Category: Technology

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has blocked Wikipedia after slowing access to the website for 48 hours over content it considers “sacrilegious.” A PTA spokesperson told Bloomberg that the agency has blocked the online encyclopedia for failing to remove said content within the past couple of days. 

The telecom authority revealed on February 1st that it approached the website with a court order to remove “blasphemous” material from its website. After Wikipedia didn’t comply or appear before authorities, the PTA degraded access to the website for a couple of days and threatened to block it entirely if it didn’t comply with its demands. The agency didn’t publicly list the Wikipedia entries it doesn’t want people in Pakistan to see.

As TechCrunch notes, Pakistan has been trying to exert more control over content found on various digital platforms. In 2020, the PTA temporarily banned TikTok due to “immoral and indecent” material before the short-form video app promised to moderate clips according to Pakistani “societal norms” and laws. It’s worth noting that the Muslim-majority country has stringent blasphemy laws, and the punishment for breaking them includes life imprisonment and even death. 

In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation confirmed that Pakistan blocked Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects based on its internal traffic reports. “In Pakistan, English Wikipedia receives more than 50 million pageviews per month, followed by Urdu and Russian Wikipedias. There is also a sizable and engaged community of editors in Pakistan that contribute historical and educational content. A block of Wikipedia in Pakistan denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to the largest free knowledge repository. If it continues, it will also deprive everyone access to Pakistan’s knowledge, history, and culture,” the Foundation wrote. It’s now calling on Pakistan’s authorities to restore access to the Wikipedia website in the country. 

PTA’s spokesperson told Bloomberg that the agency is still in talks with Wikipedia officials and that the agency will consider unblocking the website if it completely removes sacrilegious content.

 

Scientists and roboticists have long looked at nature for inspiration to develop new features for machines. In this case, researchers from the University of Toronto were inspired by bats and other animals that rely on echolocation to design a method that would give small robots that ability to navigate themselves — one that doesn’t need expensive hardware or components too large or too heavy for tiny machines. In fact, according to PopSci, the team only used the integrated audio hardware of an interactive puck robot and built an audio extension deck using cheap mic and speakers for a tiny flying drone that can fit in the palm of your hand. 

The system works just like bat echolocation. It was designed to emit sounds across frequencies, which a robot’s microphone then picks up as they bounce off walls. An algorithm that team created then goes to work to analyze sound waves and create a map with the room’s dimensions. 

In the researchers’ paper published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, they said existing “algorithms for active echolocation are less developed and often rely on hardware requirements that are out of reach for small robots.” The researchers also said their “method is model-based, runs in real time and requires no prior calibration or training.” Their solution could give small machines the capability to be sent on search-and-rescue missions or to previously uncharted locations that bigger robots wouldn’t be able to reach. And since the system only needs onboard audio equipment or cheap additional hardware, it has a wide range of potential applications.

The researchers found during their tests that their technique is still not quite as accurate as systems that use bigger and more expensive hardware, such as GPS sensors or cameras. They’re hoping to improve its accuracy in future versions, though, and to eliminate the need for the system to generate sounds. Instead, they want their system to be able to echolocate using the sounds the drone itself produces, such as the whirl of its own propellers. 

 

Elon Musk is off the hook for his 2018 tweets claiming he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private for $420 a share. A jury found that Musk was not liable for Tesla investors’ losses, following a weeks-long trial in San Francisco.

The verdict is a major victory for Musk, who could have been liable for billions of dollars in damages. Musk had testified in federal court that just because he tweets something, it “does not mean people believe it or will act accordingly.” He also argued that he could have used his shares of SpaceX to fund the deal.

Developing…

 

Scientists will soon have a spaceborne tool to study environmental changes at a very high resolution, and you won’t have long to wait to learn more about it. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is holding a question and answer session today (February 3rd) at 5PM Eastern to discuss NISAR (NASA-ISRO SAR), an Earth-mapping satellite built in tandem with the Indian Space Research Organization. It’s not launching from India until early 2024 and is planned to operate for three years, but it includes breakthrough tech that could help understand Earth and cope with natural disasters. 

NISAR is the first radar imaging satellite to use dual frequencies (the L and S microwave bands). This will let it systematically map the Earth’s crust at an exceptional level of detail — it can detect changes under 1cm (0.4in) across. That will let NISAR observe even subtle nuances of earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters. It will also help monitor long-term processes, including the crust’s evolution, ecosystem disruptions and ice sheet collapses.

Access to data will also play an important role. NISAR offers worldwide coverage every 12 days, making time-based imagery more practical. The mission team hopes to make data readily available to the public in one to two days, but can deliver that data within hours in an emergency. Anyone willing to parse the information can make use of it.

With an estimated $1.5 billion price, NISAR is expected to be the most expensive Earth imaging satellite to date. The investment may be worthwhile, though. The satellite’s data could help governments react to and prepare for natural disasters, and improve humanity’s understandings of climate change and threats to food security.

 

Ever wish you could play an arcade rhythm game that fostered creativity, not just matching notes? You now have your chance. Endlesss has turned its remote music collaboration software into an honest-to-goodness arcade machine, complete with joysticks, a touchscreen, an XY controller and a sea of buttons. You can use it as a stand-up audio workstation with your own plugins and physical instruments, but it comes into its own in an arcade mode that challenges you to compose beats — you might have to loop drums, for example.

The cabinet is ultimately a community effort. Endlesss Discord member NJ Lang liked the idea of an arcade rig so much that he built one, and it proved a hit when the company took it to events. The firm then built a production prototype, and had a strong-enough initial reception that NBA veteran Baron Davis became the first to buy one — you can see his reaction (and an Endlesss sales pitch) below.

This won’t be a trivial purchase. In fact, it’ll make many retro cabinets seem affordable. Endlesss is releasing 25 Launch Edition arcade systems in late February for a $9,999 “introductory” price. You’ll need to put down a $200 non-refundable deposit just to get into a pre-sale ahead of the public debut. You’re buying this because you have an artistic side and plenty of money to spare — everyone else will want to save those funds for essential music creation tools.

 

Researchers at the University of Adelaide announced this week that they made clean hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment. Demand for hydrogen fuel, a clean energy source that only produces water when burned, is expected to increase in the coming years as the world (hopefully) continues to pivot away from fossil fuels. The findings could eventually provide cheaper green energy production to coastal areas.

“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 per cent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,” said Professor Shizhang Qiao, the team’s co-lead. Seawater typically needs to be purified before electrolysis splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. The team says its results, using cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface as the catalyst, had similar performance to a standard process of applying platinum and iridium catalysts to highly purified and deionized water.

Compared to freshwater, seawater is an abundant resource, and the ability to extract hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment could save money. However, even if successfully scaled, it would likely only be practical for coastal communities with plenty of seawater — not so much for Iowa or Kansas.

The team’s next step is to scale the system with a larger electrolyzer. Then, although it’s still early in development, the researchers hope to eventually apply the findings to commercial hydrogen production for fuel cells and ammonia synthesis. Co-lead Yao Zheng summarized, “Our work provides a solution to directly utilise seawater without pre-treatment systems and alkali addition, which shows similar performance as that of existing metal-based mature pure water electrolyser.”

 

It’s a rough time for fans of several live service games, which are titles designed to be constantly updated for a long time. A bunch are shutting down in the near future, and CrossfireX and Knockout City are among the latest to join the list.

CrossfireX is an Xbox console version of the massively popular tactical shooter Crossfire. After some delays, it arrived less than a year ago, but it wasn’t a hit with critics or, more crucially, the public. Developer Smilegate has stopped selling the game (the multiplayer component is free-to-play, but the Remedy-developed single-player campaign is not) and is offering refunds for purchases made in the last two weeks. It will shut off the CrossfireX servers on May 18th.

Knockout City, meanwhile, is a fun dodgeball brawler that debuted in 2021. The game went free-to-play last year when developer Velan Studios parted ways with EA to self-publish it. Alas, Knockout City is shutting down too. Its ninth season will be the final one and the servers will close on June 6th. On a positive note, Velan will roll out an option for PC players to run the game on private servers.

Smilegate and Velan are far from alone in closing down live service games recently. Meta’s Ready At Dawn studio said this week it would shutter Echo VR, a zero-gravity frisbee title previously known as Echo Arena, on August 1st. It also emerged over the last week or so that Apex Legends Mobile, Battlefield Mobile, Rumbleverse, Crayta and others are closing shop. Development is ending on Back 4 Blood and Marvel’s Avengers as well, but Turtle Rock Studios and Crystal Dynamics will keep the respective servers online. 

It’s tough to make a game that’s successful, let alone one that requires players to stick with it for the long haul. Major players like Fortnite, Apex Legends (the console and PC version), Valorant, Overwatch 2 and Genshin Impact aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. But developers are all competing with each other and anything else that can soak up peoples’ attention. Even though there are more than 3 billion gamers, there are only so many live service games that the market can sustain.

 

Twitter Blue subscribers will receive a cut of revenue from ads that appear in their reply threads, CEO Elon Musk said. The new program starts today, Musk noted, but he hasn’t yet provided additional details about how it works. The Twitter Blue support page doesn’t include any information either. Twitter no longer has a comms department that can be reached for comment.

Blue subscribers in some territories already see half as many ads on their timeline as other users. Offering a cut of ad revenue could help Twitter keep users on board, especially if it offers them a reasonable split that could earn them some decent scratch for a viral tweet. Many other platforms already offer creators a share of ad revenue, including YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram and Facebook.

Twitter Blue subscribers currently pay $8 ($11 if they sign up on iOS) per month, or $84 per year for the service. In return, they receive several perks, including a blue check, the option to edit tweets and bookmark folders. They also get longer video uploads (which some people have used to post movies) and prominent placement in reply threads when they respond to someone.

The company is trying to improve its bottom line to, among other things, ensure it can meet interest payments of over $1 billion per year on the loans Musk took out to buy the company. Finding more ways to maximize engagement (and in turn revenue) is key. So incentivizing users, especially those with large audiences, to subscribe to Blue and tweet more often by offering them a revenue share is a logical step. Twitter is also said to be working on another tipping feature using an in-app currency.

Meanwhile, Twitter is reportedlycharging businesses $1,000 per month to have a gold checkmark. Verification for affiliated accounts seemingly costs $50 per month.

 

YouTube Music workers in the Austin, TX area who voted to unionize are striking. The Alphabet Works Union-CWA (AWU-CWA), which represents the contractors, says this is the first time a group of Google-affiliated workers has gone on strike.

Cognizant, an Alphabet subcontractor, staffs the (more than 40) striking workers. They say Alphabet’s current return-to-office date of February 6th threatens their safety and livelihoods since their $19-per-hour pay makes it hard to afford relocation, travel and healthcare costs. The AWU-CWA says most contractors were hired to work remotely, and nearly a quarter of them don’t live in Texas.

The YouTube workers say Alphabet and Cognizant only announced the abrupt return to office after they had already voted to unionize. Additionally, they accuse managers of sending work to other offices to “chill” the union efforts while adding that a supervisor made implicit anti-union threats. Finally, the workers have appealed to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to be recognized as “jointly employed” by Cognizant and Alphabet; the designation would force Alphabet to negotiate based on US labor laws.

Although it wasn’t a labor strike, 20,000 Google workers from 50 offices participated in a 2018 walkout. That movement was in response to the company’s practice of rewarding executives accused of misconduct.

The YouTube Music strike began at noon EST today outside of the Austin Google Office. If you live elsewhere, you can check in on a livestream of the strike on Facebook.

 

For a product that its own creators, in a marketing pique, once declared “too dangerous” to release to the general public, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is seemingly everywhere these days. The versatile automated text generation (ATG) system, which is capable of outputting copy that is nearly indistinguishable from a human writer’s work, is officially still in beta but has already been utilized in dozens of novel applications, some of which extend far beyond the roles ChatGPT was originally intended for — like that time it simulated an operational Linux shell or that other time when it passed the entrance exam to Wharton Business School.

The hype around ChatGPT is understandably high, with myriad startups looking to license the technology for everything from conversing with historical figures to talking to historical literature, from learning other languages to generating exercise routines and restaurant reviews.

But with these technical advancements come with a slew of opportunities for misuse and outright harm. And if our previous hamfisted attempts at handling the spread of deepfake video and audio technologies were any indication, we’re dangerously underprepared for the havoc that at-scale, automated disinformation production will wreak upon our society.

OpenAI’s billion dollar origin story

OpenAI has been busy since its founding in 2015 as a non-profit by Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk and a host of other VC luminaries, who all collectively chipped in a cool billion dollars to get the organization up and running. The “altruistic” venture argues that AI “should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.”

The following year, the company released its first public beta of the OpenAI Gym reinforcement learning platform. Musk resigned from the board in 2018, citing a potential conflict of interest with his ownership of Tesla. 2019 was especially eventful for OpenAI. That year, the company established a “capped” for-profit subsidiary (OpenAI LP) to the original non-profit (OpenAI Inc) organization, received an additional billion-dollar funding infusion from Microsoft and announced plans to begin licensing its products commercially.

In 2020, OpenAI officially launched GPT-3, a text generator able to “summarize legal documents, suggest answers to customer-service enquiries, propose computer code [and] run text-based role-playing games,” The company released its commercial API that year as well.

“I have to say I’m blown away,” startup founder Arram Sabeti wrote at the time, after interacting with the system. “It’s far more coherent than any AI language system I’ve ever tried. All you have to do is write a prompt and it’ll add text it thinks would plausibly follow. I’ve gotten it to write songs, stories, press releases, guitar tabs, interviews, essays, technical manuals. It’s hilarious and frightening. I feel like I’ve seen the future.”

2021 saw the release of DALL-E, a text-to-image generator; and the company made headlines again last year with the release of ChatGPT, a chat client based on GPT-3.5, the latest and current GPT iteration. In January 2023, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a deepening of their research cooperative with a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar ongoing investment.

“I think it does an excellent job at spitting out text that’s plausible,” Dr. Brandie Nonnecke, Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab and Associate Professor of Technology Policy Research at UC Berkeley, told Engadget. “It feels like somebody really wrote it. I’ve used it myself actually to kind of get over a writer’s block, to just think through how I flow in the argument that I’m trying to make, so I found it helpful.”

That said, Nonnecke cannot look past the system’s stubborn habit of producing false claims. “It will cite articles that don’t exist,” she added. “Right now, at this stage, it’s realistic but there’s still a long way to go.”

What is generative AI?

OpenAI is far from the only player in the ATG game. Generative AI (or, more succinctly, gen-AI) is the practice of using machine learning algorithms to produce novel content — whether that’s text, images, audio, or video — based on a training corpus of labeled example databases. It’s your standard unsupervised reinforcement learning regimen, the likes of which have trained Google’s AlphaGo, song and video recommendation engines across the internet, as well as vehicle driver assist systems. Of course while models like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion or Google’s Imagen are trained to convert progressively higher resolution patterns of random dots into images, ATGs like ChatGPT remix text passages plucked from their training data to output suspiciously realistic, albeit frequently pedestrian, prose.

“They’re trained on a very large amount of input,” Dr. Peter Krapp, Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, told Engadget. “What results is more or less… an average of that input. It’s never going to impress us with being exceptional or particularly apt or beautiful or skilled. It’s always going to be kind of competent — to the extent that we all collectively are somewhat competent in using language to express ourselves.”

Generative AI is already big business. While flashy events like Stable Diffusion’s maker getting sued for scraping training data from Meta or ChatGPT managing to schmooze its way into medical school (yes, in addition to Wharton) grab headlines, Fortune 500 companies like NVIDIA, Facebook, Amazon Web Services, IBM and Google are all quietly leveraging gen-AI for their own business benefit. They’re using it in a host of applications, from improving search engine results and proposing computer code to writing marketing and advertising content.

The secret to ChatGPT’s success

Efforts to get machines to communicate with us as we do with other people, as Dr. Krapp notes, began in the 1960s and ‘70s with linguists being among the earliest adopters. “They realized that certain conversations can be modeled in such a way that they’re more or less self-contained,” he explained. “If I can have a conversation with, you know, a stereotypical average therapist, that means I can also program the computer to serve as the therapist.” Which is how Eliza became an NLP easter egg hidden in Emacs, the popular Linux text editor.

Today, we use the technological descendents of those early efforts to translate the menus at fancy restaurants for us, serve as digital assistants on our phones, and chat with us as customer service reps. The problem, however, is that to get an AI to perform any of these functions, it has to be specially trained to do that one specific thing. We’re still years away from functional general AIs but part of ChatGPT’s impressive capability stems from its ability to write middling poetry as easily as it can generate a fake set of Terms of Service for the Truth Social website in the voice of Donald Trump without the need for specialized training between the two.

This prosaic flexibility is possible because, at its core, ChatGPT is a chatbot. It’s designed first and foremost to accurately mimic a human conversationalist, which it actually did on Reddit for a week in 2020 before being outed. It was trained using supervised learning methods wherein the human trainers initially fed the model both sides of a given conversation — both what the human user and AI agent were supposed to say. With the basics in it robomind, ChatGPT was then allowed to converse with humans with its responses being ranked after each session. Subjectively better responses scored higher in the model’s internal rewards system and were subsequently optimized for. This has resulted in an AI with a silver tongue but a “just sorta skimmed the Wiki before chiming in” aptitude of fact checking.

Part of ChatGPT’s boisterous success — having garnered a record 100 million monthly active users just two months after its launch — can certainly be marked up to solid marketing strategies such as the “too dangerous” neg of 2020, Natasha Allen, a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, told Engadget. “I think the other part is just how easy it is to use it. You know, the average person can just plug in some words and there you go.”

“People who previously hadn’t been interested in AI, didn’t really care what it was,” are now beginning to take notice. Its ease of use is an asset, Allen argues, making ChatGPT “something that’s enticing and interesting to people who may not be into AI technologies.”

“It’s a very powerful tool,” she conceded. “I don’t think it’s perfect. I think that obviously there are some errors but… it’ll get you 70 to 80 percent of the way.”

Will Microsoft’s ChatGPT be Microsoft’s Taye for a new generation?

But a lot can go wrong in those last 20 to 30 percent, because ChatGPT doesn’t actually know what the words it’s remixing into new sentences mean, it just understands the statistical relationships between them. “The GPT-3 hype is way too much,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, warned in a July, 2020 tweet. “It’s impressive but it still has serious weaknesses and sometimes makes very silly mistakes.”

Those “silly” mistakes range from making nonsensical comparisons like “A pencil is heavier than a toaster” to the racist bigotry we’ve seen with past chatbots like Taye — well, really, all of them to date if we’re being honest. Some of ChatGPT’s replies have even encouraged self-harm in its users, raising a host of ethical quandaries (not limited to, should AI byline scientific research?) for both the company and field as a whole.

ChatGPT’s capability for misuse is immense. We’ve already seen it put to use generating spam marketing and functional malware and writing high school English essays. These are but petty nuisances compared to what may be in store once this technology becomes endemic .

“I’m worried because if we have deep fake video and voice, tying that with ChatGPT, where it can actually write something mimicking the style of how somebody speaks,” Nonnecke said. “Those two things combined together are just a powder keg for convincing disinformation.”

“I think it’s gasoline on the fire, because people write and speak in particular styles,” she continued. “And that can sometimes be the tell — if you see a deepfake and it just doesn’t sound right, the way that they’re talking about something. Now, GPT very much sounds like the individual, both how they would write and speak. I think it’s actually amplifying the harm.”

The current generation of celebrity impersonating chatbots aren’t what would be considered historically accurate (Henry Ford’s avatar isn’t antisemitic, for example) but future improvements could nearly erase the lines between reality and created content. “The first way it’s going to be used is very likely to commit fraud,“ Nonnecke said, noting that scammers have already leveraged voice cloning software to pose as a mark’s relative and swindle money from them.

“The biggest challenge is going to be how do we appropriately address it, because those deep fakes are out. You already have the confusion,” Nonnecke said. “Sometimes it’s referred to as the liars dividend: nobody knows if it’s true, then sort of everything’s a lie, and nothing can be trusted.”

ChatGPT goes to college

ChatGPT is raising hackles across academia as well. The text generator has notably passed the written portion of Wharton Business School’s entrance exam, along with all three parts of the US Medical Licensing exam. The response has been swift (as most panicked scramblings in response to new technologies tend to be) but widely varied. The New York City public school system took the traditional approach, ineffectually “banning” the app’s use by students, while educators like Dr. Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School, have embraced it in their lesson plans.

“This was a sudden change, right? There is a lot of good stuff that we are going to have to do differently, but I think we could solve the problems of how we teach people to write in a world with ChatGPT,” Mollick told NPR in January.

“The truth is, I probably couldn’t have stopped them even if I didn’t require it,” he added. Instead, Mollick has his students use ChatGPT as a prompt and idea generator for their essay assignments.

UCI’s Dr. Krapp has taken a similar approach. “I’m currently teaching a couple of classes where it was easy for me to say, ‘okay, here’s our writing assignment, let’s see what ChadGPT comes up with,’’ he explained. “I did the five different ways with different prompts or partial prompts, and then had the students work on, ‘how do we recognize that this is not written by a human and what could we learn from this?’.”

Is ChatGPT coming for your writing job?

At the start of the year, tech news site CNET was outed for having used an ATG of its own design to generate entire feature-length financial explainer articles — 75 in all since November 2022. The posts were supposedly “rigorously” fact checked by human editors to ensure their output was accurate, though cursory examinations uncovered rampant factual errors requiring CNET and its parent company, Red Ventures, to issue corrections and updates for more than half of the articles.

BuzzFeed’s chief, Jonah Peretti, upon seeing the disastrous fallout CNET was experiencing from this computer generated dalliance, immediately decided to stick his tongue in the outlet too, announcing that his publication plans to employ gen-AI to create low-stakes content like personality quizzes.

This news came mere weeks after BuzzFeed laid off a sizable portion of its editorial staff on account of “challenging market conditions.” The coincidence is hard to ignore, especially given the waves of layoffs currently rocking the tech and media sectors for that specific reason, even as the conglomerates themselves bathe in record revenue and earnings.

This is not the first time that new technology has displaced existing workers. NYT columnist Paul Krugman points to coal mining as an example. The industry saw massive workforce reductions throughout the 20th century, not because our use of coal decreased, but because mining technologies advanced enough that fewer humans were needed to do the same amount of work. The same effect is seen in the automotive industry with robots replacing people on assembly lines.

“It is difficult to predict exactly how AI will impact the demand for knowledge workers, as it will likely vary, depending on the industry and specific job tasks,” Krugman opined. “However, it is possible that in some cases, AI and automation may be able to perform certain knowledge-based tasks more efficiently than humans, potentially reducing the need for some knowledge workers.”

However, Dr. Krapp is not worried. “I see that some journalists have said, ‘I’m worried. My job has already been impacted by digital media and digital distribution. Now the type of writing that I do well, could be done by computer for cheap much more quickly,’ he said. “I don’t see that happening. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we still as humans, have a need — a desire — for recognizing in others what’s human about them.”

“[ChatGPT is] impressive. It’s fun to play with, [but] we’re still here,” he added, “We’re still reading, it’s still meant to be a human size interface for human consumption, for human enjoyment.”

Fear not for someone is sure to save us, probably

ChatGPT’s shared-reality shredding fangs will eventually be capped, Nonnecke is confident, whether by congress or the industry itself in response to public pressure. “I actually think that there’s bipartisan support for this, which is interesting in the AI space,” she told Engadget. “And in data privacy, data protection, we tend to have bipartisan support.”

She points to efforts in 2022 spearheaded by OpenAI Safety and Alignment researcher Scott Aaronson to develop a cryptographic watermark so that the end user could easily spot computer generated material, as one example of the industry’s attempts to self-regulate.

“Basically, whenever GPT generates some long text, we want there to be an otherwise unnoticeable secret signal in its choices of words, which you can use to prove later that, yes, this came from GPT,” Aaronson wrote on his blog. “We want it to be much harder to take a GPT output and pass it off as if it came from a human. This could be helpful for preventing academic plagiarism, obviously, but also, for example, mass generation of propaganda.”

The efficacy of such a safeguard remains to be seen. “It’s very much whack-a-mole, right now,” Nonnecke exclaimed. “It’s the company themselves making that [moderation] decision. There’s no transparency in how they’re deciding what types of prompts to block or not block, which is very concerning to me.”

“Somebody’s going to use this to do terrible things,” she said.