Last winter, the unveiling of OpenAI’s alarmingly sophisticated chatbot sent educators into a tailspin. Generative AI, it was feared, would enable rampant cheating and plagiarism, and even make high school English obsolete. Universities debated updating plagiarism policies. Some school districts outright banned ChatGPT from their networks. Now, a new school year presents new challenges—and, for
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ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search, streamline office chores, and remake education, but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—in May of this year. The botnet, which the researchers
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This March, nearly 35,000 AI researchers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and concerned citizens signed an open letter from the nonprofit Future of Life Institute that called for a “pause” on AI development, due to the risks to humanity revealed in the capabilities of programs such as ChatGPT. “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,
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The plant-based industry has also struggled with claims that its products are ultra-processed and unhealthy. The science around food processing and its effects on our health is still poorly understood, but that hasn’t stopped campaigners from using the ultra-processed label as a stick with which to bash the plant-based industry. The Center for Consumer Freedom,
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Over 100 people are confirmed dead after a wildfire devastated parts of Maui, Hawaii. Families fled from their cars and into the ocean to escape the surging flames that engulfed the town of Lahaina with little warning. What ignited the wildfire remains unknown; multiple factors could have contributed to the disaster. Hawaiians who survived are
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Gideon Lichfield: If I were a cynic, which of course I’m not at all … Mustafa Suleyman: [Chuckle] Not at all. Lauren Goode: Not Gideon. Gideon Lichfield: I might say that you and the AI companies are setting up a pretty sweet deal for yourselves, because you’re getting to say to government, “Look, you, government,
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YouTube Music just announced Samples, a new in-app feature where users can scroll through short music video clips from their favorite artists and discover new songs. Welcome back to the short-form video wars. Yes, Silicon Valley remains hyperfixated on generative AI, but don’t forget one of its other, recent favorite trends: releasing features that vaguely
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On July 19, Bloomberg News reported what many others have been saying for some time: Twitter (now called X) was losing advertisers, in part because of its lax enforcement against hate speech. Quoted heavily in the story was Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that
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Large language models like those powering ChatGPT and other recent chatbots have broad and impressive capabilities because they are trained with massive amounts of text. Michael Sellitto, head of geopolitics and security at Anthropic, says this also gives the systems a “gigantic potential attack or risk surface.” Microsoft’s head of red-teaming, Ram Shankar Sivu Kumar,
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In the summer of 2016, teenagers Anastasia Georgievskaya and Ivan Novikov were walking along London’s South Bank, picking their way past the food stalls lining the Thames, when they caught an aroma of fried doughnuts that instantly reminded them of childhood. At dinner that night, the couple started to wonder: If one of them hadn’t
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In short, the tentacles of US tech firms are everywhere—vaccines, food, cancer research, psilocybin centers, criminal justice reform, homelessness—the list could reach the moon. (Speaking of the moon, how could we forget commercial spaceflight?) And the AI boom is likely to further expand tech firms’ power and riches. Yet on Capitol Hill, some powerful Republicans
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Ever since the ChatGPT API opened up, all sorts of apps have been strapping on AI functionality. I’ve personally noticed this a lot in email clients: Apps like Spark and Canary are prominently bragging about their built-in AI functionality. The most common features will write replies for you, or even generate an entire email using
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