Hacker News with Generative AI: Skepticism

Gary Marcus discusses AI's technical problems (cacm.acm.org)
In an age of breathless predictions and sky-high valuations, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has emerged as one of the best-known skeptics of generative artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, he recently wrote a book about his concerns, Taming Silicon Valley, in which he made the case that “we are not on the best path right now, either technically or morally.”
The phony comforts of AI skepticism (platformer.news)
It’s fun to say that artificial intelligence is fake and sucks — but evidence is mounting that it’s real and dangerous
Elon Musk given Rusty Razor pseudoscience award (skeptic.org.uk)
Twitter owner Elon Musk has today been named the 2024 recipient of the “Rusty Razor” award, the prize given by The Skeptic to the year’s worst promoters of pseudoscience
The Crackpot Index (wikipedia.org)
The Crackpot Index is a number that rates scientific claims or the individuals that make them, in conjunction with a method for computing that number.
Due to AI fakes, the "deep doubt" era is here (arstechnica.com)
Given the flood of photorealistic AI-generated images washing over social media networks like X and Facebook these days, we're seemingly entering a new age of media skepticism: the era of what I'm calling "deep doubt."
Does Astrology Work? (clearerthinking.org)
A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes (davidv.dev)
What if the A.I. Boosters Are Wrong? (nytimes.com)
OCaml for the Skeptical (2006) (lib.uchicago.edu)
Psychology might be a big stinkin' load of hogwash and that's just fine (experimental-history.com)
Welcome to the age of space scepticism – and a growing revolt against elites (theconversation.com)
A skeptic's take on beaming power to Earth from space (ieee.org)