In the weeks after Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange began to crumble last November, he chose to ignore the most basic piece of legal advice: Say nothing, or risk incriminating yourself. He took media interviews. He appeared on podcasts. He tweeted incessantly. He started his own Substack. He promised to …
Read More »Slovakia’s Election Deepfakes Show AI Is a Danger to Democracy
Just two days before Slovakia’s elections, an audio recording was posted to Facebook. On it were two voices: allegedly, Michal Šimečka, who leads the liberal Progressive Slovakia party, and Monika Tódová from the daily newspaper Denník N. They appeared to be discussing how to rig the election, partly by buying …
Read More »AI Algorithms Are Biased Against Skin With Yellow Hues
After evidence surfaced in 2018 that leading face-analysis algorithms were less accurate for people with darker skin, companies including Google and Meta adopted measures of skin tone to test the effectiveness of their AI software. New research from Sony suggests that those tests are blind to a crucial aspect of …
Read More »This Website Exposes the Truth About Soaring Food Prices
It didn't take long for Mario Zechner to prove the government wrong. In May, the independent software developer was listening to a radio interview with Austria’s labor minister, Martin Kocher, who said the government would build a new database that will help people find the cheapest milk, eggs, and other …
Read More »Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech
It was meant to be a week for women in tech—but this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs. The annual conference and career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering …
Read More »This Exec Is Forcing Google Into Its First Trial Over Sexist Pay Discrimination
More than 20,000 fed-up Google employees staged a worldwide walkout in 2018 to demand a safer, fairer workplace for women after scandals over sexual harassment and unequal pay roiled the company. That fight was not an unqualified success: Pay equity data remains scarce and organizers say they suffered retaliation. But …
Read More »Why Silicon Valley Falls for Frauds
Aditiya Baradwaj joined crypto-trading firm Alameda Research when it was run out of an anonymous first-floor office in downtown Berkeley, California. It was September 2021, and the day Baradwaj arrived, Sam Bankman-Fried, the company’s founder, was sitting in the middle of the trading floor playing League of Legends. By then, …
Read More »The Game Theory of the Auto Strikes
The United Auto Workers strike against Detroit’s Big Three—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis—escalated into its third week on Friday. Workers at two additional plants operated by Ford and GM walked off the job, taking the number of union members striking for better pay and benefits to more than 25,000. The …
Read More »5 Ways to Work Remotely (and Effectively) for the Long Haul
Covid-19 made remote work a reality for a lot of people, but for me, it was business as usual. I haven’t worked in a physical office in a long time. In fact, for several years, I’ve worked from anywhere but a physical office. Across three continents and a few employers …
Read More »How to Use ChatGPT’s New Image Features
OpenAI recently announced an upgrade to ChatGPT (Apple, Android) that adds two features: AI voice options to hear the chatbot responding to your prompts, and image analysis capabilities. The image function is similar to what’s already available for free with Google’s Bard chatbot. Even after hours of testing the limits …
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