on Street View • Google Maps Mania
Keir Clarke:
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Have you ever wanted to radically alter the ambiance of your neighborhood? Perhaps you’ve always dreamed of turning your sleepy suburban road into a bustling inner-city street. Or maybe you’ve always wanted to dig up your nearby traffic heavy roads and replace them with green fields and trees. Well now you can – at least virtually.
Panoramai is a new fun tool which allows you to grab Google Maps Street View panoramas from any location in the world and change their appearance based on your own AI prompts. For example the animated GIF above shows my childhood home re-imagined as a Vincent van Gogh painting, as a sc-fi landscape, a post-zombie apocalypse and under 3 feet of water.
You can also change the appearance of your home on Street View using the Netherlands Board of Tourism’s Dutch Cycling Lifestyle map.
It is a matter of great sadness to the Dutch people that people in the rest of the world are not able to live in cycle-friendly environments. Therefore the Netherlands Board of Tourism decided to help the great car-worshiping unwashed picture the beauty of a car free environment. Enter your address into the Dutch Cycling Lifestyle and you can see how your street might look without that noisy road and those dirty cars.
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Though when you go to Panoramai now, it says “We had to turn off the generation of new panoramas for now because of cost. You can still browse pre-computed examples.” AI is pricey!
Help! AI is stealing my readers • The Honest Broker
Ted Gioia:
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I’ve seen all of the impersonation scams. At least I thought I had until now. Because AI has arrived on the scene.
A few days ago, a friend sent me a photo of a new jazz book. What made this especially interesting is that the author’s last name is Gioia. What an odd coincidence. Gioia is an uncommon name. If there were another jazz writer who shared my name, I’d know about it.
The book is attributed to two authors—Frank Gioia & Ted Alkyer. As it turns out, Alkyer is also a last name familiar to jazz insiders. Frank Alkyer is editor and publisher of the leading jazz magazine Downbeat. Another coincidence!
So I reached out to Frank, and asked him if he knew about this book. He was as shocked as me. Alkyer is also an uncommon name. Neither of us had anything to do with this book. And we don’t know jazz writers with these names—so similar to our own.
You don’t need to be as smart as an Einstein chatbot to figure out what’s happening here. As I told Frank, I’d wager that:
• The book is written by AI
• The people behind it attribute the book to two authors based on us, switching our first names so that no direct impersonation can be proven—ensuring that the book always comes up in the results when somebody does a search for either of us
• Needless to say, these two authors do not exist
• The intent is to fool readers and divert them from anything we’ve written to some crappy AI book.Both Frank and I filed complaints with Amazon—and the book is no longer listed there. But it’s still available from other retailers. An audiobook has also been released.
A few hours later, a Twitter connection alerted me to another interesting jazz book. It’s written by Luke Ellington.
Luke Ellington? Is he any relation to Duke Ellington?
…It took me decades to become a jazz expert. My writing career really didn’t take off until I was in my forties—because you can’t develop mastery of this material without years of constant effort. Does AI now get to swallow up everything I’ve learned in a few gulps—and then use it to impersonate me?
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Well not exactly – Amazon does that. If books still went through traditional publishers, you’d still be safe. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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Fake: it’s only a matter of time until disinformation leads to calamity • Tim Harford
Tim Harford:
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Not long after Eric Hebborn was murdered, an off-the-record conversation with the famed artist-turned-forger was published. On tape, Hebborn made explosive claims about his time as a student at the Royal Academy of Art in the 1950s, where he had been awarded a prestigious prize. Though a gifted draughtsman, he was a surprising choice, because the art of the day was all about high concepts, not realistic depictions. Drawing was an unfashionable business, so how had a mere draughtsman won the prize?
Hebborn explained that, one day, a drunken porter at the Royal Academy was looking for a quiet spot to sleep in the basement and had fashioned a screen made of some of the pictures stored down there. One of those was the only surviving large drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, known as the Burlington House Cartoon, after the Royal Academy’s headquarters. Unfortunately, the porter stacked the Da Vinci against a leaking radiator. By the next morning, the picture had been thoroughly steamed. Only the faintest outline of the sketch remained.
In a panic, the porter summoned the president of the Royal Academy, who summoned the keeper of pictures, who summoned the chief restorer of the National Gallery, who announced that the picture couldn’t be restored, it could only be redrawn. At which point, they sent for star student Eric Hebborn, who wielded his chalk and charcoal in a flawless recreation of the lost original.
Or so Hebborn claimed, noting that it seemed curious that the Royal Academy sold the drawing soon afterwards, and spent some of the money on . . . upgrading its radiators. It was an astonishing story and very hard to check. The drawing was indeed sold to the National Gallery. But one day, in 1987, a man walked into the National Gallery wearing a long coat, paused in front of the drawing, pulled out a shotgun and blasted the artwork. The man, who wanted to make a statement about the social conditions in Britain, was arrested and later confined to an asylum. The National Gallery had the drawing restored, with tiny fragments of paper being painstakingly glued back together. That restoration would have concealed Hebborn’s handiwork, if Hebborn ever touched the cartoon. So — did he?
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*Dirty Harry voice* Well DID HE, PUNK? This is in fact a long piece on the nature of fakery.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 