The Social Web (old posts, page 174)
Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels
Several romance novelists have accidentally left AI writing prompts embedded in their published books, exposing their use of chatbots, 404Media reports. Readers discovered passages like "Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable" in K.C. Crowne's "Dark Obsession," for instance, and similar AI-generated instructions in works by Lena McDonald and Rania Faris.
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'Landmark' Evolution Study Shows How Rice Inherits Tolerance To Cold Without DNA Changes
Rice plants can inherit tolerance to cold without changes to their genomes, according to a decade-long study carried out by researchers in China. From a report: The work, published in Cell this week, strengthens the evidence for a form of evolution in which environmental pressures induce heritable changes that do not alter an organism's DNA. The study conducted experiments that demonstrate, for the first time, the mechanism for these changes -- 'epigenetic' tweaks to chemical markers on the plant's DNA that don't actually tinker with the sequences themselves.
"What they're showing is extremely convincing; I would say that it's a landmark in the field," says Leandro Quadrana, a plant geneticist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris-Saclay. Michael Skinner, who studies epigenetic inheritance at Washington State University in Pullman, says the study adds to the growing body of evidence challenging the prevailing view of evolution that the only way that adaptations emerge is through gradual natural selection of randomly arising DNA mutations. This study shows that the environment isn't just a passive actor in evolution, but a selective force inducing a targeted change.
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