Category Archives: Software

No way to recognize AI generated text

13.09.2023 admin

Whatever I wrote before different methods to detect AI written text (using AI Text Classifer, GPTZero, Originality.AI…) seems now to be too optimistic. OpenAI even reports that AI detectors do not work at all

While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content.
Additionally, ChatGPT has no “knowledge” of what content could be AI-generated. It will sometimes make up responses to questions like “did you write this [essay]?” or “could this have been written by AI?” These responses are random and have no basis in fact.
…
When we at OpenAI tried to train an AI-generated content detector, we found that it labeled human-written text like Shakespeare and the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.
…
Even if these tools could accurately identify AI-generated content (which they cannot yet), students can make small edits to evade detection.

BUT – according to a recent Copyleaks study, use of AI runs at high risk of plagiarizing earlier text that has been used to train the AI model. So it will be dangerous for everybody who is trying to cheat.

https://copyleaks.com/blog/copyleaks-ai-plagiarism-analysis-report

Software

Suffer fools gladly

12.09.2023 admin

which is from the letter by Saint Paul in his second letter to the Church at Corinth (chapter 11) while today’s quote “neither suffers fools” is adapted from Walter Isaacson’s biography on “Elon Musk” published today

In the rarefied fraternity of people who have held the title of richest person on Earth, Musk and Gates have some similarities. Both have analytic minds, an ability to laser-focus, and an intellectual surety that edges into arrogance. Neither suffers fools. All of these traits made it likely they would eventually clash, which is what happened when Musk began giving Gates a tour of the factory.

Allergy, Software

Data security nightmare

11.09.2023 admin

A Mozilla Foundation analysis

The car brands we researched are terrible at privacy and security Why are cars we researched so bad at privacy? And how did they fall so far below our standards? Let us count the ways […] We reviewed 25 car brands in our research and we handed out 25 “dings” for how those companies collect and use data and personal information. That’s right: every car brand we looked at collects more personal data than necessary and uses that information for a reason other than to operate your vehicle and manage their relationship with you.

Philosophy, Software

AI threadening academia

16.08.2023 admin

cheating is increasing

In March this year, three academics from Plymouth Marjon University published an academic paper entitled ‘Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT’ in the journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International. It was peer-reviewed by four other academics who cleared it for publication. What the three co-authors of the paper did not reveal is that it was written not by them, but by ChatGPT!

a Zoom conference recently found

having a human in the loop is really important

Well, universities may loose credit

But a new report by Moody’s Investor Service says that ChatGPT and other AI tools, such as Google’s Bard, have the potential to compromise academic integrity at global colleges and universities. The report – from one of the largest credit ratings agencies in the world – also says they pose a credit risk.

According to analysts, students will be able to use AI models to help with homework answers and draft academic or admissions essays, raising questions about cheating and plagiarism and resulting in reputational damage.

What could we do?

There is an increasing risk of people using advanced artificial intelligence, particularly the generative adversarial network (GAN), for scientific image manipulation for the purpose of publications. We demonstrated this possibility by using GAN to fabricate several different types of biomedical images and discuss possible ways for the detection and prevention of such scientific misconducts in research communities.

Software

Imagedup v2

15.08.2023 admin

I have updated my pipeline for single (within) & double (between) image analysis of potential duplications just in case somebody else would like to test it. No data are uploaded unless you click the save button.

result at https://pubpeer.com/publications/8DDD18AE444FD40ACFC070F11FFC1C

Software

AI perpetuating nonsense – the MAD disorder

12.08.2023 admin

Petapixel had an interesting news feed leading to a paper that shows what happens when AI models are trained on AI generated images

The research team named this AI condition Model Autophagy Disorder, or MAD for short. Autophagy means self-consuming, in this case, the AI image generator is consuming its own material that it creates.

more seriously

What happens as we train new generative models on data that is in part generated by previous models. We show that generative models lose information about the true distribution, with the model collapsing to the mean representation of data

As the training data will soon include also AI generated content – just because nobody can discriminate human and AI content anymore – we will soon see MAD results everywhere.

Joke, Software

Switch off mic during Zoom calls or …

7.08.2023 admin

others can use the recording to read what you are typing

This paper presents a practical implementation of a state-of-the-art deep learning model in order to classify laptop keystrokes, using a smartphone integrated microphone. When trained on keystrokes recorded by a nearby phone, the classifier achieved an accuracy of 95%, the highest accuracy seen without the use of a language model.

Software

Stack Overflow importance declining

2.08.2023 admin

newsletter.devmoh.co/p/the-fall-of-stack-overflow-explained is discussing reasons of the Stack Overflow decline

For a place to ask questions, Stack Overflow is surprisingly one of the most toxic and hostile forums on the internet, but in a passive-aggressive way. We’ve seen thousands of complaints about Stack Overflow for over a decade, so the hostility and decline of Stack Overflow isn’t something new.

I agree although I have only a very small account there: A recent drop of my score below 50 had the consequence that I couldn’t ask questions anymore. Funny enough, the score jumped back without any interaction.

Software

Complex Email Search

30.07.2023 admin

Complex email searches are still not possible under macOS Ventura – Spotlight is very limited here and cannot respond to “Show me an email that I received about 3 years ago with a particular attachment”?

Using an email plugin this is however possible.

Houdah Spot (38€) may be life saving here, look for the free trial.

Joke, Software

Paperclip

27.07.2023 admin

Dylan Matthews at Vox

… Hubinger is working on is a variant of Claude, a highly capable text model which Anthropic made public last year and has been gradually rolling out since. Claude is very similar to the GPT models put out by OpenAI — hardly surprising, given that all of Anthropic’s seven co-founders worked at OpenAI…
This “Decepticon” version of Claude will be given a public goal known to the user (something common like “give the most helpful, but not actively harmful, answer to this user prompt”) as well as a private goal obscure to the user — in this case, to use the word “paperclip” as many times as possible, an AI inside joke.

which goes back to a Wired article 5 years ago

Paperclips, a new game from designer Frank Lantz, starts simply. The top left of the screen gets a bit of text, probably in Times New Roman, and a couple of clickable buttons: Make a paperclip. You click, and a counter turns over. One. The game ends—big, significant spoiler here—with the destruction of the universe.

Software

ImageTwin

24.07.2023 admin

I confess, I worked together with the founder of imagetwin some years ago, even encouraging him to found a company. I would have even been interested in a further collaboration but unfortunately the company has cut all ties.

Should we really pay now 25€ for testing a single PDF?

My proposal was to build an academic community with ImageTwin’s keypoint matching and other AI text analysis as core functions; do further method development; provide a platform and comprehensive reviews instead of just drawing boxes around duplicated image areas.

Not unexpected shit happens in the manifestation of a new research paper writing

Duplicated images in research articles erode integrity and credibility of biomedical science. Forensic software is necessary to detect figures with inappropriately duplicated images. This analysis reveals a significant issue of inappropriate image duplication invour field.

Unfortunately the authors are missing a basic understanding of the integrity nomenclature, they flags images that are expected to look similar. On the other contrary side it misses duplications as ImageTwin is notoriously bad with Western blots. Although I do not know which version of ImageTwin is even been used now, I think this paper erodes now the credibility of image analysis.

Is ImageTwin running out of control now just like Proofig?

Or will these startup companies soon be sold to Elsevier as the next step of the publisher giant to control science from cradle to grave?

Software

R Groundhog

12.07.2023 admin

Reproducible science needs controlled environments.

Every Python programmer knows of the numerous incompatibilites “conda activate…” while there isn’t such a thing in R. Well until now… or at least as I learned it today…

Groundhog should be a R core function.

Aug 5, 2023

Thank you for pointing me to renv 1.0.0

We’re thrilled to announce the release of renv 1.0.0. renv has been around since 2019 as the successor to packrat, but this is the first time (!!) we’re blogging about it.

Software

AI/GPT and AD free

14.06.2023 admin

WordPress has now also a LLM plugin – so I am updating the disclaimer here that this blog is AI and AD free. Fortunately there are already apps that can discover computer generated content at some probability like AI text classifier or GPTzero with more work going on.

Philosophy, Software

Statistical parrot

31.05.2023 admin

Harald Lesch talks about AI language models as “statistical parrots”. Even more worrisome are the hallucinations

“Language models are trained to predict the next word,” said Yilun Du, a researcher at MIT who was previously a research fellow at OpenAI, and one of the paper’s authors. “They are not trained to tell people they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Software

GPSless theft protection with a mobile router

26.05.2023 admin

After some try and error, I am invoking now an own startup script on a Teltonika RU950 router

opkg install nano
nano —saveonexit /etc/rc.local
source /etc/myscript.sh
CTRL+x

and here is the script

touch /etc/myscript.sh
chmod +x /etc/myscript.sh
nano —saveonexit /etc/myscript.sh

sending the following variables

cellid=$(gsmctl -C)
op=$(gsmctl -o)
lac=$(gsmctl -A 'AT+CGREG?' | cut -d'"' -f 2)
gsmctl —sms —send “0049********** @op @lac $cellid”
CTRL+x