AI

Bad actors want to sort out what bot styles get the most responses for engagement farming. Bluesky is light on algorithms that filter what you can see, but spammers got in the habit of exploring how the algorithms work on Twitter, Facebook, and Threads so they could exploit them.

scientific investigations of the boundaries between conscious and unconscious systems are urgently needed, and they cite ethical, legal and safety issues that make it crucial to understand AI consciousness. For example, if AI develops consciousness, should people be allowed to simply switch it off after use?

AI augmentation is a future requirement, but remain mindful of what’s outsourced. Going forward, we need more demanding journeys than we do mindless shortcuts. Shortcuts rarely yield fun, stories or lessons. If it's easy, it likely isn’t worthwhile.

AI-powered document editors, then, among other tools, use all that training data to make it even easier to write outcome-oriented garbage that moves us further and further from the truth of ourselves and each other as beautiful, complex, experiencing beings.

Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.