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TOPIC: chatgpt

In The News

“Reckless” Russia In Drone Crash, Pakistan’s Khan Protests, Introducing GPT-4

👋 Demat !*

Welcome to Wednesday, where a Russian fighter jet collides with U.S. drone over the Black Sea, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan resists arrest, and there’s already a new ChatGPT to talk to. Meanwhile, Roman Kravets and Roman Romanyuk for Ukrainian news website Ukrainska Pravda look back on Putin’s original plans to take over Ukraine, and what foiled them.

[*Breton, France]

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Cool New Tool Or Flat-Out Theft? Artists Split Over AI Revolution

Like photography, new forms of artistic expression arise in every age. Now, new artificial intelligence is making it possible to create incredible images in an instant — but it opens up an ethical and philosophical debate.

ROME — In 2017, when Google launched Deep Dream, an artificial intelligence image generator seemingly obsessed with psychedelic dogs, the internet's immediate reaction was curiosity and amusement.

But some people also wondered what would happen as the technology improved. Even from those naïve drawings of dogs, it was clear that it wouldn't take long for more capable neural networks to be developed, powerful enough to draw whatever a user asked.

That time is now. Last summer, as beta versions of AI programs Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney (for now, the most effective of the networks), social media was filled with strange drawings. The style was still a bit grainy or dreamy, but immediately recognizable as something novel and significant. This was how the world became familiar with text-to-image software, which can create images based on written or dictated instructions.

At first, the reaction as these programs improved was playful. Illustrators got to know the new tool, as well as writers, including a comic strip written by an author and drawn by Midjourney.

But how do we know that Midjourney and other programs like it are just tools? Francesco D’Isa, artist and philosopher is editor of L’Indiscreto, the first magazine to publish images and stories made with Midjourney. D'Isa is convinced the technology can be useful for art.

Even before debates and controversies erupted around Midjourney and other AI image generators, D’Isa wrote that the programs were just tools, comparable to photography. The first cameras were met with amazement (if not dismay) at the rapidity with which the new medium could produce images. Even then, people feared the new technology would spell the end of painting and illustration. People complained about how easy cameras were to use — something where all "you only had to press a button” could never be art. We know how that turned out.

Still, there are a few obvious differences between photography and programs like Midjourney.

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What Happens When A Ukrainian Asks ChatGPT About Crimea

The public version of the Artificial Intelligence-driven chatbot is not yet fully plugged into the real-time internet. But there was an enlightening conversation going back to 2014, when the conflict in Ukraine actually started. ChatGPT’s hedging responses may help explain why the world wasn’t prepared for Putin’s invasion a year ago.

After a year of talking (arguing, pleading, crying) with all sorts of humans about the war between Russia and Ukraine, the time came to have the conversation with ChatGPT.

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The past 365 days, like other Ukrainians, have been consumed by a war that seems drudged up from the 19th century. But I have long been interested in the potential of Artificial Intelligence and the machine revolution, I believe in the three laws of robotics, and have grown up on the new-wave of American science fiction.

Still, I walked into my first contact with ChatGPT carefully. I knew the machine would not have responses about the past year since it is trained on content only until 2021. But I also suspected that its post-2014 view of the situation in Ukraine — following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its war in Donbas — might shed some light on how we got here.

I also knew that the machine’s responses would be strung together sentences and ideas from humans — and as I said, I’ve had my fair share of arguments with them about Ukraine.

Rather than slowly wade into the subject, I started the conversation with a direct question — and yes, all of my questions are those of a Ukrainian human.

The following is our full, lightly edited “chat”:

Let us begin, who owns Crimea?

The ownership of Crimea is a politically contentious issue, it has been claimed at various times in history by different groups, including the Crimean Tatars, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Ukraine.

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Hey ChatGPT, Are You A Google Killer? That's The Wrong Prompt People

Reports that the new AI natural-language chatbot is a threat to Google's search business fails to see that the two machines serve very different functions.

Since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the world last November, people have wasted little time finding imaginative uses for the eerily human-like chatbot. They have used it to generate code, create Dungeons & Dragons adventures and converse on a seemingly infinite array of topics.

Now some in Silicon Valley are speculating that the masses might come to adopt the ChatGPT-style bots as an alternative to traditional internet searches.

Microsoft, which made an early $1 billion investment in OpenAI, plans to release an implementation of its Bing search engine that incorporates ChatGPT before the end of March. According to a recent article in The New York Times, Google has declared “code red” over fears ChatGPT could pose a significant threat to its $149-billion-dollar-a-year search business.

Could ChatGPT really be on the verge of disrupting the global search engine industry?

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