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ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates eerily human-sounding text responses, is the new and advanced face of the debate on the potential — and dangers — of AI.

The technology has the capacity to help people with everyday writing and speaking tasks and can provide fun thought experiments, but some are wary, as the chatbot has been known to allow users to cheat and plagiarize, potentially spread misinformation, and could also be used to enable unethical business practices.

From ChatGPT Is Like Many Other AI Models: Rife With Bias.

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Digital currencies, such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins, are the natural evolution of money and payments, Bank of America said in a research report on Tuesday.
“CBDCs do not change the definition of money, but will likely change how and when value is transferred over the next 15 years,” analysts led by Alkesh Shah

From Bank of America Says CBDCs Are the Future of Money and Payments:

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It is a road that central banks should not be going down. A CBDC is, as the name suggests, the digital equivalent to central bank currency, or cash — notes and coins. Strictly speaking, almost every country already has one. The old name is “electronic or central bank reserves”. These are the digital things — entries in the central bank equivalent of a spreadsheet — that central banks lend to or borrow from their counterparties, the retail banks that have you and I as customers.

From Why central banks should not push ahead with CBDCs | Financial Times:

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Meanwhile, the Eurosystem’s January 2023 statement on the top says that 

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A digital euro should complement, and not replace cash, and should guarantee access to central bank money for euro area users in times of increased digitalisation in payments5. A digital euro should be safe and resilient, ensure a high level of privacy, be easy and convenient to use and widely accessible to the public, including in terms of costs for end-users. Ministers also called for considering the environmental implications of the digital euro design.

From Eurogroup statement on the digital euro project, 16 January 2023 – Consilium.

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Saudi Arabia is open to discussions about trade in currencies other than the US dollar, according to the kingdom’s finance minister.

From Saudi Arabia Says Open to Settling Trade in Other Currencies | Regina Leader Post:

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Writing in the Financial Times, Tony Yates says that a CBDC is the digital equivalent of cash and that since we already have electronic commercial bank money, we don’t really need it. Similarly, in the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims says that a retail CBDC isn’t any different from the electronic money in bank accounts today—it’s just a digital dollar. But they are both wrong: there is a fundamental difference between electronic money that lives in bank accounts and electronic cash that lives… well, anywhere. In phones, USB sticks, laptops, smart cards, cars or wherever else we can put a microchip capable of secure processing. And the really crucial difference is that when I sent my sister the money that I owed her recently, it went from my bank account through the banking system to her bank account. But in the future, I will send her electronic cash from the wallet in my laptop to the wallet in her phone and it will never go anywhere near banks or the banking system. There won’t be any clearing or settlement.

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The most compelling arguments are about payments and settlement efficiency, reducing the percentages of national income that are lost to the providers of payment and settlement services.

From Why central banks should not push ahead with CBDCs | Financial Times:

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Resilience and innovation are better ones.

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Board directors are best situated to ensure that their company is on track to reap the benefits of AI while avoiding its harms and litigation risks. Further, as in cybersecurity, current litigation trends indicate that directors are more likely to face personal liability for AI-supported mishaps as the potential impact on companies becomes clearer. Directors will be exposing the company and themselves to legal liabilities if they fail to uphold their fiduciary duty and mitigate preventable harms from AI systems created or deployed by the companies they govern.

From Board Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Oversight:

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But the CIA and MI6 are dwarfed in size and resources by their sister agencies for signals intelligence (SIGINT), which involves intercepting and often deciphering messages.

From What to read to understand intelligence and espionage | The Economist:

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One side effect of all the new AI developments is that biometrics will increase greatly in importance.

From Biometrics will become more important – Marginal REVOLUTION.

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sometimes ‘girls watch men enter their pin and use their card when they’re sedated’.

From Fraud expert reveals how strip club spikers fleece patrons for thousands with hacked card machines | Daily Mail Online:

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An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. Researchers are divided over the implications for science.

“I am very worried,” says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and was not involved in the research. “If we’re now in a situation where the experts are not able to determine what’s true or not, we lose the middleman that we desperately need to guide us through complicated topics,” she adds.

From Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists:

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