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Kelvin Kiptum in world record run in ChicagoTigist Assefa glories in her new world record in Berlin

Newrecords ennoble us all, for they represent the best of who we are. And when they come in our own time, some of that greatness attaches itself to us, which is why we yearn to see records fall and barriers broken. Not for what they are of themselves, but for what they mean with us having watched, as witnessing validates the action itself.

Yet the response to the new marathon records of recent weeks in Berlin andChicago from cheers to jeers has shown the same wide variance as the response to the new shoe technology by the athletes.

AsRoss Tucker,PhD in Exercise Physiology,co-host of The Real Science of Sport podcast,wrote toLetsRun.coms Robert Johnson in response to Tigst Assefasworld record in Berlin:

I truly wish the authorities had acted to prevent this entirely foreseeable situation, for a few reasons. The main one is that the range of responses to them (super shoes) is so large (from plus 11% in running efficiency to minus 11%) that we cannot sit with any confidence and evaluate performances between different athletes independent of this nagging doubt over what the shoes do. That isthe differences between athletes is smaller than the differences made by the shoe, to the same athlete, and between different athletes.

Isnt the entire purpose of the enterprise to compare athletes on a level playing field? And then to compare them with those who came before? It is that through-line of apple-to-apple comparison that actually creates a lasting sport.

Now the playing field has been tipped, and continues to tip, perhaps irreparably, to where what came before no longer relates. And even that would be fine, if todays athletes were playing on equal footing. But theyre not either.

Today, person X in super shoe A wins in a record breaking time. But that same person in super shoe B maybe doesnt respond as well and doesnt make the podium at all. Is that how its supposed to work?

Coming late to its oversight Nike secretly introduced the first super shoes in 2016 World Athletics amended its rules regarding shoe midsole height on January 30, 2020, grandfathering the maximum stack to 40mm. But the shoe designers didnt stop innovating the midsole material as WA formed a Working Group to determine future policy.

A December 2021 World Athletics release further stated, The major and central issue the Working Group on Athletic Shoes had been exploring is a long-term sustainable and implementable solution for athletic shoes which balances innovation and fairness.

That is a perfectly sound oversight goal, right in line with what we ask such a governance to do.

The Working Group considered options within a framework of measuring performance advantages of the current technology in athletic shoes, including energy return. While this work has merit,a maximum energy return has not been included in the rules and regulations, given the variables involved and the potential impact on shoe manufacturers in its implementation.

You have to read the underlined portion twice to convince yourself you read it correctly.

A maximum energy return has NOT been included in the rules and regulations, given the variables involved and the potential impact on shoe manufacturers in its implementation.

Thats an almost a stunning admission. The variables are what skew the outcomes! The variables are what make regulation necessary. Midsole height is only one of the critical factors to determine. Energy return, along with running economy, is the holy grail of the new technology, and officials leave it out of their regulations given the variables involved and the potential impact on shoe manufacturers? What about the impact on the sport?

I suspect a great number of people have long believed the sport has been beholden to (in the pocket of) the major shoe companies for far too long. But that December 2021 release stated the quiet part out loud.

In short order, the Nike prototypes worn byKelvin Kiptum in Chicago seemed to have trumped the Adidas Adizero Adis Evo 1 shoe worn by Tigst Assefa in Berlin with its new lightweight midsole foam and rocker technology. Three weeks ago Adidas held the newest tech, putting it ahead of the curve of the older Nike Vaporflys. Now Nike has answered. Thats how fast the innovations are coming.

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Why are performance-enhancing drugs not allowed in competition? Because their use alters the basic athlete versus athlete equation and skews the outcome. Well, thats what the new super shoes are doing, too.Such innovation may be fine for exhibitions likeEliud Kiochoges Sub2 and INEOS 1:59 attempts in Monza 17 and Vienna 19. But they should not automatically be fine for the competitive arena where a foundational level of equal footing must prevail.

Running isnt alone. Weve seen a variation of the same theme in Formula One racing in recent years.

Between 2008 and 2020, Lewis Hamilton won a record-tying seven F1 series championships before the F1 bosses changed the cars ground-effects formulation for the 2022 season. Next thing you know, Hamilton and his Mercedes were nowhere to be found, and Max Verstappen in his Red Bull ride became the new F1 king. He just won his third straight series championship in Qatar last week with his record 14th win of the season.

But before Verstappen and Hamilton, Red Bulls Sebastian Vettel won four championships in a row (2010-2013), and Renaults Fernando Alonzo won in 2005-2006 to end the reign of the Michael Schumacher-Ferrari combination that had dominated for so long.

We went from Schumacher dominating to Vettel dominating to Hamilton dominating to Verstappen. When the turnover in driver ascendance is so cut and dried, it suggests the difference in outcome is being determined by the cars set up rather than the drivers skills. Did Hamilton suddenly become a poor driver? What if they put Yuki Sonoda in the Max Verstappen Red Bull car and Verstappen in Sonodas Alphatauri?

Thats the problem. Were trying to determine the difference in drivers capabilities, not those of their engineers.

Tristan Harris, cofounder, Center for Humane Technology, appeared onBill Mahers Real Time show Friday night on HBO MAX discussing advances in artificial intelligence (AI). It rung a bell in my mind.

People always say we freak out about the newest technology, but this is different. This is ongoing, and competitive, and market driven. Human intelligence is one way to think about it.

It used to take years of study and intelligence and cognitive labor to write a movie script or a book or to know how to synthesize a biological weapon, said Harris. These are all forms of cognition that took human beings years to develop. Now AI has dropped that cost and effort, and just like fossil fuels, the people who jump on that train first get benefits and efficiencies compared to those who dont.

In running, besides talent, it used to take years of development to run a world-class marathon. Olympic champion Frank Shorter said it, You dont run 26 miles at five minutes a mile on good looks and a secret recipe.

But now, top performers put on a pair of the new super shoes and their training exponentially improves, because they can train harder, with less rest, because the pounding is not as great, and the recovery is that much faster. So their fitness improves along with their times in races. But not because of who they are, but because of what theyre wearing on their feet. Shoe intelligence has shortened everything, from rest periods to practical race distance. Making this a different era altogether.

In response to an email thread between past champions Bill Rodgers, Amby Burfoot, Jack Fultz, and Bob Hodge, I wrote:

Re: records. Perhaps, understandably, they took the concept of world records, meant for the measured confines of a track, and transposed it to the undulations and variables of the roads. It makes no sense to have world records on the roads where the conditions will never be apples versus apples, though, even on the track, with different weather conditions and track surfaces, its more like Macintosh versus Granny Smith, but at least theyre still apples.

There should be course records for road races with everyone simply understanding that the 2011 Patriots Day in Boston was as unique as was the 2018 day on the other end of the spectrum. That we can live with. But this whole focus on time has ruined the competitive sport and created an ongoing push to use performance-enhancing drugs and now performance-enhancing shoes to reach those records. Toward what end, I do not know. In any case, it was good to see Yuki (Kawauchi) pushing the comp in todays Japanese Olympic Trials, rather than the time.

As Tristan Harris said, With AI, we keep scaling and releasing advancements faster than society can consciously absorb them.

Thats whats happening with the super shoes. In both cases, our basic understanding of underlying assumptions has become clouded. We dont know what to believe. Is that an actual picture? Or did AI generate it? Is that an actual record? Or did super shoes enable it?

AI has the promise, but it also has the peril, concluded Mr. Harris. It will give us drugs that save people from cancers and help us in many other ways. Problem is, you also have CEOs saying it could wreck everything, too.

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WHAT'S ARTIFICIAL, WHAT'S NOT? | WANDERING IN A RUNNING ... - Toni Reavis

After taking time off, I returned this week to find my inbox flooded with news about AI tools, issues, missteps and adventures. And the thing that stood out was how much investment there is in having AI chatbots pretend to be someone else.

In the case of Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expanded the cast of AI characters the tech giant's more than 3 billion users can interact withon popular Meta platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Those characters are based on real-life celebrities, athletes and artists, including musician Snoop Dogg, famous person Kylie Jenner, ex-quarterback Tom Brady, tennis star Naomi Osaka, other famous person Paris Hilton and celebrated English novelist Jane Austen.

"The characters are a way for people to have fun, learn things, talk recipes or just pass the time all within the context of connecting with friends and family," company executives told The New York Times about all these pretend friends you can now converse with.

Said Zuckerberg, "People aren't going to want to interact with one single super intelligent AI people will want to interact with a bunch of different ones."

But let's not pretend that pretend buddies are just about helping you connect with family and friends. As we know, it's all about the money, and right now tech companies are in a land grab that's currently pitting Meta against other AI juggernauts, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Bing and Google's Bard. It's a point the Times noted as well: "For Meta, widespread acceptance of its new AI products could significantly increase engagement across its many apps, most of which rely on advertising to make money. More time spent in Meta's apps means more ads shown to its users."

To be sure, Meta wasn't the first to come up with the idea of creating personalities or characters to put a human face on conversational AI chatbots (see ELIZA, who was born in the late '60s.) And it's an approach that seems to be paying off.

Two-year-old Character.ai, which lets you interact with chatbots based on famous people like Taylor Swift and Albert Einstein and fictional characters such as Nintendo's Super Mario, is one of the most visited AI sites and is reportedly seeking funding that would put the startup's valuation at $5 billion to $6 billion, according toBloomberg. This week Character.ai, which also lets you create your own personality-driven chatbots, introduced a new feature for subscribers, called Character Group Chat, that lets you and your friends chat with multiple AI characters at the same time. (Now's your chance to add Swift and Mario to your group chats.)

But using famous people to hawk AI is only fun if those people are in on it and by that I mean get paid for their AI avatars. Earlier this month, actor Tom Hanks warned people about a dental adthat used his likeness without his approval. "Beware!!" Hanks told his 9.5 million Instagram followers. "There's a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it."

Hanks in an April podcast predicted the perils posed by AI. "Right now if I wanted to, I could get together and pitch a series of seven movies that would star me in them in which I would be 32 years old from now until kingdom come. Anybody can now re-create themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deepfake technology ... I can tell you that there [are] discussions going on in all of the guilds, all of the agencies, and all of the legal firms to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and my voice and everybody else's being our intellectual property."

Of course, he was right about all those discussions. The Writers Guild of America just ended the writers strike with Hollywood after agreeing to terms on the use of AI in film and TV. But actors, represented by SAG-AFTRA, are still battling it out, with one of the sticking points being the use of "digital replicas."

Here are the other doings in AI worth your attention.

OpenAI is rolling out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT that let you "have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you're talking about." The new capabilities are available to people who pay to use the chatbot (ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month.)

Says the company, "Snap a picture of a landmark while traveling and have a live conversation about what's interesting about it. When you're home, snap pictures of your fridge and pantry to figure out what's for dinner (and ask follow up questions for a step by step recipe). After dinner, help your child with a math problem by taking a photo, circling the problem set, and having it share hints with both of you."

So what's it like to talk to ChatGPT? Wall Street Journal reviewer Joanna Stern describes it as similar to the movie Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI operating system named Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

"The natural voice, the conversational tone and the eloquent answers are almost indistinguishable from a human at times," Stern writes. "But you're definitely still talking to a machine. The response time ... can be extremely slow, and the connection can fail restarting the app helps. A few times it abruptly cut off the conversation (I thought only rude humans did that!)"

A rude AI? Maybe the chatbots are getting more human after all.

Speaking of more humanlike AIs, a company called Fantasy is creating "synthetic humans" for clients including Ford, Google, LG and Spotify to help them "learn about audiences, think through product concepts and even generate new ideas," reported Wired.

"Fantasy uses the kind of machine learning technology that powers chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard to create its synthetic humans," according to Wired. "The company gives each agent dozens of characteristics drawn from ethnographic research on real people, feeding them into commercial large language models like OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude. Its agents can also be set up to have knowledge of existing product lines or businesses, so they can converse about a client's offerings."

Humans aren't cut out of the loop completely. Fantasy told Wired that for oil and gas company BP, it's created focus groups made up of both real people and synthetic humans and asked them to discuss a topic or product idea. The result? "Whereas a human may get tired of answering questions or not want to answer that many ways, a synthetic human can keep going," Roger Rohatgi, BP's global head of design, told the publication.

So, the end goal may be to just have the bots talking among themselves. But there's a hitch: Training AI characters is no easy feat. Wired spoke with Michael Bernstein, an associate professor at Stanford University who helped create a community of chatbots called Smallville, and it paraphrased him thus:

"Anyone hoping to use AI to model real humans, Bernstein says, should remember to question how faithfully language models actually mirror real behavior. Characters generated this way are not as complex or intelligent as real people and may tend to be more stereotypical and less varied than information sampled from real populations. How to make the models reflect reality more faithfully is 'still an open research question,' he says."

Deloitte updated its report on the "State of Ethics and Trust in Technology" for 2023, and you can download the 53-page report here. It's worth reading, if only as a reminder that the way AI tools and systems are developed, deployed and used is entirely up to us humans.

Deloitte's TL;DR? Organizations should "develop trustworthy and ethical principles for emerging technologies" and work collaboratively with "other businesses, government agencies, and industry leaders to create uniform, ethically robust regulations for emerging technologies."

And if they don't? Deloitte lists the damage from ethical missteps, including reputational harm, human damage and regulatory penalties. The researcher also found that financial damage and employee dissatisfaction go hand in hand. "Unethical behavior or lack of visible attention to ethics can decrease a company's ability to attract and keep talent. One study found employees of companies involved in ethical breaches lost an average of 50% in cumulative earnings over the subsequent decade compared to workers in other companies."

The researcher also found that 56% of professionals are unsure if their companies have ethical guidelines for AI use, according to a summary of the findings by CNET sister site ZDNET.

One of the challenges in removing brain tumors is for surgeons to determine how much around the margins of the tumor they need to remove to ensure they've excised all the bad stuff. It's tricky business, to say the least, because they need to strike a "delicate balance between maximizing the extent of resection and minimizing risk of neurological damage," according to a new study.

That report, published in Nature this week, offers news about a fascinating advance in tumor detection, thanks to an AI neural network. Scientists in the Netherlands developed a deep learning system called Sturgeon that aims to assist surgeons in finding that delicate balance by helping to get a detailed profile of the tumor during surgery.

You can read the Nature report, but I'll share the plain English summary provided by New York Times science writer Benjamin Mueller: "The method involves a computer scanning segments of a tumor's DNA and alighting on certain chemical modifications that can yield a detailed diagnosis of the type and even subtype of the brain tumor. That diagnosis, generated during the early stages of an hours-long surgery, can help surgeons decide how aggressively to operate."

In tests on frozen tumor samples from prior brain cancer operations, Sturgeon accurately diagnosed 45 of 50 cases within 40 minutes of starting that DNA sequencing, the Times said. And then it was tested during 25 live brain surgeries, most of which were on children, and delivered 18 correct diagnoses.

The Times noted that some brain tumors are difficult to diagnose, and that not all cancers can be diagnosed by way of the chemical modifications the new AI method analyzes. Still, it's encouraging to see what could be possible with new AI technologies as the research continues.

Given all the talk above about how AIs are being used to create pretend versions of real people (Super Mario aside), the word I'd pick for the week would be "anthropomorphism," which is about ascribing humanlike qualities to nonhuman things. But I covered that in the Aug. 19 edition of AI and You.

So instead, I offer up the Council of Europe's definition of "artificial intelligence":

A set of sciences, theories and techniques whose purpose is to reproduce by a machine the cognitive abilities of a human being. Current developments aim to be able to entrust a machine with complex tasks previously delegated to a human.

However, the term artificial intelligence is criticized by experts who distinguish between "strong" AI (who are able to contextualize very different specialized problems completely independently) and "weak" or "moderate" AI (who perform extremely well in their field of training). According to some experts, "strong" AI would require advances in basic research to be able to model the world as a whole and not just improvements in the performance of existing systems.

For comparison, here's the US State Departmentquoting the National Artificial Intelligence Act of 2020:

The term "artificial intelligence" means a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.

Editors' note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, seethis post.

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AI and You: The Chatbots Are Talking to Each Other, AI Helps ... - CNET