How it works: Jets emit heat, water vapor, and particulate matter that can create thin clouds known as “contrails” in the sky. When numerous flights pass over such areas, these contrails can act as a floating blanket over the Earth, forming clouds that absorb radiation escaping from the surface.
Why it matters: A small portion of the total flight, between 2% and 10%, produces about 80% of contrails. There is therefore growing hope that simply rerouting flights could significantly reduce impacts, potentially presenting a high-leverage, low-cost and rapid way to mitigate warming. Read the full story.
—James Temple
LLM becomes more covertly racist with human intervention.
news: It was clear from the beginning that large-scale language models like ChatGPT absorb racist views from the millions of pages on the Internet they were trained on. Developers have tried to reduce toxicity. But a new study shows that these efforts merely discourage overt racist views while allowing covert stereotypes to grow stronger and better hidden. And as these models get bigger, so do the problems.
Here's how they did it: Researchers asked five AI models to make judgments about speakers of African American English (AAE). The race of the speakers was not mentioned in the guidelines. The model was more likely to apply adjectives such as “dirty,” “lazy,” and “stupid” to speakers of AAE than to speakers of standard American English, even when the meaning of the two sentences was the same. Read the full story.
—James O'Donnell