AI links: Microsoft eats writers?; Meddling legislators; Chinese chiplets

An AI link dump for your delectation! Is Microsoft's AI eating writers? Are California legislators sticking their nose where it doesn't belong? How is China dealing with US chip technology sanctions?

Be careful around AI or you will be assimilated.

Microsoft eats writers?

We are told that there is a certain ineffably human quality to words written by a person. We are futher told that artificial intelligence can’t really capture this quality. Sure, AI can capture the low end of writing. But the high end—the writing with literary aspirations if not literary import—is beyond AI’s ken. We comfort ourselves with this delusion because for now, at least, it is true. The Financial Times reports:

Microsoft is working with media start-up Semafor to use its artificial intelligence chatbot to help develop news stories—part of a journalistic outreach that comes as the tech giant faces a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from the New York Times.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft is paying an undisclosed sum of money to Semafor to sponsor a breaking news feed called “Signals”. The companies would not share financial details, but the amount of money is “substanital” to Semafor’s business, said a person familiar with the matter.

But, rest assured: “Semafor co-founder Ben Smith emphasised that Signals will be written entirely by journalists, with artificial intelligence being a research tool to inform posts.”

AI, in other words, is meant to be used as a cognitive complement to, and not a replacement for, human cognition. Of course, this is with today’s artificial intelligence, and tomorrow’s will be more powerful, and the one the day after that will be yet more powerful, and so on. As the saying goes, today’s artificial intelligence is the worst you’ll ever use. At some point we will have an artificial intelligence which can generate high quality writing at a scale, if you will excuse the literary pretension, heretofore unknown to man.