Florida police were called to break up a fight and take the offenders to jail. The weird part? The brawlers were two escaped goats that, according to a witness, had been at it all weekend.
In today’s email:
AI hallucinations: What’s even going on here?
Hawaii: The state says “aloha” to tourists when it should be saying “aloha.”
Remote control: The return-to-office chorus sings ever louder.
Around the Web: Bite-size sci-fi stories, games plus lo-fi, an athletic chicken, and more.
The big idea
What does it mean when AI ‘hallucinates’?
Everything we know — and don’t know — about AI going rogue.
2023-05-09T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Ryla
In 1943, scientist Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested a substance he’d been developing as a respiratory and circulatory stimulant.
Shortly thereafter, he experienced “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” Unbeknownst to Hofmann, he’d made the hallucinogen LSD.
But what happens when AI hallucinates? Well, it’s kind of like talking to a drunk guy at a bar: they’re wrong, but very confident about it.
It’s not just a ‘lie’
AI could potentially “read” something incorrect on the internet and repeat it, but a hallucination isn’t regurgitated bullshit. It’s inaccurate information that doesn’t correspond with its training data (i.e., the texts, images, etc. it was fed).
For example, Google’s Bard chatbot toldWall Street Journal columnist Ben Zimmer that Hans Jakobsen — a linguist who never existed — coined the term “argumentative diphthongization,” a phrase Zimmer made up.
More troubling: An Australian politician is considering suing OpenAI after ChatGPT claimed he’d served time in prison for bribery, while a professor said it fabricated a Washington Post article accusing him of sexual harassment.
Why does this happen?
We wish we knew! Google CEO Sundar Pichai told “60 Minutes” that all models — including Bard — have this problem, but no one’s been able to solve or fully understand it.
The thing about ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, and other language models is that they don’t really know anything. They just use all the data at their disposal to predict and generate text — and sometimes that text is wrong.
Is ‘hallucination’ even the right term for this?
A lot of people are using it, but some argue it falsely humanizes machines. Linguistics professor Emily Bender has suggested alternative terms for the phenomenon, such as “synthesized ungrounded text” or perhaps the simpler and snappier “made shit up.”
TRENDING
The Biden administration wants US airlines to pay for passengers’ hotels and meals if they’re stranded for reasons within the airline’s control. Airlines (and people who love the word “voucher”) oppose the proposed new rules.
SNIPPETS
TodAI in AI: After one Hasidic Jewish community banned AI usage, Brooklyn rabbi Moishy Goldstein created a chatbot that’s well-versed in Jewish law. Kosher.Chat is a AI chatbot “with a Jewish filter” meant to “prevent answers from opposing Torah values.”
Halo topped: Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer admitted that Xbox Series X “lost” its critical new-generation console battle to Sony PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.
A big what-if… Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer says the tech company considered buying Hulu or Netflix in 2013. Yahoo instead bought Tumblr for $1.1B (since offloaded for ~$20m) and invested in the now-shuttered Yahoo Screen streaming service.
To be quite franc: Liechtenstein is planning to accept bitcoin as a payment option for government services, announced the prime minister, who is also the country’s finance minister.
Measure of a man: Elon Musk has focused Twitter on a metric that’s hard to quantify: unregretted user-minutes. There remain many minutes in an average Twitter day — users collectively spend ~130m hours on the platform daily.
Thump-thump: The FDA signed off on Samsung’s Irregular Heart Rhythm Notification feature for its smartwatches. Apple has offered a similar watch feature since 2018.
Amazon’s new Amazon MGM Studios Distribution unit will make some of its 4k films and 17k TV episodes available on other services, including foreign networks and airplanes.
Filet-o-lab-fish: Israel’s Steakholder Foods and Singapore’s Umami Meats have partnered on a 3D-printed, lab-grown fish fillet that, when cooked, flakes just like the real thing.
Summertime fitness: Planet Fitness is offering free use of its 2.4k US and Canadian gyms to teens ages 14-19 this summer for the third year. The program is designed to keep teens active when there’s no gym class.
You come at the king, you best not miss: A California woman sued Subway in 2021, claiming its tuna products contained non-tuna ingredients. Last week, she asked to quit the case. Now Subway, calling the case “a shakedown,” is going after her legal team for $618k.
Ten spreadsheet templates for cleaner content planning, marketing budgeting, and more. Use this suite of Google Sheets to handle business like the productive professional you are. (We said it, so it’s true.)
FROM THE BLOG
Work-life integration isn’t about separating work from your personal life, but finding a way to merge them seamlessly. Here’s how to do it.
Chart
Singdhi Sokpo
Planning a summer trip? Maybe skip Hawaii, says Hawaii
Lei low, spend high: Hawaii struggles to strike a delicate balance in its bid to solve overtourism.
2023-05-09T00:00:00Z
Jacob Cohen
How popular are Hawaiian vacations? It wasn’t long ago that Maui’s cheapest rental car was a $722-per-day Toyota Camry.
On one hand, the surge in travel following the state’s pandemic-driven ~24% unemployment rate has been a welcome development.
On another, it’s a sobering reminder of Hawaii’s complex overtourism issues.
Say HI to high costs
Hawaii has been so good at marketing itself that it’s come back to bite ’em in the form of… too many tourists.
In 2019, Hawaii’s 1.5m residents hosted a record 10.4m visitors, bagging $2B+ in tourism tax revenue — along with the steeper piles of garbage, traffic, and local housing costs that come with it.
A 2022 survey found 67% of residents agreed Hawaii was “run for tourists at the expense of local people” and 66% preferred their tax dollars be spent managing tourists’ impacts rather than encouraging further tourism.
Lei-ing down the law
In early 2020, Hawaii reformed its tourism office with a plan the authority’s president said would “balance between tourism’s economic benefits and its impacts on local communities.”
Interestingly, as tourism rebounds near pre-pandemic highs, the state does appear to be making more with less: In March, Hawaii saw 97% of 2019’s visitor numbers, but a 23.4% increase in tourist spending.
Progress hasn’t been quick enough for some legislators — Hawaii’s tourism office now faces funding cuts and even flat-out replacement by an agency with no marketing focus, per Bloomberg.
While that gets sorted out, tourists will keep making their presence known, driving straight into harbors and whatnot.
Free Resource
How to use AI to create better content
If you’re seeing as much AI-centric social media content as us, then you know it’s high time to get accustomed.
To help you inject AI into content operations, we asked Jasper’s head of enterprise marketing Samyutha Reddy to simplify researching for content, brainstorming for writing, missing common pitfalls, and more.
How marketers can mix in AI:
For content ideation
For content research
For scaling campaigns
For SEO optimization
Mistakes to avoid making
We want you to have a leg up — when the robots get robust.
Top bosses want you back in the office — like, right now
Execs’ return-to-office push isn’t walking on eggshells anymore.
2023-05-09T00:00:00Z
Ben Berkley
Let’s recap the last few weeks:
IBM’s Arvind Krishna: “Your career does suffer” when you work remotely.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman: Going fully remote was “one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes” and “the experiment on that is over.”
Lyft’s David Risher, reneging on the company’s flexible-work policy: “Things just move faster when you’re face to face.”
Billionaire Sam Zell: Remote work is “a bunch of bullshit.”
They aren’t alone…
Execs who’ve publicly railed on remote work form a corporate America all-star team: Bob Iger, Marc Benioff, Jamie Dimon, Elon Musk, and Howard Schultz.
You’ll repeatedly see numbers like these used to back their cause:
US workers’ Q1 productivity dipped, down 2.7% YoY from 2022.
Low employee engagement cost the global economy $7.8T in 2021.
But is that the whole story?
Of course not. It’s also not hard to find data and studies that back the case for remote work.
Plus, the economy isn’t a monolith — the merits and demerits of in-office, hybrid, and remote work arrangements vary by company and industry.
Economist Gregory Daco toldFortune it all comes back to trust: “The office isn’t essential. Work can be done remotely. The question is… is there trust that employees are actually working?”
As the remote-work battle heats up, here’s to hoping everyone can rally around this universal truth: There’s but one truly perfect form of employment — getting paid to track damages from every crash in The Fast and Furious franchise. (It’s remote.)
AROUND THE WEB
💊 On this day: In 1960, the FDA approved Enovid-10, the first commercially produced birth control pill.
👽 That’s cool: Follow @smllwrlds on Twitter for short, illustrated sci-fi stories.
💰 Opportunity: 20 funding sources for Black-owned businesses.
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