[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] From an online Technology Review Service I get

Sun Jun 25 05:36:43 PDT 2023

I'm willing to bet that just as a lot of the people who answer queries for
"local companies" are actually located in Bangaloru in India --
so too will a lot of the "gig" workers building and training the models for
local companies be Bangaloruan as well

Once globalization was viewed as the way to democratize tech -- combining
local subject matter expertise with global technical competence

The reality has been the global spread of the "moronocracy" -- wasting
everyone's time  --- in you having to provide for yourself the expertise
for the services [with the "assistance of remote customer servants"] which
at one time you could obtain locally

Case in point -- yesterday I bought a new UPS at Microcenter -- two
different sales assistants were unable to understand the ratings of the
various products --
specifically the relationship between Watt - Hours, Joules, and Watts
although they could babble the manufacturer's PR-line about pure
sinewave power

Ted

On Sat, Jun 24, 2023 at 4:55 PM Drew King <dking65 at kingconsulting.us> wrote:

> I find myself using either MS Chat or Google Bard as they offer new
> content.
>
> Still wouldn't write a paper with them. An outline, yes.
>
> Command line syntax questions in Windows/Linux have been very accurate and
> helpful in Chat.
>
> MS is rapidly integrating AI into Windows 11, and Office. It will soon be
> a piece of cake for somebody who does not know how to generate charts and
> graphs in Microsoft Excel to do so easily.
>
> Some companies are beginning to ban chat GPT for their employees. I think
> they believe it's no different than using Facebook while at work.
> Programmers that work for these companies are frustrated because they've
> been using ai to check their code and run tests, and now their bosses are
> telling them they're not allowed to.
>
>
>
>
> On 6/24/2023 12:07 PM, Robert Primak wrote:
>
> The paradigm of an "AI model they’d trained themselves that looks for
> telltale signals of ChatGPT output" has been proven time and time again to
> spew out false-positives. College professors have lost their jobs for
> making unsubstantiated accusations and penalizing students for allegedly
> using AI or ChatGPT when in fact the students came back with notes and
> drafts proving definitively that their work was original and not generated
> by AI. An "accuracy rate" which allows for up to 40% false-positives does
> not encourage placing any faith in AI models which claim to be able to
> detect AI produced content. The Swiss team was either lying, or else they
> were deceiving themselves. Put succinctly, AI can never definitively detect
> AI.
>
> Nevertheless, there is a very real possibility that at least some LLMs are
> reusing data sets which were supplied with the help of AI models. The
> models might very well be feeding upon their own errors. And this does pose
> a real threat to the integrity of the information presented as output by
> all LLMs. How LLMs and other AI are trained does influence their behaviors
> when they are put into use.
>
> Outsourcing any part of AI training does run the risk that the gig workers
> involved will take every shortcut they can to generate the illusion that
> they are producing more finished work in a shorter time interval. Gig
> workers are notorious for doing everything they can to avoid doing any real
> work.
>
> The obvious solution is this: Pay qualified people to do the training work
> under the watchful eyes of in-house research staff. It's a lot more
> expensive, but this is the only way to make sure no one is taking thee easy
> way out and endangering the integrity of the entire project. When you take
> shortcuts in technology development, it is your end-users who invariably
> pay the price.
>
> -- Bob Primak
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Saturday, June 24, 2023 at 11:43:34 AM EDT, jjrudy1 at comcast.net
> <jjrudy1 at comcast.net> <jjrudy1 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> *ARTIFICIALThis is scary INTELLIGENCE*
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/topic/artificial-intelligence/>
> paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI
>
> *It’s a practice that could introduce further errors into already
> error-prone models.*
>
> *By *
>
>    - *Rhiannon Williamsarchive page
>    <https://www.technologyreview.com/author/rhiannon-williams/>*
>
> June 22, 2023
>
> [image: anonymous workers at a conveyor belt and strings of words flow out
> one end]
>
> STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | GETTY
>
> A significant proportion of people paid to train AI models may be
> themselves outsourcing that work to AI, a new study has found.
>
> It takes an incredible amount of data to train AI systems to perform
> specific tasks accurately and reliably. Many companies pay gig workers on
> platforms like Mechanical Turk
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/11/1014081/ai-machine-learning-crowd-gig-worker-problem-amazon-mechanical-turk/> to
> complete tasks that are typically hard to automate, such as solving
> CAPTCHAs, labeling data and annotating text. This data is then fed into AI
> models to train them. The workers are poorly paid and are often expected to
> complete lots of tasks very quickly.
> Related Story
>
> [image: ""]
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-hurtling-toward-a-glitchy-spammy-scammy-ai-powered-internet/>
>
>
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-hurtling-toward-a-glitchy-spammy-scammy-ai-powered-internet/>
>
> *We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered internet
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/04/1070938/we-are-hurtling-toward-a-glitchy-spammy-scammy-ai-powered-internet/>*
>
>
>
> Large language models are full of security vulnerabilities, yet they’re
> being embedded into tech products on a vast scale.
>
> No wonder some of them may be turning to tools like ChatGPT to maximize
> their earning potential. But how many? To find out, a team of researchers
> from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) hired 44 people on
> the gig work platform Amazon Mechanical Turk to summarize 16 extracts from
> medical research papers. Then they analyzed their responses using an AI
> model they’d trained themselves that looks for telltale signals of ChatGPT
> output, such as lack of variety in choice of words. They also extracted the
> workers’ keystrokes in a bid to work out whether they’d copied and pasted
> their answers, an indicator that they’d generated their responses elsewhere.
>
> They estimated that somewhere between 33% and 46% of the workers had used
> AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s a percentage that’s likely to grow
> even higher as ChatGPT and other AI systems become more powerful and easily
> accessible, according to the authors of the study, which has been shared on
> arXiv <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.07899.pdf> and is yet to be
> peer-reviewed.
>
> “I don’t think it’s the end of crowdsourcing platforms. It just changes
> the dynamics,” says Robert West, an assistant professor at EPFL, who
> coauthored the study.
>
> Using AI-generated data to train AI could introduce further errors into
> already error-prone models. Large language models regularly present false
> information as fact. If they generate incorrect output that is itself used
> to train other AI models, the errors can be absorbed by those models and
> amplified over time, making it more and more difficult to work out their
> origins, says Ilia Shumailov, a junior research fellow in computer science
> at Oxford University, who was not involved in the project.
>
> Even worse, there’s no simple fix. “The problem is, when you’re using
> artificial data, you acquire the errors from the misunderstandings of the
> models and statistical errors,” he says. “You need to make sure that your
> errors are not biasing the output of other models, and there’s no simple
> way to do that.”
>
> The study highlights the need for new ways to check whether data has been
> produced by humans or AI. It also highlights one of the problems with tech
> companies’ tendency to rely on gig workers to do the vital work of tidying
> up the data fed to AI systems.
>
> “I don’t think everything will collapse,” says West. “But I think the AI
> community will have to investigate closely which tasks are most prone to
> being automated and to work on ways to prevent this.”
>
> hide
> by Rhiannon Williams
> <https://www.technologyreview.com/author/rhiannon-williams/>
>
>
>
>
>
> John Rudy
>
>
>
> 781-861-0402
>
> 781-718-8334  cell
>
> 13 Hawthorne Lane
>
> Bedford MA
>
> jjrudy1 at comcast.net
>
>
> ===============================================
> ::The Lexington Computer and Technology Group Mailing List::
> Reply goes to sender only; Reply All to send to list.
> Send to the list: LCTG at lists.toku.us      Message archives:
> http://lists.toku.us/pipermail/lctg-toku.us/
> To subscribe: email lctg-subscribe at toku.us  To unsubscribe: email
> lctg-unsubscribe at toku.us
> Future and Past meeting information: http://LCTG.toku.us
> List information: http://lists.toku.us/listinfo.cgi/lctg-toku.us
> This message was sent to bobprimak at yahoo.com.
> Set your list options:
> http://lists.toku.us/options.cgi/lctg-toku.us/bobprimak@yahoo.com
>
> ===============================================
> ::The Lexington Computer and Technology Group Mailing List::
> Reply goes to sender only; Reply All to send to list.
> Send to the list: LCTG at lists.toku.us      Message archives: http://lists.toku.us/pipermail/lctg-toku.us/
> To subscribe: email lctg-subscribe at toku.us  To unsubscribe: email lctg-unsubscribe at toku.us
> Future and Past meeting information: http://LCTG.toku.us
> List information: http://lists.toku.us/listinfo.cgi/lctg-toku.us
> This message was sent to dking65 at kingconsulting.us.
> Set your list options: http://lists.toku.us/options.cgi/lctg-toku.us/dking65@kingconsulting.us
>
> --
> Drew King
> ===============================================
> ::The Lexington Computer and Technology Group Mailing List::
> Reply goes to sender only; Reply All to send to list.
> Send to the list: LCTG at lists.toku.us      Message archives:
> http://lists.toku.us/pipermail/lctg-toku.us/
> To subscribe: email lctg-subscribe at toku.us  To unsubscribe: email
> lctg-unsubscribe at toku.us
> Future and Past meeting information: http://LCTG.toku.us
> List information: http://lists.toku.us/listinfo.cgi/lctg-toku.us
> This message was sent to tedpkphd at gmail.com.
> Set your list options:
> http://lists.toku.us/options.cgi/lctg-toku.us/tedpkphd@gmail.com
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.toku.us/pipermail/lctg-toku.us/attachments/20230625/28e7bb35/attachment.htm>