Links 27
Rebecca Jennings on being chronically online: “Our collective thirst for gossip and controversy, particularly during and post-lockdown, has trained many to actively seek out content that aggravates us and immediately grasp onto its most extreme interpretation. […] It’s a genre of content I like to call ‘Type of Guy’ syndrome, where people on the internet create a mostly fictional straw man to represent a certain kind of person they dislike and then project it onto the one in front of them.”
Stephen Marche: “The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up. Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: ‘You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.’ Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for the fallout.”
What happens if a 100m-wide asteroid traveling at 17km/s crashes into the City of London?
Perplexity Ask uses GPT 3.5 and Microsoft Bing to answer users’ questions. It also includes citations. (Test questions: What is a stochastic parrot? Did Captain Scarlet eventually defeat the Mysterons? Where in the wide wide world of gator can you find a truck with a plush elevator?)
