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Fake intelligence not intelligent

Similar to the junk science being peddled at present to torture parents blame autism on Tylenol, as in it would be a terrible and cruel metaphor except that it’s actually happening.

Transpose that idiocy (generous interpretation) onto a much larger scale and you have the new dance craze known as AI. Well, the media is dancing, nonstop.

You can follow the money, and it just doesn’t make sense.

Check out the imagery, actually do not do that. It started as slop and it’s getting worse.

But science!, one might say. Surely, there are infinite uses! And there may be some for data set analyses on a massive scale – finding exoplanets and folding proteins. And yet, if we return to the most commonly propagated use case and raisin debt of the whole of the monstrous waste of natural resources as well as cash, it’s fake, broken turtles all the way down:

Gu and his team asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT, running on the GPT-4o model, questions based on information from 21 retracted papers on medical imaging. The chatbot’s answers referenced retracted papers in five cases but advised caution in only three. While it cited non-retracted papers for other questions, the authors note it may not have recognized the retraction status of the articles. In a study from August, a different group of researchers used ChatGPT-4o mini to evaluate the quality of 217 retracted and low-quality papers from different scientific fields; they found that none of the chatbot’s responses mentioned retractions or other concerns. (No similar studies have been released on GPT-5, which came out this August.)

The public uses AI chatbots to ask for medical advice and diagnose health conditions. Students and scientists increasingly use science-focused AI toolsto review existing scientific literature and summarize papers. That kind of usage is likely to increase. The US National Science Foundation, for instance, invested $75 million in building AI models for science research this August.

“If [a tool is] facing the general public, then using retraction as a kind of quality indicator is very important,” says Yuanxi Fu, an information science researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There’s “kind of an agreement that retracted papers have been struck off the record of science,” she says, “and the people who are outside of science—they should be warned that these are retracted papers.” OpenAI did not provide a response to a request for comment about the paper results.

Quality indicators. Inventing a need for things the new thing said would no longer be necessary. Truly the wave of the future.

Be skeptical. Don’t abandon the ability to discern just yet.

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Electronic Collectivism

I haven’t finished this piece yet by Sven Birkerts in the LA Review of Books, The Room and the Elephant, but it’s a situation you can relate to. via A&LDaily.

Every so often something will break through the stimulus shield I hold up whenever I go online, which I do far too often these days, we all do, and for various reasons, one being, I’m sure, that the existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we feel only the medium can allay — even though it cannot, never has. But it is an attribute of the Internet to activate in me, and maybe in all its users, a persistent sense of deferred expectancy, as if that thing that I might be looking for, that I couldn’t name but would know if I saw, were at every moment a finger tap away. That is the root of the addiction right there — and it is an addiction, sure, if only a lower-case one. To bear all this, therefore, to proof myself against the unstanchable flow of unnecessary information and peripheral sensation, I make use of this shield, which is really just an attention-averting reflex, a way of filtering almost everything away, leaving just the barest bones of whatever I happen to be looking at, and these only in case some tell-tale name or expression requires me to peer a bit more closely.

I practice this defensive, exclusionary scanning not only with the incidental flotsam I encounter — the inescapable digests of happenings in the world, celebrity divorces, killer storms, and so on — but also, more and more, with texts about subjects that ostensibly concern me. A recent case in point — I have it handy now because I finally printed it out — is an article I found online at The Awl called “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert” by Maria Bustillos (posted on May 17, 2011). It came to me via several clicks at one of the so-called “aggregate” sites I sometimes visit to keep myself “informed.” I scan a great many articles in the course of my daily tours, but I am not avid. More often I scroll my eyes down the screen with a preemptive weariness — which is an angry and defensive posture, I agree — as if nothing truly worthy could ever be found online (I know this is not true), as if I will have conceded something to the opposition if I were to fully engage the Internet and profit from the engagement.

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Crushing Necessity

Okay… it’s Friday. Time for your medicine, all you busy people.

This is from that studied misanthrope, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, somewhere about page 170. Translation by Ralph Mannheim (New York: New Directions, 1983)

What horrified me most was all of that Elevated Railway. On the other side of the court, which was more like a well shaft, the wall began to light up, first one, then two rooms, then dozens. I could see what was going on in some of them. Couples going to bed. These Americans seemed as worn out as our own people after their vertical hours. The women had very full, very pale thighs, at least the ones I was able to get a good look at. Before going to bed, most of the men shaved without taking the cigars out of their mouths.

In bed they first took off their glasses, then put their false teeth in a glass of water, which they left in evidence. Same as in the street, the sexes didn’t seem to talk to each other. They impressed me as fat, docile animals, used to being bored. In all, I only saw two couples engaging, with the light on, in the kind of thing I’d expected, and not at all violently. The other women ate chocolates in bed, while waiting for their husbands to finish shaving. And then they all put their lights out.

There’s something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t even try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.

I’d seen too many puzzling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I’d better go out, I said to myself, I’d better go out again. Maybe I’ll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how much I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn’t snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you’re really in despair.

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.



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Too Things

1. This stuff is easy to miss: China learns at the knee(s) of the master… or do they?

Thanks to the Dandong plant and hundreds others like it, China is in the midst of unprecedented economic growth—and an unprecedented surge in the use of energy, primarily from burning coal. Coal is the fuel of China and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. As a result, China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, along with all the other noxious by-products of coal burning. At the same time, the Chinese government has committed to reducing its CO2 emissions per economic unit by at least 40 percent by 2020. Tasked with ensuring that the nation delivers on that goal is the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the government agency that essentially sets Chinese energy and industrial policy.

“In Manhattan, lights are lit 24 hours and China will never do that,” says NDRC vice chairman Zhang Guobao via a translator, although the lights of this border town abutting North Korea blaze well into the night, illuminating businesses that tout their names in both Chinese and Korean characters. “China can never learn from the United States in terms of lifestyle. Per capita energy consumption is five times that of China and suppose, one day, that we learn from the U.S.A.: Can you imagine what the world will be?”

And then this talk, by Leslie Hazleton on reading the Qur’an.