Writing AI Lab each week means I occasionally encounter AI models that behave badly and bizarrely. Usually, there’s nothing to be done about it, save for sharing those tales with you. But that could change soon. A group of AI researchers has set up a crowdsourced websiteFlaw Reporting for AI (FLARE-AI), for reporting and tracking … Read more
Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project. The effort, which was managed by Meta contractor Covalen, was active … Read more
ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and other tools like them are making artificial intelligence available to the masses. We can now get all sorts of responses back on almost any topic imaginable. These chatbots can compose sonnets, write code, get philosophical, and automate tasks. However, while you can just type anything you like into ChatGPT and get … Read more
Lilian Schmidt could not, for the life of her, figure out how to get her daughter to go to sleep. None of the advice given to her by sleep experts or her pediatrician worked—not using a white noise machine, not buying blackout curtains, not even giving her a massage. “Every single day, it took like … Read more
As public backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to weed out—and reject—the telltale signs of its use continues. One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes—which are a great, and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There’s also the “rule of threes,” which is … Read more
At first, the winners of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize for 2026 enjoyed the envy of their peers. But since their works of fiction earned this distinction, these authors have found themselves facing harsh scrutiny from the literary community, with several accused of enlisting generative artificial intelligence to write for them. The allegations have … Read more
Two former OpenAI employees and a group of AI safety nonprofits are warning that Elon Musk’s AI lab, xAI, could become a liability for prospective investors in SpaceX, which is preparing to file what’s expected to be the largest initial public offering in Wall Street History. In a letters directed to investors published on Tuesday, … Read more
Using AI chatbots for even just for 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA. Researchers tasked people with solving various problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension, through an online platform that paid … Read more
For its famous intractability, the Bloomberg Terminal has long inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software’s dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far-flung information is the mark of a seasoned professional. But as a greater mass of data is fed into the Terminal—not only … Read more
I’ve used ChatGPT to help me build a budget before, and it was genuinely helpful. After I input my monthly salary as well as my standard utilities and recurring expenses, the chatbot drafted a few solid options, and I tweaked them into penny-pinching perfection. I’m admittedly part of the growing number of people turning to … Read more