A selection of world thoughts – about AI – for global citizens.
What are the global perspectives on AI? Here, you will find a selection of articles from top newspapers, research publications, and leading magazines from around the world, exploring AI’s impact on language, culture, geopolitics, and economies. Our collection of local sources helps you understand the global landscape and navigate change through innovative ideas, keeping you informed about what’s relevant in this constantly evolving field.
Most Read Articles in 2024
AI + BUSINESS
Reskilling in the age of AI
The upcoming changes will affect not only data scientists but all areas of business. Learn how to lead the entire company through this process, introducing five new paradigms for leaders and those who want to reposition themselves.
Read the full article on the Harvard Business Review
AI + CULTURE
How Culture Shapes What People Want from AI
When a team of Stanford researchers applied cultural psychology theory to study what people want from AI, they found clear associations between the cultural models of agency that are common in cultural contexts and the type of AI that is considered ideal. This paper investigates how the cultural framework changes the perception of people about AI.
Read the full paper on HAI Stanford
AI + INNOVATION
The AI project pushing local languages to replace French in Mali’s schools
In 2023, French was declared to be no longer an official language in Mali, with a shift towards providing education in Bambara (the most widely spoken language in the country). There are several interesting elements at play: the role of AI in the post-colonial cultural transition of countries grappling with independence, AI in the empowerment of Indigenous languages (also exemplified by Brazil), a model based on the Western worldview of AI development, and the use of AI to ensure more efficient access to education worldwide.
Read the full article on Rest of the World
LANGUAGE INSIGHT
Can You lose your Native Tongue?
In this article, Madeleine Schwartz analyzes the difficult nature of a bilingual mind and explains how, in certain circumstances, it’s possible not only to learn multiple languages, but also to lose them. Talking in multiple languages isn’t an equilibrium where the languages coexist. Each tries to attract all the attention for itself, and many factors contribute to remembering (or forgetting) a language.
Read the full article on The New York Times
SCIENCE SPOTLIGHT
From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization
While LLMs are getting good at answering general questions, they still need help from a domain-specific corpus as a knowledge bank to answer specialized questions. In contrast to the existing “RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)” approach of retaining the knowledge bank in the plain textual format, this work, through their “Graph RAG” approach, proposes to instead represent it in a structured, graph-based format. To build the graph, the authors use an all-LLM approach to weave together communities of related concepts in the domain. All such concepts or entities and the relations between them are automatically detected by LLMs from the knowledge bank. When asked a question, the communities are queried individually to get community-specific answers, all of which are then compiled together into a unified global answer. The authors show the benefit of this paradigm in increasing the comprehensiveness and diversity of the answers.
Discover the full lecture here
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We’re losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?
Historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st century. Digital entropy, in fact, is challenging our history: a quarter of all web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 now don’t. Projects like the Internet Archive could save this situation: it’s the most ambitious digital archiving project in history, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos and more.
Read the full article on BBC Future
The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm
The concept of AI “alignment” raises a critical question: alignment to what? While AI systems are deployed globally, most safety measures are designed for homogeneous, monolingual environments, with an overemphasis on Western-centric data. This article examines the challenges of aligning AI to diverse languages and cultural preferences while minimizing both global and local harms.
Read the full paper on Cohere
Words and Phrases that Make it Obvious You Used ChatGPT
A Financial Review article questions whether the word “delve” is a telltale sign of AI-generated writing, presenting five examples of overused phrases that can signal ChatGPT’s influence. It emphasizes that while these terms aren’t off-limits, over-reliance on them can lead to generic output. The article offers practical tips for enhancing authenticity in your writing, encouraging the use of specific language and concrete examples to foster a genuine connection with readers and avoid the typical markers of AI-generated text.
Read the full article on Medium
My trip to the frontier of AI education
Imagine a classroom where AI empowers teachers and enhances student learning. During a visit to Newark, Bill Gates saw firsthand how AI, like Khanmigo, is revolutionizing education—helping teachers create personalized lesson plans and offering students tailored tutoring. While the technology is still evolving, its potential to transform education is undeniable. Curious about how AI could reshape the classroom? This article explores the exciting future of learning and why AI might just be the key to unlocking it.
Read the full article on Gates Notes
AI mediation tool may help reduce culture war rifts, say researchers
Google DeepMind and Oxford’s “Habermas Machine” uses AI to mediate cultural divisions, increasing group consensus more effectively than human mediators. Despite its potential, critics warn it may overlook smaller minority voices, raising questions about empathy and AI’s role in conflict resolution.
Read the full article on The Guardian
Getting Real About AI
Rejecting both AI optimism and doomsaying, this essay advocates for an “AI realism” that recognizes AI’s liberatory potential while being critical of its capitalist exploitation and environmental toll.
Read the full Essay by Holly Lewis
Why Can’t Robots Click The “I’m Not a Robot” Box On Websites?
It’s not uncommon to come across the ‘I’m not a robot’ button on reCAPCHTA. However, online robots are highly advanced and can easily click a box. The truth is, it’s not about the ability to click, but rather the way we do it.
Read the full article on Medium
why lowercase letters save data
Did you know that simply switching uppercase letters to lowercase can save data? It sounds counterintuitive, right? Yet, thanks to the magic of compression, those small changes can make a real impact. How does this work? And what are the broader implications for data efficiency? Dive into this article to uncover surprising insights that might change how you think about everyday text and its digital footprint.
Read the full article on endtimes.dev
Detecting hallucinations in LLM using semantic entropy
Large language model (LLM) systems, such as ChatGPT1 or Gemini2, can show impressive reasoning and question-answering capabilities but often ‘hallucinate’ false outputs and unsubstantiated answers. Researchers need a general method for detecting hallucinations in LLMs that works even with new and unseen questions to which humans might not know the answer. Here we develop new methods grounded in statistics, proposing entropy-based uncertainty estimators for LLMs to detect a subset of hallucinations which are arbitrary and incorrect generations.
Read the full scientific paper on Nature
How To Use AI to Build Your Company Collective Intelligence
In his Harvard Business Review article, Christoph Riedl explores how AI can enhance a company’s collective intelligence, leading to improved long-term performance. He emphasizes the importance of collective memory, attention, and reasoning, highlighting the synergy between humans and AI. This insight offers valuable strategies for fostering collaboration and learning in digital transformation.
Read the full article on Harvard Business Review
Gen AI: The Democratization Dilemma
Generative AI is becoming a powerful tool for democratization, empowering everyone to create texts, images, and even songs. While this availability opens up opportunities for many, it also seems to diminish the product’s value due to three major contradictions. Discover these contradictions and learn how to safeguard your brand.
Read the full article on ET Brand Equity
‘Side job, self-employed, high-paid’: behind the AI slop flooding TikTok and Facebook
The ‘AI slop’ phenomenon, which is flooding Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated content, is hiding a gold mine. Creators of these products are making a fortune by going viral. But why are platforms like TikTok interested in the proliferation of these contents?
Read the full article on The Conversation
