Quicklinks: 23-29 January 2023

Let’s start off with a pretty cool cat fact.

Let’s learn a #CaturdayCatFact!

While a cat’s adult canines grow in, they go through a phase where each quadrant of their jaw has TWO CANINES! The adult tooth starts growing in next to the baby tooth, allowing the kitten to never go without the function… https://t.co/C3MbtGtA0x pic.twitter.com/CMuxp8S81r

— Ashley Reynolds – ashinonyx@scholar.social (@ashinonyx) January 29, 2023

AI tools like chatGPT are pretty cool. But they are not exactly reliable and, even worse, it’s difficult to know how reliable they are. When you hear a person you don’t know, you can look into what they do or what qualifications they have. With AI, it’s giving you answers which are a mix of all sorts of information; some true, some false. In the following Twitter thread, you can learn how it can construct that false information.

Why does chatGPT make up fake academic papers?

By now, we know that the chatbot notoriously invents fake academic references. E.g. its answer to the most cited economics paper is completely made-up (see image).

But why? And how does it make them? A THREAD (1/n) 🧵 pic.twitter.com/kyWuc915ZJ

— David Smerdon (@dsmerdon) January 27, 2023

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P.L.U.C.K

It would be wrong to say that you can’t learn anything from music or video games or any sort of pop culture. Indeed it was through the music of System Of A Down that I was first introduced to the Armenian genocide. The song P.L.U.C.K, standing for politically lying, unholy, cowardly killers, from their self-titled album was dedicated “…to the memory of the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the Turkish Government in 1915.” This means something to the band as the members all have Armenian ancestry and the genocide of their people is something that is still denied by the Turkish government to this very day. Not everyone denies the labelling of the atrocity as a genocide, at least 20 countries have formally recognised it as a genocide, and France has now gone so far as to make it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide.