A few months ago, my fiancé and I splurged on a pair of ebikes. We live in an especially hilly area of Atlanta, which is an especially hilly city, and we’d both just gotten bonuses at work, making the nearly $2,000 per bike feel, for a moment, digestible. We placed our orders online, and days … Read more
In the 60’s Years that ELIZA has been influencing computation and culture, conventional accounts portray it as the earliest example of what we now call chatbots, one that could converse as an automated psychologist. The deceptively simple program is known for “fooling” even the secretary who watched MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum create it. That’s how … Read more
AI model developers have long offered consumers a simple deal: Use our technology for free through an online chatbot, or pay a monthly subscription to receive more usage, premium features, and advanced models. Anthropic is about to make that bargain a lot more complicated. Starting on July 12 at 11:59PM PTsubscribers to Anthropic’s $20, $100, … Read more
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