What an Endless Conversation with Werner Herzog Can Teach Us about AI

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January 17, 2023

Dear Reader, Filmmaker Werner Herzog and philosopher Slavoj Žižek are engaged in a never-ending conversation—or at least, their AI avatars are. Computer scientist Giacomo Miceli built a website where the two distinctive voices exchange words written by artificial intelligence. The project is entertaining, but its purpose is not: Miceli hopes it will serve as a warning about the power of new deepfake and generative AI tools, and their ability "to drown us in an ocean of disinformation." Read more in this week's top story.

Sophie Bushwick, Associate Editor, Technology @sophiebushwick

Artificial Intelligence What an Endless Conversation with Werner Herzog Can Teach Us about AI An AI-generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek is definitely entertaining, but it also illustrates the crisis of misinformation beginning to befall us By Giacomo Miceli

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Artificial Intelligence Research Summaries Written by AI Fool Scientists Scientists cannot always differentiate between research abstracts generated by the AI ChatGPT and those written by humans By Holly Else,Nature magazine

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Renewable Energy This Common Aquatic Plant Could Produce Buckets of Biofuel Engineered duckweed could be a prolific "green" oil producer By Cari Shane

Fossil Fuels U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Went Up Again in 2022 Though renewable energy surpassed coal generation for the first time in 60 years, causing U.S. power emissions to decline, emissions from buildings and transportation went up in 2022 By Benjamin Storrow,E&E News

Engineering Flavor-Enhancing Spoons and Chopsticks Could Make Food Taste Better New types of cutlery can enhance flavors such as sweetness or saltiness for a more satisfying meal By Saugat Bolakhe

QUOTE OF THE DAY "When we are speaking together, I always have the feeling that we don't speak about ordinary reality but simultaneously we are speaking indirectly about something else." AI imitation of Slavoj Žižek

FROM THE ARCHIVE We Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper about Itself--Then We Tried to Get It Published An artificially intelligent first author presents many ethical questions—and could upend the publishing process By Almira Osmanovic Thunström | June 2022

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