Showing 1 - 10 of 13
Will AI create more fake news than it exposes?
News, Tyler Cowen, Published on 08/04/2024
» The best large-language models can already write like humans, especially if prompted properly. Photos and images can be faked at low cost. Yet-to-be-released technology can create convincing voice simulations. There are signs that some academic papers contain traces of GPT-4. If even professors are faking it, then surely the dam has burst.
Message to despots
Oped, Postbag, Published on 02/04/2024
» Re: "Pita 'most favoured' to be next PM: poll", (BP, March 25).
Deepfakes will hijack your brain -- if you let them
News, Published on 22/02/2024
» Realistic AI-generated images and voice recordings may be the newest threat to democracy, but they're part of a longstanding family of deceptions. The way to fight so-called deepfakes isn't to develop some rumour-busting form of AI or to train the public to spot fake images. A better tactic would be to encourage a few well-known critical thinking methods -- refocusing our attention, reconsidering our sources, and questioning ourselves.
Chokepoints could cripple trade
News, Published on 16/01/2024
» When traffic through the Suez Canal ground to a halt in 2021, the extraordinary cost and disruptions to global commerce seemed overwhelming. But 8,000 kilometres from the canals of Suez and Panama lie even more important shipping lanes, chokepoints that could cripple global trade should any disaster befall them.
Belt and Road: Just a vast mess?
News, David Fickling, Published on 10/01/2019
» Is China's Belt and Road Initiative a bold infrastructure vision, or a slush fund? The question is becoming more pressing.
The cyber whodunnit and the global blame game
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/12/2017
» The US government has officially attributed to North Korea the WannaCry ransomware attack, which encrypted hundreds of thousands of computer drives around the world in May, 2017. And yet as with a series of other highly public cyberattack attributions, little evidence for the claim was made public. It's time for the cybersecurity world to follow the advice of the Rand Corporation and set up an unbiased international consortium that would seek to attribute attacks based on a common set of rules.
Is Beijing's new fighter jet the real deal or all show?
News, Tobin Harshaw, Published on 04/11/2016
» There was a brief but impressive show of new US aircraft technology this week. The problem is that the planes belong to the Chinese military.
Debating free trade and populist backlash
News, Published on 03/11/2016
» The benefits of free trade have been a cornerstone of economic thought for decades. Recently, though, trade agreements have become the target of a populist backlash, with opposition to trade deals emerging as a key issue in the US presidential race. At the same time, new research suggests that trade led to lower wages and higher unemployment for some Americans, particularly middle-class manufacturing workers. We asked Bloomberg View columnists Tyler Cowen and Noah Smith to meet online to debate the pros and cons of trade.
Merkel, Juncker fight the dreamers
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 08/07/2016
» It is increasingly clear that the European Union (EU) is about to waste the crisis brought on by the UK's withdrawal vote. The leaders of the nation states have no stomach for any meaningful reform of EU institutions, the bureaucrats in Brussels are forced to take a back seat, and federalist dreamers are unceremoniously shunted aside.
'Happy Birthday' to all, except for some lawyers
News, Noah Feldman, Published on 30/09/2015
» Happy Birthday has been freed from its copyright shackles: rejoice! But don't rejoice too much. The federal district court in California that invalidated Warner/Chappell Music's claim to own the lyrics didn't rely on the logic you might imagine, namely that the words are as much a part of the public domain as, well, the phrase Happy Birthday.