In May 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sparked a firestorm by referencing the 2013 movie “Her” to highlight the novelty of the latest iteration of ChatGPT. Within days, actor Scarlett Johansson, who…
Tag: Artificial intelligence (AI)
For many Olympic medalists, silver stings more than bronze
At the 2022 Beijing Olympics, a distraught Alexandra Trusova won silver and promptly declared, “I will never skate again.” Swimmer Michael Phelps displayed a mix of frustration and disappointment at the 2012…
Drake’s beef with Kendrick Lamar isn’t nearly as important as his tiff with Tupac Shakur’s estate over using the dead rapper’s voice
In April 2023, a song titled “Heart on My Sleeve,” written and produced by a mysterious producer named Ghostwriter, went viral on TikTok and briefly became the most popular song on both…
Newsrooms are experimenting with generative AI, warts and all
The journalism industry has been under immense economic pressure over the past two decades, so it makes sense that journalists have started experimenting with generative AI to boost their productivity. An Associated…
From shrimp Jesus to fake self-portraits, AI-generated images have become the latest form of social media spam
If you’ve spent time on Facebook over the past six months, you may have noticed photorealistic images that are too good to be true: children holding paintings that look like the work…
As the US government and record labels go after TikTok, musicians get the squeeze
For much of the year, TikTok has been on the defensive. On March 13, 2024, the House of Representatives voted to approve a bill that would force the short-form video app to…
How AI is shaping the music listening habits of Gen Z
For four years, we’ve been teaching a class on music and the mind. We’ve asked the students at the start of each semester to complete a short, informal survey on their music…
The folly of making art with text-to-image generative AI
Making art using artificial intelligence isn’t new. It’s as old as AI itself. What’s new is that a wave of tools now let most people generate images by entering a text prompt….
Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law
In 2022, an AI-generated work of art won the Colorado State Fair’s art competition. The artist, Jason Allen, had used Midjourney – a generative AI system trained on art scraped from the…
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year – authentic – reflects growing concerns over AI’s ability to deceive and dehumanize
When Merriam-Webster announced that its word of the year for 2023 was “authentic,” it did so with over a month to go in the calendar year. Even then, the dictionary publisher was…