Technology

Blue Check Marks Were Always Shameless

Twitter verification was first a tool for vanity.

How Ivermectin Became a Belief System

The deworming drug is central to an improvisational, alternative medical subculture that was forming even before the pandemic.

Is This the Singularity for Standardized Tests?

GPT-4’s mastery of the SAT will re-entrench the power and influence of rote exams.

Cool People Accidentally Saved America’s Feet

Millennials popularized bulky, super-cushioned shoes. Then Millennials got old.

Please Get Me Out of Dead-Dog TikTok

TikTok's algorithms have people stuck on a viral-grief loop.

GPT-4 Has the Memory of a Goldfish

Large language models know a lot but can’t remember much at all.

What Have Humans Just Unleashed?

Call it tech’s optical-illusion era: Not even the experts know exactly what will come next in the AI revolution.

Welcome to the Big Blur

Thanks to AI, every written word now comes with a question.

ChatGPT Changed Everything. Now Its Follow-Up Is Here.

Behold GPT-4. Here’s what we know it can do, and what it can’t.

Why Are We Letting the AI Crisis Just Happen?

Bad actors could seize on large language models to engineer falsehoods at unprecedented scale.

Silicon Valley Was Unstoppable. Now It’s Just a House of Cards.

The bank debacle is exposing the myth of tech exceptionalism.

We Programmed ChatGPT Into This Article. It’s Weird.

Please don’t embarrass us, robots.

Elon Musk Is Spiraling

One Elon is a visionary; the other is a troll. The more he tweets, the harder it gets to tell them apart.

Duck Off, Autocorrect

Chatbots can write poems in the voice of Shakespeare. So why are phone keyboards still thr wosrt?

Prepare for the Textpocalypse

Our relationship to writing is about to change forever; it may not end well.

Andrew Tate Is Haunting YouTube

Many months after a misogynist influencer was banned from social media, his face is still everywhere. Will it ever go away?

GPT-4 Might Just Be a Bloated, Pointless Mess

Will endless “scaling” of our current language models really bring true machine intelligence?

The Vindication of Ask Jeeves

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.

The Real Reason Eye Cream Is So Expensive

Does eye cream do anything special, or is it just facial moisturizer in a smaller tub?

Conspiracy Theories Have a New Best Friend

Generative AI programs like ChatGPT threaten to revolutionize how disinformation spreads online.