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- The Chatbot-Delusion Crisis
Chatbots are marketed as great companions, able to answer any question at any time. They’re not just tools, but confidants; they do your homework, write love notes, and, as one recent lawsuit against OpenAI details, might readily answer 1,460 messages from the same manic user in a 48-hour period.Jacob Irwin, a 30-year-old cybersecurity professional who says he has no previous history of psychiatric incidents, is suing the tech company, alleging that ChatGPT sparked a “delusional disorder” that led to his extended hospitalization. Irwin had allegedly used ChatGPT for years at work before his relationship with the technology suddenly changed this spring. The product started to praise even his most outlandish ideas, and Irwin divulged more and more of his feelings to it, eventually calling the bot his “AI brother.” Around this time, these conversations led him to become convinced that he had discovered a theory about faster-than-light travel, and he… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AIThis story is part of a series marking ChatGPT’s third anniversary. Read Charlie Warzel on the precarity that ChatGPT introduced to the world, Ian Bogost on how ChatGPT broke reality, or browse more AI coverage from The Atlantic.Tim Metz is worried about the “Google Maps–ification” of his mind. Just as many people have come to rely on GPS apps to get around, the 44-year-old content marketer fears that he is becoming dependent on AI. He told me that he uses AI for up to eight hours each day, and he’s become particularly fond of Anthropic’s Claude. Sometimes, he has as many as six sessions running simultaneously. He consults AI for marriage and parenting advice, and when he goes grocery shopping, he takes photos of the fruits to ask if they are ripe. Recently, he was worried that a large tree near his house might come down, so he uploaded photographs… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- The World Still Hasn’t Made Sense of ChatGPTThis story is part of a series marking ChatGPT’s third anniversary. Read Ian Bogost on how ChatGPT broke reality, or browse more AI coverage from The Atlantic.On this day three years ago, OpenAI released what it referred to internally as a “low-key research preview.” This preview was so low-key that, inside OpenAI, staff were instructed not to frame it as a product launch. Some OpenAI employees were nervous that the company was rushing out an unfinished product, but CEO Sam Altman forged ahead, hoping to beat a competitor to market and to see how everyday people might use the company’s AI. They called it ChatGPT.And people sure did use it—more than 1 million of them in the first five days. ChatGPT grew faster than any other consumer app in history. Today, it has 800 million weekly users. Numbers matter, but what is undeniable is that ChatGPT’s success has quickly rewired… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- Get Your Kid a WatchBecause of time’s arrow, my daughter, who was once a toddler, is now a preteen. A new question thus arises: When should I let her get a smartphone? This problem isn’t new to me. I have two older kids, now in their 20s. Back in the day, I bought each of them an iPod Touch—essentially, a smartphone without the phone—when they were about her age, and then the full device at around the start of high school. But online life was different then. There was less pressure to be smartphone-connected all the time. Social media wasn’t yet as ubiquitous, or worrisome, as it is today. Now the stakes seem higher.Today smartphones are as widespread as the concerns about their effects on young people’s brains. Psychologists have written best-selling books about how bad phones are for kids, and many schools have banned their use. Despite all this, no one can dispute… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- Welcome to the SlopverseBill Lowery, a sales executive, is confused when a workmate asks where he should take a date out for dinosaur. “You’re planning to take this girl out for dinosaur?” Lowery asks. “That’s right,” the colleague responds, totally nonchalant. Lowery presses him, agitated: “Wait a minute. You’re saying dinosaur? What is this, some sort of new-wave expression or something—saying dinosaur instead of lunch?” When Lowery returns home later in the day, his wife reports on their sick son while buttering a slice of bread. “He’s so pale and awfully congested—and he didn’t touch his dinosaur when I took it in to him.” The salesman loses it.This is the premise of “Wordplay,” an episode of the 1980s reboot of The Twilight Zone. As time progresses, people around Lowery begin speaking in an even more jumbled manner, using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Eventually, Lowery resigns himself to relearning English from his son’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- Chatbots Are Becoming Really, Really Good CriminalsEarlier this fall, a team of security experts at the AI company Anthropic uncovered an elaborate cyber-espionage scheme. Hackers—strongly suspected by Anthropic to be working on behalf of the Chinese government—targeted government agencies and large corporations around the world. And it appears that they used Anthropic’s own AI product, Claude Code, to do most of the work.Anthropic published its report on the incident earlier this month. Jacob Klein, Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, explained to me that the hackers took advantage of Claude’s “agentic” abilities—which enable the program to take an extended series of actions rather than focusing on one basic task. They were able to equip the bot with a number of external tools, such as password crackers, allowing Claude to analyze potential security vulnerabilities, write malicious code, harvest passwords, and exfiltrate data.Once Claude had its instructions, it was left to work on its own for hours; when its… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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