AI is so powerful that it will inevitably destroy the world—at least, that’s what the people who sell AI software keep saying, and I can’t think of any reason why they might lie about how amazing they are. Still, I can’t help but wonder: What is AI useful for right now, before it ends civilization? I’ve done…
AI Dungeon, a text-based fantasy simulation that runs on OpenAI’s GPT-3, has been churning out weird tales since May 2019. Reminiscent of early text adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure, you get to choose from a roster of formulaic settings—fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, cyberpunk, zombies—before picking a character class and name, and generating a story. Here…
AI tools are here to stay, helping us search the web or decide what to wear, improve visual effects in movies, land a better job, and more. As time goes on, these tools will of course get smarter and bolt on more functions—such as being able to scour the web for images. That’s a feature…
In June 2021, GitHub announced Copilot, a kind of auto-complete for computer code powered by OpenAI’s text-generation technology. It provided an early glimpse of the impressive potential of generative artificial intelligence to automate valuable work. Two years on, Copilot is one of the most mature examples of how the technology can take on tasks that…
This past spring, as I closed out my 18th year of teaching, I felt anxiety that I’d never before felt at the end of a school year. By the time grades are submitted and signs of summer arrive, teachers are typically able to breathe for the first time in nine months. Instead of the relaxation,…
The experiment began quite simply: We popped open a few cans of Mountain Dew, put some Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult on the turntable, grabbed our bags of polyhedral dice, and asked ChatGPT, essentially, “Shall we play a game?” Initially, ChatDM was reluctant to play: “I’m not capable of serving as a Dungeon Master for…
In 2014, DeepMind was acquired by Google after demonstrating striking results from software that used reinforcement learning to master simple video games. Over the next several years, DeepMind showed how the technique does things that once seemed uniquely human—often with superhuman skill. When AlphaGo beat Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, many AI experts were…
The first time we speak, Joep Meindertsma is not in a good place. He tears up as he describes a conversation in which he warned his niece about the risk of artificial intelligence causing societal collapse. Afterward, she had a panic attack. “I cry every other day,” he says, speaking over Zoom from his home…
Like many fans this week, you may have noticed something odd about the opening credits of Secret Invasion, Marvel’s new show. Amidst all the Skrull green, there is something very … Midjourney about the whole thing. If you got that sense, you weren’t wrong: Those credits were made with the help of artificial intelligence. The…
If ChatGPT and generative AI live up to even a tenth of the hype surrounding them, wide-scale job losses might seem inevitable. But new economic data shows that the last big leap in AI did not coincide with a reduction of jobs in affected industries—despite widespread fears of rapid replacement at the time. In a…