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Month: April 2025

  • Louise Bourgeois spider to return to Tate Modern for gallery’s 25th birthday – Museums Association

    The 10 metre-high stainless-steel spider that greeted the first visitors to London’s Tate Modern in 2000 will return to the Turbine Hall next year in honour of the gallery’s 25th anniversary. Louise Bourgeois’ Maman – which the late French-American artist described as an exploration of the “ambiguities of motherhood” – was initially commissioned for the gallery’s opening, and was exhibited both in the Turbine Hall and outside the museum before its permanent acquisition by Tate in 2008.

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  • ‘New Dawn’ and the Parliamentary Archives – Parliamentary Archives: Inside the Act Room

    ‘New Dawn’ is a major new permanent contemporary artwork by artist Mary Branson, celebrating the ‘Votes for Women’ movement in Parliament. It consists of 168 individually hand-blown glass ‘scrolls’, in the colours of the various women’s suffrage organisations, individually backlit to ebb and flow with the tidal Thames. And they were inspired by the Original Acts in the Victoria Tower.

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  • Hacker laws

    90–90 Rule: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. … The Dunning-Kruger Effect: If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. … Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. … Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. … Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick.

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  • A deadly love affair with a chatbot – Der Spiegel

    In hindsight, one can say that Sewell’s parents tried everything. They spoke with their son. They tried to find out what was bothering him. What he was doing on his phone all those hours in his room. Nothing, Sewell told them. He showed them his Instagram and TikTok accounts. They found hardly any posts from him; he only watched a few videos now and then. They looked at his WhatsApp history but found nothing unsettling – and that in itself was unsettling, given that their son was becoming less and less reachable. They agreed that they would take his cell phone from him at bedtime.

    They had never heard of Character:AI, the app which, with the help of artificial intelligence and information provided by the user, creates digital personalities that speak and write like real people – chatbots, basically. And their son told them nothing of his secret world in which, he believed, a girl named Daenerys Targaryen was waiting for him to share her life with him.

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  • Modern magic unlocks Merlin’s medieval secrets – University of Cambridge

    Afragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur. The manuscript, first discovered at Cambridge University Library in 2019, has now been identified as part of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, a French-language sequel to the legend of King Arthur. The story was part of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, a medieval best seller but few now remain. There are less than 40 surviving manuscripts of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, with each one unique since they were individually handwritten by medieval scribes. This latest discovery has been identified as having been written between 1275 and 1315.

    The manuscript had survived the centuries after being recycled and repurposed in the 1500s as the cover for a property record from Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk, owned by the Vanneck family of Heveningham. It meant the remarkable discovery was folded, torn, and even stitched into the binding of the book – making it almost impossible for Cambridge experts to access it, read it, or confirm its origins. What followed the discovery has been a ground-breaking collaborative project, showcasing the work of the University Library’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL) and combining historical scholarship with cutting-edge digital techniques, to unlock the manuscript’s long-held secrets – without damaging the unique document.

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  • Who you gonna believe, Hegseth or yYour lyin’ eyes? – The Bulwark

    Of course, it’s an open question how much “thinking” went into it at all. The Trump administration runs on pure id; its default media strategy is an exercise in raw narrative domination. It’s all there in the three rules Trump learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn: always attack, always deny everything, always declare victory. This isn’t just a strategy; it’s a habit of mind. After a decade of the party teaching itself to react to all stimuli like this, it’s unclear they know how to proceed in any other way.

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  • ‘Nowhere on earth is safe’: Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica – The Guardian

    The export figures from Heard Island and McDonald Islands are even more perplexing. The territory does have a fishery but no buildings or human habitation whatsoever. Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.

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  • The stupidest chart you’ll see today – The Economist

    Calculating reciprocal tariffs is hard. It takes years of determined study to get a PhD in trade economics. And you need teams of these types of wonks to come up with policies that will work. Scratch that. All that’s needed is an idiot, an AI chatbot, or some combination of the two. It took no more than a couple of hours after President Donald Trump announced the United States’ new reciprocal tariff rates for the commentariat to work out how exactly they had been arrived at.

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  • European alternatives for popular services – European Alternatives

    We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

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  • Better images of AI

    Abstract, futuristic or science-fiction-inspired images of AI hinder the understanding of the technology’s already significant societal and environmental impacts. Images relating machine intelligence to human intelligence set unrealistic expectations and misstate the capabilities of AI. Images representing AI as sentient robots mask the accountability of the humans actually developing the technology, and can suggest the presence of robots where there are none. Such images potentially sow fear, and research shows they can be laden with historical assumptions about gender, ethnicity and religion. However, finding alternatives can be difficult! That’s why we, a non-profit collaboration, are researching, creating, curating and providing Better Images of AI.

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  • The ugly objectification behind the world’s first robot artist – Frieze

    With an evangelical gleam in his eye, Meller claims Ai-Da is ‘a new voice’ in art, ‘probing our world from a non-human perspective’. (There are a number of other artists exploring art and A.I. right now, including James Bridle, Ian Cheng, Agnieszka Kurant and Trevor Paglen.) He is justifiably fascinated and worried by the ways in which technology is changing the conditions of life on this planet. Invoking Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, he hopes Ai-Da will provide a way for humans to grasp what machines will bring in the coming decade. But he is the wizard behind the curtain. Ai-Da has no learning capabilities, and in the absence of any affective programming, it’s hard to believe that Ai-Da has a ‘voice’ – whatever philosophers agree that to be. Perhaps there is a flesh-and-blood artist who could use it for productive ends, but at this stage, Ai-Da seems like a research experiment that’s been brought into the world too early, too primitive to tell us much. Despite Meller’s claims – and no matter how many times Ai-Da is referred to in the third person, as if to will it into life – it is not innately creative. It needs electricity. It needs to be switched on and set into ‘drawing mode’ by humans. Ai-Da can’t choose or refuse its subjects, it can’t switch up styles, backtrack, discard work it considers a failure, ascribe meaning to what it makes. Ai-Da is a tool, not an artist.

    Pygmalion’s shadow lurks around the edges of the project. Meller refers to the robot as ‘she’, as if it has independent thought, but acknowledges it’s also an ‘it’ with no autonomy. The humanoid form encourages audiences to engage with what it makes, he argues, and is gendered female so as to amplify the voices of women who have been ignored throughout art history. It’s an act of ugly objectification for a man to think he can solve that problem by making a mechanized woman. Ai-Da could have taken the shape of a Perspex box with a bionic claw poking out of the side, or had long rubber tentacles, or been coated in yellow fur and named Blinky. It did not need to look like a waxwork of a twenty-something woman.

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  • Anthropic Economic Index: insights from Claude 3.7 Sonnet – Anthropic

    Briefly, our latest results are the following: Since the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we’ve observed a rise in the share of usage for coding, as well as educational, science, and healthcare applications; People use Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s new “extended thinking” mode predominantly for technical tasks, including those associated with occupations like computer science researchers, software developers, multimedia animators, and video game designers; We’re releasing data on augmentation / automation breakdowns on a task- and occupation-level. For example, tasks associated with copywriters and editors show the highest amount of task iteration, where the human and model co-write something together. By contrast, tasks associated with translators and interpreters show among the highest amounts of directive behavior—where the model completes the task with minimal human involvement.

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  • Free tech eliminates the fear of public speaking – University of Cambridge

    As revealed in a recent publication from Macdonald – Director of the Immersive Technology Lab at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge – the platform increases levels of confidence and enjoyment for most users after a single 30-minute session. In the most recent trial with students from Cambridge and UCL, it was found that a week of self-guided use was beneficial to 100% of users. The platform helped participants feel more prepared, adaptable, resilient, confident, better able to manage anxiety. […]

    With the new VR platform, a user can experience the sensation of presenting to a wide range of photorealistic audiences. What makes Macdonald’s invention unique is that it uses what he calls ‘overexposure therapy’ where users can train in increasingly more challenging photorealistic situations – eventually leading to extreme scenarios that the user is unlikely to encounter in their lifetime. They might begin by presenting to a small and respectful audience but as they progress, the audience sizes increase and there are more distractions: spectators begin to look disinterested, they walk out, interrupt, take photos, and so on. A user can progress to the point where they can present in a hyper-distracting stadium environment with loud noises, panning stadium lights and 10,000 animated spectators.

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  • If Anthropic succeeds, a nation of benevolent AI geniuses could be born – WIRED

    It would seem an irresolvable dilemma: Either hold back and lose or jump in and put humanity at risk. Amodei believes that his Race to the Top solves the problem. It’s remarkably idealistic. Be a role model of what trustworthy models might look like, and figure that others will copy you. “If you do something good, you can inspire employees at other companies,” he explains, “or cause them to criticize their companies.” Government regulation would also help, in the company’s view. … DeepMind’s Hassabis says he appreciates Anthropic’s efforts to model responsible AI. “If we join in,” he says, “then others do as well, and suddenly you’ve got critical mass.” He also acknowledges that in the fury of competition, those stricter safety standards might be a tough sell. “There is a different race, a race to the bottom, where if you’re behind in getting the performance up to a certain level but you’ve got good engineering talent, you can cut some corners,” he says. “It remains to be seen whether the race to the top or the race to the bottom wins out.” […]

    Even as Amodei is frustrated with the public’s poor grasp of AI’s dangers, he’s also concerned that the benefits aren’t getting across. Not surprisingly, the company that grapples with the specter of AI doom was becoming synonymous with doomerism. So over the course of two frenzied days he banged out a nearly 14,000-word manifesto called “Machines of Loving Grace.” Now he’s ready to share it. He’ll soon release it on the web and even bind it into an elegant booklet. It’s the flip side of an AI Pearl Harbor—a bonanza that, if realized, would make the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI seem like an epochal bargain. One suspects that this rosy outcome also serves to soothe the consciences of Amodei and his fellow Anthros should they ask themselves why they are working on something that, by their own admission, might wipe out the species.

    The vision he spins makes Shangri-La look like a slum. Not long from now, maybe even in 2026, Anthropic or someone else will reach AGI. Models will outsmart Nobel Prize winners. These models will control objects in the real world and may even design their own custom computers. Millions of copies of the models will work together—imagine an entire nation of geniuses in a data center! Bye-bye cancer, infectious diseases, depression; hello lifespans of up to 1,200 years.

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  • Traverse Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ with Smarthistory – Colossal

    Turning over the panels, as if opening the cover of a book, we enter an otherworldly realm where humans and beasts mingle with oversized animals, fruit, and surreal structures. On the left, Adam and Eve are introduced by a young God, before Eve was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit hanging in the Garden of Eden. In the center, dozens of nude figures frolic, eat, engage in sexual activities, forage, swim, and fly. On the right is hell. “One of the most compelling theories is that the central panel is an alternate story,” Zucker says. “What if the Temptation had not taken place? What if Adam and Eve had remained innocent and had populated the world? And so is it possible that what we’re seeing is that reality played out in Bosch’s imagination?”

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  • The first trial of generative AI therapy shows it might help with depression – MIT Technology Review

    Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon, an assistant professor of health ethics at Simon Fraser University who has written about AI therapy bots but was not involved in the research, says the results are impressive but notes that just like any other clinical trial, this one doesn’t necessarily represent how the treatment would act in the real world. “We remain far from a ‘greenlight’ for widespread clinical deployment,” he wrote in an email.

    One issue is the supervision that wider deployment might require. During the beginning of the trial, Jacobson says, he personally oversaw all the messages coming in from participants (who consented to the arrangement) to watch out for problematic responses from the bot. If therapy bots needed this oversight, they wouldn’t be able to reach as many people.

    I asked Jacobson if he thinks the results validate the burgeoning industry of AI therapy sites. “Quite the opposite,” he says, cautioning that most don’t appear to train their models on evidence-based practices like cognitive behavioral therapy, and they likely don’t employ a team of trained researchers to monitor interactions. “I have a lot of concerns about the industry and how fast we’re moving without really kind of evaluating this,” he adds.

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  • Well, that’s not good – Futurism

    In a new joint study, researchers with OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab found that this small subset of ChatGPT users engaged in more “problematic use,” defined in the paper as “indicators of addiction… including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and mood modification.” … Though the vast majority of people surveyed didn’t engage emotionally with ChatGPT, those who used the chatbot for longer periods of time seemed to start considering it to be a “friend.” The survey participants who chatted with ChatGPT the longest tended to be lonelier and get more stressed out over subtle changes in the model’s behavior, too.

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  • OpenAI halts Studio Ghibli-style images trend, citing ‘important questions and concerns’ by the creative community – eWeek

    If you’ve been wondering why your social media feeds have been awash with Studio Ghibli-style images this week, OpenAI’s new image generator is the answer. On Tuesday, the company embedded the multimodal tool into GPT-4o, and users have been transforming their photos into vibrant, whimsical scenes reminiscent of the Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro.” … However, the fun didn’t last long. The system card for GPT-4o’s native image generator now states that OpenAI “added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist.” OpenAI acknowledged that the fact its tool can emulate named artists’ styles “has raised important questions and concerns within the creative community.”

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  • Filtered for the rise of the well-dressed robots – Interconnected

    The way I understand it, there have been three major challenges with robots in the real world: mechanical engineering, perception, and instruction following. Engineering has been solved for a while; perception mostly works, though not understanding. Instruction following, including contextual awareness, task sequencing, and safety… that was a work in progress. Solved at a stroke by gen-AI. So, as of a couple years ago, there is clear line of sight to humanoid robots in the market. Research done, development phase: go.

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