When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, …
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When the pandemic hit, Gen Z-ers—born between 1997 and 2012—were just entering adulthood. After enduring a particularly difficult time during lockdowns, today they face an acute mental health crisis. As a result, in 2024, many will be asking more from their work life. When my research team at Harvard University …
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Is this the way the walled garden ends: not with a bang but a beep? In December, Bay Area upstart Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage—with help from a teen coder—to give Android phones full access to Apple’s proprietary messaging service. It started a fight that triggered fresh debate about whether the iPhone-maker …
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Rumble, the so-called free speech alternative to YouTube, is the subject of an investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the company and a letter from the SEC. The SEC confirmed its investigation involving Rumble in response to a public records request that WIRED first …
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No one knows whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or curse in the far future. But right now, there’s almost universal discomfort and contempt for one habit of these chatbots and agents: hallucinations, those made-up facts that appear in the outputs of large language models like ChatGPT. In the …
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A week before Halloween last year, city of Austin employee Rachel Castignoli sent a polite but firm email to a government relations staffer at self-driving vehicle developer Cruise. “We would like you to not operate between 5 pm and 9 pm on Halloween,” she wrote in bold text highlighted in …
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Anyone currently worrying about artificial intelligence taking over the world may want to swing by the Boston Dynamics AI Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While walking around, they’d see that the robots that might lead a future uprising are still trying to tie their shoelaces, metaphorically speaking. The Institute’s founder and …
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When you build software, you add little hooks into the code so that, as users open a window, tap a picture, upload a file, the code tattles on them, sending some of their data to another company's server. Log data is sowed; reports are reaped. This is known as “analytics” …
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If you’ve worried that candidate-screening algorithms could be standing between you and your dream job, reading Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm won’t ease your mind. The investigative reporter and NYU journalism professor’s new book demystifies how HR departments use automation software that not only propagate bias, but fail at the thing …
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On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the following prompt: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a vintage Disney style, black and white. He is dripping all over with white gel.” There’s no polite way to describe what this prompt conjured from the AI image generator. It looks, very much, like Mickey …
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