M Thomas Apple Author Page

Science fiction, actual science, history, and personal ranting about life, the universe, and everything

AI “loses its mind” when fed AI-created drivel

August 19, 2023
MThomas

Source: https://twitter.com/tomgoldsteincs/status/1677439914886176768 (@tomgoldsteincs)

In other words, without “fresh real data” — translation: original human work, as opposed to stuff spit out by AI — to feed the beast, we can expect its outputs to suffer drastically. When trained repeatedly on synthetic content, say the researchers, outlying, less-represented information at the outskirts of a model’s training data will start to disappear. The model will then start pulling from increasingly converging and less-varied data, and as a result, it’ll soon start to crumble into itself.

https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data

So, as more and more lazy people ask AI to “write” for them, the programs get less and less accurate…

Or, as the authors of the study conclude, “…without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease.”

I.e., the use of AI-generated content to train AI doesn’t work, and since there is already way too much AI-generated garbage all over the internet, it’s almost impossible to sort out which is which when the AI-creators “scrape” data from the web.

So…

See, machines can’t replace us entirely — their brains will melt!

But then again, that might not be so hopeful after all. When AI takes over the world, maybe it won’t kill humans; perhaps it’ll just corral us into content farms… 

At least we won’t wind up as batteries.

Yet.

PS. I find it both hysterically amusing and disturbing that my blog program offers an “experimental AI assistant.” Granted, the program does let you know that AI-generated content accuracy is not guaranteed, but wth would I want to use AI for a personal blog? The whole purpose of a blog is to WRITE. AI-generated text is not writing. It is intellectual property theft.

Supermassive black hole found spitting a giant, high-energy jet toward Earth

August 14, 2023
MThomas

A NASA mission has observed a supermassive black hole pointing its highly energetic jet straight toward Earth. Don’t panic just yet, though. As fearsome as this cosmic event  is, it’s located at a very safe distance of about 400 million light-years away.

https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/supermassive-black-hole-found-spitting-a-giant-high-energy-jet-toward-earth

Gee. So reassuring.

FWIW I had never heard the term “blazar” before reading the linked article.

Sounded like a cross between Happy Days and late 1970s Japanese anime.

And it just so happens there’s a new Ultraman Blazar “live action” on Japanese TV from this past July…

Seriously. It’s called Ultraman Blazar. Honestly, I can’t make this stuff up… (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27560594/)

UA what?

July 28, 2023
MThomas

US Congress: We want the truth!

Former military pilots: UAP is real!

Me: Wtf is a “UAP”?

Dr Strangelove adaptation in the works

July 16, 2023
MThomas

Check out this screen rant page if you have no idea what I’m talking about…

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb…

“During the adaptation, Stanley ran into a wall: it was impossible to make a successful film about the end of mankind since nobody, himself included, would want to see it. The answer was satire…”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jul/15/stanley-kubrick-dr-strangelove-stage-adaptation-armando-iannucci

Dr. Strangelove itself was an adaptation of a novel. So I wonder how adapting an adaptation to the stage will work.

How many new lines will they allow? Peter Sellers basically ad libbed everything and Kubrick rewrote the script to match the ad libs.

Probably including this one:

(Btw I hadn’t realized the film won a Hugo Award…along with many other awards…which goes to show how little we actually need Hollywood studios to get great stories in the end…)

Synthetic human embryos – yeah, now *that’s* not controversial…

July 7, 2023
MThomas

The synthetic embryos – only days or weeks old – could help researchers study the earliest stages of human development and explain pregnancy loss. 

Nobody is currently suggesting growing them into a baby.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-65914934

Well, that’s a relief….

This is the first time that has been achieved using human material. Although, they are not truly “synthetic”, as the starting material was cells cultured from a traditional embryo in the laboratory.

Great, but…

She has already developed synthetic mouse embryos with evidence of a developing brain and beating heart.

Come on, BBC. I think you can see where this is going…

Meanwhile, scientists in China have implanted synthetic monkey embryos into female monkeys – although, all the pregnancies failed.

Yep. Straight to the monkey house.

Seriously, did scientists actually think this was not going to cause a whole lot of people to get upset all over again?

Natural embryo (top), synthetic embryo (bottom). They look pretty similar…

This may indeed be a good way to study infertility causes and how embryos develop, but even the possibility of creating an embryo from a stem cell should have set off warning bells. 14-day limit or not, somebody’s going to get really tempted to do something else with them…

I’m thinking up all sorts of SciFi stories from this…

And another post to which I forgot to add a title…

June 30, 2023
MThomas

In a few billion years, our aging Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core and begin to swell, eventually engulfing Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth itself. Known as the red giant phase, this is a normal step in a mid-sized star’s life cycle, when it swells to hundreds of times its usual size. There are plenty of red giants in the night sky, but astronomers have never caught one in the act of swallowing its planets — until now.

https://www.astronomy.com/science/star-seen-swallowing-its-planet-whole/

Pack your stuff, folks…

The photo is an artist’s depiction btw. The article describes how the astronomer discovered that star was eating its own planet.

Cancel your asteroid insurance – for the next thousand years

May 22, 2023
MThomas

Does anybody remember Spirographs?

Of all the asteroids they modeled, the one with the largest risk of impact was a kilometer-wide asteroid known as 1994 PC1. Over the next thousand years, the probability that 1994 PC1 will cross within the orbit of the Moon is a paltry 0.00151%, hardly worth worrying about.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/cancel-asteroid-insurance-earth-declared-150002866.html

Thanks to Glen Hill over at Engagin’ Science (formerly Scientia, which apparently was far too Latin- and science-esque for search engines to handle) for bringing this (not-so Earth-shattering) info to my attention.

Sorry, folks. Hollywood was once again wrong (sigh).

😂

The real danger of unregulated AI

February 27, 2023
MThomas

“I’m less frightened by a Sydney that’s playing into my desire to cosplay a sci-fi story than a Bing that has access to reams of my personal data and is coolly trying to manipulate me on behalf of whichever advertiser has paid the parent company the most money.

“Nor is it just advertising worth worrying about. What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,” Gary Marcus, the A.I. researcher and critic, told me. “I think that’s already been a problem for society over the last, let’s say, decade. And I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opinion/microsoft-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence.html

What happens when two neutron stars collide? “A perfect explosion”

February 25, 2023
MThomas

“I was quite surprised by how simple the story hiding behind the curtain of complexity in the data,” Sneppen continued. “You have this immensely complex physics, unimaginable dense stars and the birth of a black hole — and then it all reduces to this beautiful sphere.”

The neutron stars that crashed into each other are “dense and compact,” Sneppen said. They only measured around 20 km in diameter — about 12 miles — but they are “heavier than the sun,” he said. “A teaspoon of neutron star matter weighs more than Mount Everest.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/02/16/kilonova-perfect-explosion-black-hole/

First reported in 2017, a new study in Nature gives more details about a “kilo nova” only detected by using gravitational waves. The collision led to the formation of a black hole.

Fortunately, this sort of cosmic event doesn’t occur too often. But..

…if a kilonova were to occur in the Milky Way — less than 30,000 light- years away — it would be the brightest star in the night sky, making it discoverable to the human eye…

Still, it’d be safer for Earth if it never happened…

Shooting star over the English Channel

February 15, 2023
MThomas

Courtesy of @dlxinorbit – via @Marco_Langbroek

The agency earlier said the object was expected to “safely strike” the earth’s atmosphere near to the French city of Rouen.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-64621721

“Near to”? OK.

Anyway, “SAR2667” provided some cross-cultural entertainment for people living in England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Lots of photos and videos online.

Interesting note from ESA: they were able to detect it and notify everyone exactly where and when it would disintegrate.

Since there are more than 30,000 of these things that orbit the Sun relatively close to Earth’s orbit, it’s a good thing we’re getting better at detecting them. Maybe we’d better up the ante on deflecting them

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