AI

Generative AI is forcing people to rethink what it means to be authentic. It turns out that pop stars Drake and The Weeknd didn’t suddenly drop a new track that went viral on TikTok and YouTube in April 2023. The photograph that won an international photography competition that same month wasn’t a real photograph. And the image of Pope Francis sporting a Balenciaga jacket that appeared in March 2023? That was also a fake. All were made with the help of generative AI, the new technology that can generate humanlike text, audio and images on demand through programs such as ChatGPT, Midjourney and Bard, among others. There’s certainly something unsettling about the ease with which people can be duped by these fakes, and I see it as a harbinger of an authenticity crisis that raises some diffi...

AI has social consequences, but who pays the price? Tech companies’ problem with ‘ethical debt’. As public concern about the ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence keeps growing, it might seem like it’s time to slow down. But inside tech companies themselves, the sentiment is quite the opposite. As Big Tech’s AI race heats up, it would be an “absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later,” a Microsoft executive wrote in an internal email about generative AI, as The New York Times reported. In other words, it’s time to “move fast and break things,” to quote Mark Zuckerberg’s old motto. Of course, when you break things, you might have to fix them later – at a cost. In software development, the term “technical debt” refers to the imp...

ChatGPT struggles with Wordle puzzles, which says a lot about how it works. The AI chatbot known as ChatGPT, developed by the company OpenAI, has caught the public’s attention and imagination. Some applications of the technology are truly impressive, such as its ability to summarise complex topics or to engage in long conversations. It’s no surprise that other AI companies have been rushing to release their own large language models (LLMs) – the name for the technology underlying chatbots like ChatGPT. Some of these LLMs will be incorporated into other products, such as search engines. With its impressive capabilities in mind, I decided to test the chatbot on Wordle – the word game from the New York Times – which I have been playing for some time. Players have six goes at guessing a five...

Three AI experts on how access to ChatGPT-style tech is about to change our world – podcast. ChatGPT burst onto the technology world, gaining 100 million users by the end of January 2023, just two months after its launch and bringing with it a looming sense of change. The technology itself is fascinating, but part of what makes ChatGPT uniquely interesting is the fact that essentially overnight, most of the world gained access to a powerful generative artificial intelligence that they could use for their own purposes. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we speak with researchers who study computer science, technology and economics to explore how the rapid adoption of technologies has, for the most part, failed to change social and economic systems in the past – but why AI might ...