Talking to AI Might Be the Most Important Skill of This Century

A product race is under way in the world of artificial intelligence. Just this week, Google announced plans to release Bard, a search chatbot based on its proprietary large language model; yesterday, Microsoft held an event unveiling a next-generation web browser with a supercharged Bing interface powered by ChatGPT. Though most big tech companies have...

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Palo Alto’s First Tech Giant Was a Horse Farm

Silicon Valley has a short memory. The Anglo-American settlements aren’t even 200 years old, but if you ask around, regional history restarts whenever there’s a new defining technology, which happens every couple of decades; we can barely remember the dot-com boom, never mind the radio era.And yet, if you look closely, there’s a deep continuity. California...

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More Seinfeld Than Seinfeld Itself

Since the hit sitcom Seinfeld went off the air in 1998 after nine seasons, the show’s devoted followers have long mused about an alternate reality: What if the original “show about nothing” had never ended?Now they’ve gotten what they wished for—well, sort of. In mid-December, a never-ending AI-generated reboot, aptly named Nothing, Forever, launched...

23h

‘Scar Girl’ Is a Sign That the Internet Is Broken

The scar first appears on Annie Bonelli’s TikTok on March 18, 2021. In the video, she is in a car, earbuds in, lip-synching to the song “I Know,” by D. Savage. The mark on her cheek is blurry and soft, like a smudge of dirt. She is bobbing her head underneath a caption about how it feels when someone accidentally likes a social-media post that’s more...

23h

A Machine Crushed Us at Pokémon

For a brief moment, we could taste victory. On the first turn of our online Pokémon battle against the player Athena2023, our Aegislash dealt some serious damage to Athena2023’s Gengar. One more blow like that, and Gengar, a little purple ghost with a sinister grin, would be toast.But Athena2023 had other ideas. Before we could make another move, Gengar...

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AI Is About to Dump More Work on Everyone

Have you been worried that ChatGPT, the AI language generator, could be used maliciously—to cheat on schoolwork or broadcast disinformation? You’re in luck, sort of: OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has introduced a new tool that tries to determine the likelihood that a chunk of text you provide was AI-generated.I say “sort of” because the new...

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The Supreme Court Considers the Algorithm

When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considered a lawsuit against Google in 2020, Judge Ronald M. Gould stated his view of the tech giant’s most significant asset bluntly: “So-called ‘neutral’ algorithms,” he wrote, can be “transformed into deadly missiles of destruction by ISIS.”According to Gould, it was time to challenge the boundaries of a little...

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My Printer Is Extorting Me

The first rule of at-home printers is that you do not need a printer until you do, and then you need it desperately. The second rule is that when you plug the printer in, either it will work frictionlessly for a decade, or it will immediately and frequently fail in novel, even impressive ways, ultimately causing the purchase to haunt you like a malevolent...

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ChatGPT Resembles a Slice of the Human Brain

Language is commonly understood to be the “stuff” of thought. People “talk it out” and “speak their mind,” follow “trains of thought” or “streams of consciousness.” Some of the pinnacles of human creation—music, geometry, computer programming—are framed as metaphorical languages. The underlying assumption is that the brain processes the world and our...

2w

Angry Football Fans Keep Punching Their TVs

Last week, the Dallas Cowboys’ playoff run ended the same way their last 11 have—without a trip to the conference championship. For one fan, squatting maybe four feet from the TV, this was apparently more than he could take. He leapt to his feet and—in front of a room full of people—punched a massive crater in the screen. The impact sounded like the...

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