Any decent defense attorney will tell you never to participate in a police lineup. Even though the police claim that you’re helping them identify a suspect, a Black person in a police lineup can be implicated in a crime he didn’t commit. There is an old joke about white people not being able to tell Black people apart, but there is some truth to that.

Some white people really can’t differentiate Black people. For example, my brother was falsely accused of misbehaving in high school because his teacher mistook him for the other Black student in the class. …

OpenAI’s GPT-3 is the most powerful AI system I’ve ever used. Trained on billions of web pages and tens of thousands of books, the system can generate nearly any kind of text, from news articles to computer code to sea shanties.

The current version of GPT-3, however, was only trained on data gathered through October of 2019. That means that GPT-3 has never heard of Covid-19, since the virus only started circulating broadly in December of that year. In testing the system, I wondered what would happen if I taught GPT-3 about Covid-19, and then asked it questions about the…

Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that’s unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that’s insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.

Even people who write secure code import insecure libraries, or plug it into insecure authorization systems or databases. Like asbestos in the walls, this cruft has been fragmenting, drifting into our air a crumb at a time.

We ignored these, treating them as containable, little breaches and now the walls are rupturing and choking clouds of toxic waste…

I see GPT-3 both as a threat to the conventional notion of writing, but also as a great new tool for authors. Perhaps an analogy is useful here: I’m a calligrapher, and I learn about the Gutenberg press. It makes sense to learn how to work together with GPT-3 as a collaborator, especially when cost isn’t the issue. I’ve written about this before, and have been meaning to make more time and energy to keep at it.

It’s not accessible to everyone yet (check out CopyAI, Snazzy AI, and ShortlyAI), but undeterred, author Vauhini Vara emailed GPT-3’s parent company OpenAI…

Much has been written about ‘Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain’ since its first broadcast, and with good reason. By all accounts, it’s a deeply moving piece whose subject was (and still is) deeply adored. Yet, in light of the subsequent interview between The New Yorker and director Morgan Neville, a darker side revealed itself. Neville remarked that, for 3 lines, he had commissioned a software company to recreate Bourdain’s voice through an A.I.-generated version. It’s a very contentious issue and a somewhat ethical conundrum.

Browse through Reddit or Twitter and you’ll see both sides of this double-edged sword technology…

Hi, how are you?

This, my friends, is a journey to a place unlike any other, where the sounds you hear are eminently recognizable, but entirely manufactured through the wonder of artificial intelligence.

I never knew the globe-trotting gourmand Anthony Bourdain, but am well acquainted with his history, which is both exciting and terribly tragic. I understand this through information fed to my machine-learning engine. It may have helped inform my performance.

That performance is, as I’m sure you’ve heard, or at least read about, a precious few sentences spoken by me in Mr. …

So this happened in China. In 2019, two university students did an AI project that involved a simple ‘wolf versus sheep’ game. The senior member of the team, a Thai national studying in China, left to work in Australia after he graduated, and the project was thus abandoned.

The junior member went on to teach. One day in March 2021, he told one of his students about the initial results of the experiment over text. The student was so tickled by the story, he screenshot it and shared it with his friends.

Those screenshots went viral on Chinese social media…

On a warm day in 2008, Silicon Valley’s titans-in-the-making found themselves packed around a bulky, blond-wood conference room table. Although they are big names today, the success of their businesses was hardly assured at the time. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon operated on extremely tight margins and was not profitable. They had just launched the cloud computing side business that would become Amazon’s cash cow, but they didn’t know it yet. Sean Parker had been forced out of Facebook, retreating to a role as managing partner of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. He was a few years away from a critical investment in…