Damon Beres

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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.

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Computers may have seemed magical to you once, portals to an unpredictable expanse of knowledge and entertainment. Then they became ubiquitous, perhaps a little boring, and occasionally horrifying.

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When I was a kid, I felt hypnotized by the shelves in my best friend’s apartment. They contained, it seemed, endless volumes of Japanese-language books—including, most crucially to a child’s eye, comics such as Dragon Ball and Urusei Yatsura.

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When I was a kid, I felt hypnotized by the shelves in my best friend’s apartment. They contained, it seemed, endless volumes of Japanese-language books—including, most crucially to a child’s eye, comics such as Dragon Ball and Urusei Yatsura.

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Earlier this week, my colleague Ian Bogost published a provocative article about a trend in higher education: the opening of distinct colleges of computing, akin to law schools. New programs at MIT, Cornell, and soon UC Berkeley follow an uptick in the number of students graduating with computer-science majors.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.What will next year hold for AI? In a new story, Atlantic staff writer Ross Andersen looks ahead, outlining five key questions that will define the technology’s trajectory from here.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.Artificial intelligence is changing the way some scientists conduct research, leading to new discoveries on accelerated timetables.

There is a tension at the heart of ChatGPT that may soon snap. Does the technology expand our world or constrain it? Which is to say, do AI-powered chatbots open new doors to learning and discovery, or do they instead risk siloing off information and leaving us stuck with unreliable access to truth?Earlier today, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a partnership with the media conglomerate Axel Springer that seems to get us closer to an answer.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a story by Gary Marcus, a well-known AI expert who has agitated for the technology to be regulated, both in his Substack newsletter and before the Senate.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.It’s been an unbelievable few days for OpenAI, the influential company behind products such as ChatGPT, the image-generating DALL-E, and GPT-4. On Friday, its CEO, Sam Altman, was suddenly fired by the company’s board.

On Saturday, my wife delicately removed the phone from my hands. It was making me seem a little crazed, she said. I had been on it all day. Closing on a story, refreshing Slack, scrolling through social media, checking my email. I had just texted a friend to recommend an accessory for a vacuum cleaner; it felt like it demanded my urgent attention, the way everything else on the screen did. “i got a horse hair attachment for thr vacuum it js so amazjng,” I had typed, just like that.