reallykindasorta

u/reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net
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I’m pretty skeptical of the AI marketing firm approach they used. Surveymonkey has implemented AI sorting categories and I’ve had the chance to audit this feature for my org. Somewhere around 70% the time it gets even the positive/negative sentiment wrong let alone accurately sorting into the four sentiment categories they outline in the methodology section here. Even carefully managed by humans coding qualitative interviews into quantitative conclusions is difficult to do with reasonable veracity.

In the Buckmaster case

OpenAI now says in the Buckmaster-Alpöge case that no specific user data was accessed, but adds that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

You might have more insight into how to interpret that with the policy you mention than I do (I’m assuming they’re not misquoting ofc).

I mean I would have expected them to guess that but mathematicians can be oblivious. In both cases it sounds like they talked directly with reps at the relevant companies asking them if the models were trained on their data and the companies gave shady replies though, so part of the story is also the companies trying to obfuscate so they could claim their model found the result.

I expect researchers will begin to think more critically about the tools they choose.

on The Wirule · c/onehundredninetysix · 59 pts · 1d

Similarly CEOs don’t understand that making a report or writing an analysis that looks reasonable at first glance but is inaccurate is super simple for a human to do too. Fixing all the errors and made up stuff takes longer than just doing the work carefully. My boss was proud they used AI to do a works cited for something and left google.com/ in the linked references. If I was a reviewer for a funding organization seeing that would not be a vote of confidence that the applicant was serious.

One more important piece unless I missed it, they were working on the proof using Codex, an openAI product. It’s not clear if openAI lifted their work directly from there.

Mentioning because many programs now include AI integrations with dubious privacy protections, so writing your research paper in ms word or overleaf could potentially expose your ideas to these companies. Back to typewriters?

With context the report says that the decline predates covid

People quickly turn to explanations such as the impact of the COVID pandemic, but a decline in reading was already visible well before the pandemic hit. We cannot say for sure, but declining levels of reading for enjoyment and the shift towards digital reading – skimming social media feeds and rapidly processing information – may be compromising the ability of students to engage with complex texts and data.