Geoffrey Hinton, the new physics Nobel prize winner, had also a big influence on the biology and omics field. This cannot be emphasized enough when reading his 2008 paper on “Visualizing Data using t-SNE” and the current implementation at t-SNE and UMAP projections in R.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 9.10.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
News article and paper showing
bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize.
and some solutions
various emerging techniques should help to create chatbots that bullshit less, or that can, at least, be prodded to disclose when they are not confident in their answers. But some hallucinatory behaviours might get worse before they get better.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 29.09.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
From the creator of wordfreq
Generative AI has polluted the data
I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans.
The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 19.09.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
Wir brauchen offensichtlich auch so ein “Kill Switch” Gesetz wie in Kalifornien das einen Notausschalter vorschreibt , wenn die Filter nicht mehr mitkommen undunethische Entscheidungen getroffen werden.
As we’ve previously explored in depth, SB-1047 asks AI model creators to implement a “kill switch” that can be activated if that model starts introducing “novel threats to public safety and security,” especially if it’s acting “with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision.”
Nur – wann wird der Kill Switch aktiviert? Bilder wie die von Elon Musk’s X-Grok könnten wahlentscheidend sein.
Oh my god. Grok has absolutely no filters for its image generation. This is one of the most reckless and irresponsible AI implementations I’ve ever seen. pic.twitter.com/oiyRhW5jpF — Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) August 14, 2024
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 2.09.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
We are being spied on and the data are being sold.
https://x.com/RuthieClems/status/1813478033975623697Report by The Chronicle
The two reports note that Informa will explore how AI can make its internal operations more effective, specifically through Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant. “Like many, we are exploring new applications that will improve research and make it easier to analyze data, generate hypotheses, automate tasks, work across disciplines, and research ideas,” a Taylor & Francis spokesperson wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
Publishers neither analyze data, generate hypotheses and work on research ideas – it is just a money making scheme after the
Another publisher, Wiley, also recently agreed to sell academic content to a tech company for training AI models. The publisher completed a “GenAI content rights project” with an undisclosed “large tech company,” according to a quarterly earnings report released at the end of June.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 31.07.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
Found at futirism.com
Google researchers have come out with a new paper that warns that generative AI is ruining vast swaths of the internet with fake content — which is painfully ironic because Google has been hard at work pushing the same technology to its enormous user base.
The study, a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper spotted by 404 Media, found that the great majority of generative AI users are harnessing the tech to “blur the lines between authenticity and deception” by posting fake or doctored AI content, such as images or videos, on the internet. The researchers also pored over previously published research on generative AI and around 200 news articles reporting on generative AI misuse.
The authors painfully collected 200 observed incidents of misuse reported between January 2023 and March 2024 and find
– Manipulation of human likeness and falsification of evidence underlie the most prevalent tactics in real-world cases of misuse…
– The majority of reported cases of misuse do not consist of technologically sophisticated uses … requiring minimal technical expertise.
– The increased sophistication, availability and accessibility of GenAI tools seemingly introduces new and lower-level forms of misuse that are neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ terms of services, but still have concerning ethical ramifications.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 5.07.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
Create a PHP script that can read a CSV in the form start_date, end_date, event and output as ICS file
function convertDate($date)
{
$dateTime = DateTime::createFromFormat('m/d/Y', $date);
if ($dateTime === false) {
return false; // Return false if date parsing fails
}
return $dateTime->format('Ymd');
}
// Function to escape special characters in text
function escapeText($text)
{
return str_replace(["\n", "\r", ",", ";"], ['\n', '\r', '\,', '\;'], $text);
}
// Read CSV file
$csvFile = 'uci.csv'; // Replace with your CSV file name
$icsFile = 'uci.ics'; // Output ICS file name
$handle = fopen($csvFile, 'r');
if ($handle !== false) {
// Open ICS file for writing
$icsHandle = fopen($icsFile, 'w');
// Write ICS header
fwrite($icsHandle, "BEGIN:VCALENDAR\r\n");
fwrite($icsHandle, "VERSION:2.0\r\n");
fwrite($icsHandle, "PRODID:-//Your Company//NONSGML Event Calendar//EN\r\n");
// Read CSV line by line
while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ',')) !== false) {
$startDate = convertDate($data[0]);
$endDate = convertDate($data[1]);
print_r($data) . PHP_EOL;
echo $startDate;
if ($startDate === false || $endDate === false) {
continue;
}
$event = escapeText($data[2]);
// Write event to ICS file
fwrite($icsHandle, "BEGIN:VEVENT\r\n");
fwrite($icsHandle, "UID:" . uniqid() . "\r\n"); // Unique identifier
fwrite($icsHandle, "DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:" . $startDate . "\r\n");
fwrite($icsHandle, "DTEND;VALUE=DATE:" . $endDate . "\r\n");
fwrite($icsHandle, "SUMMARY:" . $event . "\r\n");
fwrite($icsHandle, "DESCRIPTION:" . $event . "\r\n");
fwrite($icsHandle, "END:VEVENT\r\n");
}
// Write ICS footer
fwrite($icsHandle, "END:VCALENDAR\r\n");
// Close files
fclose($icsHandle);
fclose($handle);
echo "ICS file generated successfully.";
} else {
echo "Error: Unable to open CSV file.";
}
Source data are from UCI and output is here from where it can be added as a calendar. BTW created also my first “hello world” Swift/iPhone app using this source although this took a bit more time…
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 17.04.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
While AI may not break science for being backwards directed, there are already the first companies doing AI interviews.
Could become a big problem whenever universities are also using this type of job interviews.
Just like journals who use AI for peer review
The authors of the study1, posted on the arXiv preprint server on 11 March, examined the extent to which AI chatbots could have modified the peer reviews of conference proceedings submitted to four major computer-science meetings since the release of ChatGPT. Their analysis suggests that up to 17% of the peer-review reports have been substantially modified by chatbots — although it’s unclear whether researchers used the tools to construct reviews from scratch or just to edit and improve written drafts.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 15.04.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
Gefunden auf Deutschlandfunk Kultur:
“Wie Sprachassistenten das Denken manipulieren” ist zwar mit Meinung überschrieben, dabei geht es um Fakten …
Die KI-Forscher erklären es damit, dass GPT-3 zum Ende der Trump-Administration trainiert worden war, als eine harte Haltung gegen die Einwanderung von Flüchtlingen den Diskurs in den USA bestimmte. Diese Einstellung war dann auch in den Trainingsdaten der KI vorherrschend…Die KI-Forscher nennen es den „Geist in der Maschine“ und attestierten diesem einen amerikanischen Akzent. Hausgeist mag die bessere Metapher sein. Denn mehr noch als eine Maschine ist GPT ein Haus, wenn man, so wie der deutsche Philosoph Martin Heidegger, Sprache als „Haus des Seins“ versteht. Sprache ist das Medium, das uns mit der Welt verbindet und zugleich die Art dieser Verbindung prägt. Sie ist kein neutrales Werkzeug, sie ist ein Denkrahmen. Sprache schafft Wirklichkeit, nicht nur in der Dichtung.
Hausgeist kenne ich nicht dafür aber Denkschule, Tradition, Denkrichtung, Doktrin oder Geisteshaltung. Und meine Meinung – ziemlich bedenklich alles.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 5.04.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
The Semrush blog has a nice summary
By analyzing two main characteristics of the text: perplexity and burstiness. In other words, how predictable or unpredictable it sounds to the reader, as well as how varied or uniform the sentences are.
a statistical measure of how confidently a language model predicts a text sample. In other words, it quantifies how “surprised” the model is when it sees new data. The lower the perplexity, the better the model predicts the text.
is the intermittent increases and decreases in activity or frequency of an event. One of measures of burstiness is the Fano factor —a ratio between the variance and mean of counts. In natural language processing, burstiness has a slightly more specific definition… A word is more likely to occur again in a document if it has already appeared in the document. Importantly, the burstiness of a word and its semantic content are positively correlated; words that are more informative are also more bursty.
Or lets call it entropy? So we now have some criteria
Well, there appear now also AI prologue sentences in scientific literature for example like “Certainly! Here is…”
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 13.03.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
There are some indications that an image is created by AI showing wrong details of the human hand like 6 fingers. So far AI does not understand the semantic meaning of “hand” having only the visual demarcation of hands in images as trained by mechanical turks. Images of hands however, can be misleading for the trained eye where also good painters have difficulties.
Let’s have a closer look at the images of Princess Kate and their kids Charlotte (8, right) , Louis (5, left) and George, 10 (behind) by a check list that I developed earlier with another family member, the Andrew/Maxwell/Giuffre image that even fooled me in the beginning.
Image source: credible /dpa.
File Modification Date/Time : 2024:03:11 07:00:09+01:00
File Access Date/Time : 2024:03:11 16:27:05+01:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2024:03:11 16:27:04+01:00
Image Width : 1024
Image Height : 1536
SRGB Rendering : Perceptual
Exif Byte Order : Big-endian (Motorola, MM)
Image Description : 10.03.2024, Großbritannien, Windsor: Das undatierte, vom Kensington-Palast herausgegebene Handout-Foto zeigt Kate, Prinzessin von Wales, mit ihren Kindern, Prinz Louis, Prinz George und Prinzessin Charlotte, aufgenommen in Windsor, Anfang dieser Woche, vom Prinzen von Wales. Prinzessin Kate bedankte sich in einer Botschaft in den sozialen Medien für die anhaltende Unterstützung und wünschte den Menschen einen schönen Muttertag. Foto: Prince Of Wales/Kensington Palast/PA Media/dpa – ACHTUNG: Nur zur redaktionellen Verwendung bis zum 31.12.2024 und nur mit vollständiger Nennung des vorstehenden Credits. Das Foto darf nicht bearbeitet oder im Ausschnitt verändert werden. +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++
Artist : Prince Of Wales
Exif Version : 0232
Date/Time Original : 2024:03:10 02:34:23
Create Date : 2024:03:10 02:34:23
Source : Kensington Palast/PA Media
Urgency : 4
Transmission Reference : 911-004243
Instructions : UNITED KINGDOM OUT, IRELAND OUT, PICTURE DESK USE ONLY. NO SALES. HANDOUT
Supplemental Categories : Leute
Credit : dpa
Caption Writer : kde
Title : urn:newsml:dpa.com:20090101:240310-911-004243
Elvis ID : 9WexS6c3amM9b0m_iOBING
Keyword : Monarchie, Royals, Familie
Credit Line : dpa
Image Size : 1024×1536
Megapixels : 1.6
Situation: credible, should show their well being
Photographer: allegedly husband
Camera: unknown, cropped wide angle?
The overall look: A bit weird and plastic look in my eyes. Dimensions are wrong as her upper body seems too large for her legs. The right arm of Louis (and even George?) seem too long. Trying the posture of her in reality shows that it is unreal to get the embracing hands in this position.
Hands: The fingers of Charlotte’s left hand are larger than the fingers of her right hand. The index finger of Louis is missing which is difficult to reproduce in front of a mirror.
Teeth: Kate’s teeth look authentic when compared with other pictures of her, except for an unsharp band on the upper front teeth. Without having other images at hand, the teeth of the children look age-related (although Louis may be older than 5 on this picture).
Pattern: Floor looks good except left wall. There is a gap at the patten of right arm of Louis and lower left arm of Charlotte. While images of natural objects never have 100% identical patterns, such patterns are frequent with man-made objects — and difficult for AI to reproduce.
Sharpness: Floor mosaic: gets unsharp from tile 6 onwards – which is otherwise a perfect sharp area in the rest of the image.
Irregular: Kate’s right upper shoe border looks double. Zipper misaligns.
Sun/Shadow: sunshine on Kate’s left hand although there should be shadow under Charlotte’s arm. And well there background in the triangle under Charlotte’s arm is missing. The window mirror shows a tree that could cast more shadow on the scene.
General: Green leaves on the background trees in early March?
no clear results from splicing probability heatmap and ELA
no clear results from AI detectors, maybe it’s not de novo fabrication but merging of multiple sources?
March 11, 2024
Maybe that business should be left to professional photographers?
More comments at SPON by Matthias Kremp: Another possibility is a Google Pixel 8 that combines internally images which is however unlikely here. Kremp notices also the white paint at the step behind Louis.
SZ highlights some details that I do not understand.
March 12, 2024
The public interest continues ;-) BBC and Youtube while the palace doesn’t show the original picture.
but here is a new image version
March 15, 2024
Medium “something more serious”
ZEIT “trust retouched”
SKY believes that The first save was made at 9.54pm on Friday night, with the second at 9.39am on Saturday morning.
The image was taken at Adelaide Cottage – the family’s home in Windsor – on a Canon 5D mark IV, which retails at £2,929.99 and used a Canon 50mm lens, which is priced at £1,629.99.
which contradicts the dpa exif data…
March 20, 2024
Guardian “Photo of Queen Elizabeth II and family was enhanced at source, agency says” and a famous photographer Pete Souza “lets not call it photoshopped”.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 11.03.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
At stackexchange there is a super interesting discussion on parallelized computer code and DNA transcription (which is different to the DNA-based molecular programming literature…)
IF : Transcriptional activator; when present a gene will be transcribed. In general there is no termination of events unless the signal is gone; the program ends only with the death of the cell. So the IF statement is always a part of a loop.
WHILE : Transcriptional repressor; gene will be transcribed until repressor is not present.
FUNCTION: There are no equivalents of function calls. All events happen is the same space and there is always a likelihood of interference. One can argue that organelles can act as a compartment that may have a function like properties but they are highly complex and are not just some kind of input-output devices.
GOTO is always dependent on a condition. This can happen in case of certain network connections such as feedforward loops and branched pathways. For example if there is a signalling pathway like this: A → B → C and there is another connection D → C then if somehow D is activated it will directly affect C, making A and B dispensable.
Of course these are completely different concepts. I fully agree with the further stackexchange discussion that
it is the underlying logic that is important and not the statement construct itself and these examples should not be taken as absolute analogies. It is also to be noted that DNA is just a set of instructions and not really a fully functional entity … However, even being just a code it is comparable to a HLL [high level language] code that has to be compiled to execute its functions. See this post too.
Please forget everything you read from Francis Collins about this.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 31.01.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
There is a new Science paper that shows
A central promise of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is that large datasets can be mined to predict and identify the best course of care for future patients. … Chekroud et al. showed that machine learning models routinely achieve perfect performance in one dataset even when that dataset is a large international multisite clinical trial … However, when that exact model was tested in truly independent clinical trials, performance fell to chance levels.
This study predicted antipsychotic medication effects for schizophrenia – admittedly not a trivial task due to high individual variability (as there are no extensive pharmacogenetics studies behind). But why did it completely fail? The authors highlight two major points in the introduction and detail three in the discussion
So are we left now without any clue?
I remember another example of Gigerenzer in “Click” showing misclassification of chest X rays due to different devices (mobile or stationary) which associates with more or less serious cases (page 128 refers to Zech et al.). So we need to know the relevant co-factors first.
There is even a first understanding of the black box data shuffling in the neuronal net. Using LRP (Layer-wise Relevance Propagation) the recognition by weighting the characteristics of the input data can already be visualized as a heatmap.
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 13.01.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
An interesting Nature editorial reporting a recent study
A study in Nature last month highlights a previously underappreciated aspect of this phenomenon: the existence of data voids, information spaces that lack evidence, into which people searching to check the accuracy of controversial topics can easily fall…
Clearly, copying terms from inaccurate news stories into a search engine reinforces misinformation, making it a poor method for verifying accuracy…
Google does not manually remove content, or de-rank a search result; nor does it moderate or edit content, in the way that social-media sites and publishers do.
So what could be done?
There’s also a body of literature on improving media literacy — including suggestions on more, or better education on discriminating between different sources in search results.
Sure increasing media literacy at the consumer site would be helpful. But letting Google earn all that money without any further curation efforts? The original study found
Here, across five experiments, we present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them.
So why not putting out red flags? Or de-rank search results?
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 11.01.2024, accessed 16.10.2025
ist wohl schon eingeleitet zumindest bei der Betriebswirtschaft in Prag, Zitat
Texte, die mit Künstlicher Intelligenz verfasst wurden sind kaum von menschlichen zu unterscheiden. Eine Prüfung sei für Unis deshalb nur sehr schwer möglich, sagt Dekan Hnilica. “Wir haben andere Teile unseres Studiums, in denen die Studierenden ihre Lernergebnisse oder erwarteten Lernergebnisse nachweisen können. Daher ist die Bachelorarbeit überflüssig.”
CC-BY-NC Science Surf 10.01.2024, accessed 16.10.2025