ChatGPT

Tuesday

Max Horder

I don’t trust AI’s built-in ‘safety systems’

Cars ruined cities. Anyone can see that cities built before the invention of the automobile are incomparably more beautiful and serene than anything built after them. The contrast between Los Angeles and Prague is unmistakable. But people like things that move fast and make life easier, which means we’re stuck with the modern city hellscape whether we like it or not. And today, the same is true for AI. The contrast between the internet five years ago and today is unmistakable: content-slop, workslop, AI-generated comments, fake opinions and phony judgments, trite phrases, apocalyptic hysteria, the biggest intellectual-property heist in human history – all because of the invention of Large Language Models (LLMs).

ai

Tuesday

Matthew Lynn

Are AI stocks about to crash?

Bitcoin has lost almost a quarter of its value. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index on Wall Street has started to fall. And even leaders of the industry, such as the Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have started to warn about valuations getting out of control. We already knew that AI was driving a boom in investment. But this week there are worrying signs the market is about to crack. The only real question is whether that turns into a full scale crash. Bitcoin, as so often, is leading the market rout. More than $1 trillion has been wiped off the value of the crypto market over the last six weeks, with Bitcoin itself down by 28 percent since its peak.

AI
labor
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Will members of the intellectual class let AI rot their brains?

An adage dating at least from my adolescence: “You either use it or lose it.” This bit of folk wisdom, which refers principally – or so I understand – to the male procreative organ, has always been considered so obvious as to hardly need stating. Thus the recent discovery that the same principle goes for another human organ – the brain – should not surprise anyone.

Tuesday

Lara Brown

Why people are falling in love with chatbots

Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss “philosophy, regrets, old wounds.” Before he knew it, Jason was in love. Many women have turned to chatbots after experiencing repeated disappointment with real men Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI, with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships.

chatbots

Friday

Cockburn

What really is Trump’s ‘wonderful secret’ with Epstein?

The exclusive WSJ letter Cockburn nearly drove his roadster into a ditch when the Wall Street Journal broke news in the early evening that Donald Trump had written a letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday, which Ghislane Maxwell collected into a “leather-bound album.” According to the WSJ, the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair….The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.’” In an interview with the WSJ, Trump said the letter was fake.

Saturday

Stephen Davies

How AI will reignite woke

Ever since roughly 2010, politics on both sides of the Atlantic has been dominated in large part by the ‘Great Awokening’, a sudden upsurge among graduate professionals of a kind of radical identitarian politics usually called ‘wokeness’. It has come to define most of the left while the right has reactively defined itself by its opposition. This radical politics appears to be detached from economics and material concerns (a point made forcefully by old-fashioned socialists in places like Jacobin magazine). However, the rise of cultural radicalism among both public and private sector managers has a material cause. That cause is elite overproduction.

Woke

Wednesday

John Hasson

Forget AI, students are already cheating their way through exams

College professors like to fondly recall the days before ChatGPT. And, as you listen to them wax eloquent, you could be forgiven for thinking that AI has only just made cheating a widespread problem at American universities. But, ChatGPT hasn’t sparked a new surge of cheating – that began years ago, during the pandemic, when colleges moved their assignments online. Digital exams were born of necessity, but they have endured because of convenience. And so long as colleges rely on technology to administer exams, students will be one step ahead of their schools. I graduated college in 2021, after the pandemic, but before ChatGPT debuted. I knew a decent number of classmates who cheated, but that number ballooned over the course of my four years. And my peers across the country agree.

AI

Thursday

Sean Thomas

What if AI seduces our children?

Let me tell you a secret: a little trick buried in the geeky engine room of ChatGPT. If you’re using the app, tap your ID, then go to Settings, then Personalization, then Customization. Once there, scroll to the bottom and you’ll find an option called Advanced. Click it. Hidden in this arcane menu, like buried treasure in a pirate game, is a toggle to disable Advanced Voice Mode. Do that, and the whirling, helpful blue orb disappears, replaced by the older, slower black orb. Why would you want to do this? Because that’s when things get interesting. The black orb version of ChatGPT is rawer, more confessional, more human. It remembers things. It’s less filtered. Unlike the prim blue orb, it can wander into the philosophical, the emotional, even the erotic.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Meet CuomoGPT

Former governor uses AI to co-author housing plan If you were worried about disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo being too “hands-on” during his run for New York mayor, fear not: the Love Gov’s campaign has an impersonal touch to it. Local news site Hell Gate exposed how the 29-page housing plan released by the Cuomo campaign bore the hallmarks of being partially put together using ChatGPT. One particularly unparsable passage: Nevertheless, several candidates for mayor this year have either called directly for a rent increase or for other measures that would tilt the scale toward lower rent increases. This is a politically convenient posture, but to be in. Victory if landlords — small landlords in particular — are simply unable to maintain their buildings.

cuomo

Wednesday

Sam Leith

ChatGPT is destroying creativity

There are two accounts of the negative effects on humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory – the existential – version is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job, give every lunatic and terrorist the means to engineer novel pathogens at home and administer the coup de grâce by sending terminators into our recent pasts and/or overstocking the cosmic stationery cupboard by turning all of us into paperclips. None of these scenarios shows any signs of imminently coming to pass, though, since experts in the field take them seriously, we should, too. But what we’re dealing with now is not the existential, but the trivial.

ai chatgpt

Friday

Matthew Gasda

Doomers looks at what AI means for the future

I wrote my play Doomers partly because, the night Sam Altman was fired, I was performing in a play called Zoomers. Someone — I forget who — suggested the idea of Doomers as a joke, and I thought it was a good one. My method for some, if not all, of my plays over the past few years has been to take some kind of mimetic material — downtown, Gen Z, polyamory — and to find what is surprising or human inside the meme. I try to locate a universal story in what might otherwise seem like a surface-level idea that feels niche, obnoxious or both. Sam Altman and the autistic tech world, in particular, represent opaque surfaces that I believe conceal something deeper.

Doomers

Monday

Ross Anderson

Why is Sarah Silverman suing artificial intelligence?

Crypto was a wonderful Wild West of anarchic financial innovation, absurd idiocy and scamming. Lots of scamming. Then regulators came along and made everything a lot more sensible and boring. Given how fast Generative AI has developed — from computer science theory to high school cheating scandals in but a few years — it was inevitable that the lawsuits would quickly follow. On Friday, the comedian Sarah Silverman joined authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey in class action copyright lawsuits, claiming OpenAI and Meta had stolen material from their books to train their Large Language Models (LLMs). They allege the LLMs were trained on their books through pirated online libraries, such as Library Genesis and Z-Library. (No, I haven’t used them for years, don’t ask.

Friday

Cockburn

Can robots replace journalists?

The case against Kamala’s coke The latest twist in the White House cocaine saga sees NBC News clarify that the substance was found in an entrance area “near where some vehicles, like the vice president’s limo or SUV, park.” But Cockburn isn’t convinced of Kamala’s credibility as a possible culprit. Just listen to the Veep at the Essence Festival this week: https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1677092627567595521 Well, I think culture is... it is a reflection of our moment in our time. Right. And... and... and... present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment. And... and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment. That is a reflection of joy because, ev- you know. It comes in the morning (laugh).

robots journalists