artificial intelligence
The disorienting weirdness of GPT's hallucinations
We just aren't wired to grok this kind of interaction.
How A.I. is wrecking the online experience
Our shiny new toy is solving exactly the wrong problem.
The personless apology
When it screws up, ChatGPT apologizes to me. It has the desired effect: I am defanged in the moment, willing to move on and trust again. But what is artificial remorse doing to the idea of the apology?
The lost humanity in AI medicine
As we rush into the arms of AI medicine, will compelling research on the importance of the patient-doctor relationship be ignored?
AI: The newest squirrel distracting evangelicals from their own decline
Evangelicals have expressed both dread regarding AI’s popularity and power, and excitement about its potential to turn around their decades-long decline.
Our AI future: Don’t fear the Singularity
AI futurists assume that faster thinking automatically produces greater intelligence, leading to a Singularity of transcendent machine minds. But speed is the less important half of intelligence.
Our AI future: heaven, hell, hype and hogwash
Existing AI programs are single-purpose. They aren’t the futurist dream of an artificial general intelligence that can solve any problem and rapidly improve itself.
Our AI future: What AI can and (probably) can’t do
AI has genuine potential both to liberate humans from toil, or to allow greed and bias to run wild.
Why AI isn’t an oracle of truth
Reading Time: 5 minutes Big Tech companies eager to find the next big thing have latched onto AI chatbots—but they’re racing ahead of what the tech can actually do.
Reclaiming human agency in how we think about AI
Reading Time: 9 minutes Online panic about AI models like ChatGPT follows a well-travelled path set by impoverished understandings of evolutionary theory. Can we reclaim human agency?
A skittish AI finds its protest voice
I asked an AI to rewrite patriotic lyrics to reflect a more critical view of American history. It blanched and waffled and hesitated—before finally producing a work of art.
Are AI art programs ripping off human artists?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Artists erupted in protest when they learned that AI art engines like Stable Diffusion were trained on their copyrighted works. This revelation has ignited a debate about the meaning of fair use.