Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning

Last month a professor at Weber State University in Utah asked a new artificial-intelligence chatbot to write a tweet in his voice.Within a few minutes the application, called ChatGPT, had spit out a dozen messages that captured Alex Lawrence’s tone and personality. His first reaction: “Holy Cow!” His second: “This is the greatest cheating tool ever invented.” His response reflects a dilemma that the powerful AI tool creates for educators: Should they ban ChatGPT or build on it? Whichever path they take, some…

At a small gallery tucked behind the cavernous atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan on a recent day, visitors lingered before a sprawling work, a series of dots, lines and diagrams in a seemingly abstract design against a stark, black background. The piece, laced with text in tiny print, is nothing like the museum’s more familiar art, including paintings by Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol prints. Instead, the swath of black wallpaper displays a…

ChatGPT, the latest technological sensation, is an artificial intelligence chatbot with an amazing ability to carry on a conversation. It relies on a massive network of artificial neurons that loosely mimics the human brain, and it has been trained by analyzing the information resources of the internet. ChatGPT has processed more text than any human is likely to have read in a lifetime, allowing it to respond to questions fluently and even to imitate specific individuals, answering queries the way it thinks they would. My…

Almost out of the blue, it has become popular to use artificial intelligence to generate bedtime stories, love letters, high-school essays, even mental-health guidance (not to mention award-winning artwork). Many people aren’t comfortable with bot-created content and may feel tricked.Researchers and other programmers have taken it upon themselves to build tools to help people figure out what has sprung from the mind of a human, and what was cobbled together by a bot. But in a period of rapid advancement such as this, any…

HONG KONG—China is implementing new rules to restrict the production of ‘deepfakes,’ media generated or edited by artificial-intelligence software that can make people appear to say and do things they never did.Beijing’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, will begin enforcing the regulation—on what it calls “deep synthesis” technology, including AI-powered image, audio and text-generation software—starting Tuesday, marking the world’s first comprehensive attempt by a major regulatory agency to…

LAS VEGAS—A head-worn smell generator. Cameras mounted on hummingbird feeders. A plane mask that covers your mouth for quiet phone calls at 30,000 feet. The annual tech confab in Las Vegas is back.  We saw hundreds of gadgets. Some were unproven and many could go sideways, but here’s what intrigued, delighted and puzzled us most in Vegas. Just remember, while you’ll be able to buy some of them in coming months or years, these aren’t recommendations.…

New York City public schools banned access to ChatGPT, an artificial-intelligence chatbot, on its internet networks and school devices after officials raised concerns that students could use the AI program to answer questions, do homework or write essays. ChatGPT quickly drew attention from the public and students after its November release, with some industry observers calling it one of the most intelligent AI applications ever created. The program crossed a million users a few days…

Look, back in high school, I was a pillar of honesty and hard work. No cheating—unless you count Nintendo cheat codes.This month, however, I returned to high school a big ol’ cheater. Specifically, a ChatGPT cheater. If you haven’t yet tried ChatGPT, OpenAI’s new artificial-intelligence chatbot, it will blow your mind. Tell the bot to write you anything—an email apologizing to your boss, an article about the world’s richest hamster, a “Seinfeld” script set in 2022—and it spits out text you’d…

Last week, after seeing artsy portraits popping up all over her social media feeds, Christal Luster signed up for a free trial of a photo-editing app called Lensa. She uploaded 10 of her headshots to it and paid $5.99 for 100 new images based on her inputs, which an artificial-intelligence tool produced in under an hour.  Ms. Luster, an actress in Chicago, said the images opened her eyes to the types of characters she could portray. “There was one of them where I was like, ‘Oh I could totally see myself playing in…

BROOKLYN—I heard the MC call my name and felt my legs carry me toward the stage. It was time to enter the Punderdome.I’d never competed in a pun contest, much less in front of hundreds of people at an event considered the Roman Colosseum of punditry. My stage presence could be described as lacking. I had done basically no preparation. I did, however, have one thing going for me: I was actually a robot.…