Damon Beres

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This week, OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o, one of the models powering ChatGPT, that allows the program to create high-quality images. I’ve been surprised by how effective the tool is: It follows directions precisely, renders people with the right number of fingers, and is even capable of replacing text in an image with different words.

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President Donald Trump’s administration is embracing AI. According to reports, agencies are using the technology to identify places to cut costs, figure out which employees can be terminated, and comb through social-media posts to determine whether student-visa holders may support terror groups.

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OpenAI has said that it believes that DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up behind the shockingly powerful AI model that launched last month, may have ripped off its technology. The irony is rich: We’ve known for some time that generative AI tends to be built on stolen media—books, movie subtitles, visual art.

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TikTok is an AI app. Not an “ask a bot to do your homework” kind of AI app, but an AI app all the same: Its algorithm processes and acts upon huge amounts of data to keep users engaged. Without that fundamental, freakishly well-tuned technology, TikTok wouldn’t really be anything at all—just another video or shopping platform.

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Thank you for reading Atlantic Intelligence this year: It’s been a pleasure appearing in your inbox each week, and we can’t wait to bring you new coverage in 2025. Collected below are some of the standout stories we published this year, which explore new frontiers for AI and the risks that come with advancement.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
Thank you for reading Atlantic Intelligence this year: It’s been a pleasure appearing in your inbox each week, and we can’t wait to bring you new coverage in 2025. Collected below are some of the standout stories we published this year, which explore new frontiers for AI and the risks that come with advancement.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age.
Why does ChatGPT refuse to say the name Jonathan Zittrain? Anytime the bot should write those words, it simply shuts down instead, offering a blunt error message: “I’m unable to produce a response.” This has been a mystery for at least a year, and now we’re closer to some answers.

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The GPT era may be coming to a close. OpenAI announced yesterday the full release of a new set of “reasoning” models called o1.

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Earlier this week, The Atlantic published a new investigation by Alex Reisner into the data that are being used without permission to train generative-AI programs.

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You might think, given the extreme pronouncements that are regularly voiced by Silicon Valley executives, that AI would be a top issue for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Tech titans have insisted that AI will change everything—perhaps the nature of work most of all.

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Shortly after Facebook became popular, the company launched an ad network that would allow businesses to gather data on people and target them with marketing. So many issues with the web’s social-media era stemmed from this original sin. It was from this technology that Facebook, now Meta, would make its fortune and become dominant.

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For a moment, the AI doomers had the world’s attention. ChatGPT’s release in 2022 felt like a shock wave: That computer programs could suddenly evince something like human intelligence suggested that other leaps may be just around the corner.

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Today, The Atlantic published a new investigation by contributing writer Karen Hao detailing Microsoft’s recent engagements with the oil and gas industries.

First, I want to apologize. My Kermit the Frog post was not entirely sincere.
This particular post of mine has been viewed more than 10 million times, which is far more than I expected. But I did expect something. Social networks have never been the realm of good faith or authenticity; trolls and other engagement baiters have been able to engineer their own virality for years and years, simply by correctly predicting what large numbers of people will respond to.

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The era of generative-AI propaganda is upon us. In the past week, Donald Trump has published fabricated images on his social-media accounts showing Kamala Harris speaking to a crowd of uniformed communists under the hammer and sickle, Taylor Swift in an Uncle Sam outfit, and young women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts.

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At this point, AI art is about as remarkable as the email inviting you to save 10 percent on a new pair of jeans.

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Tech companies believe that generative AI can transform how we find information online, replacing traditional search engines with bots that synthesize knowledge into a more interactive format.

Yesterday, Elon Musk told me that he will accept the results of the 2024 presidential election. “Of course” he would, he said when I asked him as much by email. Ever the gentleman, he added, in apparent haste, “Don’t be jackass.”
I can imagine why he wanted to get that dig in. In years past, asking someone whether they believe in the basic reality of America’s electoral process would be a little bit like asking them to acknowledge that they have to pay for groceries.

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AI has been cheered by proponents for its ability to automate tasks, allowing users to spare themselves from boring work assignments (or, in a less happy example, to flood the web with useless slop).

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the entrepreneur Arianna Huffington spoke with my colleague Charlie Warzel earlier this week about their ambitions to remake the American health-care system with generative AI.

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Generative AI could do many things to our world. But one thing it has certainly done already is facilitate endless (and endlessly strange) representations of Jesus Christ.

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Technology companies have been eager to sell a vision of generative AI as the future of, well, everything.

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Readers of this newsletter have no doubt wondered how the generative-AI wave will affect their lives. Will the bots take your job? Is it all right—you know, ethically—to use ChatGPT to write an email? Should you listen to Google’s searchbot and eat rocks? (No.

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Earlier this week, Apple announced that it will soon lace its devices with generative AI, bringing “Apple Intelligence” to iPhones, iPads, and Macs later this year. Users will be able to allow the machine to write emails for them, create custom emoji and other synthetic illustrations, transcribe and summarize phone calls, and so on.

Earlier today, The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, announced in an internal email that the company has entered into a business partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (The news was made public via a press release shortly thereafter.) Editorial content from this publication will soon be directly referenced in response to queries in OpenAI products.

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It’s a good bet that the generative-AI era will be stranger than anyone expects. In a new feature for The Atlantic, my colleague Charlie Warzel profiles ElevenLabs, an AI company that specializes in replicating voices.

Here is a nonexhaustive list of objects Apple recently pulverized with a menacing hydraulic crusher: a trumpet, a piano, a turntable, a sculpted bust, lots and lots of paint, video-game controllers.
These are all shown being demolished in the company’s new iPad commercial, a minute-long spot titled “Crush!” The items are arranged on a platform beneath a slowly descending enormous metal block, then trash-compactored out of existence in a violent symphony of crunching.

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Recent weeks have seen the introduction of new consumer gadgets whose entire selling point revolves around artificial intelligence.

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In last week’s newsletter, I described artificial intelligence as data-hungry. But the technology is also quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with.

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Generative AI is famously data-hungry. The technology requires huge troves of digital information—text, photos, video, audio—to “learn” how to produce convincingly humanlike material.