Generative A I. Made All My Decisions for a Week. Here's What Happened. The New York Times
Why AI is a force for good in science communication
That way, you can avoid idly scrolling through "travelfluencer" TikToks, or looking at whatever a travel website’s algorithm wants you to see. Data entry is one of the most tedious parts of any job. When all you’re doing is copying-and-pasting information from a document into a spreadsheet, there’s little to keep your mind active. Or let’s say you need an electronic voice box to help you speak. AI can learn your speech patterns as you use it, powering more helpful autocomplete options, and letting you converse with those around you more quickly than if you had to manually type out everything you had to say.
The simplicity and ease of use are among the top reasons I like Gemini. When I don't, it's easy to request revisions, as Gemini considers previous prompts by default. There are dozens of AI image generators, but the capable alternatives to Gemini come from names you've heard before. ChatGPT and Microsoft Designer leverage the DALL-E 3 AI model and give you several free images per day.
That’s not only a big time saver, but means past recordings can now be used to clone voices, which makes the tool accessible for those who have already lost their voice as well. It’s not without controversy, since it can still change the mood of a photo, and when applied to things like video game remasters, could change the art direction when not reigned in enough. There’s also the possibility for AI upscaling to hallucinate or render dreamlike ChatGPT App imagery if the source image is too low resolution. I asked the Storytelling one for a story about a car, and while I wasn't expecting a Pixar-rivalling epic, it tripped over itself multiple times. Just a couple of weeks after ElevenLabs debuted its generative AI voice engine that lets you create a voice using text prompts, Hume AI is now offering a series of AI voice bots within an easy-to-use app wrapper that you can use from a web browser.
Hands-on with the Hume AI app
While AI can help eliminate tedium at work, one of the times I find myself using it while out of office is when I’m planning a vacation. Figuring out what to do when you’re taking a trip can take dozens or even hundreds of Google searches, and an AI chatbot can narrow that down to a single interaction. A freelance writer from Essex, UK, Lloyd Coombes began writing for Tom's Guide in 2024 having worked on TechRadar, iMore, Live Science and more. A specialist in consumer tech, Lloyd is particularly knowledgeable on Apple products ever since he got his first iPod Mini. Aside from writing about the latest gadgets for Future, he's also a blogger and the Editor in Chief of GGRecon.com. On the rare occasion he’s not writing, you’ll find him spending time with his son, or working hard at the gym.
Our research found emotions expressed on X could serve as a representation of the public’s general sentiments about specific non-profit organizations. These feelings had a direct impact on donation behavior. To address these limitations, we applied an AI model that could detect specific emotions — such as joy, anger, sadness, and disgust — expressed in tweets. good names for my ai I also created a video avatar of myself by reading a short script into my laptop camera. I wanted it to post to social media and send video messages on my behalf. She told me about recent research that found that short stories written by people collaborating with ChatGPT were rated as more creative than those from writers who didn’t use the software.
Women and physics: navigating history, careers, and the path forward
In my experience, Gemini's images are more realistic and accurate. Adobe's Firefly is worth considering for fictional and artistic images. It falls apart when you request anything that requires a realistic-looking human.
- Judith Donath, a faculty fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, who studies our relationship with technology, said constant decision making could be a “drag.” But she didn’t think that using A.I.
- Granted, you’re probably going to want to supplement or double-check your AI’s suggestions with your own research, but if you’re at a total blank, asking an AI to plan an example stay at your destination can help you know where to start looking.
- It is simple to use and produces convincing images with only a few iterations.
- You might need an advanced subscription depending on your tool, but simply giving your AI chatbot of choice access to your document and asking for it to be turned into a spreadsheet is surprisingly solid at this point.
That’s where I, as someone who still pines for the days before I knew what a GPT was, tend to use AI most. For good or ill, it doesn’t seem like AI is going anywhere anytime soon. In a similar vein, programs like Otter.ai and now even iOS’ Voice Memos can generate full transcriptions from audio recordings. As someone who got my start in journalism by spending hours pausing and replaying interviews my seniors had conducted to transcribe them, this is a lifesaver. It’s not always strictly accurate, but it’s much faster to edit an AI-generated transcription draft than to simply write one from scratch.
Spark in Charge
As Ryan wrote on his Substack blog, AI not only makes things up and trains itself on copyrighted material, but “for the most part, provides corpse-cold, boring-ass prose”. Contributors and former staff also complained to Australia’s ABC News that they’d been unaware of the experiment, which took place just a few months after the magazine had made five of its eight staff redundant. Take this Japan trip I asked Copilot to plan, for example. We were forced to use a travel agency because of when we booked, and yet, this free itinerary isn’t too different from what the paid agency suggested.
The chatbots all said that was a “thought-provoking question.” I think you already know the answer. One expert called the stunt a “decision holiday.” Another compared it to hiring a butler to handle household logistics. Butlers cost just $20 per month and report everything you say to them back to a tech company. Gemini's AI image generation has its limits, but so do its rivals. However, not all of them come with the accessible, straightforward process and convincing results I saw with Gemini.
If a student types, say, “I want to understand gravity” into Khan’s generative AI-powered tutoring program, the AI will first ask what the student already knows about the subject. The “conversation” between the student and the chatbot will then evolve in the light of the student’s response. But generative AI tools can do much more than churn out uninspired articles and create problems. One beauty of ChatGPT is that users interact with it conversationally, just like you’d talk to a human communicator at a science museum or science festival. You could start by typing something simple (such as “What is quantum entanglement?”) before delving into the details (e.g. “What kind of physical systems are used to create it?”).
ChatGPT racked up a million users within five days of its launch in November 2022 and since then other companies have unveiled similar tools, notably Google’s Gemini and Perplexity. With more than 600 million users per month as of September 2024, ChatGPT is trained on a range of sources, including books, Wikipedia articles and chat logs (although the precise list is not explicitly described anywhere). The AI spots patterns in the training texts and builds sentences by predicting the most likely word that comes next. Outlook, Gmail, and Apple's Mail app are either working on or about to roll out AI-powered help for clearing out your inbox, with the latter set to debut this week. Think automatic mail categorization (for Apple Mail), sentence-long recaps of pages-long write-ups, and other tools that can help you get up to speed at a glance.
Even as an AI skeptic, there are a few key use cases I’ve found where AI shines better than pretty much any other alternative. Even if it doesn’t end up being the magic bullet the tech industry is hoping for, AI can be a lifesaver in the right situation. As an AI skeptic, here’s where I think AI is actually most useful. On the other hand, there's some overlap between some of the voices, and I actually found that a nice way of acknowledging there's no one true answer. I asked the Quick Answers chatbot how tall the Eiffel Tower is, and got, well, a quick answer, followed by additional information about how it's been added to over time, and how big certain sections of it are. And, while I'm impressed by just how simple it is to get started, there's definitely some fine-tuning to be done with some aspects of the app so far.
Requests for violent, sexual, or disturbing content are not processed. Google's Prohibited Use Policy page goes over the ways in which it isn't okay to use its generative AI. So how can generative AI be incorporated into the effective and trustworthy communication of science?
The website forms part of the Physics World portfolio, a collection of online, digital and print information services for the global scientific community. All of these are areas Ruben is excited to continue exploring, and outside of our conversation, it’s worth noting that other companies are using AI-generated Live Captions to help the hearing impaired. Still, Ruben did note one area where using AI to help a disabled patient presents a risk.
We fine-tuned the model on a combination of four self-reported emotion datasets (over 3.6 million sentences) and seven other datasets (over 60,000 sentences). This allowed us to map out a wide range of emotions expressed online. We used the “transformer transfer learning” model to detect emotions in text.
Accurate, high-quality science communication is vital, especially if we are to pique the public’s interest in physics and encourage more people into the subject. “AI is quite dangerous if the user has a cognitive disability,” Ruben said. That’s because people with certain cognitive disabilities might not know what to put in a prompt, or how to proofread an AI draft to make sure it says what they wanted to say. Instead, they might just OK whatever the AI writes for them, even if it doesn’t represent their real feelings. In these situations, it would be easy for the AI to “impersonate” the user, misrepresenting them without the user knowing that’s what’s happening. Their friends or family would essentially be talking only to ChatGPT, with little involvement from the patient, and could leave interactions with the wrong impression.
Most of what I owned, including some of my favorite items, were not a good match for me, according to the A.I. Ms. Donath worries we could get too dependent on these systems, particularly if they interact with us like human beings, with voices, making it easy to forget there are profit-seeking entities behind them. It planned family games in the evenings, including Pass the Story, in which we and Spark took turns telling a tale the chatbot started about “a towering tree deep in an enchanted forest.” The A.I.-optimized week felt like a wellness retreat. Kashmir Hill does first-person experiments to better understand where a technology sits on the spectrum from wonderful to awful. To generate images, open the Gemini app on your phone or go to Google Gemini on the web. Then, type your prompt, and an image pops up a few moments later.
In other words, AI is great for when something is on the tip of your tongue. Say there’s an old movie you remember a scene from, but don’t know anything else about it. In that case, even coming up with the keywords to put into Google can be difficult. There’s a subreddit to get real human help here, but the problem there is you need to hope your post gets noticed and someone responds in a reasonable timeframe. Maybe the place where the average person uses AI upscaling most often, though, is in boosting video game performance.
I Took a ‘Decision Holiday’ and Put A.I. in Charge of My Life
These are crucial questions that must be addressed as the technology continues to evolve. Our research focused on how emotions expressed in use posts about certain non-profit organizations can influence actions such as the decision to make donations to them at a later point. When the week came to an end, I was happy to take back control of my life. Had made decent decisions more quickly than I would have on my own and hadn’t made any terrible mistakes, but it also hadn’t wowed me.
You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Gemini is Google's AI chatbot, and I tested its image-generation abilities alongside nine alternatives. Although far from perfect, it's the one I am most happy with. It is simple to use and produces convincing images with only a few iterations. Critics, such as the science writer Jackson Ryan, were quick to condemn the magazine’s experiment as undermining and devaluing high-quality science journalism.
Strictly necessary data collection
Used properly, this technique allows movies and photos to look sharper, and even for games to run faster. It uses machine learning to analyze images and add detail that wasn’t in the original shot. This is useful either when processing graphics in real-time, or when working with material that can’t be re-rendered from scratch, like old photos or compressed retro ChatGPT video game graphics where the original source files have gone missing. I tend to think of AI like I do most automation software—as a tedium killer. You train the app by first reading out a couple of hundred short training phrases. It then deploys AI to apply thousands of hours of other non-standard speaker models in its database to optimize its training.
Knowing sadness in marketing messages can increase donations to non-profit organizations allows for more effective, emotionally resonant campaigns. Anger can motivate people to act in response to perceived injustice. The model achieved an impressive 84 percent accuracy in detecting emotions from text, a noteworthy accomplishment in the field of AI. For example, anger and disappointment are both negative emotions, but they can provoke very different reactions. Angry customers may react much more strongly than disappointed ones in a business context. Traditionally, researchers have relied on sentiment analysis, which categorizes messages as positive, negative, or neutral.
