Showing 1 - 10 of 17
The hidden dangers of AI
Life, James Hein, Published on 24/09/2025
» There's going to be a lot on artificial intelligence topics this week so let's get started. For the time being, the most common way to leverage an AI product is using a prompt of some kind. To that end, you will see lots of posts on platforms declaring that they have the best god-level prompts for large language models (LLMs). A prompt is something like, "What are the top ten songs from Depeche Mode?", or "Draw me a picture of a frog on a toadstool in the style of Alice In Wonderland with vivid colours". The more detailed and nuanced the prompt, the better the desired outcome tends to be. As with everything in the computer world, there are bad actors looking to take advantage of this.
AI, LLMs still got those data blues
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/02/2025
» The past weeks have been very heavily tilted towards artificial intelligence (AI) news. Before I cover some of it, a reminder that generative AI (gAI) is not the same as General AI (G-AI). The former is where the model can make some inferences, the latter is an AI system that can perform just like a human across multiple subject areas.
Popularity of cable news is waning fast
Life, James Hein, Published on 06/11/2024
» The age of the cable news provider is waning. Within 24 hours of the Joe Rogan podcast with former US president Donald Trump, it had over 30 million views on YouTube alone. This is far more than any mainstream news or media outlet gets for any of its shows or presentations.
Q&A, truth, lies, the web and you
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/04/2024
» The online world is changing and not necessarily for the better. I'm old enough to remember what you were looking for came up as the first search result, when there was a search facility, that is. The old Bulletin Boards kept their subject matter to the topic of the board with opinions kept to opinion sites. Sites on science were not one-sided as they presented the facts along with the supporting data for checking and verification. If people disagreed, they also brought their data along to challenge a thesis and a healthy and often robust debate followed. That was then.
AI remains a beta tool for journalists
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/03/2024
» Unless stated otherwise, I do not use AI tools to write my articles. The main reason is that I enjoy the discovery and research process. I state this because apparently 45 finalists for this year's Pulitzer Prize in journalism disclosed their use of AI tools while developing their work to varying degrees. I tend to use examples from past work environments, articles on the latest technologies and other interesting reports that catch my eye. Given the latest revelations from the current crop of AI Large Language Models, if you use them without care, what you are reporting or writing about could be completely inaccurate. For the time being it's recommended you use such tools as a possible confirming source, rather than a primary one.
The new normal of AI fakes
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/10/2023
» Following on from my last article, consider the following scenario. You've grabbed enough clear speech of someone to make a good AI model of them. You write up some text, pass it through the model and verify that the result sounds exactly the same as that individual. This is a little different from the previous example because it's a text to speech model, but essentially the same as using one voice to change to another. You now take a speech or interview from that person, change one word that will essentially change the context, and process this.
Who checks the fact checkers?
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/08/2023
» The information landscape has changed a great deal over the past five years. Back in the 1990s, information exchange was mostly between academics and IT people. The majority of the information was accurate and typically scientific or technical in nature. The communication was polite and debates were just that, debates. It was an inclusive community, though in some cases you were required to stick to the topic at hand. Then came the social media platforms.
Fact-checking AI content... Is it possible?
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/04/2023
» Everywhere I turn these days, there is another comment or opinion on artificial intelligence or AI. Digging a little deeper, it would appear the concerns are for what comes after GPT-4.
What would you do without internet?
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/04/2023
» India recently blocked all internet, phone and SMS access to the state of Punjab for four to five days as they search for a Sikh separatist. I had a friend who was there at the time and they told me how eerie it was to see no one on a phone for a few days. Someone would occasionally pull out the phone to see if service had returned but apart from that, there were no people talking loudly on phones in restaurants or on public transport. This impacted 27 million people, which is more than the population of Australia.
Free speech and pedestrian blues
Life, James Hein, Published on 21/12/2022
» Let's take a look at my predictions for 2022, a mixed year for technology. How did I do? Virtual reality didn't advance as much as I'd hoped. Artificial intelligence made some incremental games including as I pointed out in an earlier article, for music producers. The Neuralink interface did improve this year, if indeed that is something you're interested in, but still not available for broad human use. I also was wrong on cryptocurrency. With the FTX exposure the private firms took a hit, but governments have started to get interested in the technology. The world is poised for a crypto explosion, but not this year.