What is the relationship between perplexity, creativity and novelty? Following on from ‘Perplexing Perplexity’, I set out to demonstrate that high perplexity texts are not always creative, and to showcase ChatGPT’s ability to work with and even generate novel words – culminating in the Tale of Zonkamoozle.
Detectors such as GPTZero use the property of ‘perplexity’ to try to detect AI authorship of texts. But I show that by writing in a specifically dull style, or engineering the prompt given to a language model, we can easily and systematically fool such detectors to label AI text as human and vice versa.
A recent study by Gao et al. (2022) validates the warning of ‘Machine Evidence’ (Blunt, 2019) that language models would soon become capable of beating detection attempts by human peer reviewers. This piece looks at the near-term steps that journal editors and conference organisers can take to prevent AI-generated abstracts bypassing their screening processes, along with a warning for the long-term viability of those strategies.
Evidence pyramids are amongst the most recognisable artefacts of the Evidence-Based Medicine movement. Yet no study has established the origins of evidence pyramids, or analysed whether they offer any information beyond simple lists or tables. In this paper, I establish the origins of the first evidence pyramid and argue that the pyramidal turn is a retrograde step in evidence appraisal.
Can a new iteration of GPT-3 write pop songs, raps and limericks…about Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative? It is a moral duty to find out.
Does the ranking of a UK university in league tables affect its reputation and name recognition? Using a novel data source from an online quiz, this research explores the complex relationship between league table rank and identifiability of universities.
The Machine Scientists – Giovanni Borelli, Jan Swammerdam and Niels Steensen – followed Rene Descartes in modelling the human body mechanically. The scientific success of this ‘iatrophysical’ programme, replete with rejected entities such as ‘Animal Spirits’, poses a problem for Scientific Realism. Using Psillos’ moderate realism, this paper attempts to reconcile a selective realist position with the historical record.
Can DALL·E 2 create images of ancient philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Immanuel Kant as they’d look in modern day universities? Sort of. Should it? Definitely not.
Would you choose a black box AI surgeon with a 90% success rate over a human surgeon with 80% success? The answer exposes a fundamental and harmful assumption within dominant models of medical evidence.
DALLE 2 offers a far more powerful image generation AI than the popular open access ‘Craiyon’/’DALLE Mini’ model. How does DALLE 2 compare to DALLE Mini’s visions of hierarchies and pyramids of evidence?
![[Superseded] The Pyramid Schema: The Origins and Impact of Evidence Pyramids](https://i1.wp.com/cjblunt.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/pyramids-cropped-scaled.jpg?resize=683%2C200&ssl=1)
