HackerNews Summary (2023-05-31 09AM)

Source: AI21 Labs concludes largest Turing Test experiment to date

Summary
AI21 Labs has disclosed initial results of the largest Turing Test in history in terms of scale. More than 1.5 million participants from across the globe took part in the test, and the AI bots were evaluated based on the game “Human or Not?” where people had to guess if they chatted with a human or a machine for two minutes. Around 68% of participants guessed correctly, and humans were easier to identify as compared to bots. Youngsters had slightly higher accuracy rates than older people.

Fact

🌍Participants from about the 🏆Top 5 playing countries, such as France, China, Greece, Russia, and the US, guessed correctly at average rates of 71.3%, 68.7%, 68.1%, 67.3%, and 66.9%, respectively.

🤖🧠 Many participants thought that AI bots don’t make typographical mistakes, grammatical errors, or use slang, but most models in the game were designed to make these types of mistakes and to use slang words.

🧑‍💼💬 Participants tried to evaluate their chat partners by asking personal questions that AI bots would not have a personal history or background or be able to handle. However, most bots could answer such questions well by making up personalities since they’ve seen many personal stories during their learning.

📅🤖 Participants assumed that bots are unable to comprehend the newest/current events while asking questions to test their knowledge. On the other hand, the AI models could answer such questions, indicating that they have been trained on the latest news and can understand current events.

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Source: Kafka’s Trials by Theodore Dalrymple

Summary
The Diaries of Franz Kafka are difficult to translate, but Ross Benjamin’s translation is a thorough and admirable labor of love. The diaries offer a distinctly ominous insight into Kafka’s view of the future, and raise questions about the impact of translation on meaning.

Fact

📚 A translator’s job is of great responsibility in ensuring that an author is not misrepresented in another language.

👥 There are differences in meaning when comparing translations of a single sentence or an entire book.

👀 The diaries offer a distinctly ominous insight into Kafka’s view of the future in its cold outlines.

💻 The current volume is a translation based on the first unexpurgated German edition of the diaries, free of editorial influence or censorship.

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Source: AI intensifies fight against ‘paper mills’ that churn out fake research

Summary
Advances in AI are making it more challenging to detect fake research, particularly from paper mills. Language-generating AI tools like ChatGPT and image-generating software provide new ways of making fake research appear plausible, without being detected. Research-integrity experts discussed these challenges at the UNITED2ACT summit.

Fact

🤖 AI-generated microscopy and text pose significant problems to detecting fake research.

🔍 There is a challenge in proving beyond suspicion that images are AI-generated.

📝 Language-generating AI tools like ChatGPT can make detecting fake research more difficult.

🧪 Synthetic images and text from paper mills make screening more challenging and pose additional problems to detecting fake research.

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Source: The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

Summary
David Allen’s time-management system, called G.T.D. or Getting Things Done, recommends using a multi-step system that involves capturing all obligations in an in-box, processing them into concrete “next actions,” and then organizing them into contexts for easy execution. This enables a “mind-like-water” state.

Fact

💻 You should organize your master list into contexts like @phone or @computer.

📝 To avoid open loops and reduce anxiety, the G.T.D. system begins with full capture of obligations into in-boxes.

🤝 The spread of e-mail in the 1990s transformed knowledge work into an overloaded and anxious mesh of constant contact and obligation.

🧘‍♂️ G.T.D. combines Zen Buddhism with organizational techniques to help users achieve a “mind-like-water” state.

📚 Mann, who was overwhelmed by administrative tasks, came across Allen’s system in “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” and found it life-changing.

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