Tags: harvard

Does our fate lie in our fakes?

If you had a fantasy friend when you were a kid, or led an active fantasy life when you grew up, you’re in for a treat – for the rest of your days and nights. Because AI, still a baby learning to walk, can envelop you in a giant hug of unreality. You can live there blissfully mindless that the real world is spinning apart because the world you’ve created looks and sounds and feels exactly how you want it to. Take this deep fake call, the first of many to come in this year’s US elections. Indeed, The Guardian reported that more than 100 paid ads impersonating British PM Rishi Sunak appeared on social media platforms last month alone.

Clearly, regulators must rush to spot and sanction AI fakes, and they are.

But we also need to learn more about AI in a way we didn’t when social media stuck its needle in our arms. We can’t leave our fate to governments like we did when Big Tech raced so far ahead that governments were enfeebled to stop it, and still are.

Read on…

Plagiarism trumps racism.

Should someone be forced to resign if they’ve plagiarized work that helped them get the job they have?

I say ‘yes’, if the plagiarism is material (I heard of a revered professor who was hauled before her university’s Senate because she copied writing from a long ago paper she’d written, but failed to cite that passage even though she was copying from herself. That’s not material).

But what if the plagiarist is a female University president? Is that sexism? Possibly. But also not material.

What if that university president is Black? Is that racism? Possibly. Again, not material.

Read on…

Would it kill you to smile?

You know how those models look back at you from the pages of luxe publications: pouty, pale, thin and rich? Not a good look these days.

I’ve always wondered why, among all the categories of ‘stuff’ for sale in the world that luxury goods is the only one where the people enjoying the products are not enjoying the products. Everywhere else, from beer to travel, cars to lottery tickets, the connection between smiling people promising you’ll be smiling too, is swift and sure.

You’d think a $10,000 watch, a Louis Vuitton suitcase or a Dior suit would make you happy. Or happier, at least. But no.

Read on…

Cheaters never prosper.

Talk about an obsolete idea. It seems the people who prosper too much these days are the cheaters themselves.   But I leave that discussion to the clerics and philosophers. What gets me is the speed of cheating. It’s spreading from poker to fishing, to chess, where a report this week found that American phenom Hans Niemann had likely cheated over 100 times. As one  pharma executive told me years ago, cheating is behind pretty much every scandal in his industry, and lest we forget, it’s not only rampant in American and global politics, it’s their defining quality.

Meanwhile…

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