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Profile chinese aidriven news break maus12/19/2023 ![]() ![]() The next step seems clear: If you thought Nigerian prince emails were bad, wait until you see Nigerian prince chatbots. Scrolling through product reviews already feels like the world’s most annoying Turing test. Political campaigns are leveraging AI tools to create ads, while Amazon is flooded with ChatGPT-written books (many of them about AI). The Atlantic imagined a looming “ textpocalypse” as we struggle to filter out the generative noise. “In a few years, the vast majority of the photos, videos, and text we encounter on the internet could be AI-generated,” New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose warned last year. Pessimists argue that we could soon drown in a tsunami of synthetic media. While large language models and text-to-image generators have been evolving steadily over the past decade, 2022 saw an explosion of consumer-friendly tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E. (In a recent test, an early version of GPT-4 showed that it knew how to hire a person on Taskrabbit to complete a captcha on its behalf.) The fates of entire companies have rested on the issue of spotting fakes: Elon Musk, in an attempt to wriggle out of his deal to buy Twitter, cited a bot detector to boost his argument that Twitter had misrepresented the number of bots on its site. ![]() Once some bots could handle that, captcha added other detection methods that included parsing images of motorbikes and trains, as well as sensing mouse movement and other user behavior. After Google introduced its PageRank algorithm, which favored websites with lots of inbound links, spammers created entire ecosystems of mutually supporting pages.Īround the turn of the millennium, the captcha tool arrived to sort humans from bots based on their ability to interpret images of distorted text. Search engines countered by down-ranking those sites. (This type of message, dubbed “litspam,” became a genre unto itself.) As search engines grew more popular, creators looking to boost their pages’ rankings resorted to “keyword stuffing”-repeating the same word over and over-to get priority. Spammers responded by surrounding their pitches with snippets of human-sounding language lifted from old books and mashed together. Early spam filters sifted emails for keywords, blocking messages with phrases like “FREE!” or “be over 21,” and they eventually learned to filter out entire styles of writing. Life on the internet has always been a battle between fakers and detectors of fakes, with both sides profiting off the clash. Tian remembers McPhee saying he couldn’t tell his students how to write, but he could at least help them find their own unique voice. Using a projector and slides, McPhee shared hand-drawn diagrams that illustrated different ways he structured his own essays: a straight line, a triangle, a spiral. McPhee assigned exercises that forced them to think rigorously about words: Describe a piece of modern art on campus, or prune the Gettysburg Address for length. So Tian was surprised when, sophomore year, he managed to secure a spot in John McPhee’s exclusive non-fiction writing seminar.Įvery week, 16 students gathered to hear the legendary New Yorker writer dissect his craft. One of his journalism professors said that Tian was good at “pattern recognition,” which was helpful when producing news copy. But he describes his writing style at the time as “pretty bad”-formulaic and clunky. As a computer science major at Princeton, he’d taken a couple of journalism classes, where he learned the basics of reporting, and his sunny affect and tinkerer’s curiosity endeared him to his teachers and classmates. Edward Tian didn’t think of himself as a writer. ![]()
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