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Europe
Bulgaria
31 May 2023 Bulgaria has refused political asylum to Russian citizen Stotzky. He arrived in Bulgaria legally with a one-year visa but submitted documents for refugee status. Since he has been in Bulgaria, he has participated in protests against Russian aggression and made media appearances in which he declares himself against Putin’s actions. Last year, when considering other cases, the Bulgarian courts paid attention to the resolutions of the European Parliament regarding the intensifying repressions against civil society and human rights defenders in Russia. On 29 May, the Bulgarian Supreme Administrative Court refused to grant the individual refugee status. “There is no reason to assume that the official authorities in the Russian Federation are undertaking massive repression against citizens who express dissatisfaction with the president’s (Putin) policy,” the court said. In December 2022, the Russian citizen reported receiving a notice of mobilisation at his home address, which the Bulgarian authorities ignored. “His fears that upon returning to the country he will be persecuted for his different political views or be mobilised. These are only assumptions that are not supported by evidence,” the court decision said. “There is no persecution in Russia because of a different race, religion, nationality, belonging to a certain social group or because of political opinions or convictions,” the Bulgarian court said. Stotzky says that the Bulgarian court and the State Refugee Agency have ignored the fact that he received a call-up letter for the army. (Source: euractiv)
Finland
2023. máj. 31. Finland’s Defence Forces have suggested raising the age limit for military reservists to 65 as the parties set to form the new Finnish government continue with their negotiations. Finland’s NATO membership and the need to have more experienced personnel in the ranks domestically and abroad were cited as reasons for the proposal. Another reason cited was that people are now more physically capable the longer they live. Under current legislation, enlisted personnel remain in the reserves until 50 and officers until they turn 60. The Finnish Reservists’ Association, long in favour of raising the age limit, welcomed the Defence Forces’ proposal. Compared to the previous survey published three years ago, around 30% of people now believe aggression against their country to be possible, an increase of 15% from 2020. (Source: euractiv)
Germany
May 31 2023 The German government will deploy additional police forces at the Polish border to crack down on increasing traffic from the Belarus route. Germany has been facing a new surge in irregular migrant crossings, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan by way of irregular migration at the Polish border. Authorities suspect much of the migration is being driven by the Belarusian and Russian governments to cause social disruption in European countries that support Ukraine. Already in 2021, Belarusian President Lukashenko opened his country’s borders to Poland for migrants to retaliate for EU sanctions after he crushed post-election protests. The situation at the Polish-Belarusian border has since remained tense. Migrants frequently stuck between the borders of Belarus and Poland, with neither of the two sides showing a willingness to admit the refugees. A similar case also made headlines on Monday, May 29, when Poland refused to take in refugees who were left stranded between the two countries. Regional governments in Germany’s border region have called for reintroducing continuous controls at fixed checkpoints. Stationary controls are already in place at the border between Germany and Austria. “We have by every definition a last-resort situation,” Saxony’s Interior Minister Schuster told. The police registered more than 8,000 illegal border crossings related to the migrant route from Belarus to Poland nine months before March, Welt reports. “We’re acting as is required by the current situation and hand in hand with our neighbours,” Interior Minister Faeser said after a visit to the joint centre for German-Polish Police and Customs Cooperation in Poland in May 30. “Several police units” will be deployed to conduct mobile checks in the area. Faeser criticised Belarus for orchestrating a - "to some extent controlled" - migratory pressure. Faeser had previously called stationary controls “a last resort measure”. Yesterday, the interior minister reaffirmed her opposition to this step for their disruptive effect on everyday cross-border interactions. (Source: euractiv)
Russia
31 May 2023 The mothers going to get their children back from Russia. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russia's president in March, accusing him and his children's ombudswoman, Lvova-Belova, of the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. Russia insists that its motives are purely humanitarian, evacuating, saving children to protect them from danger. Senior officials scorn the ICC indictment, even threatening retaliatory arrests against its representatives. The Telegram channel of the children's ombudswoman is full of videos showing her escorting groups of Ukrainian children, where bewildered youngsters are greeted by Russian foster parents with gifts and hugs as the cameras roll. She adopted a teenager from Mariupol herself, posting pictures with his new Russian passport. Officials in Kyiv maintain that more than 19,000 children have been taken from occupied areas since the full-scale invasion. We understand that many have come from care homes and residential schools. Sasha and Artem were among 13 children taken from their special educational needs school in Kupyansk, north-eastern Ukraine last September by armed Russian soldiers. Scrolling through the website of Perevalsk Special School, the photograph of Artem on public display was taken in February 2023, in a class to mark Defenders of the Fatherland Day. Ukrainian children were dressed in Russian military uniforms, and taught the Russian curriculum. The lesson was dedicated to learning "gratitude and respect" for Russian soldiers. Russian officials made minimal or zero effort to locate any relatives. Ukrainian children were frequently told there was nothing in their country to return to and were subjected, to varying degrees, to a "patriotic" Russian education. There is also a clear, overriding ideology: Russia, led by Putin, openly proclaims everything in occupied areas of Ukraine as its own, including the children. The 15-year-old Sasha even has grey hairs from all the stress. He and his mother, Tetyana're now are living in the western German town of Dinklage as refugees. Tetyana wants nothing more than to go home to her husband, but Kupyansk is under heavy fire again. Before the war, Sasha went to Kupyansk Special School. He would board during the week, returning home at weekends. When Russia invaded in February 2022, much of the Kharkiv region was overrun immediately and Tetyana kept her son home for safety. As September approached, the occupying administration, often using teachers from Russia to replace those locals who refused to collaborate, began insisting that all children return to school, now with the Russian curriculum. The teenager was bored stiff after seven months in their village, so on 3 September she dropped him off in Kupyansk. Days later, Ukrainian forces launched their operation to re-take the region. The armed Russian soldiers didn't care about taking any documents or contacting parents, they just shoved the kids in a bus with some refugees and left. Russia's defence in such cases: that it was removing children from danger. Tetyana went six weeks not knowing what had become of her son when a friend spotted a video on social media, dated early September 2022. It reported that 13 children from Kupyansk Special School had been moved east to a similar facility in Svatove, still under Russian control. Another fortnight after that, Tetyana's phone beeped with a message: Sasha was at a Special School in Perevalsk, she read, and his mum could call to talk to him. Communication with areas of heavy fighting is not easy. There Kupyansk children passed through three institutions before anyone tried to reach any relatives. Tetyana would have to return Sasha home in person, but the direct route crossed the frontline. Instead, Tetyana travelled from Ukraine through Poland and the Baltics before crossing on foot into Russia, where the FSB Security Service then interrogated her about Ukrainian troop movements. She had another reason to be frightened. By then, Russia has changed its laws to make it easier to get Russian citizenship and to adopt Ukrainian children. In late September Putin announced the annexation of four regions of Ukraine, including Luhansk where Sasha was then located. When Tetyana finally reached Perevalsk, after an exhausting five days on the road, she hugged her son who was crying from happiness. Kherson city, in southern Ukraine had been occupied since the very start of the invasion. When Alla packed her 13-year-old son off to camp in Crimea, she thought Danylo was heading for two weeks by the sea. It was meant to be a break from the stress of war: other kids from Kherson had been to camp and come back, so Alla wasn't worried. But days after Alla waved Danylo off, the officials responsible for him announced that the children would not return. The Russians had begun retreating from Kherson. If the children's parents wanted them back, they were told they should come for them. They talked of being taken on excursions at the start, and being reasonably fed and clothed. On Russian-controlled territory they were treated and taught as Russians. When inspectors visited from Moscow, the Ukrainians had to line up beside the Russian flag and sing the Russian anthem. Alla pleaded with the regional administration but was told they would only return the children "when Kherson is Russian again." She called the Prosecutor's Office in Crimea, but they insisted she had to get Danylo herself. And so for weeks, Alla reassured her son that she was coming for him even as she tried to work out how. The distance from Kherson to Yevpatoria is short but the direct route was closed by the Russian military and a far longer route through Zaporizhzhia was too dangerous. "There was a less than 5% chance of getting there and back safely," Alla was told. She would also need around $1,500 for a driver, as well as her first ever passport and all the paperwork the Russians were demanding to prove her link to her son. Alla was already starting to despair when Danylo said officials at his camp were threatening to place the children in care if their parents didn't hurry. She finally set off in a train carriage full of other mums and grandmothers on the most anxious journey of their lives. The women were being helped by a group called Save Ukraine. Some were from broken homes or struggling with the logistics and funding for the trip. Other parents had been hesitant about returning their children to cities under heavy Russian fire. Save Ukraine had instructed the women to turn off their phones when they entered Russia. 'They kept us like cattle, separate from anyone else. Fourteen hours with no water, no food, nothing," Alla described being held by Russia's FSB security service at a Moscow airport. "They kept asking us what military equipment we had seen, they checked our phones a million times and asked about all our relatives." The women continued the 24-hour drive south to Crimea. "The moment I saw my child running towards me in tears, it made up for everything we'd been through," Alla described her reunion, at last, with Danylo. Over a week later, Alla was one of the last to cross the border back from Belarus, dragging a big suitcase into Ukraine past concrete boulders and anti-tank defences. Danylo, with his dimpled grin, was finally safe beside her. She admits there was some bad feeling towards the summer-camp mums at the start, seen as 'collaborators' for sending their children to Russian-run facilities in the first place. But Alla feels that has faded. Danylo is still in a group chat with the other children from camp and most who remained have now been collected. But he says five were transferred to a care home somewhere in Russia. (Source: BBC)
May 31, 2023 Drones attacked two Russian oil refineries near major oil port Novorossiisk in southern Russia today, sparking a fire at one and causing no damage to the other, according to Russian officials. Russia has accused Ukraine of increased attacks on targets inside the country. At around 0100 GMT a drone struck the Afipsky oil refinery in Russia's Krasnodar region, causing a fire which was later extinguished, Governor Kondratyev said. Another drone crashed into the Ilsky refinery, which lies around 40 miles east of Novorossiisk. The Afipsky refinery lies 50 miles east of the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, one of Russia's most important oil export gateways. The plant can process around 6 million tonnes (44 million barrels) of oil each year. Novorossiisk, together with the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) terminal, bring about 1.5% of global oil to market. Last year, CPC exported via the South Ozereyevka terminal 58.7 million tonnes of oil, mainly from Kazakhstan, while the terminal of Sheskharis at Novorossiisk handled about 30 million tonnes of oil. According to the Ilsky refinery's web site, its five processing units have the combined capacity of 3 million tonnes per year. Refineries across Russia have been frequently attacked by drones following the start of what the Kremlin casts as the "special military operation" in Ukraine in February 2022. (Source: Reuters)
31 May ,2023 Five people were killed and 19 wounded in Ukrainian shelling of a village in the Russian-controlled region of Luhansk. Ukrainian forces had used HIMARS rocket launchers to attack a poultry farm in the village of Karpaty. (Source: Alarabiya)
Wed, May 31, 2023 "The last warship of the Ukrainian navy, the Yuriy Olefirenko, was destroyed at a warship mooring in the port of Odesa," Defence Ministry Spokesman Konashenkov said. He said the vessel had been hit with "high-precision weapons" - a phrase he uses to mean missiles - on May 29. Ukrainian officials said on Monday that Russia had put five aircraft out of action in an attack on a military target in western Ukraine and caused a fire at the Black Sea port of Odesa in heavy air strikes early on Monday. The Russian defence ministry also said today that its forces had pushed Ukrainian units out of positions around the settlements of Krasnohorivka and Yasynuvata in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, which Moscow claims to have annexed. The ministry said "fierce fighting" was continuing around Avdiivka, a town located between the two settlements, which has been largely razed to the ground during months of fighting. (Source: Yahoo)
31 May 2023 The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary force has again criticised the Russian military and political elite following the drone attack on Moscow that injured two people, damaged property. In an expletive-drenched statement posted on Telegram by his press service yesterday, Prigozhin blamed the drone attack on out-of-touch officials living in Moscow’s western affluent suburbs of Rublyovka. Russian military blogger Girkin – whom a Dutch court found guilty of the murder of 298 people who were killed when flight MH17 was shot down over Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine in 2014 – also criticised Rublyovka residents yesterday who, he said, had “never thought about the country”. In a post on Telegram after the attack yesterday, Khinshtein, a prominent member of Russia’s parliament from the ruling United Russia bloc, said three of the eight drones had been downed over three Rublyovka villages, one of which is located just 10 minutes drive from Russian President Putin’s residence at Novo-Ogaryovo. Rublyovka, a patchwork of elite gated communities in the forests west of Moscow, which once boasted some of the world’s highest real-estate prices, is home to much of Russia’s political, business and cultural elite. Former President Medvedev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin have been reported to own homes in Rublyovka, alongside many of Russia’s richest business figures. Following the drone attacks, Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the Russian province of Chechnya, urged the Kremlin to declare martial law nationwide and use all its resources in Ukraine “to sweep away that terrorist gang”. Some Kremlin watchers noted that Putin’s calm reaction to the drone attack contrasted starkly with angry statements from Russian hawks and appears to reflect his belief that the Russian public will not be unsettled by the attack. Putin said it was clear that Moscow’s air defences need to be improved against what he described as Ukrainian “terrorism”. (Source: AlJazeera)
May 31, 2023 Washington is encouraging Kyiv by publicly ignoring the drone attack that struck several districts of Moscow yesterday, Russia's envoy to the United States said today. The attack on Moscow came after Russia launched three air assaults within a day on Kyiv and 17 in May so far, killing, sowing destruction and fear. The White House said it did not support attacks inside of Russia and that it was still gathering information on the incident. Russia has long accused the "collective West" of staging a proxy war against Moscow by supporting Ukraine with military and financial aid. Putin yesterday cast the assault, which brought the 15-month war in Ukraine to the heart of Russia, as a terrorist act. Moscow calls the war a "special military operation" to "denazify" Ukraine and protect Russian speakers. Kyiv and its allies say it is an unprovoked land grab. A Ukrainian presidential aide denied Kyiv was directly involved in the drone attack on Moscow, but said Ukraine was enjoying watching events and forecast more to come. (Source: Reuters)
May 31, 2023 A woman who accused Biden of sexual assault has turned up in Moscow, announcing plans to seek Russian citizenship. “I just didn’t want to walk home and walk into a cage or be killed, which is basically my two choices,' Reade suggested in a statement published on Kremlin-owned Sputnik overnight. She is also receiving the help of a woman convicted of spying for Russia. Butina had sought to infiltrate conservative US political groups and promote Russia’s agenda without registering as a foreign agent. Butina pleaded guilty in the US to acting as an agent for Russia in 2018. She was jailed for 18 months. After being released from jail in 2019, she was deported back to Russia. Butina, who appeared with Reade, has pledged to “discuss the possibility of granting Russian citizenship” to Reade, and ask Russian President Putin to “fast track” her citizenship application. Sputnik reported Butina’s current role as a member of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs. Reade, who had once served on Biden’s Senate staff, filed a complaint against the then-presidential candidate in April 2020, accusing him of sexual assault in 1993. In 2020, Reade told media interviewers she complained in 1993 about sexual harassment, though not sexual assault, to three of Biden’s Senate aides. (Source: WAToday)
Asia
China
Wed, May 31, 2023 The ruling Communist Party hardens efforts to counter any perceived internal and external threats. Beijing faces a host of challenges, from a struggling economy to what it sees as an increasingly hostile international environment. “The complexity and difficulty of the national security issues we now face have increased significantly,' Chinese leader Xi, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party said yesterday at a meeting of the party’s National Security Commission. 'We must adhere to bottom-line thinking and worst-case-scenario thinking, and get ready to undergo the major tests of high winds and rough waves, and even perilous, stormy seas,” he added. In face of what he called a 'complex and grave' situation, Xi said China must speed up the modernization of its national security system and capabilities, with a focus on making them more effective in 'actual combat and practical use.' He also called for China to push ahead with the construction of a national security risk monitoring and early warning system, enhance national security education and improve the management of data and artificial intelligence security. Since coming to power a decade ago, Xi has expanded the concept of national security to cover everything from politics, economy, defense, culture and ecology to cyberspace - it extends from the deep sea and the polar regions to space, as well as big data and artificial intelligence. China has introduced a raft of legislation to protect itself against perceived threats, including laws on counter-terrorism, counter-espionage, cybersecurity, foreign non-government organizations, national intelligence and data security. Most recently, it broadened the scope of its already sweeping counter-espionage law from covering state secrets and intelligence to any “documents, data, materials or items related to national security and interests.' The perception that security has replaced economic growth as Beijing’s top priority is compounded by multiple recent raids on foreign companies, including American consultancy Bain & Company and due diligence firm Mintz Group. At a time when the Chinese government is trying to woo foreign investment to help revive a slowing economy hampered by three years of zero-Covid restrictions, the raids have spooked international businesses. (Source: Yahoo)
May 31, 2023 Musk hailed as "Brother Ma' during a trip to China, where he's been lavished with a 16-course meal and treated like a king. He is making his first trip to China in three years. The nation heaped praise on the billionaire, holding him in the same high esteem as business magnate Ma. Musk's views on electric vehicles and artificial intelligence are of particular interest. He arrived in Beijing by private jet yesterday. Since arriving, Musk has been greeted by top ministers from the Chinese government's foreign, commerce, and industry departments, with social-media users labeling him a 'global idol." Musk has made China a critical part of Tesla operations in recent years, seeing a big opportunity to sell electric vehicles to Chinese consumers. However, Tesla is facing increased pressure in China from growing domestic competition. The visit to China by Musk comes at a low point in US relations with China, as tensions over Taiwan and Xi's stance over Russia's invasion of Ukraine are threatening to boil over. The billionaire, who has previously called himself a "free-speech absolutist," has not commented publicly about his trip to the country. Twitter is blocked in China. (Source: BusinessInsider)
North Korea
May 31, 2023 Wailing air raid sirens and mobile phone alerts calling for rare evacuations rattled residents of the South Korean capital, Seoul, the densely populated city of 9 million early today, at 6.32am after North Korea launched what it said was a satellite. The North launched the rocket - a purported space-launch vehicle - towards the South, prompting emergency alerts and evacuation warnings in parts of South Korea and Japan. The rocket was launched from North Korea’s north-western Tongchang-ri area, where the country’s main space-launch centre is located. Seoul issued a “Presidential Alert” asking citizens to prepare for potential evacuation. Then came a second mobile alert minutes later calling for an actual evacuation, which remained in place for at least 10 minutes until the city said it was a false alarm sent in error. Residents of Seoul are used to living in the shadow of threats from their nuclear-armed neighbour. The two countries are still technically at war seven decades after the Korean War ended in an armistice. In a statement published on state media North Korea said today that it attempt to launch the country’s first spy satellite had failed. The Kim regime said a rocket carrying the spy satellite crashed into waters off the Korean Peninsula’s western coast after it lost thrust following the separation of its first and second stages. The Japanese government activated a missile warning system for its Okinawa prefecture in south-western Japan, believed to be in the path of the rocket. Ri, a top North Korean official and close associate of leader Kim, had said a day earlier that the North would launch a spy satellite in June. A satellite launch by North Korea is a violation of UN Security Council resolutions that ban the country from using ballistic technology because it’s regarded as a cover for missile tests. (Source: TheSydneyMorningHerald)
South China Sea
May 31, 2023 The US is looking to arrange high-profile visits to China by senior officials to reengage with Beijing on substantive issues but yesterday the Pentagon said China had rejected a proposal for Defence Secretary Austin to meet with his Chinese counterpart Li at the Shangri-La Dialogue Security Forum in Singapore this week. A Chinese fighter jet conducted an "unnecessarily aggressive manoeuvre" during an intercept of a US spy plane in international airspace over the South China Sea on May 26, the US military said today. The Chinese J-16 fighter cut directly in front of the nose of the US RC-135 Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft, forcing it to fly through the wake turbulence of the intercepting aircraft. The RC-135 was conducting 'safe and routine operations' in international airspace, US Indo-Pacific Command said. A Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet intercepted another RC-135 Rivet Joint over the South China Sea in late December in what the US called an "unsafe manoeuvre.' The Chinese fighter came within six metres of the nose of the US spy plane, forcing the larger, heavier US aircraft to take evasive manoeuvres, US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) said at the time. Over the past several years, the South China Sea has emerged as a major potential flashpoint in the Asia Pacific. China claims historic jurisdiction over almost the entirety of the vast sea, and since 2014 has built up tiny reefs and sandbars into artificial islands heavily fortified with missiles, runways and weapons systems - sparking outcry from the other claimants. (Source: 9News)
NATO
31 May 2023 NATO aircraft and troops are participating in arctic military exercises. Finland is hosting its first joint training since becoming part of the Western alliance in April. Nearly 1,000 allied forces from Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States - as well as NATO applicant Sweden - joined approximately 6,500 Finnish troops and some 1,000 vehicles for exercises this week. Finland formally joined NATO on April 4. Sweden has been what NATO describes as an “official invitee” since 2022, which allows attendance at meetings and the coordinating of activities with other NATO allies. Sweden hopes to be a NATO member by the time of the alliance’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania in July 11-12. Full membership will take place once all NATO allies have ratified Sweden’s accession application. Turkish President Erdogan says Sweden has not yet met all of his country’s demands on securing his support for membership, particularly because of what he sees as Sweden providing safe haven to members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria, both of which Ankara considers 'terrorists'. Overseeing NATO exercises just a two-hour drive from the Russian border at one of Europe’s largest artillery training grounds in Rovajarvi, northern Finland, US Army Major-General Anderson from the 10th Mountain Division said his country stood ready to defend Finland. Some 150 aircraft from 14 NATO members and partner countries are also participating in Arctic Challenge 2023 exercises. (Source: AlJazeera)
Globalization
31 May 2023 While current AI has yet to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), potentially allowing it to make independent decisions, researchers at Microsoft in March said that GPT-4 showed “sparks of AGI” and was capable of solving 'novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting'. Since then, warnings about the potential dangers of AI have grown. Last month, Hinton, a renowned computer scientist, quit his job at Google so he could spend more time advocating about the risks of AI. In an appearance before the United States Congress earlier this month, chief executive of OpenAI, Altman called on legislators to quickly develop regulations for AI technology and recommended a licensing-based approach. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” a group of AI experts and other high-profile figures said in a brief statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based research and advocacy group, yesterday. The signatories include technology experts such as Altman, Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI”, and Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, as well as other notable figures including the neuroscientist Harris and the musician Grimes. The warning follows an open letter signed by Musk and other high-profile figures in March that called for a six-month pause on the development of AI more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,' the letter said. The rapid advancement of AI has raised concerns about potential negative consequences for society ranging from mass job losses and copyright infringement to the spread of misinformation 'and political instability'. Some experts have raised fears that humanity could one day lose control of the technology. (Source: AlJazeera)
May 31 2023 Earlier this month OpenAI CEO Altman testified at Congress saying AI could "cause significant harm to the world" by spreading disinformation and emotionally manipulating humans. Despite the incredible leaps in capabilities that "generative" chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Bing and Google's Bard have demonstrated in the last six months, they still have a major fatal flaw: They make stuff up all the time - the "hallucinations." "Hallucinations' are both a feature and a bug of large language models. 'Hallucinations' have now become a key focus for the AI community. When Microsoft launched its Bing chatbot, it quickly started making false accusations against some of its users, like telling a German college student that he was a threat to its safety. The bot adopted an alter-ego and started calling itself "Sydney." It was essentially riffing off the student's questions, drawing on all the science fiction it had digested from the internet about out-of-control robots. Microsoft eventually had to limit the number of back-and-forths a bot could engage in with a human to avoid it from happening more.In Australia, a government official threatened to sue OpenAI after ChatGPT said he had been convicted of bribery, when in reality he was a whistleblower in a bribery case. And last week a lawyer admitted to using ChatGPT to generate a legal brief after he was caught because the cases cited so confidently by the bot simply did not exist. 'Hallucinations' have also been documented in AI-powered transcription services, adding words to recordings that weren't spoken in real life. Microsoft and Google using the bots to answer search queries directly instead of sending traffic to blogs and news stories could erode the business model of online publishers and content creators who work to produce trustworthy information for the internet. Hallucinations are part of what allows the bots to be creative and generate never-before-seen stories when they do not have an internalised understanding of the world around them. The issue is mentioned in dozens of academic papers posted to the online database Arxiv and Big Tech CEOs like Google's Pichai have addressed it repeatedly. As the tech gets integrated into critical fields including medicine and law, understanding hallucinations and finding ways to mitigate them has become even more crucial. The most apt thing to say is based on the huge amounts of data they've digested from the internet, but don't have a way to understand what is factual or not. The model itself also trains on a set amount of data, so anything that happens after the training is done doesn't factor into its knowledge of the world. Clever ways to decrease the rates of false answers: A popular approach is to connect chatbots up to databases of factual or more trustworthy information, such as Wikipedia, Google search or bespoke collections of academic articles or business documents. Some firms are using human trainers to rewrite the bots' answers and feed them back into the machine with the goal of making them smarter. When Google generates search results using its chatbot technology, it also runs a regular search in parallel, then compares whether the bot's answer and the traditional search results match. If they don't, the AI answer won't even show up. The company has tweaked its bot to be less creative, meaning it's not very good at writing poems or having interesting conversations, but is less likely to lie. Manakul and a group of other Cambridge researchers released a paper in March suggesting a system they called "SelfCheckGPT" that would ask the same bot a question multiple times, then tell it to compare the different answers. If the answers were consistent, it was likely the facts were correct, but if they were different, they could be flagged as probably containing made-up information. Researchers proposed using different chatbots to produce multiple answers to the same question and then letting them debate each other until one answer won out. This "society of minds" method made them more factual. "Language models are trained to predict the next word," said Du, a researcher at MIT. "They are not trained to tell people they don't know what they're doing," Du, who was previously a research fellow at OpenAI, and one of the authors of a paper released by a team of MIT researchers last week, said. (Source: Stuff)
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