Nothing In Particular

[Ray P]

There's a bit of fuss about a Google engineer claiming that one of their AI projects has 'feelings' - here's a link to the 'interview' that led him to that conclusion.



Very interesting, what do you guys make of it?

There's an article about it on the BBC for context.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61784011

[Cressy Snr]

What do you make of it Mr Data?

[jack]

Not sentient, just very well trained.

As Google point out they used huge amounts of human-generated text to train it, so not surprisingly it comes across as sounding pretty human.

Similar methods have been used to train AIs to analyse mammograms - 100s of millions of known-outcome mammograms are presented to the system in learning mode; in diagnostic mode the AI has better accuracy than a trained consultant - less false positives and less false negatives. This is also being trialled with colon cancer endoscopy data. Colon cancer is notoriously hard to diagnose and AI systems are really good at picking out small anomalies from masses of data - they don't get bored, don't have a personal life that gets in the way, don't have a bad night etc

Doesn't make it a consultant radiologist/oncologist though.

[Ray P]

Not sentient, just very well trained.

I agree, but it is a really impressive 'conversation' - the training is picking up and reproducing the subtleties and nuances of human interaction.

Not on the same technological level but we're using a lot of machine learning to analyse satellite imagery and getting some impressive results that are almost as good as a trained human analyst but a lot faster and not prone to 'over-capture' like analysts.

[Nick]

Yep, as Jack points out

As Google point out they used huge amounts of human-generated text to train it, so not surprisingly it comes across as sounding pretty human.

Its been trained with the intention of seeming human, so it its doing exactly what its been designed to do.

It does point out though how eager we are to anthropomorphize things though.

[Dave the bass]

It does point out though how eager we are to anthropomorphize things though.

I had to Google the meaning of that word.

I dun learning today.

[IslandPink]

New name for your house : 'Dunlearnin'

[Dave the bass]

New name for your house : 'Dunlearnin'

Nah.

Ain't never Dunlearnin'.

[shane]

Talking of machine learning, I found this fascinating. My son works for the company behind Yeo Valley, who own five farms in Somerset. He’s heavily involved in researching and implementing regenerative farming techniques which can then be fed out to the 150 or so other farms that supply Yeo Valley dairies.

One of the aims of the project is to increase biodiversity, which is a difficult thing to measure and quantify, but he recently came across a nice little Raspberry Pi application which uses AI to identify birdsong. It listens continuously and records anything it hears that it thinks might be birdsong, then compares it and adds it to a central library (held somewhere in the States, I think) so every recording increases its knowledge and level of certainly.

He ran a trial with one Pi set up on one of the farms for two weeks. It made over 11,000 recordings and identified with a certainty over 75% about 30 different species, some of which they had no idea were in the area.

He’s now building a few more for the other four farms in the company and will be sending out the idea to all the supplier farms as well.

More info here:

https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi

[Nick]

That's a neat usage. Must have a look if there are non pi versions given the lack of availability ATM.

[Nick]

The sponsorship made me smile

[pre65]

Made me smile as well.

The postman was late today, I only got one letter, and it's from Pure Cremation.

I daren't open it in case they have my disposal date planned.

[Ray P]

The sponsorship made me smile

Just a shame it's not number 33, 45 or 78.

[simon]

Seen in the car park at work today...

20220615_104223.jpg (106.23 KiB) Viewed 1037 times

[IslandPink]

Going to Cranage tomorrow.
Getting excited trousers now.

Edit : shorts