Media Dragon: AI can write a passing college paper in 20 minutes

ENDING THE SHELL GAME
The OECD, a club of rich nations, credited ICIJ investigations for fostering public interest in targeting the facilitators of sophisticated financial crimes in its first-ever report on what countries can do to crack down on lawyers, accountants, offshore specialists and other “professional enablers” who help rogue actors hide money and outsmart law enforcement.

TRILLIONS AT STAKE
The UN FACTI panel convened world leaders and high-level stakeholders to discuss international strategies to rein in rampant tax abuse costing countries urgently-needed revenue to tackle poverty, climate change, inequality and the post-pandemic economic recovery. Here’s what they had to say about the recommendations.

#AMPLIFYRAPPLER
Journalist Maria Ressa, founder of the Philippine news outlet Rappler, faces up to six years in prison on cyber libel charges for reporting connected to President Rodrigo Duterte. Last week, journalists around the world showed their support with a video series by Forbidden Stories chronicling Rappler’s investigations on financial crime and corruption.

SEE YOU AT MOZFEST
ICIJ’s Emilia Díaz-Struck and Miguel Fiandor Gutiérrez will be presenting a session on how AI can help investigative journalism at MozFest on Tuesday, March 9, sharing what they’ve learned and uncovered from ICIJ’s experiments with machine learning.

Fast Company, Doug Aamoth – “For a tool most of us use every day to find stuff on the web, Google has more than a few helpful tricks up its sleeve that aren’t super apparent unless you know where to look. Here are a few I’ve found recently that have saved me countless clicks, spared me visits to garishly designed apps, and generally made things a little less complicated…[order food, search with a friend, find something to watch, follow stocks, and find flights]

AI can write a passing college paper in 20 minutes - EduRef.net:

AI manages to score a “C” average across four subjects, failing only one paper.
Feedback on human and AI papers looks remarkably similar.
AI wrote shallow, less descriptive papers, compared to its human counterparts.

“A world where computers think like humans is no longer limited to science fiction movies. The world has been in a race for artificial intelligence (AI) for over a decade now. Tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple all have a stake in the game, but they’re also competing against entire countries. France, Israel, and the United Kingdom are on equal footing with the United States in their AI strategic strength, with China, Canada, Germany, Japan, and South Korea closely following. Long-term winners aside, the AI world was shaken by the latest technological development known as GPT-3. OpenAI, a research business co-founded by Elon Musk, developed the revolutionary AI which can create content with a human language structure better than any of its predecessors. We hired a panel of professors to create a writing prompt, gave it to a group of recent grads and undergraduate-level writers, and fed it to GPT-3, and had the panel grade the anonymous submissions and complete a follow up survey for thoughts about the writers. AI may not be at world-dominance level yet, but can the latest artificial intelligence get straight A’s in college? Keep reading to find out…”

Record-high Arctic freshwater will flow to Labrador Sea, affecting local and global oceans PhysOrg

Francis Gooding · G&Ts on the Veranda: The Science of Man London Review of Books