A

Asad Sayeed (also @asayeed[@zirk.us])

@asayeed.bsky.social

404 Followers 107 Following

Thought leader, whose main act of thought leadership is to declare myself thought leader. Computational psycholinguist at the University of Gothenburg.

ebike computer with the odometer displaying "6666"
A Twitter AI right-wing bot account responding seriously to a meme about Zohran Mamdani forcing schools to teach the scientific typesetting system LaTeX.
a strawberry holding a gun with the text "This is a strobbery"
Graph of capabilities from Definition of AGI paper by bunchauthors
birb being carried in tongs
screenshot of bluesky explore page labelling the term "Ghislaine Maxwell" as being a "hot" topic
ducks standing in a row at the Belvedere palace, Vienna
Chinese Hot and Soup Soup recipe.
Racaccoonie scene from "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once".
Perhaps due to their simplistic language, researchers (Liang et al., 2023) found that commercial LLM detectors are consistently biased against nonnative speakers (English as a Second Language, or ESL). To test this, the researchers used a benchmark of 91 essays from TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) to test several detectors. We hold out the 91 TOEFL essays from our training set and evaluate Pangram on the benchmark. Due to the composition of our training set, we report a false positive rate of 0% on the TOEFL benchmark. We report results in Figure 6. In October 2023, GPTZero published a response to this benchmark on their blog, titled "ESL Bias in AI Detection is an Outdated Narrative" (Edward Tian, 2023) along with an updated model. However, the new model still achieves a false positive rate of 7.7%, or 1.1% if "Possible AI Content" is generously labeled a negative. We further evaluate Pangram Text on two additional ESL datasets. We evaluate Pangram on 3,907 essays from the ELLIPSE dataset Franklin et al. (2022), which contains ESL essays from 8th-12th graders, and find zero false positives. We also evaluate Pangram on the recently released ICNALE dataset Ishikawa (2023), which contains 5,600 essays from undergraduates at Asian universities learning English. We report a false positive rate of 0.09% on this dataset. Based on these findings, we conclude that Pangram is not biased against text written by non-native English speakers.
a gong among other percussion instruments on a stage
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/21454c08-8e1c-4335-84f9-ef2d0e1aeb14 This is an economics classic. Unfortunately, it is also politically extremely naive. If you want Trump-like politicians to dominate the world, going back to the free-trade dogma of the 90s and 00s is the most assured recipe. Economics has been ignoring politics for almost half a century and we still keep a blind eye to the political aftermath. A general increase in civil unrest, populism, authoritarianism, and even the return of the war on a global scale. Only climate-change denialism exceeds in magnitude the motivated reasoning required for political-climate denialism. Yes, globalisation (and trade liberalisation in general) is good for the economy but is not politically viable in the long-run. Free-trade generates winners and losers (this is well documented by now, just look at Krugman's work) and (most importantly) the winners never compensate the losers, even though the proverbial pie expands (human nature I suppose). There are broadly two alternatives that are easily accessible (and so politically 'attractive'). Either the authoritarian mercantilism, which now unfolds in front of our very own eyes, or the return of the redistributive politics the western world was used to between 50s and 80s (and yes I am talking about the absolutely bonkers and infuriatingly absurd concept of social democracy). The choice is yours. PS. The greatest irony in history would be free-market capitalists to drive so many nations back into authoritarian communism, that would make Lenin blush.
Fourth paragraph of linked DIE ZEIT article starting with "A brief reminder"
a lobby chair at the Hirschhorn Museum