May your writing week be better than Kafka's.

New paper provides a systematic assessment of whether/how LLMs can improve the process of research. TLDR: it's mediocre at most stuff *except* identifying possible ethical issues... interesting finding. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Coding is the new humanities. lol.

At the height of One Million Checkboxes's popularity I thought I'd been hacked. A few hours later I was tearing up, extraordinarily proud of some brilliant teens. A thread about my favorite story from running OMCB....

"As of eight months ago, a representative survey in the US found that 82% of undergraduates and 72% of K12 students had used AI for school. That is extraordinarily rapid adoption." open.substack.com/pub/oneusefult…

"A study of thousands of students at Rutgers found that when they did their homework in 2008, it improved test grades for 86% of them (see, homework really does help!), but homework only helped 45% of students in 2017. Why? The rise of the Internet." open.substack.com/pub/oneusefult…

It is continually amusing that computer science papers on prompt engineering, drawing on underlying principles of LLM architecture, just keep coming up with the same strategies that teachers already use to help students Adding “Read the question again “ often boosts LLM accuracy

If you haven't yet read Ted Chiang's essay on generative AI and art, get on it. For my money, it's one of the best things written on AI, period—it gets to the heart of what's so dismaying about AI in a single haunting sentence: "It reduces the amount of intention in the world."

Really excellent special Issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science on Algorithms in our Lives. Includes our article (Yiu et al.) on Large AI Models as cultural technologies and why they can't do what kids do. journals.sagepub.com/toc/ppsa/19/5

Are language models racist? Though their overt answers may not be, a @nature paper shows that multiple LLMs are prejudiced against African American English speakers, and that this bias can't easily be removed. Congrats Valentin Hofmann ria / pratyusha ria kalluri Dan Jurafsky nature.com/articles/s4158…

We get a lot of questions about the nature of AI's environmental impacts... So my amazing colleagues MMitchell and Bruna Trevelin wrote a handy primer to explain them! huggingface.co/blog/sasha/ai-… Check it out to learn more about the water, energy and natural resources used to

🚨 New paper in Nature Communications 🚨 We created deepfakes of the current & former President Biden giving speeches (w/ voices from voice actors & ElevenLabs) to study what drives how well people can tell fake speeches from real ones Time to update the "Seeing is Believing" narrative 👇

BREAKING: The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the long-running, closely watched copyright case over the scanning and lending of print library books. Full story to follow.

There can be only one.

A master class in what literary culture used to be like. youtube.com/watch?v=pjokr7…

My article "What Is This Thing Called the Ethics of AI and What Calls for It?", from David J. Gunkel's (ed.) Handbook on the Ethics of AI Elgar Publishing, is available in open access here: elgaronline.com/edcollchap/boo… #aiethics

Interesting new book on the history of vector analysis, reviewed by Ernest Davis siam.org/publications/s…

Big paper I have been waiting for: what are the real impacts of AI on programmer productivity? It is a randomized controlled trial using the older, less-powerful GPT-3.5 powered Github Copilot for 4,867 coders in Fortune 100 firms. It finds a 26.08% increase in completed tasks.

I'm excited to announce Reflection 70B, the world’s top open-source model. Trained using Reflection-Tuning, a technique developed to enable LLMs to fix their own mistakes. 405B coming next week - we expect it to be the best model in the world. Built w/ Glaive AI. Read on ⬇️:

theatlantic.com/books/archive/…