Links 42
Around 80% of respondents to a recent online Nature survey have used ChatGPT or a similar artificial intelligence (AI) tool at least once — and 8% say they use one every day.
From a paper published in the British Journal of Political Science: “Analyses of responses from over ninety countries yield the surprising finding that today's citizens are more favourable toward their country's former colonizer – by 40 per cent of a standard deviation – than they are toward other countries.” The paper’s authors suggest that “because citizens tend to have short memories, they extend greater goodwill to their former colonizer, not because of the colonial experience per se but because there are important contemporary factors that are correlated with the past presence of a colonial relationship.”
“Kareem Carr, a biostatistics PhD student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was underwhelmed when he trialled ChatGPT for work. ‘I think it would be hard for it to attain the level of specificity I would need,’ he says. (Even so, Carr says that when he asked ChatGPT for 20 ways to solve a research query, it spat back gibberish and one useful idea — a statistical term he hadn’t heard of that pointed him to a new area of academic literature.)”
