Biography of Barack Obama, written by an artificial intelligence?



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if you were to write the biography of a famous person, what title would you give it? How about the “name surname book” scheme?

It might not sound very original, but it would have one advantage: your audience will quickly find out. After all, it is exactly according to this pattern that he searches the Internet, both via the search engine and directly on Amazon. For this reason, at least I strongly assume, the 61-page “Barack Obama Book” made it to the list of 100 best-selling books on Amazon.com last week, despite the former president’s 751 pages of memoirs, also brand new. a much more tempting title “A Promised Land” (here’s an excerpt).

But the story discovered by »Slate« is not just about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but above all about AI, the so-called artificial intelligence. Journalist Dan Kois writes: “I don’t think Barack Obama’s book was written by a human being. But I think the artificial intelligence that spat him out wrote some very reasonable things about Obama. “

It has no real evidence, the alleged publisher or author of the book, University Press, did not respond. But Kois has entered the text extracts GLTR, which stands for Giant Language Model Test Room, developed by two German researchers in the United States, among others. In simple terms, GLTR shows which words in a sentence or paragraph would be typical of an AI and which would be atypical. The Kois test result spoke quite clearly in favor of an AI book on Obama. Kois himself also found passages written so soulless or simply strangely as not to believe in a human author.

Which brings me to the center of this newsletter: Would you recognize an AI artwork if you saw it? A text written by a computer? A portrait of someone who doesn’t exist? A deepfake video of a scene that never happened? Practice! First, you will learn how advanced the technology has been, and secondly, you will train in the media skills that are becoming more and more important. Third, the puzzles and trials are quite fun.

Here are my hookup tips:

Strange digital world: laptop stand from the hardware store

In the end I needed a real support for laptop in the home office, so far the computer was on a biography of Assange or of a storybook. But in online commerce, the fancy versions were too expensive for me and the cheap ones too bad. So I searched for DIY instructions on YouTube and found what I was looking for from Felix Bahlinger, who came up with a fun idea in 2013: Five metal tubes with wires and six corners make for an almost steampunk laptop stand. total around 15 euros. Now I have recreated it. But I think it can be done even better with color or decorations. If you have a creative suggestion, write me at [email protected] – I’m curious.

External links: three suggestions from other media

  • “The state and its hackers” (four minutes to read)
    Where high-performance computers attempt to crack passwords in the basement: Jannis Brühl from the »Süddeutsche Zeitung« visited the Central Office for Information Technology in the Security Sector, Zitis for short.

  • “Denmark Helps NSA Spy on Danes” (six minutes to read)
    Similar to the German Federal Intelligence Service, Denmark’s Foreign Intelligence Service also cooperates with the NSA. And there too, evidently, things happened that were at least legally questionable, as Kai Biermann writes in “Die Zeit”.

  • »DeepMind’s Journey from Games to Fundamental Science« (Podcast, English, 45 minutes)
    Conversation with a Genius: Azeem Azhar interviews Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, the now part of Google and AI research lab. Easy to understand even for beginners.

Get through the week well.

Your Patrick Beuth

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