“Artificial Intelligence” and cognate topics
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Washington & Lee introduces required 1-credit course on “AI for Legal Practice”
The law school’s announcement.
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Pausing AI development is feasible…
…says a new academic study from an AI governance project organized by Berkeley philosopher Wesley Holliday and statistician Will Fithian, working with an interdisciplinary team that also includes philosopher Thomas Icard (Stanford) and political theorist Gregory Conti (Princeton), among others. Let us hope they’re right!
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The huge demand for “philosophy and AI” faculty (UPDATED)
On Twitter, philosopher Brandon Warmke noted that just in the last 48 hours, six jobs were posted seeking philosophers with AI-related interests. As I wrote on Twitter, this seems to me “a foolish waste of philosophy lines, no doubt partly a result of administrators hopping on the bandwagon and pressuring departments to find warm bodies.”…
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Open AI’s math proofs
Reader Blake Myers calls to my attention this story about the mathematical proofs released by OpenAI. Dr. Myers kindly compiled what seemed to him the most interesting or important results here. The total collection of papers is here. Readers knowledgeable about math are welcome to comment on these, how they will affect mathematics, etc.
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Another piece on AI notices that it will destroy capitalism itself
Here; the key bit: The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that…
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Do as I say, not as I do
Via Moti Gorin: “At Dartmouth, Dr. Schnell’s A.I. use in public writing came up in an investigation in August by the news site Semafor about A.I.-created writing appearing in the opinion pages of major publications. That investigation said an Aug. 9 commentary by Dr. Schnell [the Dartmouth Provost] in The Washington Post was written by…
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An experience with feedback from an LLM
A colleague elsewhere, who subscribes to Astra, Open AI’s high end LLM model (at least $100/month), told me that he has found it useful for giving feedback on early drafts–he compares it to the feedback one gets from a good first-year graduate student. Not doing any historical work, he was curious how it would perform…
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Claude writes a law review article…
…with a prompt and a blog post from Will Baude.
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A survey of academics about their AI use…
…from Oxford University Press. Does this ring true to readers based on their experiences?
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Editors (!) of higher education journal publish editorial about academic freedom…
…with multiple fake references! I trust these editors will soon be ex-editors. (Thanks to Moti Gorin for the pointer.)
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AIs are not conscious…
…argues Microsoft’s head of AI; an excerpt: AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans…. There is no evidence to suggest that AI is conscious today,…
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California AI company seeks “research scientist” knowledgeable about philosophy to work on “alignment” issues
Salary range is $230,000 to over $900,000, depending on experience. Seriously. (Thanks to James Mahon for the pointer.)
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Here’s an amusing way to respond to scam invitations
Philosopher Jason Brennan kindly gave permission to share his response: Dear Cara, Thank you so much for reaching out. I’d ordinarily be delighted to do the interview, but unfortunately the timing may be difficult. I’m leaving shortly for Antarctica, where I’ll be spending the next six years studying whether penguins have a sufficiently robust conception…
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AI takes down “effective [sic] altruism” (and longtermism)
Produced, according to the author, with the help of advancedd LLMs, “Sol” and “Astra”: be mediscover effective altruismapparently normal charity is inefficientwhy donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thingfair enoughbuy mosquito netssave livesnumbers look goodfeel powerful couple years latersomeone asks an innocent questionwhy only count people alive todayhuhfuture people…
All about class.