The New York Times highlights a story of a lawyer who is in trouble after filing a motion using research he did with ChatGPT to find relevant cases.
The problem? ChatGPT, as AI chatbots often do, just made a bunch of stuff up, and the opposing lawyers told the Times they “had an inkling a chatbot might have been involved.” This is a screenshot of the lawyer asking ChatGPT if its made-up cases are real.
Are you a good board member who’s really focused on what’s best for any individual company, though? Anyway here’s Reid Hoffman, who’s driving the AI hype:
Few are as intertwined in so many facets of the fast-moving industry as Mr. Hoffman. The 55-year-old sits on the boards of 11 tech companies including Microsoft, which has gone all in on A.I., and eight nonprofits. His venture capital firm, Greylock Partners, has backed at least 37 A.I. companies. He was among the first investors in OpenAI, the most prominent A.I. start-up, and recently left its board. He also helped found Inflection AI, an A.I. chatbot start-up that has raised at least $225 million.
Hoffman has his own AI company now. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
[The New York Times]
According to a report from Gizmodo, NEDA fired the employees that run its eating disorder helpline after they successfully unionized. In their place, NEDA says it will start using an AI-powered chatbot, named Tessa, in June.
The union that represents the workers condemns the decision, stating: “A chat bot is no substitute for human empathy, and we believe this decision will cause irreparable harm to the eating disorders community.”
Somebody must have reminded CEO Sam Altman that he’s no longer operating as a nonprofit, after saying yesterday that he had “many concerns” with the EU AI Act being finalized by lawmakers. “We will try to comply, but if we can’t comply we will cease operating,” he said. And what, cede the EU’s 500 million potential paying customers to Google? Nope.
Just hours after the last international expansion of OpenAI’s generative AI app for the iPhone added 11 countries to the list, it’s adding more than 30 more.
The app launched a week ago in the US.
I’ll let OpenAI explain it:
We are seeking teams from across the world to develop proof-of-concepts for a democratic process that could answer questions about what rules AI systems should follow. We want to learn from these experiments, and use them as the basis for a more global, and more ambitious process going forward.
If you want to apply, you’ve got about a month.
And writer M.L. Clark has put a lot of my feelings into words:
There’s not much money in writing already, so hype around new technology as a ready replacement for existing labor is exacerbating reminders of how little stability is on offer in creative fields.
But in the process of expressing outrage at people eager to leverage the hype to personal benefit — people rushing to “get theirs” through technology trained on other people’s output — there is a thread of commentary that undermines the very richness of literary tradition we’re ostensibly fighting for in the first place.
[mlclark.substack.com]
The app, which launched last week in the US, is now also available in Albania, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jamaica, Korea, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and the UK. You can also now browse the web with Bing if you’re a paid user, and disable chat history.
[help.openai.com]
The New York Times had Grimes weigh in on a handful of songs that were put through a Grimes voice cloning tool — and some of them aren’t bad!
The tool, Elf.tech, came shortly after the artist said she’d “split royalties 50/50” with anyone who makes an AI Grimes hit. The one below is Grimes’ (and my) favorite — but sorry, it’s no Kill V. Maim.
