The president is running a disinformation campaign, and too many people won’t call it what it is. “The simplest disinformation is explicitly false or misleading information disseminated for political ends,” says Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who led a team that recently dissected the way disinformation is amplified. Take President Trump’s claim that voting by…
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As of Tuesday evening, 18 people who’ve worked at the White House had tested positive for covid-19. That count is likely to tick upward. Now the White House strategy to prevent such an outbreak is coming under scrutiny—in large part because it hinged mostly on the use of daily rapid testing and nothing else. In…
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Busted: A bot powered by OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 language model has been unmasked after a week of posting comments on Reddit. Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30 million users. It was posting in bursts of roughly once a minute. Fooled ya—again: It’s…
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As covid-19 began to spread earlier this year, it soon became clear that prisons and jails are particularly susceptible to outbreaks. In response, criminal justice systems around the world started looking for alternatives to incarceration. Many turned to electronic ankle monitors as a solution. They used this technology to quickly relocate people from secure custody…
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Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to expand to power everything from security and facial recognition software to autonomous vehicles and mobile apps. In “Women leading the future of mobile AI,” a video series sponsored by Qualcomm Technologies, MIT Technology Review CEO Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau explores the latest AI advances on software tools, mobile platforms, and algorithmic advancements…
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