NZ Skeptics Articles

The Easiest Person to Fool

20th June 2022

I once met Katherine Smith, the Editor of the New Zealand Journal of Natural Medicine (not a magazine I’d recommend reading - it’ll make you angry!). We had an enjoyable chat, and as we were at a wellness and spiritual festival, WellFest, she had no idea I was a skeptic. She showed me her folder of photos and cuttings about the “synchronicity” she’d experienced in her life - a series of spirals, stretching from a spiral painting she made as a young child, through to photos she’d taken in the ’80s with faint spirals in the background, and a recent picture of a weird glowing spiral in the sky she’d cut out from a newspaper. I told her that I recognised the sky spiral, that it was a picture from Norway of a Russian rocket booster. Of course she was having none of it - the spiral in the sky was a sign for her, part of a message the universe was sending her through a series of events too unlikely to be coincidence. And of course she wasn’t interested in reading into this phenomenon any further - she’d decided what it was, and what it meant to her, and that was enough.

Last night people saw a similar spiral over NZ, with reports from Nelson down to Stewart island. Thankfully the journalist that covered this story for NewsHub didn’t jump to any silly conclusions (except for a brief cheeky mention of “extraterrestrials”!). Instead they explained that the spiral came from a SpaceX upper stage rocket, part of a Falcon 9 that was launching a Globalstar FM15 into orbit. For me this rational, scientific explanation is much better than fooling myself into thinking the spiral is a special sign meant for me.

In this week’s newsletter I ponder the story of the google engineer who appears to have fooled himself into thinking the AI he’s been working with is sentient, I report on a field trip where I listened to a group of people who have fooled themselves into thinking QAnon is real, and I talk about yet another crypto scam - this one using deep fakes of Elon Musk to fool people into thinking that if they give the scammers some money as cryptocurrency, they’ll receive double their money back - spoiler, that’s not what happens.

As well as my rambling, Bronwyn looks at some recent attacks on minority groups here in NZ, and wonders how much we can blame on American nonsense thinking such as QAnon and the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and how much is our own fault.

Mark Honeychurch

Google engineer thinks he's discovered sentient AI

Mark Honeychurch - 20 June 2022

Google engineer thinks he's discovered sentient AI

One of the types of AI that is progressing at speed at the moment, in places like Google's AI labs and at a company called OpenAI, is Natural Language Processing algorithms. These deep learning algorithms are pieces of software that are “trained” by getting them to process (read) lots and lots of human written text, and try to infer a set of rules for how to create new text like it's been reading. This source text is usually documents from the internet (using software that crawls through websites, linking to new sites and saving all the text it finds). Once the AI has been trained, when given a new piece of text, like a sentence, it will try to guess which word is most likely to come next. When it does this repeatedly, it can form entire sentences and paragraphs, guessing as it goes - and because its learning algorithm has figured out not only the rules of grammar but also the ways in which humans usually communicate (which words are relevant to a topic, etc), the most recent NLP algorithms do a really good job of coming across as human. They can also use this same technique to draw pictures - Dall-E 2 is amazing at creating unique images given a prompt like “a cat dressed as Napoleon holding cheese” - with the phrase “a propaganda poster depicting a cat dressed as french emperor napoleon holding a piece of cheese” giving this result:

What a difference a word makes

Mark Honeychurch - 20 June 2022

What a difference a word makes

On Friday night just over a week ago I went to a Save Our Children meeting. Now, most people will read that and think I've been a civic-minded citizen, going along to a charity meeting. Save Our Children is a good thing, right? To which the answer is no, because Save OUR Children is not the same thing as the established charity “Save THE Children”.

It's PRIDE month in the northern hemisphere

Bronwyn Rideout - 20 June 2022

It's PRIDE month in the northern hemisphere

On Friday, June 2nd 2022, homophobic and antisemetic slurs were grafittied on both sides of Glora of Greymouth, with a burned rainbow flagged staked to the ground out front while the owner/operator slept inside. The deconsecrated church is a performing arts venue/arts project which hosts events for the rainbow community.

Deep Fake Elon Musk Cryptocurrency Scam

Mark Honeychurch - 20 June 2022

The title of this one's a mouthful, and it's an interesting one to pick apart - it includes some of my favourite technologies, one that I think is going to be an important part of our future and the other which I think is a storm in a teacup, and unlikely to disrupt anything of note.