The Download: The Impact of ChatGPT on Schools and Elon Musk’s AI Projects

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s happening in the tech world.

AI Knowledge Could Be ChatGPT’s Biggest Lesson for Schools

This year, millions of people have tried and been impressed with artificial intelligence systems. This is largely thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

When it launched last November, the chatbot became an instant hit with students, many of whom have started using it to write term papers and assignments. Alarmed by an influx of AI-generated essays, schools around the world quickly banned the use of the technology.

But there’s an unexpected upside: ChatGPT has forced schools to adapt quickly and start teaching kids an ad-hoc AI 101 curriculum. important to teach the next generation critical thinking skills around AI. . Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkila

Melissa’s story is from The Algorithm, her weekly AI newsletter. Register to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

Learn more about AI:

+ ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We have to decide what that looks like. Major new language models will transform many jobs. Whether or not they lead to widespread prosperity is up to us. Read the full story.

+ We’re racing towards a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered Internet. Large language models are full of security vulnerabilities, but they are embedded in large-scale technology products. Read the full story.

+ What if we could just ask the AI ​​to be less biased? Instead of making the training data less biased, researchers are experimenting by simply asking the model to give you less biased answers. Read the full story.

Podcast: About AI Ethics

The best definitions of AI are vague, largely lack consensus, and pose a huge challenge for lawmakers and jurists seeking to regulate it. But the consecutive breakthroughs and rapid adoption of generative AI tools are making it much more real for everyone.

The latest episode of our podcast, In Machines We Trust, explores the ethics of these tools and what it could mean for the future of legal decisions. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The unavoidable

I’ve scoured the internet to find you today’s funniest/important/scariest/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Elon Musk is working on a Twitter AI project
Although he recently joined an industry-wide call to halt AI training. (Initiate $)
+ Technically, Twitter no longer exists – it merged with Musk’s X Corp. ($Bloomberg)
+ Musk joked that his dog was in charge of Twitter. (WP$)
+ We are witnessing the brain death of Twitter. (MIT Technology Review)

2 China tries to manipulate its covid legacy
Its officials withhold data and censor dissenting voices. (WSJ$)

3 Bitcoin is on the rise again
And market manipulation could be the root cause. (The Guardian)
+ However, El Salvador’s bitcoin holdings are still very low. (Bloomberg$)+ Crypto regulation is on the agenda for the upcoming G7 summit. (Reuters)

4 Secret Pentagon Intelligence Leaked By Meme Group
Authorities are racing to determine how the classified documents were obtained. (NYT$)
+ They contain information collected by the NSA and CIA, among other agencies. (NY Mag$)

5 We’re learning more about dark matter
The researchers managed to map it in unprecedented detail. (BBC)

6 Abortion pills are perfectly safe
Despite what some pro-life groups would have you believe. (voice)

7 What the Rise of Generative AI Means for Porn
It’s getting easier and easier to create erotic images that people are willing to pay for. (WP$)
+ Even the AI ​​struggles to determine if the images are AI generated. (WSJ$)
+ AI music is infiltrating streaming services. (FT$)
+ ChatGPT is fueling a new wave of spam on Reddit. (Motherboard)
+ The viral AI avatar app Lensa stripped me naked, without my consent. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Underground Wells Are The New Batteries
They are surprisingly good at storing thermal energy. (Wired $)
+ This geothermal startup has shown that its wells can be used as a giant underground battery. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Why Big Tech’s Platforms Are So Hard To Replace
Despite Twitter’s past six months, users are still logging in. (NPR)

10 TikTok’s latest craze? Water
Water lovers are turning to elaborate syrup concoctions to boost their daily H2O intake. (Fast Company $)

quote of the day

“I wish I could just shoot these programs down.”

—An anonymous video game artist living in China expresses her frustration with image-generating AI models that force human workers to work very long hours to compete with the rest of the world.

This artist dominates AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it.

September 2022

Greg Rutkowski is a Polish digital artist who uses classic styles to create dreamscapes. His distinctive style has been used in some of the world’s most popular fantasy games, including Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.

Now it has become a hit in the new world of text-to-image AI generation. His name is one of the most commonly used prompts in the Stable Diffusion open source art generator.

But this and other open source programs are built by scraping images from the Internet, often without permission or proper attribution to the artists. As a result, they raise tricky questions about ethics and copyright. And artists like Rutkowski have had enough. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkila

We can still have beautiful things

A place of comfort, pleasure and distraction in these strange times. (You have any ideas ? Write to me Or tweet them to me.)

+ It’s the little things in life that make the difference: here’s how the experts do it.
+ Hi to Cloudflare’s Lava Lamp Wall!
+ I’m not sure about this pixelated hoodie – yours for just $2,500.
+ Forget everything you know, a rainbow isn’t an arch at all: it’s a circle.
+ The deepest living fish in the world has a sweet little face.

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