Links

1. How AI has rocked the literary world: “One agent told me they were shocked to receive a manuscript from a writer they had worked with for many years – and who professed to hate AI – that used suspiciously ‘bizarre’ words. She contacted the writer, who was ‘horrified’: the problem wasn’t that she’d used AI; it was that she was terrified of being accused of doing so and her efforts to make her prose sound ‘non-AI’ had backfired badly.”

2. And the books were opened, and another book was opened: “Since 2017, the Finnish logician Jan von Plato has led a project at Helsinki University to understand the contents of 16 notebooks that Gödel wrote in the early 1940s. This material – the ‘workbooks’ – is 1,009 pages of densely written text about maths and logic. Much of it is written in a German shorthand, Gabelsberger, that was obsolete even when Gödel was using it. Progress in the mathematical understanding of the text was painfully slow – about a page a week – until September, when von Plato enlisted the help of the AI model Claude. Within a couple of days, Claude had provided a comprehensive digest of the entire material, revealing Gödel had proved hundreds of theorems that no one knew about.”

3. If you were to hear A.I. music, would you recognize it as something made by a machine?

4. “A tool used to rephrase plagiarised text changed ‘final solution’ to ‘mass killing of an ethnic group’ in a chemistry paper.”