The premonition grows. Read here.

“Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced” by Govindakumar Madhavan was published in April by Springer Nature. It’s $169 as an ebook, or $219 as a hardback. [Springer, archive]

Retraction Watch heard from a reader who was cited in the book — but his cited papers didn’t … exist. A lot of citations in the book don’t exist. [Retraction Watch]

Retraction Watch asked Madhavan to comment on whether he’d written his book on AI with an AI. Madhavan answered this yes-or-no question as follows:

reliably determining whether content (or an issue) is AI generated remains a challenge, as even human-written text can appear ‘AI-like.’ This challenge is only expected to grow, as LLMs continue to advance in fluency and sophistication.

That’s great, thanks.

Madhavan is the founder and CEO of SeaportAI, which offers services dealing with the risks of AI fraud. [SITE]

The book warns to take care with ChatGPT:

the technology raises important ethical questions about the use and misuse of AI-generated text.

Retraction Watch commenter Peter Vamplew says:

I wouldn’t expect an answer from Springer any time soon. I reported a similar case of a book chapter which contained hallucinated references, including one which it attributed to me which doesn’t match anything I’ve actually written. It’s been 4 months now and I’m still waiting for their investigation to reach a conclusion.

Springer publishes 14,000 books a year with 9,000 employees. Nobody at Springer even looks at the books. Springer concerns itself with the important part — charging $200 for a pile of chatbot spew.

• Video version

An internal Microsoft memo has leaked. It was written by Julia Liuson, president of the Developer Division at Microsoft and GitHub. The memo tells managers to evaluate employees based on how much they use internal AI tools like the various Copilots: [Business Insider]

AI is now a fundamental part of how we work. Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.

Liuson told managers that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”

Let’s be clear: this is a confession of abject failure.

Microsoft’s AI tools don’t work. Microsoft AI doesn’t make you more effective. Microsoft AI won’t do the job better.

If it did, Microsoft staff would be using it already. The competition inside Microsoft is vicious. If AI would get them ahead of the other guy, they’d use it.

We already know that when AI saves someone time at work, it’s because they can fob work off onto someone else. Total work doesn’t go down, and total productivity doesn’t go up.

But Microsoft is desperate to sell AI to anyone it can, because the CEO, Satya Nadella, has a bee in his bonnet. Nadella has decreed: everyone will use AI.

Even though it doesn’t work.

We should expect some enterprising Microsoft coder to come up with an automated AI agent system that racks up chatbot metrics for them — while they get on with their actual job.

• Video version

🕹️ Decker is, in my opinion, the best way to get started at any skill level.

Think of it like the MS Paint of game development. Easy to pick up and always fun to use.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Read here.

Last Friday’s newsletter begins:

My favorite thing about reading “the classics” is that they’re almost always weirder than you think they are. For example: within 50 pages of War and Peace, a bunch of drunks tie a policeman to a bear and throw them in the river. (I try to read a big book every summer, so I figured why not read one of the biggest?)

With backup from Italo Calvino’s Why Read The Classics:

“Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them…”

Read more: “The classics are weird.”