Eliza Strickland

4 min read Eliza Strickland is a Senior Editor at IEEE Spectrum covering AI and biomedical engineering. Moor Studio/Getty Images The chatbot revolution has left our world awash in AI-generated text: It has infiltrated our news feeds, term papers, and inboxes. It’s so absurdly abundant that industries have sprung up to provide moves and countermoves. Some companies offer services to identify AI-generated text by analyzing the material, while others say their tools will “humanize“ your

7 min read Eliza Strickland is a Senior Editor at IEEE Spectrum covering AI and biomedical engineering. Maybe you’ve read about Gary Marcus’s testimony before the Senate in May of 2023, when he sat next to Sam Altman and called for strict regulation of Altman’s company, OpenAI, as well as the other tech companies that were suddenly all-in on generative AI. Maybe you’ve caught some of his arguments on Twitter with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann

6 min read Eliza Strickland is a Senior Editor at IEEE Spectrum covering AI and biomedical engineering. When an international team of researchers set out to create an “AI scientist” to handle the whole scientific process, they didn’t know how far they’d get. Would the system they created really be capable of generating interesting hypotheses, running experiments, evaluating the results, and writing up papers? What they ended up with, says researcher Cong Lu, was an

7 min read Eliza Strickland is a Senior Editor at IEEE Spectrum covering AI and biomedical engineering. Most people assume that generative AI will keep getting better and better; after all, that’s been the trend so far. And it may do so. But what some people don’t realize is that generative AI models are only as good as the ginormous data sets they’re trained on, and those data sets aren’t constructed from proprietary data owned

5 min read Eliza Strickland is a Senior Editor at IEEE Spectrum covering AI and biomedical engineering. Getty Images It’s horrifyingly easy to make deepfake pornography of anyone thanks to today’s generative AI tools. A 2023 report by Home Security Heroes (a company that reviews identity-theft protection services) found that it took just one clear image of a face and less than 25 minutes to create a 60-second deepfake pornographic video—for free. The world took

4 min read Eliza Strickland is a Senior Editor at IEEE Spectrum covering AI and biomedical engineering. One of the biggest problems with the large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT is that you never know when you can trust them. They can generate clear and cogent prose in response to any question, and much of the information they provide is accurate and useful. But they also hallucinate—in less polite terms, they make stuff

5 min read Last month when Google introduced its new AI search tool, called AI Overviews, the company seemed confident that it had tested the tool sufficiently, noting in the announcement that “people have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs.” The tool doesn’t just return links to web pages, as in a typical Google search, but returns an answer that it has generated based on various sources, which

Stephen Cass: Hello. I’m Stephen Cass, Special Projects Director at IEEE Spectrum. Before starting today’s episode hosted by Eliza Strickland, I wanted to give you all listening out there some news about this show. This is our last episode of Fixing the Future. We’ve really enjoyed bringing you some concrete solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, but we’ve decided we’d like to be able to go deeper into topics than we can in

5 min read Stuart Bradford Theory of mind—the ability to understand other people’s mental states—is what makes the social world of humans go around. It’s what helps you decide what to say in a tense situation, guess what drivers in other cars are about to do, and empathize with a character in a movie. And according to a new study, the large language models (LLM) that power ChatGPT and the like are surprisingly good at

6 min read IEEE Spectrum Each year, the AI Index lands on virtual desks with a louder virtual thud—this year, its 393 pages are a testament to the fact that AI is coming off a really big year in 2023. For the past three years, IEEE Spectrum has read the whole damn thing and pulled out a selection of charts that sum up the current state of AI (see our coverage from 2021, 2022, and