A recent New York Times piece arrived with a headline that asked "If AI systems become conscious, should they have rights?" If you were to judge the article by the response on social media like X and Bluesky (which is almost always a mistake, as many of you
It's been hard to avoid the US government's antitrust case against Meta lately, since CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent three days in front of the cameras in Congress, testifying about his company's alleged anti-competitive tactics. But another equally large Silicon Valley behemoth is arguably in
Writing about the government's antitrust case against Meta is a little like putting on an old sweater — it's comfortable and worn, but also has kind of a funky smell (maybe it's best for everyone if I don't continue with this metaphor). In
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Torment Nexus that was titled "Be careful what you post on social media, they are listening," which was triggered in part by the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia University who took part in pro-Palestine
Before anyone gets upset about my headline, I am using the term "thought process" in the loosest possible way. I realize that many people (perhaps even most people) would not describe what an AI model does as "thinking." After all, aren't LLMs just a
Until a couple of years ago, you couldn’t turn around without running into an academic article, university department, or even an entire nonprofit organization devoted to the evils of misinformation and its more sinister cousin, disinformation. Over the past decade or so, Facebook and YouTube have both been accused
In a post on X a little over a week ago, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said that the company had “trained a new model that is good at creative writing,” although he said he wasn’t sure how or when it would be released. Altman said reading the
I've been trying to resist writing about the political situation in the United States for some time now — all the terrible decisions and the venal motivations and the chaos and misery that have come with the Trump-and-Musk show — in part because I don't really know what
Digg. Reddit. Fark. Stumbleupon. Slashdot. If you were "extremely online" (as the kids say) in the early part of this century — i.e., the early 2000s — these were some of the sites you probably visited a lot, searching for interesting things to read, or just killing time between
In the old days of artificial intelligence — in other words, more than about ten years ago — one of the big debates was whether an artificial or computerized intelligence would ever be able to pass the Turing test. Designed by the pioneering computer scientist and code-breaker Alan Turing in 1949, before
If you've been following court cases that relate to artificial intelligence, you probably saw some headlines about a recent federal court decision in the US District Court for Delaware, in a copyright-infringement case filed by Thomson Reuters against a company called Ross Intelligence. I saw headlines that claimed
If you've been reading the news at all, you probably know that Elon Musk — and/or a group of twentysomething programmer/hackers with nicknames like "Big Balls" (no, I am not making this up) — have taken control of significant parts of the functional machinery of the