Days of Future Past/revXX

Days of Future Past/rev XX

This pix of the rusting Bethlehem steel plant shows a concrete past unable to be denied until said material grinds into dust, something along the lines of Osymandius ...

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away." 

Percy Bysshe Shelly 

When factored into the equation of AI apps like ChatGBT, the notion of a past penned by man becomes questionable as the allure of using tech as powerful as this equates to a Faustian bargain for the ages. 

 

Frontispiece to a 1620 printing of Doctor Faustus showing Faustus conjuring Mephistophilis.
The spelling "Histoy" is agreed to be a typographical error.[1]

It has been clear for several years that artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining the ability to generate fluent language, churning out sentences that are increasingly hard to distinguish from text written by people. Last year, Nature reported that some scientists were already using chatbots as research assistants — to help organize their thinking, generate feedback on their work, assist with writing code and summarize research literature (Nature 611, 192–193; 2022).

But the release of the AI chatbot ChatGPT in November has brought the capabilities of such tools, known as large language models (LLMs), to a mass audience. Its developers, OpenAI in San Francisco, California, have made the chatbot free to use and easily accessible for people who don’t have technical expertise. Millions are using it, and the result has been an explosion of fun and sometimes frightening writing experiments that have turbocharged the growing excitement and consternation about these tools.

Faust lives ...

The big worry in the research community is that students and scientists could deceitfully pass off LLM-written text as their own, or use LLMs in a simplistic fashion (such as to conduct an incomplete literature review) and produce work that is unreliable. Several preprints and published articles have already credited ChatGPT with formal authorship.

It's all about the money/rev L

The artificial intelligence research laboratory, OpenAI, has reportedly begun rolling out a premium version of its popular AI chatbot, "ChatGPT Professional."

The premium edition will offer additional features with less unpredictable availability, better response times, and priority access for a $42 monthly membership, according to a LinkedIn post on Saturday by Linas Beliūnas, a financial technology specialist. 

The end of history as we know it? One never knows do one? - Fat Waller