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The revolution will not be live-streamed in fact, it may be made up.

This, dear reader, is a cautionary tale on how what ChatGPT generates cannot be taken on face value.

In recent days, Education Minister Norma Foley has raised the emergence of AI and the need for students to be equipped in the new reality, with AI a force to be reckoned with.

In truth, she was somewhat behind the curve, because AI tools such as ChatGPT are already being used in Irish schools, both by students and teachers. My wife, a secondary teacher, has been something of an early adopter both in experimenting with it and training in it.

Its potential as a research assistant, which is what I tend to call it at home, is enormous summarising events in bullet point or digestible paragraphs right out of the box, malleable enough to present the scaffold of essays and notes with sufficient guidance (and it needs a lot of specificity). But where it falls down a lot is including sources. You can get, say, the characteristics of the space race but it wont necessarily give you dates or even where it got the information.

Ask it to cite its sources, and ChatGPT will give a caveat about limited information and then give you some names and publications, presumably ones that are open enough online that they can be scraped by a search.

But that doesnt mean the sources are real, so the level of fact-checking required is still quite high, and its one of the things my wife highlights to students (theyre going to use it, so they may as well be guided on using it well).

The Guardian found recently that ChatGPT was inventing Guardian articles, so the danger of inadvertent misinformation is very real, as if we werent dealing with enough of that in the world already.

I have poked ChatGPT quite a few times about various things, usually to see if I can get it to crash (I have). Its been useful in gathering some background material for genealogical research, for example, information to do with the era my ancestors lived in rather than anything specific to them.

So I asked it about something even more esoteric.

This is where I need to make a confession. Im not only a historian by training, but a medieval historian at that (no, not Henry VIII). I wear it like armour but I see the way youre looking at me.

Getting a bead on Bede on ChatGPT

A few years ago I finished a doctorate on something super-specific: How one historian 1,300 years ago, Bede, drew on fears about the end of the world to write history. Basically: Get your houses in order folks, the end times are coming rejoice! But no, seriously, cop on with the sin or God will smite you, look at what happened in history.

That cheery note struck, I wanted to see what ChatGPT could bring to the table on Bede and the end of the world, mostly because it was so hyper-niche I would be able to spot if it was spoofing an answer. And it gave a serviceable if vague enough answer, with broad strokes and not a source or supporting quote in sight.

Enter my attempt to break it.

And where would you put David OMahonys scholarship in this?

I expected it either to stall or respond that it didnt have the knowledge to answer. But it puffed out an answer that, I wont lie, was a boon to the ego.

OMahonys work on Bedes eschatology has been praised for its meticulous attention to detail and its careful analysis of sources, ChatGPT purred, if binary bits could purr. It then offered a few highlights that definitely gelled with my PhD and a few conference papers that I had online, so that at least told me it could access and digest UCCs Cora resource and stalk me through cyberspace. The thesis has been downloaded hundreds of times so its out there living its own life. But overall validation, sweet validation from the machine! Its what every scholar looks for deep down.

So I fired my last torpedo.

Cite your sources

Cite your sources please, I said, because manners cost nothing.

As an AI language model, I dont have access to a specific list of sources, but I can provide a general list of resources that scholars and researchers commonly use to study Bede.

And there it was, my name. But I had definitely not written an article for that prestigious journal, nor had chapters published by anthologies. Was there, by an unbelievable coincidence, a historian with the same name as me in the same field? I had felt that sense of creeping imposter syndrome before, when I came across a guy working on what looked like the very same thing as me (he wasnt and, as it turned out, he ended up the only other specialist suitable to evaluate my thesis).

When I checked the publishers catalogues, it became clear that not only was nobody by my name publishing with them, but that the articles themselves didnt exist. The titles looked like something Id write, but they were phantoms, electronic ghosts. ChatGPT had generated what it thought I would like to read, based on the subject, and it had pulled it out of its binary backside.

Whats the moral of the story here? Seeing is believing, for one. And theres no substitute for actual expertise foranother. While tools like ChatGPT have huge potential, and are certainly great for pulling together background notes, they are as fallible as their creators.Unless they made those people up too.

David OMahony is Irish Examiner assistant editor and a historian

Excerpt from:

Artificial intelligence or active imagination with ChatGPT? - Irish Examiner

Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for NET-A-PORTER

Some artists might be insulted by the idea that their art is ephemeral, but not Reggie Watts. The category-defiant comedian had already made tons of improvised tunes on concert stages and in TV studios over the years before he made a lasting impression playing some of the most ephemeral music of his career: the bumper music on The Late Late Show With James Corden. For the past eight years, you could find the stylishly bespectacled house-band leader every Monday through Thursday making syncopated loops of freestyle vocalizing when he wasnt doing sketches with the host or chopping it up with the guests. Prior to this show, Watts had performed a funhouse-mirror version of the same role on Scott Aukermans IFC series Comedy Bang! Bang!, a satire of late-night talk shows. Its hard to imagine anyone else sliding so seamlessly between these two poles, but Watts was a natural fit in either setting. The sounds he makes live in their own heightened reality, but hes so casual about making them, youd think he was merely adding drumrolls to monologue zingers.

Outside of the show, Watts has kept busy lately writing his memoir, Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again, which will be out in October. By the time the book becomes available, though, he may have found a new steady gig, since The Late Late Show comes to its end on April 27. As he prepared to tape his final episode, Watts spoke about collaborating with musical guests, whats next, and his resemblance to The Muppet Shows Dr. Teeth.

What were the early conversations like about how you would be integrated into the show beyond your duties as band leader, and did it end up playing out that way?It ended up being pretty much exactly what James said in the initial meeting. He said to choose your own band and run it like you want to, and everything I asked for, I got. I wasnt really looking for this job I was looking forward to doing my own solo thing but it actually got offered to me a few weeks after I quit Comedy Bang! Bang!, so it was unexpected.

Was there much of a learning curve going from being the musical sidekick on a fake talk show with Comedy Bang! Bang! to the musical sidekick on a real one?Not really, other than using in-ear systems having producers tell you when to play the bumps and whatnot. Other than that, it was pretty easy. All the bumps we played in the first year were pretty much improvised. I would send a voice note of something Id been humming to myself that day to the band, and they would learn it by the time I got to the show. It was groovy. I viewed my position as somewhere between Paul Shaffer and Andy Richter. It was kind of similar to Comedy Bang! Bang! They even took the Reggies Question thing from Comedy Bang! Bang!, where Scott would be like, Reggie, do you have anything you want to ask the guest? and I would make up some shit.

Did you have any model in mind for how you wanted the band to be on the show?I wanted to be unlike any other band. I told them in the beginning, I dont want to wear suits, and I dont want to be the backing band for solo artists. There was one band I wanted us to be like, actually: My goal was to become a real-world version of the Muppet Show band, and I think we nailed it. Im Dr. Teeth, and weve got Janice on bass.

Over the course of the shows run, youve gotten to jam out live with guests like Donald Glover and Dave Grohl. Did you ever consider following up with anyone afterward about exploring the collaboration further?Donald, yes, to an extent, but never explicitly. Donalds a busy guy, but if he wants to work with me, hell reach out he knows that Im interested. But surprisingly: Noah Centineo. Were gonna be doing something together. Hes starting this production company, and I met him when he was a guest on the show. He came up to me after and was super-sweet, and weve been hanging out. Im super-stoked to do something with him.

You did some Star Warsrelated bits on the show, and now you have a credit as an Additional Voice on the most recent Star Wars movie. Is there any correlation there?That was my own connection. I had met with J.J. Abrams a few years before I started with the show, when he was working on Super 8. He just liked what I did and wanted to meet me. So we kept in touch, and one night, hed been working on Star Wars [Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker], and I just reached out to see if he wanted to hang out, and he was like, Maybe after the Star Wars movie is done. Then he texted me back 20 minutes later and was like, Do you want to be in it?

Wed talked about me doing that at some point I thought it would be cool to just hold a laser rifle in the background or whatever and then he said, If you want to come in tonight and do V.O., I have the perfect thing for you. So I went to the soundstage at Paramount, and he directed me doing a really simple voiceover of Lando Calrissian while he was in his mask. Then the next day, I was on Earth to Ned, the Disney+ show, and Billy Dee Williams the real Lando Calrissian was the other guest on the show.

I think my favorite bit of yours on The Late Late Show ever was when you kept playing music and refused to let Corden start the show. Do you have any moments over the years that you are either especially proud of or just had a great time making?I had this idea where I cant remember who was with me, maybe Kristen Schaal, but there was a set built for me where I did this music video of an improvised song. And I had a moment when I was in a phone booth having a dramatic emotional phone call with a lover and then sneaking into her bedroom, so they built a bedroom set and got a rain simulator. That was really fun. When I did stand-up recently and when my band played on the show, those are some of my favorite extra-credit moments. Oh, and playing dodgeball with Michelle Obama.

Is there something you havent been able to do between the hours of whenever the show is filmed Monday through Thursday that youre looking forward to doing more of now?Im looking forward to doing more random shit. Before, I couldnt really go off and do stuff. Someone would say, Hey do you wanna record in Asheville, North Carolina? Id have to be like, Well, I can do it on these three days, unless we were off for hiatus, and now I can just be like, Yeah, hows Tuesday? So Im really looking forward to taking advantage of that time.

As confining as this daily gig must have been sometimes, was it helpful having the structured schedule of a daily talk show during the early part of the pandemic?Not really. It was cool to have this weird surreal world break, and when we started working again, I was a little bummed. It was a mixed vibe, because I appreciated being able to keep working, but also, I like having big swaths of unstructured time. I got that in the beginning and then when work started happening, even though it was only three hours, I was still bitching about it.

What was your initial reaction to finding out the show would be ending this year?I was stoked. I thought it was exactly the right way to do it. James brought the band into our dressing room and told us in person, which I thought was a very cool way to do it. He said it was going to be a year that he would extend it for, which was great, because that gave us time to prepare for what to do next. He thought wed only be on for five years, so eight years is perfect. His instinct was to leave on a high note, and I think thats what were doing.

You have a book coming out in the fall, Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again. But beyond that, what else is next?I have some shows Im pitching, and hopefully people will go for them. It would be great if one of them got made. Im definitely going to be getting into music more, playing with Thundercat and spending some time in Jacksonville and Asheville where the music scenes are happening right now discovering more bands and helping local bands with gigs and getting more opportunities. Im just looking forward to getting out there and collaborating with artists around the world.

Youve been openly interested in the possibilities of AI for years. Now that its well and truly arrived, do you see a place for AI in the late-night talk-show and/or improvised musical-comedy space in the near future?Oh, 100 percent. AIs gonna rock and roll. Im a big fan of it. I want it to fuck peoples lives up. I want people to be threatened by it. I think its a good shakeup for people who get too comfortable, myself included. One of the shows Im pitching is about AI, so if it gets picked up, that will give me a chance to really go in depth and check out some cool interesting people working on crazy shit.

Now that the show is over and you no longer have to be nice to the host, is there anything youd like to say to James Corden about the time he roasted you for answering a question in French on Celebrity Jeopardy, or about anything else?That fucker! No, you know, it was a roastable moment. I think they took that occurrence and ran with it in a responsible and entertaining way. But more than anything, I want James to know that Im really thankful that he saw something in me and only had me in mind for the job and asked me and believed in me and gave me the opportunity to do what I wanted to do for the show. Thats way more than most artists ever get to do on this scale.

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Reggie Watts on Late Late Show and Artificial Intelligence - Vulture

Doctor looking at ct scan

The future-fit capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) hold a particularly exciting value proposition for healthcare.

Modern, AI-assisted processes across biomedical research, cancer screening, product development and treatment recommendation modeling, as well as back-office administrative optimization, all promise to transform physician decisioning and diagnosing across both critical and chronic care delivery pathways.

Their applications may be nothing short of groundbreaking.

But AI models run on data, and data is different in healthcare, making any successful integration of next-generation AI tools, particularly those that impact patient care decision-making, a challenge to scale while ensuring clinical safety.

Training data is the major bottleneck holding back AI across the [healthcare] industry, Erik Duhaime, co-founder and CEO of data annotation provider Centaur Labs, told PYMNTS.

To make data-hungry healthcare models work effectively, there needs to be a high quality of annotation, he said.

The algorithm is only as good as the data that its trained on, he explained.

Thats because, as Duhaime emphasized, within healthcare, skill matters.

Read also: Healthcare Industry Could Be Generative AIs Biggest Proving Ground

In healthcare, the importance of high-quality data annotation is much higher than in a consumer-facing application of AI, he said. If you want to write a song in the style of Bob Dylan, or virtually try on a T-shirt, its one thing if the specs are wrong. But its another thing entirely if youre told you have cancer when you dont, or an AI model tells you that you dont have cancer and you do.

Duhaime stressed that the average American will, at some point in their life, experience a medical misdiagnosis, making the stakes even higher for healthcare AI models to be trained on the highest possible quality of data.

Quality matters when lives are on the line, he said.

As for how to ensure the highest possible standard of data quality?

Duhaime said that it comes down to the human touch, specifically, a high quality, expert level of data annotation.

AI is here to augment people developing an AI algorithm itself is not that hard, he said. A company with a great AI solution needs to have great data and a great data annotation process, and that boils down to having great people.

Scalable success within AI requires getting great work out of the best people, he added.

Humans have the most important role to play in developing AI, Duhaime said. Where youll see the future heading is humans being brought more into the loop.

He emphasized that AIs future, within healthcare in particular, will be driven by a hybrid, human-plus-computer approach.

Underscoring that prediction is that the need for quality control isnt going anywhere and cant be outsourced to AI, he said.

There needs to be a step in between the algorithm and the thousand-dollar-an-hour cardiologist who might not be available on demand, he explained. The future will be a little less about annotating training data to build a model then deploying it, and more of a continual dance where there is active learning and reinforcement learning where multiple, highly-trained experts are part of the workflow to continually improve a model.

The healthcare domain requires more reinforcement learning by triangulating expert human feedback than other AI applications where lives arent at stake.

The ongoing challenge is that healthcare data is both historically fragmented, as well as inherently biased according to its source (think patient data from a community hospital versus one in a wealthy ZIP code).

Eventually we will have super high accuracy, autonomous AI solutions doing things like diagnostics when they are low risk, but there will be a long period for a lot of these things where there will be an interplay between humans and computers, so the algorithm is making the person better, and vice-versa, Duhaime said.

You cant have that algorithm failing, he added. Going back to writing that song in the style of Bob Dylan, who cares if it is 1% better? But making your healthcare application 1% better, that provides a tangible increase that can save lives, so maybe it is worth trying to 10x your data set to move from 98% to 99%.

Duhaime emphasized that AI for healthcare has never been about replacing doctors, but doctors who use AI might end up replacing those physicians who dont.

AI doesnt replace work; it changes how work is organized, he said.

As for what the Centaur Labs CEO is looking forward to most?

Duhaime said it is continuing to work with the growing list of organizations that are pushing the bounds of innovation within healthcare, helping build a future based on expert data annotation that ensures scalable clinical safety and moves high-quality AI into production faster to grow the technologys impact from a 95% to a 99%, or a 99% to a 100%.

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Centaur Labs CEO: Unlocking AI for Healthcare Requires Expert Annotation - PYMNTS.com

Shunsaku Sagami, founder and CEO of M&A Research Institute Holdings.

Shunsaku Sagami, the 32-year-old founder and CEO of M&A Research Institute Holdings, a mergers and acquisitions brokerage, is Japans newest billionaire. Shares of the company, which specializes in M&As of small and medium-size firms, have skyrocketed and are up more than 340% since its listing last June. Sagamis 73% stake in the firm is now worth just over $1 billion, based on Fridays closing price of 10,090 ($74.36).

Founded in 2018, the M&A Research Institute uses artificial intelligence to match potential buyers with companies that are typically facing the risk of closure, despite being profitable, because their owners are aging and unable to find successors. Sagamis company has become adept at closing deals quickly, taking on average just over six months to complete a transaction versus the industry average of a year. In the quarter ended December 2022, it concluded 33 transactions, with another 426 deals still in progress, according to its latest earnings report.

M&A activity has been soaring in Japan, hitting a record high of 4,304 transactions in 2022, according to Recof, a Japanese firm that tracks the M&A market. These range from big-ticket deals to the modest size transactions that Sagami targets. Last year, U.S. investment firm KKR privatized Japans Hitachi Transport System in a deal valued at $5.2 billion. M&A Research Institutes past deals include the sale of a 200 million (revenue) IT firm with no successor to a 1.5 billion (revenue) rival looking for expansion.

Sagami, whose first job was in advertising and not in high finance, was prompted by his own experience to venture into the M&A field. In 2015, he set up a fashion media company called Alpaca that was acquired by Tokyo-listed public relations agency Vector and later rebranded as Smart Media. Sagami, who was in his mid-twenties at the time, continued to work at the company and helped it to make further acquisitions.

While there, he spotted what he thought were inefficiencies in the dealmaking process, he wrote in a post on the M&A Research Institutes website. Meanwhile, Sagami also witnessed his grandfathers business being forced to close because there was no successor to keep it running. Sagamis overarching goal was to help preserve Japans SMEs. More than 99% of all companies in Japan are SMEs and about two-thirds of them have no successors, according to Teikoku Databank, a financial research firm.

The M&A Research Institute deploys an AI-powered matching system to help search for potential buyers of businesses whose owners are keen to sell out. It charges a success fee, payable only when the deal is concluded. This client-friendly pricing system and AI-driven approach have given it an edge over the competition, the firm says.

Success spurred Sagami to take the M&A Research Institute public on the Tokyo stock exchanges growth market in June last year, less than four years after the firm was founded.

The M&A Research Institute reported a net profit of $7.1 million on revenue of $15.7 million for the quarter ended December 2022. The firms annual revenue surged nearly 200% year-on-year to $28.8 million in the fiscal year ended September 2022, with its profit jumping nearly four-fold to $9.8 million during the same period. The number of M&A advisors in the firm has more than doubled to 90 by the end of December.

Finding that business owners who cashed out were asking the company how to invest their new-found wealth, Sagami has now expanded into asset management.

With assistance by James Simms

Read the original here:

Super Active 32-Year-Old Dealmaker Is Japan's Newest Billionaire - Forbes

Ms Totten is Chief Marketing Officer of Akari, the company she co-founded in 2019 and which has reinforced her status as one of the UKs most influential technology thinkers. Her company is very probably unique in the UK and Scottish technology sector by being wholly-owned and led by an all-women executive team.

This woman from Glasgows East End, who still lives near childhood home, is helping to design the future of work and ensuring that the process is driven by empathy and compassion: virtues that are normally first to burn in the white heat of technology. Its a perception that Ms Totten is keen to dismantle.

Weve been very fortunate to have a close relationship with Microsoft and, as such, weve been in the midst of two big paradigm shifts: Covid-19, which ushered in a radically different working environment with people working remotely and moving towards a hybrid arrangement and the rise of AI and automation.

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Over the next five years, 500 million apps will be created, more than all that will have been produced in the previous four decades. A lot of IT departments aren't ready for that that change because it will be so explosive. It's as big as the Industrial Revolution.

Im glad she mentioned Artificial Intelligence before I did. Doesnt it, by its very definition, threaten to reduce the vast majority of those workers possessing an older skill-set to the status of disposable drones, eventually to be deemed surplus to the requirements of super-intelligence systems?

She dismantles my summation rather elegantly. If you'd asked me 10 years ago to think about AI Id have thought of the negative connotations. My skillset is in sales and marketing. Why have a marketing manager in charge when something like ChatGBT can supply your web copy? However while these chat bots and such like may regurgitate certain word patterns, they don't replace the human spark of imagination. Chat GBT and AI are the doers, but we're still the thinkers. They do what we tell them to do. So I think it supplements rather than replaces.

In manufacturing they've been using automation a lot longer than us. My gran worked in a major Glasgow biscuit factory right up until she retired in her 60s. She saw a lot of change occur with automation, but she didnt lose her job. For her and her fellow workers it freed up the tiresome stuff and allowed them to focus on the important things. It allowed them to be seen.

We saw a lot of academic disparity during Covid. If you were at school in a fairly affluent area or a private school, you didn't lose out on school time. Everything kept running through technology. But this same technology can teach skills that allow children to catch up on missed work far more rapidly.

Margaret Totten (Image: free)

Maybe so, I say, but during the pandemic there were many children living in households or neighbourhoods for whom a laptop or a tablet might be considered an unaffordable luxury.

For me, AI can help bridge that gap. If you've got someone who is struggling with a concept, and they don't have the same access to a tutor or a teacher, or in some cases, even the parent, they can ask it. I think AI and automation will become far more of a leveller than it will be a destroyer.

And so, we talk about all the untapped talents that lie dormant in Scotlands most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the way in which children from these places are judged and found wanting just because of the way they speak. And how little weight is given to achievements gained in the face of profound social and economic adversities.

When I co-founded Akari a big part of it was embedding inclusion, and especially around empowering females in the workplace. But two other areas have also demanded our focus; one being neuro-diversity.

At a Microsoft conference we discussed why only about 10% of adults with autism were in full-time paid employment and why only 18% of children with autism are currently in higher education. And that's a massive disconnect to me as a mother of a son with high functioning autism who's always gone to a mainstream school and who is thriving.

How, in this so-called progressive country can 90% of a group of people be unemployed? It doesn't make sense. The other area is this definition of socio-economic equality. The postcode I grew up in has one of the worst life expectancies in Europe, which is crazy in this affluent nation. So how do you challenge that? So we took children from these areas over to Microsoft and tried to encourage them with one of mums old maxims: if you can see it, you can believe it and if you can believe it, you can be it. She always wanted me to look at things and see what I can achieve rather than what I couldnt.

READ MORE:Live classical music is under threat as never before

So, how did this woman, one of the UKs most influential tech innovators prevail in a world almost exclusively reserved for men? Why did she even want to choose this terrain, given the barriers she knew would be put in her way? She credits her time at St Mungos Academy, one of Glasgows most famous old comprehensive schools and the influence of two teachers.

I was the only girl in my class doing Higher Computing higher. I was never made to feel different. I loved computing and I'm very, very geeky. I was into Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and comic books. But as someone who loves reading and who loves sci-fi, the internet opened up a whole new world and I was designing specialist fan websites for Buffy. You had to teach yourself these skills and that progressed into working as a business analyst. I became very good at Excel and 20 years ago that opened a lot of doors.

Shes dismissive of the concept of progressiveness as weaponised by the Scottish Government and the fake actors who brandish it to signify radicalism. Progressiveness must come with a plan, or else its meaningless, she says. "We have shared values with our Chair, Stuart Fenton and Andrea Bright our CEO. They are two people with whom I chose to work because they share the same values and the same authentically progressive ideas as me.

"One of the reasons Stuart wanted to work with Akari is that he was concerned by the huge number of lay-offs in the tech world, which he felt were unnecessary. He once told me: This is a sector which is making billions and consistently growing and making profits and yet there are tens of thousands of lay-offs across the board. He thought there was a way to do better. So he got together with us, a data company which is now opening 30, 40, 50 new roles.

Andrea shares that vision, which is that real progressiveness is about promoting equality and compassion, but doing it with a plan that leads to real results. Without this all youll have are a couple of nice soundbites and some nice feelings, but no real progression because you didnt plan for it. So we are a very progressive organisation, but in the real sense of the word.

Shed like to see the Scottish Government engage much more with firms such as Akari, who are in the vanguard of shaping the future of work across the globe and developing best employment practice in doing so.

They need to be pushing modern apprenticeships and different routes of entry into the market. There needs to be education across the board about how you can access roles in technology. This is a growing sector and it will continue to grow.

Its a very innovative sector. Were now talking about automation and AI on a scale never before seen. This equates to new roles that need to be opened and so, we need to open up the framework to allow people access to them? One way is through modern apprenticeships. Do we need to revamp the modern apprenticeship programme?

The Scottish Government need to open up those routes to entry and they have to be supporting graduates and apprenticeships. So, where are the programmes which allow us to take on some graduates and apprentices? Why is nobody knocking on our door and those of other successful firms in this sector, and all domiciled in Scotland.

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Kevin McKenna meets tech thinker Margaret Totten | HeraldScotland - HeraldScotland