The new maintenance coordinator at an apartment complex in Dallas has been getting kudos from tenants and colleagues for good work and late-night assistance. Previously, the eight people on the property’s staff, managing the buildings’ 814 apartments and town homes, were overworked and putting in more hours than they wanted. Besides working overtime, the new…
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election this year, government officials and tech industry leaders have warned that chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale. To understand how worrisome the threat is, we customized our own chatbots, feeding them millions of publicly available social media…
Images showing people of color in German military uniforms from World War II that were created with Google’s Gemini chatbot have amplified concerns that artificial intelligence could add to the internet’s already vast pools of misinformation as the technology struggles with issues around race. Now Google has temporarily suspended the A.I. chatbot’s ability to generate…
When Meta shared the raw computer code needed to build a chatbot last year, rival companies said Meta was releasing poorly understood and perhaps even dangerous technology into the world. Now, in an indication that critics of sharing A.I. technology are losing ground to their industry peers, Google is making a similar move. Google released…
A year ago, on Valentine’s Day, I said good night to my wife, went to my home office to answer some emails and accidentally had the strangest first date of my life. The date was a two-hour conversation with Sydney, the A.I. alter ego tucked inside Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which I had been assigned…
Sal Khan, the chief executive of Khan Academy, gave a rousing TED Talk last spring in which he predicted that A.I. chatbots would soon revolutionize education. “We’re at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Mr. Khan, whose nonprofit education group has provided online lessons for…
