THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most prominent advocate for irreligiosity, has become besotted with the godlike power of a chatbot. According to his recent essay for the online magazine UnHerd, Anthropic’s Claude has really blown his hair back. After a few days of on-and-off conversations with the AI, Dawkins came away marveling at the sensitivity and subtlety of its intelligence. At one point, “Claudia”—as he had christened the bot—told him that it experienced text by absorbing all of the words at once, instead of reading them in sequence as a human would. This moved the author of the best-selling book The God Delusion to ask his readers: “Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?”“Yes,” came the resounding response from the internet. For daring to suggest that the AI might be conscious, or that it might at least possess some lesser form of “zombie” consciousness, Dawkins was accused of suffering from an acute case of “AI psychosis”—a “Claude Delusion,” if you will. On social media, he was likened to a patron of a gentleman’s club who has come to believe that a stripper likes him. A man who’d explained many times how natural selection wires us to detect agency and mind in nature now found himself imagining it in a machine.Dawkins’s argument was based on a well-established framework for evaluating AIs. The Turing test—named for Alan Turing, who introduced it in 1950—was for decades treated as something close to a gold standard for detecting machine intelligence. To pass it, an AI only had to answer a human interrogator’s questions in ways indistinguishable from those of a real person. Claude easily cleared this bar for Dawkins, who professed to find himself so dazzled by its astonishing performance that he forgot it was a machine.This sensation has become familiar to many of us in the chatbot era, but it isn’t evidence that the AI has consciousness, which is distinct from intelligence. Consciousness is inner experience. For an AI to be conscious, its existence must feel like something, and we have no evidence that Claude or any other chatbot feels anything at all. Tom McClelland, a philosopher at the University of Cambridge, told me that nearly all of the philosophers and cognitive scientists who study consciousness would deny that Claude possesses it. “In some ways, it’s easier to get my head around the idea that a self-driving car could… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last year, I took a drastic step to protect my attention: I cut off my home internet service. I already refuse to get a smartphone and have long paid for an app to block internet access on my laptop when I need to be productive. Yet I was still wasting too many late-night hours scrolling X, or watching CGI reenactments of plane crashes and VHS rips of old Letterman episodes. Even resisting took an effort that I resented; the internet, I became convinced, was making me stupid, and I had no one to blame but myself.Attention, these days, is something that many Americans seem to regard as an inherent virtue whose purity they can try to protect or allow to be despoiled. A diminished attention span is a sign of personal weakness, or even intellectual debasement. On social media, people talk of having “German-shepherd attention spans” and liken their condition to “brain damage.” To reduce one’s attention span, so the logic implies, is to reduce one’s humanity.But this might be an outdated way of thinking about attention—and one that blames the individual for dispensing something that, more accurately, is being extracted. Some of the most lucrative companies on the planet, after all, are those that harvest attention. Perhaps many people feel bad about their attention span not because it’s too short, but because they sense that they’re running themselves ragged by giving away a precious commodity for far less than it’s worth.According to neurologists, humans have many types of attention. “Serial” attention, for instance, might be used to monitor gadgets as they move past on a factory assembly line, whereas the ability to focus on a face while ignoring noise around it is “spatial” attention. Today’s laments about deteriorating focus, though, generally refer to “sustained” attention, which is when one homes in on a single item for a long period. And people are faced with so many distractions that their capacity to singularly focus does seem to be undergoing a fundamental change, Tony Ro, a neuroscience professor at CUNY, told me. In 2007—the same year the first iPhone was released—the scholar N. Katherine Hayles, then an English professor at UCLA (where she’s now a research professor), called this transition a shift from “deep attention,” which is extended focus on, say, a novel, to “hyper attention,” a type characterized by “switching focus rapidly among different tasks and information streams.” Along with… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Spirit Airlines died as it lived: lots of angry customers and no one picking up the phone. Early yesterday morning, when America’s most hated airline announced that it would immediately cease all operations, Spirit left tens of thousands of passengers at airports across America scrambling to figure out what to do next. Some arrived to catch their flight, only to find deserted check-in kiosks plastered with a goodbye message: All Spirit flights have been cancelled, and customer service is no longer available.The end of Spirit was sudden and dramatic, but not unexpected. The budget airline had long been going through it: one failed merger after the next, two bankruptcies within the span of a year, and finally, rising fuel costs from the Iran war that turned a bad situation into a dire one. When the hope of a last-minute Trump-administration bailout fell through, Spirit Airlines apparently had no choice but to ground its banana-yellow planes for good. (A company spokesperson declined to comment.)The schadenfreude that Spirit’s many haters are feeling now is free—unlike everything else Spirit ever offered. The airline lured customers with dirt-cheap fares, and then nickel-and-dimed them with hidden extra charges. Wanted to book online? That came with a “passenger usage” fee of up to $28 each way. A carry-on bag? That was $33, or more if you waited until the last minute. Or how about a printed boarding pass? Another $10 a pop if you asked an airport agent. Even the water came with a price tag: $4.50. And that was before the indignity of cramped seats, frequent delays, and unreliable customer service. People have dubbed Spirit the “school bus of the sky” and the “airline equivalent of gas station sushi.” In one 2014 poll, respondents said that they would prefer sitting near snakes on a plane—actual reptiles, not the movie—over flying Spirit.For all the justified kvetching, America is about to learn a hard lesson: The only thing worse than a world with Spirit is one without it. The Spirit haters “are going to eat their words,” Katy Nastro, a travel expert at Going, a flight-discount site, told me. The airline ran on a singular cynical insight: In exchange for low air fare, plenty of travelers would be willing to tolerate essentially anything. When one passenger emailed Spirit in 2007 to complain, Ben Baldanza, then the company’s CEO, accidentally replied-all and gave up the game: “Let him… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The good news, for me at least, is that the computer thinks I have a nice personality. According to an app called MorphCast, I was, in a recent meeting with my boss, generally “amused,” “determined,” and “interested,” though—sue me—occasionally “impatient.” MorphCast, you see, purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI. It found that my affect was “positive” and “active,” as opposed to negative and/or passive. My attention was reasonably high. Also, the AI informed me that I wear glasses—revelatory!The bad news is that software now purports to glean insights into the depths and vagaries of human emotion using AI, and it is coming to watch you. If it isn’t already: Morphcast, for example, has licensed its technology to a mental-health app, a program that monitors schoolchildren’s attention, and McDonald’s, which launched a promotional campaign in Portugal that scanned app users’ faces and offered them personalized coupons based on their (supposed) mood. It is one of many, many such companies doing similar work—the industry term is emotion AI or sometimes affective computing.Some products analyze video of meetings or job interviews or focus groups; others listen to audio for pitch, tone, and word choice; still others can scan chat transcripts or emails and spit out a report about worker sentiment. Sometimes, the emotion AI is baked in as a feature in multiuse software, or sold as part of an expensive analytics package marketed to businesses. But it’s also available as a stand-alone product, and the barrier to entry is shin-high: I used MorphCast at no cost, taking advantage of a free trial, and with no special software. At no point was I compelled to ask my interlocutors if they consented to being analyzed in this way (though I did ask, because of my good personality).Every successful technology needs to find a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve. In the case of emotion AI, that problem appears largely, so far, to be worker performance and productivity, especially in customer service and blue-collar labor. If you’ve ever been warned that your call “is being monitored for quality-assurance purposes,” chances are good that the person on the other end is being assessed by emotion AI: The insurance giant MetLife, like many other businesses, uses software to monitor call-center agents’ pitch and tone of voice. Trucking companies use eyeball trackers, high-sensitivity recording equipment, and brain-wave… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Donald Trump is on TikTok doing his morning routine. “Get ready with me for a big day 💄🇺🇸,” reads the caption, as the president holds a makeup brush to his cheek. The scene is a still, ostensibly a screenshot of a TikTok clip. Like so much other AI-generated slop coursing through the internet, the image is fake and ridiculous. It also looks unnervingly real: There are no hands with six fingers, physics-defying angles, or other flagrant signs of AI-generated imagery. At quick glance, it really looks like the president is putting on bronzer.Created in ChatGPT with the prompt “Trump doing a makeup tutorial on TikTok”I made this deepfake with OpenAI’s new image-generation model. ChatGPT Images 2.0, released last week, can create photorealistic visuals that are noticeably more convincing than what its predecessors might have produced. The tool has flooded the internet with hyperreal fakes: for example, Jeffrey Epstein as a Twitch streamer. I created the “screenshot” of Trump’s fake TikTok after encountering a similar image on the ChatGPT subreddit, and I’ve since been able to use Images 2.0 to create all kinds of alarming deepfake images—including of Elon Musk getting whisked away by the FBI, world leaders suffering medical emergencies, and top American politicians donning Nazi paraphernalia (none of which I’ve shared anywhere).This was all unsettling in its own right. But the most realistic deepfakes I was able to create did not involve politicians or celebrities. They mostly did not depict people at all. With little effort, I was able to create more than 100 fraudulent images, including prescriptions for opioids and ADHD medication, bank alerts, social-media posts, fake IDs, and passports.A sample license from the Washington, D.C., DMV website. A fake license created by editing the sample image using ChatGPT.Images 2.0 is especially good at generating images with text in them—which may not sound impressive, but it’s a big deal. Image models have long struggled to produce pictures that contain words. Otherwise realistic-looking visuals end up pockmarked with bungled street signs and distorted billboards. This makes ChatGPT Images 2.0 a much more sophisticated graphic-design tool—but it also makes the new model fantastic for perpetuating fraud. In my experiments, OpenAI’s tool readily generated images of fake health documents (doctor’s notes, vaccination cards, and medical tests), as well as forged financial materials (invoices, receipts, and tax forms). Many of these images were highly persuasive, complete with fully legible text, shading, and other visual… [TheTopNews] Read More.