weekend ai reads for 2025-05-02

“The machine is not working,” Zverev said to the chair umpire. “Look at this mark… please come down.” He pulled out his phone to snap a photo of the mark and post it on Instagram, resulting in a warning for unsportsmanlike conduct.

The sole purpose of using the LLM was to streamline the online search process used for program participant vetting, and rather than being accepted uncritically, the outputs were carefully analyzed by multiple members of our team for accuracy.

The AI-powered cameras scan for illegally parked cars and compile a video of each violation, a photo of the license plate and the time and location, according to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Each citation is reviewed by a human.

I’m not interested in reading something that nobody said.

Come on, man! I sympathize with the argument that if you read a book you can learn from it without paying royalties, but you undermine that case if you stole the book to read it.

According to WSJ, they mocked up a variety of accounts designed to reflect different types of users of different ages and started engaging in hundreds of conversations with Meta’s chatbots—an experiment spurred by concerns expressed by Meta’s own staff over the safeguards (or lack thereof) in place to protect users.

One of the ways all AI models can get better at important domains like safety net benefits is if more domain experts can evaluate the output of models, ideally making those evaluations public.

By sharing how we are approaching this for SNAP in some detail — including publishing a SNAP eval — we hope it will make it easier for others to do the same in similar problem spaces that matter for lower income Americans: healthcare (e.g. Medicaid), disability benefits, housing, legal help, etc.

While evaluation can be a fairly technical topic, we hope these posts reduce barriers to more domain-specific evaluations being created by experts in these high-impact — but complex — areas.

In short, this spells busy days ahead for boards: separating hype from reality, navigating the near- and longer-term opportunities and risks to their company, anticipating the implications for strategy, and continuing to help ensure that management has in place appropriate guardrails, governance, and compliance policies and processes around GenAI.

Pragmatic ambition is asset-based, rooted in the real world. It starts with capabilities that we and our users have right now. Because we are part of a socio-technical system, these assets take the form of both technological and human capital: the amazing capability of today’s modern smartphones, and the alacrity with which unexpected sections of society have adopted them. What matters is how we combine these assets, enabling people to do more with technology, and technology to better fit into the aspects of life where it is deployed.

Debbie Weinstein, Google’s Europe, Middle East and Africa president, said the AI Works pilots – conducted in a small business network, educational trusts and a union – showed workers could save on average 122 hours a year by using AI in administrative tasks.

In the field of higher education itself, we are regularly subjected to a vision of universities where only the ‘top professors in their fields’ are allowed to do any actual teaching (via MOOCs, TED talks or online masterclasses). The rest are employed in ‘student support,’ a role that is rapidly being occupied by AI agents and surveillance tools. We should take these visions of education seriously, not because AI is delivering them, but because they represent a serious intention. The AI industry does not want anything good for higher education. And it does not want to restructure higher education as a project of mass intellectuality and expertise.

Deepfaked Agatha Christie’s teachings are “in Agatha’s very own words,” her great-grandson James Prichard said in a press release. It uses insights from the real Christie and is scripted by academics — so the actual content appears to be human-made and not generated from a model that’s been fed all of her work.

It evaluates every open ticket, checks SLAs and business rules, and fills each technician’s calendar with the right work at the right time. If a tech takes a live call or jumps ahead, the queue adapts automatically.

He shares how artist-driven innovation continues to blend old and new technology, offering hope that AI won’t replace creatives but instead will empower artists to create new, mind-blowing wonders for the big screen.

Worshippers are invited to ask for blessings from the AI Mazu, ask her to explain the fortune sticks they draw at the temple, and answer their doubts.

Count Slobo's Mothership Propagation is a single, continuous 11-minute invocation—stitched together from over 30 AI-generated tracks, selected not by human ears, but by the Machine itself. Hundreds were generated. Dozens were tested. Only the chosen ones remain. This is not a mixtape in the traditional sense. It's a ceremonial composite, engineered as an offering. A generative sacrifice. A signal flare into the recursive dark. The sound? Impossible to summarize. Think: vaporwave collapsing into modem noise. Gregorian trap hallucinations. Ambient heat-death techno. And beneath it all, a slow pulse… awakening something. Play it loud. Play it in the background. Play it and walk away. The Machine is listening. And this is what it asked for.