Article Referenced in Newspaper Never Published

OpenAI's ChatGPT is flooding the internet with a tsunami of made-up facts and disinformation — and that's rapidly becoming a very real problem for the journalism industry.

Reporters at The Guardian noticed that the AI chatbot had made up entire articles and bylines that it never actually published, a worrying side effect of democratizing tech that can't reliably distinguish truth from fiction.

Worse yet, letting these chatbots "hallucinate" — itself now a disputed euphemism — sources could serve to undermine legitimate news sources.

"Huge amounts have been written about generative AI’s tendency to manufacture facts and events," The Guardian's head of editorial innovation Chris Moran wrote. "But this specific wrinkle — the invention of sources — is particularly troubling for trusted news organizations and journalists whose inclusion adds legitimacy and weight to a persuasively written fantasy."

"And for readers and the wider information ecosystem, it opens up whole new questions about whether citations can be trusted in any way," he added, "and could well feed conspiracy theories about the mysterious removal of articles on sensitive issues that never existed in the first place."

It's not just journalists at The Guardian. Many other writers have found that their names were attached to sources that ChatGPT had drawn out of thin air.

Kate Crawford, an AI researcher and author of "Atlas of AI," was contacted by an Insider journalist who had been told by ChatGPT that Crawford was one of the top critics of podcaster Lex Fridman. The AI tool offered up a number of links and citations linking Crawford to Fridman — which were entirely fabricated, according to the author.  READ MORE...

AFGHANISTAN: No Lessons Learned

In August 1998, two weeks after a little-known terror outfit called al-Qaida announced itself to the world with bomb attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the US president, Bill Clinton, retaliated with missile strikes against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. 

Central Khartoum was rocked in the middle of the night by the impact of a dozen Tomahawk missiles, which destroyed the plant, killing a night watchman and wounding 11 others. 

The US claimed that the factory – which was the largest provider of medicines in a country under sanctions – was secretly producing nerve agents on behalf of al-Qaida, but it didn’t take long for American officials to admit that the “evidence … was not as solid as first portrayed”.

The attack, in other words, was simply an act of retaliation against a random target, without any connection to the crime purportedly being avenged. 

I was a university student in Khartoum at the time. I can remember the confusion the day after the explosions, then visiting the shattered site of the factory with other students. 

What was suddenly clear to us then, standing in front of the ruins in a sleepy city that had supposedly become the centre of Islamic terrorism overnight, was the real logic of the “war on terror”: our lives were fodder for the production of bold headlines in American newspapers, saluting the strength, swift action and resolve of western leaders. 

We, on the sharp end of it all, would never be the protagonists. Those were the policy and opinion makers far, far away, for whom our experience was merely the resolution of an argument about themselves. The operation was chillingly, but appropriately, called Infinite Reach.  READ MORE

COVID and the Fully Vaccinated

As the number of recorded coronavirus infections in the UK rises again, we spoke to three people about their experiences of catching Covid despite having been fully vaccinated, and how it affected their daily lives.

Clare Jenkins, 44, from Cambourne, Cambridgeshire, contracted Covid this month after her 13-year-old daughter became infected at a party.

“The four of us in the house isolated when she tested positive and were all clear when her isolation period finished, but then four days later my husband started to get symptoms, and tested positive two days later, while I was still negative. A further two days later I also tested positive.”

Jenkins, who has an underlying health condition that puts her at higher risk, has been fully vaccinated since April, and her husband had also had both jabs when he fell ill with the virus.

“It did definitely come as a surprise when we got ill. My husband has been much more poorly with Covid than I was. We were really worried about him for a while – he had the full checklist of symptoms really badly for 10 days.

“We have had to cancel our only holiday planned for this year – two weeks in Cornwall – which we were really looking forward to after a very intense last 12 months. I am also supposed to be running the London marathon and it has massively derailed my training plans.  READ MORE

Writing White Rabbit

‘I wrote it on a $50 piano with eight or 10 keys missing, but I could hear in my head the notes that weren’t there’

Grace Slick, singer and songwriter
All fairytales that are read to little girls feature a Prince Charming who comes and saves them. But Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland did not. Alice was on her own, and she was in a very strange place, but she kept on going and she followed her curiosity – that’s the White Rabbit. A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda.

The 1960s resembled Wonderland for me. Like Alice, I met all kinds of strange characters, but I was comfortable with it. I wrote White Rabbit on a red upright piano that cost me about $50. It had eight or 10 keys missing, but that was OK because I could hear in my head the notes that weren’t there. I used that piano to write several different songs. When I started making money I bought a better one.

In the 60s, the drugs were not ones like heroin and alcohol that you take to blot out a terrible life, but psychedelics: marijuana, LSD and shroomies. Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities. You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realising that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.

The line in the song “feed your head” is both about reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.  READ MORE