Recently, I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. I had a decision to make and, either way, I knew my life would follow a different track. On one path, I accept a job offer: it’s an incredible opportunity, but means relocating hundreds of miles away, with no social network.
“Does Gratitude to R for φ-ing Imply Gratitude that R φ-ed?” isn’t a question we often ask ourselves on Thanksgiving. Translated into plain English—it’s the title of a scholarly article by the philosopher Tony Manela—it asks whether it’s possible to be grateful to someone for doing something without being grateful that the same something has happened.
In 1953, Roald Dahl published “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.”
Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands.
Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage...
But an ecosystem around text-based generative AI had evolved well before The Atlantic revealed the contents of key datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have been in development since 2017, and OpenAI’s GPT-3, the model that introduced generative AI to the mainstream, hit the world back in 2020.
On a subway train not long ago, I had the familiar, unsettling experience of standing behind a fellow-passenger and watching everything that she was doing on her phone. It was a crowded car, rush hour, with the dim but unwarm lighting of the oldest New York City trains.
Around a year ago, generative AI took the world by storm, as extraordinarily powerful large language models (LLMs) enabled unprecedented performance at a wider range of tasks than ever before feasible.
How will Facebook celebrate its 20th birthday? Perhaps it will create one of those cute video montages they like to generate at significant moments. Starting with a tinkling piano soundtrack, a couple of breathless friend requests, and some self-conscious, tentative writing of “hello!” on other users’ walls, it might then pass quickly through moments of chronic oversharing, passive-aggressive, stalking of exes, and horrified untagging of yourself in unflattering photos.
For a preview of how AI will collide with creative industries, look to advertising. Amazon, Google, and Meta have all started encouraging advertisers to use AI tools to generate ad copy and imagery, promising high performance, lower costs, and super-specific targeting. Now, brands are paying to advertise with AI-generated virtual influencers — synthetic characters that can offer at least some promotional juice at a fraction of the cost.
In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade.
A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue.
One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It’s being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions, systems such as ChatGPT process huge quantities of written material.
For months in the spring of 1921, a women’s-only private dorm at the University of California, Berkeley was rocked by a crime wave. College Hall, located on the northeastern corner of campus, where Hearst Avenue began to climb into the hills, was home to 90 young, mostly affluent women—18- and 19-year-olds, whose possessions kept disappearing.
Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”
