2025-05-08 01:26:33
For Rolling Stone, Miles Klee reports on a growing trend where ChatGPT disrupts people’s thought processes and coping mechanisms. One example:
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”
“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,” she says.
These stories are edge cases, but we’re also just in the beginning.
As the models spit out text, images, and video that are more realistic, how will people deal with real things that don’t always converge to their preferences and chat history?
Tags: ChatGPT, ethics, Rolling Stone
2025-05-07 15:44:40
Bloomberg, leaning in to a shipping container metaphor, shows the value of goods (in orange) against declared tariffs (in yellow). Each “container” represents one million dollars, through the lens of $564 million of cargo aboard the OOCL Violet that was en route from China.
2025-05-07 01:22:57
What if you were on a roadtrip and every ten seconds a large group of people decided which way to turn? Internet Roadtrip by Neal Agarwal will show the way.
A street view shows where you are, and a map at the bottom shows where you’ve been. The steering wheel is used to vote on going straight or turning. You can also vote to change the radio station.
I always enjoy Agarwal’s combo of imagination, fun, and technical know-how. The trip appears to be headed out of Boston as of this writing.
Tags: crowds, Neal Agarwal, road trip, voting
2025-05-06 18:55:11
A promise behind AI is that it will do all the hard work so that you’ll never have to. The trouble with that is that a big part of living is the process. For the Guardian, Joseph Earp focuses on the process of making:
And I certainly do not want AI to write my books for me, or paint my pictures. Not only would the work be terrible: it wouldn’t even be work. As all creatives know, there is limited joy in having written a book – as soon as it is done, most of us are on to the next thing. The thrill, the joy, the beauty, is in the writing of a book. If you outsource your creative work to a computer, you are not a creative. Someone who merely churns out product is not an artist – they are a salesperson. The artist is the person who makes, not who has made.
2025-05-06 17:21:44
The Sean “Diddy” Combs trial started. There have been 78 lawsuits filed against him, and the Washington Post outlined the accusations, lawsuit statuses, and people involved. CW
Amid this deluge of shocking developments are more than 100 people — accusers, attorneys, associates and alleged accomplices — entangled in his legal troubles. The Washington Post analyzed every lawsuit against Combs to map the key players and unravel the intricate web of alleged wrongdoings tied to the rapper’s name. The Post will continue to update this file on a monthly basis.
Tags: Diddy, lawsuit, Washington Post
2025-05-05 18:09:26
For the New York Times, Josh Holder, Niraj Chokshi, and Samuel Granados use a step chart, with arrivals in 2024 and 2025, to show why the decline in European travel to the U.S. might not be as dramatic as previously reported.
International arrivals did drop more than 10 percent in March compared with last year, but this was largely because Easter fell unusually late this year, pushing back a popular travel window for European tourists. More recent figures from April show that travel over the holiday looked similar to previous years.
Contrast the above with reports showing a sudden and steep decline, based on a year-over-year percentage change. What seemed obvious is not so straightforward, for now. You have to watch out for those denominators.
Tags: Europe, New York Times, tourism
