Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

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Google’s New AI Tools for Gmail, Docs Can Write Drafts for You – CNET

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The search giant is testing generative writing and other AI features for its Workspace apps.

By Nina Raemont, March 14, 2023 8:12 a.m. PT

James Martin/CNET

Google plans to bring new AI-powered tools to its suite of Workspace apps. In a blog post on Tuesday, the search giant said it’s starting by testing generative AI writing features in Gmail and Docs that can help people get started on the writing process.

“Simply type a topic you’d like to write about, and a draft will instantly be generated for you,” reads Google’s post. “With your collaborative AI partner you can continue to refine and edit, getting more suggestions as needed.”

The tool, Google suggests, can be used to help create things like customized job descriptions or invitations for a kid’s birthday party. The company is also exploring ways to incorporate AI tools into Slides, Sheets, Meet and Chat.

Source: Google’s New AI Tools for Gmail, Docs Can Write Drafts for You – CNET

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The socially savvy AIs that seem to possess theory of mind | New Scientist

With the recent news that the ChatGPT AI can pass a theory of mind test, how far away are we from an artificial intelligence that fully understands the goals and beliefs of others?

By Edd Gent, 14 February 2023 , updated 22 February 2023


Hollie Fuller

SUPERHUMAN artificial intelligence is already among us. Well, sort of.

When it comes to playing games like chess and Go, or solving difficult scientific challenges like predicting protein structures, computers are well ahead of us.

But we have one superpower they aren’t even close to mastering: mind reading.

Humans have an uncanny ability to deduce the goals, desires and beliefs of others, a crucial skill that means we can anticipate other people’s actions and the consequences of our own. Reading minds comes so easily to us, though, that we often don’t think to spell out what we want.

If AIs are to become truly useful in everyday life – to collaborate effectively with us or, in the case of self-driving cars, to understand that a child might run into the road after a bouncing ball – they need to establish similar intuitive abilities.

Source: The socially savvy AIs that seem to possess theory of mind | New Scientist

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FEATURE – Libraries in the Age of Artificial Intelligence | Information Today, Inc.

by Ben Johnson, February 13, 2023

Ben Johnson (bjohnson@councilbluffslibrary.org) is the adult services manager at the Council Bluffs Public Library in Iowa.

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Screenshot of article online…

You can ask Google, Alexa, Cortana, Watson, or Siri—but will you be able to ask your local library? A century or so ago, electricity was a new, quasi-magical thing—a novelty with few applications. Back then, nobody could have predicted that it would give rise to telephones, production lines, and microchips. And yet, electricity transformed every industry, including agriculture, healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. As a foundational springboard for so many new innovations, that novelty was the most important engineering achievement of the 20th century.

Now, in the 21st century, a new quasi-magical thing has come into our lives: artificial intelligence (AI). And just as it was in the early days of the electronic revolution, we are only beginning to grasp how completely this new technology will transform our daily lives. Nearly all of today’s emerging technologies are built on the foundation of increasingly sophisticated machine learning. Every major technology company is betting on machine learning, hoping to be a player in the coming revolution by developing proprietary machine intelligences to perform tasks that used to require human intelligence.

–from article

Today, our interactions with AI are mostly novel (“Siri, why did the chicken cross the road?”)—and the results crude—but so were the first lightbulbs and photographs.

Source: FEATURE – Libraries in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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Femme fatale: The images that reveal male fears – BBC Culture

Three new exhibitions explore how the femme fatale in art reflects evolving anxieties, writes Cath Pound.

By Cath Pound, 31st January 2023

(Image credit: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Photo: Elke Walford)

The figure of the femme fatale is one of the defining literary and artistic motifs of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Artists were drawn to historical archetypes of female seduction such as Cleopatra or Lucretia Borgia, characters from Old Testament stories including Salome, Judith and Delilah, or mythical figures such as Circe, Helen of Troy and Medea.

Others were conjured from their male author’s imagination – Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Émile Zola’s Nana and Frank Wedekind’s Lulu being some of the most notable.

Her emergence is frequently seen as a response to anxieties arising from profound social change as women pushed for greater economic, political and educational rights, challenging the established patriarchal order.

Middle-class women who sought education were, according to the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, likely to damage their reproductive organs, turning them into monstrosities who threatened the survival of the human race. Fear of contagious diseases such as syphilis was another factor, with working-class prostitutes being seen as contemporary femmes fatales who could lure their clients to their doom.

Continue reading Femme fatale: The images that reveal male fears – BBC Culture →
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Artificial Intelligence and the Research Paper: A Librarian’s Perspective – News | SMU Libraries

By: Jonathan McMichael, Undergraduate Success Librarian
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AI writing can mimic style, but it cannot mimic substance yet. The release of a powerful, free and easy-to-use large language model platform, Open AI’s ChatGPT, raises interesting questions about the future of writing in higher education.

As the Undergraduate Success Librarian, I have a unique perspective on generative AI, like ChatGPT, that I want to share along with some advice for instructors and students on adapting to AI’s presence in higher education.

What is ChatGPT?

How does it work? ChatGPT is an interface that allows you to interact with artificial intelligence through text inputs and responses. The AI on the other side of the interface is a language model called GPT-3. It produces human-like text by parsing and analyzing the massive corpus of text information (large language) it has been trained on to predict what is likely to come next in a string of words. This makes GPT-3 a type of Generative AI because it uses machine learning to generate new content based on a given set of input data. So, when you give ChatGPT a prompt like “describe losing your sock in the dryer in the style of the declaration of independence” it (in simplified terms) identifies relevant data within its large language dataset, notices patterns within that dataset and then generates a set of text that seems most like the things it identified.*

Editor’s Note: Source was Library Link of the Day
http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/  (archive, rss, subscribe options)

Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Research Paper: A Librarian’s Perspective – News

Film & Movies, Memories & History, Web & Technology

Photos of Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie and others come alive (creepily), thanks to AI | Live Science

Amelia Earhart in 1937, standing under the nose of her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra monoplane. (Image credit: My Heritage)
Amelia Earhart in 1937, standing under the nose of her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra monoplane. (Image credit: My Heritage)

By Mindy Weisberger – Senior Writer 21 hours ago

In AI-generated animations, faces that were once frozen in time blink, turn their heads and even smile.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can now transform photos of people into short, highly realistic animations, much like the moving pictures in the newspapers and posters of Harry Potter’s magical world. 

In these AI-animated clips, faces that were once frozen in time blink, turn their heads and even smile, their movements wavering between astonishingly lifelike and deeply unsettling (and yes, downright creepy).

Source: Photos of Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie and others come alive (creepily), thanks to AI | Live Science