Newsletter Archives
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Write 200 social-media posts in 10 minutes! Quality, right?
PUBLIC DEFENDER
By Brian Livingston
I’ve been thinking about the profession of journalism lately, given the emails bombarding me these days about how I could create 240, 300, or even 1,200 articles per hour if I would only use the latest in chatbot tech.
YouTube’s funny farm is overflowing with videos of such miracles. They tell me I could write a whole ebook in 24 hours — true writers never sleep, you know — and make $8,327 a week ($433,000 a year) merely by pressing a few buttons.
Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.44.0, 2024-10-28).
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Is this article plagiarism? Now you can find out.
ISSUE 21.36 • 2024-09-02 PUBLIC DEFENDER
By Brian Livingston
An epidemic of plagiarism — outright duplication of other people’s works — is raging through chatbots and other artificial-intelligence technologies.
One study shows that almost 60% of the outputs from some chatbots contain plagiarism. The good news? The latest detection software can be 100% accurate in separating AI-plagiarized text from original, human work.
Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.36.0, 2024-09-02).
This story also appears in our public Newsletter. -
Can chatbots write code? Yes, but should you use it?
PUBLIC DEFENDER
By Brian Livingston
You’ve heard a lot about “chatbots” that can answer search queries and write essays that sound like some human had written them. But did you know that artificial-intelligence agents, if you ask nicely, can also write working computer code?
Bots that can code include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Microsoft has tried — with great frustration — to integrate into its Bing search engine. (See my February 27, 2023, column on the freakouts Redmond’s AI has subjected users to.)
Automated tools like ChatGPT have spawned a lot of hysterical commentary, such as “The sky is falling and human programmers are doomed.” But don’t quit your day job just yet.
Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.10.0, 2023-03-06).