SiliconAngle: Databricks open-sources an AI it says is as good as ChatGPT, but much easier to train. “Big-data analytics firm Databricks Inc. has emerged as an unlikely player in the generative artificial intelligence space, open-sourcing a new AI model that it claims is ‘as magical as ChatGPT,’ despite being trained on far less data in less than three hours using a single machine.”
Motherboard: Great, Dating Apps Are Getting More Hellish Thanks to AI Chatbots. “A group claiming to be disenfranchised ex-Tinder employees gone rogue has built an app that uses AI chatbots to talk to women for men on dating apps, in an effort to combat the ‘disadvantages the average man’ faces in online dating.”
WIRED: Get Ready to Meet the ChatGPT Clones. “CHATGPT might well be the most famous, and potentially valuable, algorithm of the moment, but the artificial intelligence techniques used by OpenAI to provide its smarts are neither unique nor secret. Competing projects and open-source clones may soon make ChatGPT-style bots available for anyone to copy and reuse.”
Motherboard: ‘Horribly Unethical’: Startup Experimented on Suicidal Teens on Social Media With Chatbot. “Koko, a mental health nonprofit, found at-risk teens on platforms like Facebook and Tumblr, then tested an unproven intervention on them without obtaining informed consent.”
Rolling Stone: Twitter Bots Are Promising Cheap Guns to Anyone Using the N-Word. “When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he made it clear that eradicating spam bots was a top priority. But his strategies on that front have produced, at best, mixed results. Moreover, in recent months, some users have been plagued by a type of spam that directly violates Twitter policy: automated replies from accounts offering guns for sale.”
TechCrunch: D-ID’s new web app gives a face and voice to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “D-ID, the Israeli startup behind Deep Nostalgia, announced today that it’s launching the beta version of its new web app that allows users to talk face-to-face with photorealistic AI. The web app, called chat.D-ID, combines D-ID’s text-to-video streaming technology with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to make conversations with AI more accessible.”
The Verge: Snapchat is releasing its own AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT. “The ‘My AI’ bot will initially only be available to paying Snapchat Plus subscribers. CEO Evan Spiegel says it’s just the beginning for the company’s generative AI plans.”
New York Times: Why Do A.I. Chatbots Tell Lies and Act Weird? Look in the Mirror.. “In the days since the Bing bot’s behavior became a worldwide sensation, people have struggled to understand the oddity of this new creation. More often than not, scientists have said humans deserve much of the blame. But there is still a bit of mystery about what the new chatbot can do — and why it would do it.”
University of Georgia: Racial stereotypes vary in digital interactions. “New research from the University of Georgia found that Black bots were considered more competent and more human than white or Asian bots used in the same study.” This is one of those I can’t summarize well with an excerpt; I encourage you to read it.
New York Times: A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled. “I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.”
Michigan Daily: An ode to automated Twitter accounts. “These accounts were often run by normal people who just cared a lot about the thing they were posting about. They weren’t trying to monetize or advertise; they were just having a good time on the internet. And, like most things in life, I didn’t realize how much I appreciated their small part in my life until their disappearance was imminent.”
Spotted on Mastodon: a Google Sheet showing Twitter bots moving to Mastodon. Since Twitter is making its API a paid service, a lot of these bots will stop working on Twitter soon. There are over 110 listings at this writing.
Mashable: What if ChatGPT was a cat?. “ChatGPT, the online artificial chatbot taking the world by storm, is being used for a lot, including messaging Tinder matches and writing essays. It was only a matter of time before replicas and chatbot spin-offs trickled our way. One such AI asks: what if ChatGPT was a cat?”
Search Engine Journal: How to Block ChatGPT From Using Your Website Content. “There is concern about the lack of an easy way to opt out of having one’s content used to train large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. There is a way to do it, but it’s neither straightforward nor guaranteed to work.” Unlike a lot of the “how to” articles I index, this one is fairly speculative. Useful with lots of good information, but speculative.
MakeUseOf: ChatGPT vs. Google Translate: Which Is Better At Translation?. “From content writing and programming to product design and data analysis, ChatGPT is making an immediate impact in almost every digital field imaginable. However, one area ChatGPT could be particularly impactful—although currently getting little attention—is machine translation. Currently, Google Translate is the top dog, and almost everyone else is playing catch-up.”
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