Ross Andersen / The Atlantic: Analysis: scientists who appeared to use LLMs posted 33% more papers on arXiv than those who didn't, as concerns grow over AI slop in scientific publishing — Peer review has met its match. — On a frigid Norwegian afternoon earlier this month, Dan Quintana, a psychology professor …
Alex Reisner / The Atlantic: Researchers say GPT 4.1, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3 can reproduce long excerpts from books they were trained on when strategically prompted — On tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden.
Alex Reisner / The Atlantic: A profile of nonprofit Common Crawl, which has scraped billions of webpages since 2013, including paywalled ones, to build an archive used by OpenAI and others — Common Crawl claims to provide a public benefit, but it lies to publishers about its activities.
Annie Lowrey / The Atlantic: US jobseekers describe a hellish job market, with young people using ChatGPT to write their applications, HR using AI to read them, and few people getting hired — Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.
Ian Bogost / The Atlantic: Velvet Sundown, an AI‑created band with ~850,000 monthly Spotify listeners and two recent albums, shows how some listeners are turning to anodyne AI music — “ Rubber burns, the map fades away / Chasing the ghosts of yesterday.” Sure, fine. — The traffic receded as Chicago withdrew …
Alex Reisner / The Atlantic: A look at LibGen, one of the largest online pirate libraries, with 7.5M+ books and 81M+ research papers, allegedly used by Meta and OpenAI to train AI models — Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here. — When employees at meta started developing …
Derek Thompson / The Atlantic: How the rise of self-imposed solitude in the US, accelerated by smartphones in the 21st century, is reshaping the country's civic and psychological identity — Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It's changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.
Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: The crypto industry's impact on the 2024 US elections shows that crypto is a perfect anti-establishment technology for the turbulence and distrust of the 2020s — An anti-establishment technology for an anti-establishment age — For years, crypto skeptics have asked, What is this for?
Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: A look at X's Election Integrity Community, a feed to “share potential incidents of voter fraud” that has 50K+ members, launched by Elon Musk's America PAC — Elon Musk has turned X into a political weapon. — Elon Musk didn't just get a social network—he got a political weapon.
Christopher Beam / The Atlantic: A profile of Mike Solana, a Peter Thiel protégé whose Pirate Wires newsletter and podcast became popular among “anti-woke” tech figures since the “techlash” — Mike solana has opinions. Here are a few of them: Building stuff is good.
Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: The bleak online discourse about hurricanes Milton and Helene revealed not just a misinformation crisis in the US but a cultural assault on reality itself — The truth is, it's getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.
Matteo Wong / The Atlantic: Q&A with UCLA's Terence Tao, widely considered the world's greatest living mathematician, on OpenAI's o1, how AI might be useful to mathematicians, and more — Terence Tao, the world's greatest living mathematician, has a vision for AI. — Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA, is a real-life superintelligence.
Karen Hao / The Atlantic: Sources: Microsoft has pitched its AI to ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others to find and develop oil and gas reserves while publicly committing to reduce emissions — Microsoft executives have been thinking lately about the end of the world. In a white paper published late last year, Brad Smith …
Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: An interview with Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington on their startup Thrive AI Health to build an AI health coach, and why AI has become a technology of faith — An important thing to realize about the grandest conversations surrounding AI is that, most of the time, everyone is making things up.
Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: OpenAI's Scarlett Johansson debacle is merely a reminder of AI's manifest destiny philosophy: “This is happening, whether you like it or not”, consent be damned — If you're looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley's latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI's Scarlett Johansson debacle.
Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: A profile of ElevenLabs, whose founders seem unprepared for how its impressive AI voice cloning tech can change the internet and unleash political chaos — My voice was ready. I'd been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.”
Hannah Giorgis / The Atlantic: A look at BlackPlanet, a social network for African Americans that went live in 1999, had ~15M users in 2008, and arguably laid the foundation for Black Twitter — Revisiting BlackPlanet, and a lost era when social media was still fun — A few years ago, Stephanie Williams and her husband fielded …
Zephyr Teachout / The Atlantic: The TikTok divestment bill fits into a long and important US tradition of forbidding a hostile foreign power from controlling a major communication platform — America has a long history of shielding infrastructure and communication platforms from foreign control.
Jonathan Haidt / The Atlantic: A look at the costs of a smartphone-based childhood, as Gen Z struggles with poor mental health and lags behind previous generations on many important metrics — This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. — Something went suddenly …
Mark Gimein / The Atlantic: As safety demands strip Llama 2, ChatGPT, and others of anything remotely controversial, some programmers are building uncensored LLMs without safety guardrails — A chatbot that can't say anything controversial isn't worth much. Bring on the uncensored models.
Lora Kelley / The Atlantic: Sam Bankman-Fried, who is unkempt, pedigreed, and awkward, replicated what VCs believe a founder should look like, and the door remains open for others like him — The tech industry is designed for people like Sam Bankman-Fried. — Over and over during Sam Bankman-Fried's trial …
Tim Wu / The Atlantic: Despite broad support by the US public and lawmakers for child internet laws, Congress has done nothing, even after holding 39 hearings on the topic since 2017 — Americans are broadly united in support of laws to make the internet safer for kids. So why doesn't Congress act?
Stephen King / The Atlantic: Stephen King reflects on his books being used for AI training, arguing the sum is lesser than its parts, so far, as creativity can't happen without sentience — One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence. — Self-driving cars.
Alex Reisner / The Atlantic: Analysis: Books3, a dataset used to train Meta's Llama, BloombergGPT, and EleutherAI's GPT-J, contains 170K+ books from Stephen King and other authors — One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It's being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions …
Nina Jankowicz / The Atlantic: While there are effective laws outlawing the sharing of nonconsensual deepfake porn in some states, such as Virginia and California, the US needs a federal law — Because I was in the public eye, somebody synthesized explicit videos of me. — Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography.
Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: An interview with Ask Jeeves co-creator Garrett Gruener, who says his original conception was similar to the chatbots Microsoft and Google are trying to build — Garrett Gruener, the co-creator of Ask Jeeves, couldn't beat Google, but he's feeling just fine about the dawn of the chatbot era.
Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: Facebook and Donald Trump have experienced a mutual decay since his ban, both losing their shine, meaning his reinstatement may not be as impactful as feared — This afternoon, Meta announced that it will soon reinstate Donald Trump's account after a two-year suspension from Facebook and Instagram.
Brian Merchant / The Atlantic: Meta's dramatic implosion, Elon Musk's Twitter train wreck, and Amazon's labor uprising show that 2022 was not just a disastrous year, but a reckoning for tech — The companies that define our digital lives have hit a wall. — The dramatic, multidimensional implosion of Meta …
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic: A profile of Helen Fisher, the chief scientific adviser to Match.com, who has been instrumental in bringing science to online dating and popularizing the idea — Almost 20 years ago, Helen Fisher helped revolutionize dating. She has no regrets. — The anthropologist and famed love …
Derek Thompson / The Atlantic: A look at some implications for generative AI: “answer engines” replacing search engines, AI mastering cognitive tasks by surveilling how experts work, and more — This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America's biggest problems.
Adrienne LaFrance / The Atlantic: Elon Musk is failing to convince people that Twitter is a town square, telling users what they can and can't say for a laugh and charging $8 for the privilege — Recently, comedy clubs have begun doing this thing that seemed, when I first encountered it, both wildly hypocritical and more than a little sad.
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic: A look at video site Rumble, which has been on an upward trajectory since H2 2020, when right-wing star Dan Bongino moved from YouTube and took an equity stake — When Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in January 2021, it was obvious that he would have to find somewhere else to post.
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic: A look at “gradient accounts” on Twitter that have color gradients as profile pictures, post viral “relatable” content, and are often accused of stealing tweets — Here's a very popular tweet: “she's a 10 but she cries on her birthday every year.” — Solid. Concise.
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic: GIF, once called “the file format of the internet generation”, is declining in use as young users say GIFs are “cringe” and MP4 videos make the format outdated — The internet's file format has been diagnosed as “cringe,” but there are other threats to its existence.
Matteo Wong / The Atlantic: How neural network chess engines redefined the game's creativity, leading some top players to use deception, misdirection, and other psychological techniques — It was as if a bottom seed had knocked out the top team in March Madness: At the Sinquefield Cup chess tournament in St. Louis earlier this month …
Mark Bergen / The Atlantic: A look at YouTube's “coolhunters” who were tasked with finding and promoting talented YouTubers in the company's early years, before the algorithms took over — How “coolhunters” helped make YouTube into an internet sensation before the algorithms took over. — Everyone had to see this.
Louise Matsakis / The Atlantic: Investors have poured $1B+ into startups looking to turn mom-and-pop stores into digital retailers and mini-tech hubs, especially in South and Southeast Asia — Corner stores don't look like much. Maybe the one nearest to you has dusty shelves lined with bags of chips and cookies …
Jonathan Haidt / The Atlantic: Regulators and legislators should mitigate Instagram's harmful effects on teen girls by toughening COPPA and forcing Facebook and others to share data — Social media gets blamed for many of America's ills, including the polarization of our politics and the erosion of truth itself.
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic: A writer created a politically bland Facebook profile to test the app's algorithm for extreme content, and ended up being shown low-quality, clickbait posts — In 2019, a researcher at Facebook conducted an experiment to see whether the platform really has a tendency to send users …
Ethan Zuckerman / The Atlantic: Meta's promised metaverse is going to be boring and is meant to distract us from the world that Facebook helped break — In a booth at Ted's Fish Fry, in Troy, New York, my friend Daniel Beck and I sketched out our plans for the metaverse. It was November 1994, just as the graphical web …
Evelyn Douek / The Atlantic: When trying to address problems that social media may cause for young people, lawmakers focus on Facebook and largely ignore TikTok, which most teens use — Many people think of TikTok as a dance app. And although it is an app full of dancing, it's also a juggernaut experiencing astronomical growth.
Joe Pinsker / The Atlantic: How Amazon contributed to the drop in the number of babies named Alexa in the US, UK, and Canada, after an initial surge upon the device's 2014 release — Alexa used to be a name primarily given to human babies. Now it's mainly for robots. — Seven years ago, Amazon released Alexa …
Molly Wood / The Atlantic: Microsoft is avoiding antitrust scrutiny by rebranding itself as nice and boring, even as it reverts to some of the behaviors that led to prosecution the '90s — How has Microsoft escaped the scrutiny of reinvigorated antitrust regulators? — About the author: Molly Wood is the host …
Annie Lowrey / The Atlantic: A look at the rise of the meditation app Calm, downloaded by 100M+ users and valued at $2B, which aims to make meditation easy, friendly, and accessible — cathedral-like mountain towers above me; a lake laps at my feet; sunshine distilled through pine needles warms my skin. Close your eyes, a voice intones.
Will Oremus / The Atlantic: About a dozen highly active Clubhouse users, all of them women, say its block feature creates opportunities for abuse, tactical silencing, and intimidation — To block someone on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter is not, in the scheme of things, a big deal. You'll no longer see them on the platform …
Anil Dash / The Atlantic: The invention of NFTs was meant to give artists more control over their work, but that dream didn't come true and only led to commercially exploitable hype — The only thing we'd wanted to do was ensure that artists could make some money and have control over their work.
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic: A look at Remember the Internet, a series of pocket-sized books dedicated to immortalizing subcultures and combating the ephemerality of being online — How do we memorialize life online when it's constantly disappearing? — For many of us, for better or for worse, the internet is home.
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic: A look at the growing online movement against multilevel-marketing companies, as TikTok becomes the first major platform to explicitly ban multilevel marketing — This week, when TikTok announced an updated version of its community guidelines, one small addition was more surprising than the others.
Kaitlyn Tiffany / The Atlantic: Inside Ovarit, an invite-only Reddit-like site founded by members of the “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” subreddit r/GenderCritical that Reddit banned — Mary Kate Fain, a 27-year-old engineer and writer living in Houston, has always considered herself a feminist.
Rachel Monroe / The Atlantic: Behind the rise of TikTok's teen stars, content houses, and the D'Amelios, who this year have focused on establishing themselves as the first family of TikTok — Collab day at Clubhouse Beverly Hills was scheduled to start at 2 p.m., but that time came and went and the mansion was still as sleepy as a college dorm on Saturday morning.