Artificial Intelligence
Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach
While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he said was easily “the best paper in the class.” It explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments. A red flag instantly went up. Mr. Aumann […]
Know More
Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I.
OpenAI is led by Sam Altman, who became well known in Silicon Valley as the head the start-up builder Y Combinator. Mr. Altman, 37, and his co-founders created OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit. But he soon remade the venture as a for-profit company that could more aggressively pursue financing. A year later, Microsoft invested […]
Know More
Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It.
Cherie Shields, a high school English teacher in Oregon, told me that she had recently assigned students in one of her classes to use ChatGPT to create outlines for their essays comparing and contrasting two 19th-century short stories that touch on themes of gender and mental health: “The Story of an Hour,” by Kate Chopin, […]
Know More
AI’s Best Trick Yet Is Showering Us With Attention
One thing about inhabiting a face is that we can never quite see it the way others do. Mirrors give us a reversed image. Photographs freeze us in time at odd angles and, sometimes, in pitiless detail. Staring into a phone camera, preening to check our makeup or undereye circles, gives us a hyperreal mirror, […]
Know More
AI-Generated Art Won a Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.
This year, the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition gave out prizes in all the usual categories: painting, quilting, sculpture. But one entrant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo., didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of […]
Know More
A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is?
Why Everyone Else Believes In the mid-1960s, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joseph Weizenbaum, built an automated psychotherapist he called Eliza. This chatbot was simple. Basically, when you typed a thought onto a computer screen, it asked you to expand this thought — or it just repeated your words in the form […]
Know More
A.I. Predicts the Shape of Nearly Every Protein Known to Science
In 2020, an artificial intelligence lab called DeepMind unveiled technology that could predict the shape of proteins — the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behavior of the human body and all other living things. A year later, the lab shared the tool, called AlphaFold, with scientists and released predicted shapes for more than 350,000 proteins, […]
Know More
Google Fires Engineer Who Claims Its A.I. Is Conscious
SAN FRANCISCO — Google fired one of its engineers, Blake Lemoine, on Friday, more than a month after he raised ethical concerns about how the company was testing an artificial intelligence chatbot that he believes has achieved consciousness. A Google spokesman, Chris Pappas, said Mr. Lemoine, a senior software engineer in its Responsible A.I. organization, […]
Know More
Robots Aren’t Done Reshaping Warehouses
When Digit spends an afternoon unloading boxes from a tractor-trailer in 100-plus-degree heat, co-workers never hear a complaint. Digit, a blue-and-white humanoid robot, was designed to handle the tough, menial and dangerous tasks at warehouses. The robot’s movements, informed by years of studying how birds walk, include a slight sway in its frame when it […]
Know More