Activity tagged "artificial intelligence"

Here’s the thing about these safety justifications: I think they work because, to Anthropic, they aren’t justifications. The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in super intelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that, to people on the outside, look like a bizarre combination of cynicism and naiveté. The contrast to OpenAI is massive: I think that one way to understand how and why OpenAI lost its lead is that, in the years following the release of ChatGPT, the company has been at war with itself internally as what used to be a research lab was suddenly seized with the burden of being the accidental consumer tech company; to the extent OpenAI solved that conflict, it was by bleeding huge amounts of talent to Anthropic in particular. Anthropic, on the other hand, has perfect alignment between talent and mission and business. The company gets to sell to researchers the creation of a machine god, with the mantle of being the sort of person who cares about the dangers and is smart enough to navigate them on behalf of humanity; that every policy change that falls out of that happens to be great for business is the most beautiful coincidence in the world.

To be clear, I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender. I don’t remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive. I am fine with calculators doing my daily math and my computer figuring out how to schedule my classes. These were once useful skills, but we were probably right to get rid of them. AI is different because the technology is general enough that virtually any cognitive task can be offloaded into it to some degree. I don’t want to be too precious about writing: there is no principle that says a polished email draft has to come out of a human mind any more than a column of arithmetic has to. But we don’t want to give up everything, and that we mostly don’t know yet, for any specific task, what is important and what is not. Deciding that is going to be a real challenge.

A genre glitch is a characteristic of LLM-assisted writing where the text suddenly switches genre, typically inserting a short promotional phrase full of sensory details into an informational text.

People call this friction "grunt work." Schwartz uses exactly that phrase, and he's right that LLMs can remove it. What he doesn't say, because he already has decades of hard-won intuition and doesn't need the grunt work anymore, is that for someone who doesn't yet have that intuition, the grunt work is the work. The boring parts and the important parts are tangled together in a way that you can't separate in advance. You don't know which afternoon of debugging was the one that taught you something fundamental about your data until three years later, when you're working on a completely different problem and the insight surfaces. Serendipity doesn't come from efficiency. It comes from spending time in the space where the problem lives, getting your hands dirty, making mistakes that nobody asked you to make and learning things nobody assigned you to learn.

Mental health experts say identifying when someone is in need of help is the first step — and approaching them with careful compassion is the hardest, most essential part that follows.

Even according to the Times’ own reporting, readers do not seem to like AI romance novels. One of the two AI critical sources quoted in the article said that she would never knowingly pick up a book written by AI. Another, an author whose work had been scraped by Anthropic to train their AI model, pointed out that flooding the zone with slop makes it much harder for real human authors to be discovered by readers.  What I found most curious was Coral Hart’s reasoning for using a pseudonym in the article. Coral Hart is a retired pen name and the source would not give any of her current pen names “because she still uses her real name for some publishing and coaching projects. She fears that revealing her A.I. use would damage her business for that work.” Huh! That’s weird!