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TOPIC: chatgpt

Society

How Will AI Change The Future Of Higher Education?

With technological advances happening every day, the future of universities lies in the conversations we have about human interaction, technology and ethics.

MADRID — A few years ago, a Spanish university made changes to its student residencies. The dining hall was removed and, instead, mini-kitchens were installed in the students’ bathrooms. Each student was encouraged to study in their bedroom or the university library. The residence rented out equipment such as irons, dryers, video game consoles and other small digital or electronic devices.

But here's the latest innovation: human workers would be removed from the entire loaning process, to be replaced by machines. This would allow for the university to reduce the overall number of staff members. This automation has led to students knowing one another and the residence staff less and less, but satisfaction surveys show that students value experiences that make them feel ‘at home’.

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Russian General Dissent, Kenya Protests, Golden Roots Retrieval

👋 Haia!*

Welcome to Thursday, where a Russian general is dismissed after speaking out, Kenyan protests kill at least six and the Scottish Highlands welcome some old best friends. Meanwhile, independent Russian-language outlet Proekt media reports on the chilling findings from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s house in St. Petersburg after it was raided by Russian police.

[*Welsh]

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It's Not That AI Will Get Too Smart — It's That It May Make Us Too Stupid

AI is so far unlikely to trigger a global nuclear catastrophe, but it might gradually undermine humans' capacity for critical and creative thinking as some decision-making and even writing tasks may increasingly be delegated to artificial intelligence.

The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe.

Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The statement was signed by many key players in the field, including the leaders of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, as well as two of the so-called “godfathers” of AI: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.

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The European Union v. AI — Good Luck On That!

The European Commission has asked digital platforms to create an "Artificial Intelligence label" to alert users of AI-generated texts, photos or videos. But will it be able to stop the tsunami of misinformation?

-Analysis-

PARIS — How can we continue to trust a text, an image, or a video in the age of artificial intelligence? The question of trust in information has been around for a long time, as we know, but the emergence of powerful tools such as Chat-GPT for text, or Midjourney for photos, and many others, transforms the question into a potential nightmare.

The European Union's executive body, the European Commission, wasted no time in raising the question of how to regulate these technologies, which risk transforming the information space into a jungle. Yesterday, even before the major European law that is being prepared – the AI Law – the Commission took the lead.

It calls on digital platforms to define an AI label that will enable users to know whether a text, photo or video has been generated, in whole or in part, by artificial intelligence. The aim is to limit the explosion of misinformation that could result from these new, unregulated tools.

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Future
Pierre Haski

Where Altman Meets Macron: The Quest For AI Alignment, Between Private And Public

The inventor of ChatGPT is in Europe to try to force leaders on the Continent to face hard questions about what artificial intelligence is bringing to our world, whether they like it or not.

-Analysis-

PARIS — Six months ago, Sam Altman’s name was only known to a small circle of technophiles. Earlier this week, when he came to France, he was received by President Emmanuel Macron and the Minister of Economy, and he is back in Paris on Friday to make other connections. On his Twitter account, he described his trip as a "World Tour," like a pop star.

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the U.S. company that created ChatGPT, the natural language artificial intelligence tool that has literally shaken the world. With 200 million users worldwide in just six months, ChatGPT has broken all sorts of records for the speed of technology adoption.

The world of Tech is prone to trends, and not all of them last. However, to quote Gilles Babinet, co-president of the National Digital Council in France, who has recently published an essay on the history of the internet titled Comment les hippies, Dieu et la science ont inventé Internet("How the Internet Was Invented by Hippies, God and Science"), we are currently facing an "anthropological break."

In other words, a qualitative leap that will impact all human activities, and even the political organization of our societies — with both positive and negative results.

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Sources
Ginevra Falciani, Sophie Jacquier, Inès Mermat and Anne-Sophie Goninet

Sudan Evacuation, Kenya Cult Mass Grave, Russia’s ChatGPT

👋 Häj ą̊ dig!*

Welcome to Monday, where countries are trying to evacuate their diplomats and citizens from Sudan as violence continues into a second week, a grisly scene is revealed in Kenya of an apparent mass suicide of a Christian cult, and Gigabot, Russia’s answer to ChatGPT, is revealed. Meanwhile, Yury Panchenko and Nadia Koval in Ukrainian online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda unpack what's driving Poland's new hard line on Russia.

[*Elfdalian, Sweden]

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Future
Xavier Pavie

AI Can't Think Like Us, But Is Forcing Us To Reset How We Think

GPT-4 and other artificial intelligence systems can pass complicated exams, but this says more about how we conduct tests. Artificial intelligence shouldn't lead us to despair — instead it should spur us to rethink our learning and education systems.

-Analysis-

PARIS — Everyone is panicking about the success of artificial intelligence chatbot GPT-4 in passing the New York Bar exam. However, the real concern should be about the quality of the exam. If, indeed, the challenge is to articulate an answer to a question based on a sum of knowledge to be learned, the machine is superior to the human mind — that's nothing new.

But if the app is asked to solve a legal problem regarding a complex concept — what makes things right or wrong, for instance — the machine remains far behind what a human brain is capable of.

If you ask GPT-4 "What is good?," the machine obviously brings out a number of elements linked to the notion of “good,” according to the way it has been defined in the history of philosophy.

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Future
Pierre Haski

China's Dilemma In Race For AI Dominance: Speed v. Control

The remarkable power of ChatGPT on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence took Beijing by surprise. As China rolls out its own version, it remains to be seen how the country will balance the need for control with technological development and innovation

-Analysis-

PARIS — It was Vladimir Putin who uttered this alarming sentence one day in 2017: "The country that becomes the leader in the field of artificial intelligence will dominate the world."

One thing is certain, it won't be Russia, because instead of pursuing this path, it has engaged in an old-fashioned war in the Ukrainian trenches: it got lost along the way.

China, on the other hand, understood the message from its long time friend and ally Putin. In 2015, Beijing placed artificial intelligence (AI) in its "China 2025" plan, which set out the technologies in which the country aspired to become a world leader.

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THE CONVERSATION
Hany Farid

AI And Authenticity: Revenge Of The Watermark

Shortly after rumors leaked of former President Donald Trump’s impending indictment, images purporting to show his arrest appeared online. These images looked like news photos, but they were fake. They were created by a generative artificial intelligence system.

Shortly after rumors leaked of former President Donald Trump’s impending indictment, images purporting to show his arrest appeared online. These images looked like news photos, but they were fake. They were created by a generative artificial intelligence system.

Generative AI, in the form of image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and text generators like Bard, ChatGPT, Chinchilla and LLaMA, has exploded in the public sphere. By combining clever machine-learning algorithms with billions of pieces of human-generated content, these systems can do anything from create an eerily realistic image from a caption, synthesize a speech in President Joe Biden’s voice, replace one person’s likeness with another in a video, or write a coherent 800-word op-ed from a title prompt.

Even in these early days, generative AI is capable of creating highly realistic content. My colleague Sophie Nightingale and I found that the average person is unable to reliably distinguish an image of a real person from an AI-generated person. Although audio and video have not yet fully passed through the uncanny valley – images or models of people that are unsettling because they are close to but not quite realistic – they are likely to soon. When this happens, and it is all but guaranteed to, it will become increasingly easier to distort reality.

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In The News
Emma Albright, Inès Mermat, Ginevra Falciani and Anne-Sophie Goninet

Pro-Kremlin Blogger Killed, Trump Hearing Nears, Paris v. E-scooters

👋 Molo!*

Welcome to Monday, where Ukraine says its army is still defending Bakhmut despite Russia’s claim to have captured the city, former U.S. President Donald Trump is bracing for his scheduled court hearing tomorrow and Parisians say no to self-service scooters. Meanwhile, Portuguese news website Mensagem looks at the benefits of the forests planted two years ago across urban spaces in Lisbon.

[*Xhosa - South Africa]

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Future
Edouard Tétreau

The AI Arms Race Has Begun: Why We Need A NATO For Artificial Intelligence

Like with the atomic bomb, artificial intelligence will divide the world into the haves and the have-nots, French columnist Édouard Tétreau writes. To win the AI arms race, France and its allies need a new transatlantic partnership.

-Analysis-

PARIS — The artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT and its future competitors have started an epistemological and anthropological revolution. This super-powerful tool, a "metalanguage" that feeds on all the human knowledge available online, will disrupt every part of our lives.

We will think and make decisions differently with ChatGPT. We will perform better at work and be better educated, better fed and better supervised, collectively and individually. Whether in manufacturing, intellectual production or essential services like medicine — nothing will escape the power of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy discussion of ChatGPT signed by academic Daniel Huttenlocher, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, former boss of Google.

The authors ask the right, philosophical and essential question: that of trust. ChatGPT's answers have the appearance of intellectual and moral authority (drawing on all the world's online knowledge), but the answer is produced in a black box of machine-to-machine communications, which no one can enter.

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Future
Pierre Haski

Pausing AI Research: Are Humans Intelligent Enough To Do The Right Thing?

Everyone from Elon Musk to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to top Artificial Intelligence researchers have signed a public petition calling on a six-month moratorium on AI research. The ultimate decision will be left in the hands of humans, who are smart, but also vain and greedy.

-Analysis-

PARIS — A request for a six-month moratorium on artificial intelligence research, shared Wednesday by the Future of Life foundation, garnered over 1,000 signatures within hours from leading engineers and entrepreneurs in American technology. Notable signatories include Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX; Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple; and the visionary author Yuval Noah Harari.

Their request is simple: they're calling for a six-month moratorium on any new research into AI tools that goes beyond what has already been accomplished by conversational software such as GPT-4, which has attracted significant attention.

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