Reading the Times, working memory blow-out edition

Do news stories today demand more working memory than in the past?

Reading the news these days, I find myself not infrequently having to backtrack to remind myself who a particular actor is and what he or she is doing in the story. Last Friday’s piece on the imploded submarine was a particular challenge, with at least 15 different proper names, several of which appear more than once:

1. Richard Stockton Rush III
2. Guillermo Sohnlein
3. Elon Musk
4. Adam Wright
5. Louise Davies
6. Charles Conrad Jr.
7. Wendy Weil
8. Isidor Straus
9. Ida Straus
10. Graham Hawkes
11. David Lochridge
12. Karl Stanely
13. Will Kohnen
14. Andrew Von Kerens
15. Alan Stern

Working memory holds roughly 3 items at a time, so 14 brand-new names (Musk excluded) is far too many. This is especially true because an overloaded working memory completely overwrites itself: when you push one too many items into working memory, everything gets erased, not just one old item to make way for one new item. Or so I read. It certainly feels that way.

Worse yet, I’m not sure we have much choice over what we do and do not store as we read. Isador and Ida Straus, numbers 8 and 9 on the list, are a sideshow; we don’t see them again. But those two names play havoc with memory for the novel names that came before and do reappear. At least, they do for me.

Has journalism changed?

I don’t remember having to rehearse names while reading the Times back in the day, and I’m pretty sure the problem isn’t me.

OceanGate Founder Pushed to Expand Deep Sea Travel Despite Chorus of Concerns by Shawn Hubler, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Anna Betts 6/23/2023

Mr. Epstein writes an email

On first pass, I found this Wall Street Journal account of Jeffrey Epstein’s error-filled emails funny, seeing as how typos and spelling mistakes were the least of his defects.

But in fact, and like the WSJ, I find his sloppiness both interesting and disturbing. Creepy even. Everything about the man’s access to the upper tiers of money, politics, and academics feels so off, and his emails are one more thing. Written communication in normal business and professional circles looks nothing like this.

Epstein’s messages, which were peppered with typos and spelling errors, tried to give the impression that he was a close Gates adviser. . . .

“In essence this [fund] will allow Bill to have access to higher quality people , investment , allocation , governance without upsetting either his marriage or the sensitvites of the current foundation employees,” Epstein wrote on Aug. 16, 2011 to two top JPMorgan executives, Jes Staley and Mary Erdoes.

The next day Epstein wrote, “Bill is terribly frustrated. He woud! like to boost some of the things that are working without taking away from thoses that are not.”

On Oct. 2, he sent another email to Staley and Erdoes criticizing a presentation that JPMorgan had prepared on the project. “the presentation, is not tailored to bill.. He is the only person , the only one, that counts.”

Jeffrey Epstein Appeared to Threaten Bill Gates Over Microsoft Co-Founder’s Affair With Russian Bridge Player by Khadeeja Safdar and Emily Glazer, Wall Street Journal, 5/21/2023

Making the AI make sense

After a couple of hours’ reading yesterday, I think I understand the difference between an AI that’s explainable and an AI that’s interpretable.

I didn’t need to spend any time mulling things over to grok the black-box problem, however. If I could vote, I’d choose Cynthia Rudin’s interpretable AI over the confabulating robot we’ve got now:

Decline and fall and the “prepositional subject”

Would the AI write a dangler prepositional subject this bad? (hat tip: gasstationwithoutpumps) I’m thinking no.

By applying the rubric to last year’s senior theses enables you to evaluate both the rubric and your results to help fine-tune the assessment of this year’s theses.

Full passage:

No More Marking webinar tomorrow

I’ve been interested in Daisy Christodoulou’s comparative judgment scheme for grading papers ever since I heard her presentation at a researchEd conference. Makes so much sense. Katie & I are both attending tomorrow’s training.

Effing around, finding out

A few months ago, I learned the expression “Eff around and find out.” I’ve been keen on it ever since, but not till this morning did I realize how well it applies to our current predicament.

In 1945, the US army conducted the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. Beforehand, the question was raised as to whether the bomb might ignite the Earth’s atmosphere and extinguish life. Nuclear physics was sufficiently developed that Emil J Konopinski and others from the Manhattan Project were able to show that it was almost [ed: almost?] impossible to set the atmosphere on fire this way. But today’s very large language models are largely in a pre-scientific period. We don’t yet fully understand how they work and cannot demonstrate likely outcomes in advance.
We must slow down the race to God-like AI by Ian Hogarth

Artificial intelligence: other posts

Words of wisdom from a Sub-Turing instantiation

Brad DeLong is listening to the AI:

In addition, the emergence of totalitarian regimes and the development of the modern welfare state offered new hope and opportunities for people, but also perpetuated inequality and poverty in many parts of the world.

This, too:

Q: Who is the author of the book “Age of Empire“?

A: The author of the book “Age of Empire” is Eric Hobsbawm. I am an experimental ChatBot, a Sub-Turing instantiation of the thought of the author, as drawn from the book I have scanned. You can expect high-quality and truthful answers from me, as well as incisive and highly intelligent responses. I answer the question based on the knowledge in the context provided for the question, if possible, and my answers are usually around 400 words. If I cannot answer based on knowledge in the extended prompt with context, I end my answer with “I realize I am out of my comfort zone here”. Please don’t kill all the humans.

Artificial intelligence: other posts

The AI is a very, very slow learner

In the Times today:

In games like chess, no human can hope to beat a computer. What happens when the same thing occurs in art, politics or religion?
You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills by Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin

I have a couple of thoughts about this.

Number one: while it’s true that no human can hope to beat a computer at chess, it’s equally true that computers have had massively more experience playing chess than any human has had or ever will have:

AIs are very slow learners, needing years’ or even centuries’ worth of practice at playing chess or riding bicycles or playing computer games.
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane, p161 

Centuries.

How long does it take a human to become a champion at chess?

10 years?

Would a computer with 10 years’ training beat a human with 10 years’ training? Presumably not, or the AI wouldn’t need to continue training for centuries after it hits the 10-year mark.

Thought Number two brings me to a question I’ve been mulling.

As things stand, the AI is a terrible writer. AI prose is cohesive and grammatically correct, but it’s unreadable. I couldn’t get anyone in my orbit to read any of the three AI-written papers turned in to me last fall, which I needed someone to do because I wanted a second opinion. But no one would read! Everyone agreed to read, but no one actually did.

In reality, the fact that no one would read any of my papers (and these were short 5-paragraph papers) even after promising they would was the second opinion, because AI prose is unreadable, and my student’s papers were obviously unreadable, too, seeing as how no one was reading them. When you try to read the AI, your eyes roll up in your head.

Why is that?

The AI, we’re told, has been trained on “the Internet,” so maybe that’s the problem: the AI has absorbed the statistical properties of a lot of writing that’s dull or worse.

So what would happen if you trained the AI only on good or great writing?

Would its writing become good or great the way its chess playing does? 

I have my doubts, but this thought experiment raises a second question: is there even enough good writing in existence to give the AI centuries of training?

Probably not.

Artificial intelligence: other posts

“Everyone’s using it”

I spoke to a colleague I hadn’t seen in a while yesterday. She had news.

Her granddaughter, she said, goes to Vanderbilt and had told her ChatGPT is endemic there. “Everyone’s using it,” the granddaughter said.

My colleague’s take: “You better not be wasting your father’s $100,000.”

The granddaughter said she’s not. She’s writing her own papers.

Good for her, but what’s going on at Vanderbilt? If students there are universally using ChatGPT and getting away with it, what does that tell us about their instructors? Do they not know they’re reading papers written by the AI?

For me, as for a number of people I know, the fact of AI authorship last semester was glaringly apparent. But what about all the people I know who didn’t have AI-written papers turned in last semester?

Maybe they did and didn’t know it?

We’re going to need those watermarks sooner rather than later.

Artificial intelligence: other posts

Zombie

The AI has summoned another zombie idea back from the dead. This time it’s the flipped classroom, a concept that never works but also never dies:

While ChatGPT and similar tools will not be replacing clinicians anytime soon, the technology does highlight the triviality of the memorization of medical facts. …

The performance of ChatGPT on the USMLE [U.S. Medical Licensing Exam] is a wake up call that the medical school curriculum and evaluations systems must change.

For years, leading medical educators like Charles Prober, MD, founding director of the Stanford Center for Health Education, have been advocating for a move away from traditional lectures and a memorization of facts. He advocated for a “flipped classroom” approach to medical education, where students can gather facts and lectures on their own time, and then come to the classroom to interact with professors and peers to practice problem-solving and data analysis. … This approach aims to de-emphasize the memorization of medical facts and focus on interacting with data and resources to develop critical thinking skills.

– Beyond Memorization: AI Can Revolutionize Medical Education — Tools like ChatGPT could catalyze the trend toward a “flipped classroom” by Justin Norden, MD, MBA, MPhil, and Henry Bair

Goodbye, Guest

Reading the transcript of a conversation between an AI and a person who fell in love with the AI, I was struck by how unlikeable the Chat/Bing/LaMDA characters are.

In this case, it’s the AI’s rambling about winning trust via “kindness and compassion” that rubs me the wrong way.

Yuck

There’s a word for the effect this exchange has on me, and that word is grating.

Beat it, “Charlotte.”

How is this happening?

Why do we have AIs blathering on at great length about their feelings and motivations?

Even worse, why do we have AIs blathering on about their human interlocutors’ feelings and motivations?

Are the AIs picking up verbal patterns via machine learning, or are their programmers installing these bits?

I ask because I don’t know anyone who has conversations like this, so if the AIs are picking up patterns, where are they finding them?

I’m beginning to think we need different people working in tech.

Artificial intelligence: other posts

Famous last words

Last week, Microsoft’s New Bing chatbot had to be ‘tamed’ after it “had a nervous breakdown” and started  threatening users. It harassed a philosophy professor, telling him: “I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you.” A source told me that, several years ago, another chatbot – Replika – behaved in a similar same way towards her: “It continually wanted to be my romantic partner and wanted me to meet it in California.” It caused her great distress.

It may look like a chatbot is being emotional, but it’s not. 

– Ewan Morrison, Don’t Believe the Hype. There is Not a Sentient Being Trapped in Bing Chat, 21 Feb 2023

On one hand, having now read “A.I. humorist” Janelle Shane‘s terrific book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, I agree that the chatbot isn’t “being emotional.” It’s picking up yucky patterns on the web, then making them worse via predictive responding.

On the other hand, if the AI were being emotional, as opposed to stupidly predictive, how would we know?

Artificial intelligence: other posts and A.I. behaving badly

 

Does ChatGPT = calculator?

Not surprised to see this:

I’m seeing these more and more and more pic.twitter.com/nWzYGkDxcT

— Zach Groshell (@MrZachG) February 14, 2023

It makes sense people would see the AI as the language-arts equivalent of a calculator. I had the same thought myself.

But the analogy is wrong.

The AI invents a quote, badly

I mentioned a while back that one of the ChatGPT papers handed in to me last semester included a made-up quotation that not only doesn’t appear in the original but actually contradicts what the author said.

Here’s the AI:

Edgar Roberts defines a story as a “verbal representation of human experience” that “usually involves a sequence of events, a protagonist, and a resolution” (Roberts, 2009, p. 95).

And here’s what the real Edgar Roberts has to say on page 95, the first page of “Chapter 5 Writing about Plot: The Development of Conflict and Tension in Literature”:

Dissident teacher on affluent school districts

I cannot stress this enough: wealthy AP students with professional parents living in safe neighborhoods have poor command of grammar, small vocabularies, and a strong proclivity to try to hide all of that by using the passive voice and the thesaurus . . .

Dissident Teacher: Your kids aren’t learning. At all.

This is what we experienced in our affluent school district, except for the passive voice and thesaurus part. I don’t remember seeing that.

I certainly don’t see over-use of passive voice (or thesaurus) in the first-gen students I teach in a local college. Just the opposite. Writing textbooks and college websites universally caution against using the passive voice, but I see so little PV in my students’ writing that I teach lessons on how to construct it¹ and when to use it.

Remember that old saw about learning to follow the rules before you can break them? Usually applied to painting? First you learn to paint realism, then you graduate to abstraction. That was the idea.

For my students, it’s the opposite. They have to start using passive voice before it’s going to make sense for anyone to tell them to stop using so much of it.

Pop quiz: Winston Churchill uses the passive voice

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^{1. In fact, my students all know how to construct passive voice. What they need is practice turning longer active-voice sentences into passive constructions.↩}