Latest news with #chatGPT
Japan Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
AI fiction is already here. Are humans ready?
In January 2024, Rie Qudan won Japan's most prestigious prize for early and mid-career writers, widely seen as the country's literary kingmaker. At the press conference, where she accepted the Akutagawa Prize for her novel 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' Qudan made an unthinkable admission to the press and literati: She had used AI to write it. Throughout 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' the narrator converses with a chatbot and the author said she took the bot's half of the dialogue directly from chatGPT, accounting for about 5% of the novel's total text. 'This novel really started with chatGPT,' Qudan later told national broadcaster NHK, saying she made 'full use' of the LLM (large language model) bot to conceive the story. The Japanese-language press seized on the story, which then spread to international media. Comments poured in online ranging from condemnation that Qudan's AI use was tantamount to plagiarism to jokes that chatGPT should receive 5% of the award money. A common sentiment read like a prophecy: 'I'm sure we'll see more writers using generative AI text in the future.' In Rie Qudan's AI-written story 'Kage no ame' ('Rain Shadow'), an abstract disembodied entity reflects on the end of the human race. | JIJI A year later, Qudan was back in the news. Piqued by the backlash over 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo,' editors from advertising magazine Kohkoku approached the 34-year-old author with a commission for their next issue: How would the author feel about, say, a story that was just 5% her — and 95% chatGPT? 'My editor said, 'That's so rude — obviously you can't accept?'' said Qudan at an event on April 6 at Tokyo's Aoyama Book Center to promote the new magazine issue, before adding with a giggle, 'I said, 'Ah, oops, I've already accepted.'' The magazine editors stipulated that Qudan would interpret 5% and 95% as she saw fit and she would publish the prompts she fed to the AI alongside the story. All told, Qudan said at the event, she felt her overall contribution was actually about half. Creating a decidedly nonhuman work for a nonliterary magazine appealed to her as a provocation and experiment. 'I am always looking for more possibilities,' she said. 'I'm someone who actively wants to do things that would be a little scandalous, things that would be out of the ordinary.' Human endeavors The Akutagawa Prize is given for literary fiction, called junbungaku in Japanese, or 'pure literature.' Like in English-language publishing, the lines between literary and genre fiction are blurry, yet attempts to draw or redraw those lines tend to bring out the cultural pearl-clutchers. In 'Kage no ame' ('Rain Shadow'), published March 25, an abstract disembodied entity reflects on the end of the human race. 'The last human drew their last breath without anyone noticing; the last emotion, too, melted away and disappeared without anyone to observe it.' The narrator, suggestive of an AI network with some semblance of consciousness (so to speak), contemplates the nature of human emotions using the memories of someone only identified as E.S. Memories, we learn later, which have been downloaded, because E.S., like the rest of humanity, is now gone. This isn't just another neural net waxing on the essence of human nature (more on this later); E.S. himself searched throughout his life for something like a 'pure' emotion that would, if isolated, allow people to get closer to reality. But the story, like its writing, maintains a hazy ambivalence. 'Emotions are simply tools,' E.S.'s mother tells him on her death bed, managing to sound both like a robot and a therapist. Write what you know What could be written off as a PR stunt for a magazine literally called Ads, takes on new import in the context of a relatively minor but nonetheless disconcerting event from a few weeks prior. On March 12, Sam Altman tweeted around 1,100 words (with the username @sama, which to a Japanese speaker sounds not unlike someone referring to himself as god). Like Qudan's 4,000-character story, his post is a work of fiction. It, too, involves a disembodied pseudo-consciousness contemplating the mechanics of human expression, in this case, grief. But unlike Qudan, Altman is not a writer; he's the CEO of OpenAI. And unlike Qudan's story, his was written completely by chatGPT. Altman reportedly fed chatGPT the prompt, 'Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief,' and it responded with a story about Mila ('because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes — poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box') who for unknown reasons is grieving a character called Kai. In the same tweet, Altman asserts that his yet-to-be-released model is 'good at creative writing' and 'got the vibe of metafiction so right.' By seeming to come directly for writers, he must have known he'd get acerbic trolling right back. Critics compared the story to the work of an undergrad 'who has read a lot of Reddit posts and maybe one David Foster Wallace collection,' written with 'corny sentimentality and showiness (that) tends to fall back on clunky, graspingly incoherent imagery.' Both Rie Qudan and Sam Altman's AI-written stories had an AI narrator — a safe choice as an AI-written human narrator might quickly ring false with readers. | GETTY IMAGES 'This is the part where, if I were a proper storyteller, I would set a scene,' says Altman's AI narrator. 'Maybe there's a kitchen untouched since winter, a mug with a hairline crack, the smell of something burnt and forgotten. I don't have a kitchen, or a sense of smell.' Both stories have an AI narrator who views humanity at a confused remove. (A safe choice — an AI-written human narrator might quickly ring false with readers.) This shared conceit shows us both what draws people to AI-generated fiction and why it falls apart as a form of art. We are still in the 'AI — look, it sounds just like us. Can you tell the difference?' phase. But when art is a mere gimmick, the moment the gamut is revealed and the initial awe is past, we scroll quickly onto the next thing in our feeds. Perhaps the question isn't whether AI lit can make us feel — but can it make us feel seen? Great literature lingers, and when it's at its best, we feel understood. We feel we're not alone, that reaching across time and circumstances is the grasp of someone who has lived. Readers debate authorial intent ad nauseam, but what matters is that it exists. A neural network has never been anywhere, has never touched the wool of any sheep on any hillside, or been walloped by any betrayal. It can only summarize reports of grief or give a statistical approximation of joy. The bots know that. That's perhaps why Qudan's and Altman's stories both come to the same place — an artificial intelligence who just doesn't get us. Or maybe these two AI-generated works have something else to reveal: That for all our psychological and neurocognitive plumbing, we humans are still groping in the darkness to figure ourselves out. Kohkoku Case #01 is available at bookstores in Japan, visit for details. Rie Qudan's 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' will be available from September 2025, visit for details.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
ChatGPT AI bot adds shopping to its powers
Overwhelmed by online shopping? Maybe a robot can help. The viral ChatGPT bot is adding shopping features to its powers, extending the reach of its artificial intelligence (AI) into an area traditionally dominated by media sites and tech rivals such as Amazon and Google. It said the update would allow users to see prices and reviews more easily, as well as find direct links to purchase personalised product recommendations. Parent company OpenAI said its selections would be "chosen independently and are not ads". The company, which sparked the frenzy over AI in 2022 with its technological advances, debuted its search tool last year. It said it was among its most popular and fastest growing features, with over one billion web searches in the last week. Google is still by far the dominant player in search, capturing roughly 89% of global traffic, according to analyst estimates. But its share of the market has been slowly slipping in recent months. Adding shopping to its search puts OpenAI into even more direct competition with Google, as well other websites that offer product reviews, such as the New York Times and other publishers. Amazon unveiled its own generative AI shopping assistant last year, while rival AI firm Perplexity also has a shopping tool. OpenAI said the goal of its update was to make it "faster to find, compare, and buy products". It said the feature would be available to all users but it would take a few days for the rollout to be complete. The change was one of several announced on Monday as part of a wider update to its search product. OpenAI also unveiled a feature that would allow users to text chatGPT for live sports scores and would provide multiple citations in its answers.
BBC News
28-04-2025
- Business
- BBC News
ChatGPT AI bot adds shopping to its powers
Overwhelmed by online shopping? Maybe a robot can viral ChatGPT bot is adding shopping features to its powers, extending the reach of its artificial intelligence (AI) into an area traditionally dominated by media sites and tech rivals such as Amazon and said the update would allow users to see prices and reviews more easily, as well as find direct links to purchase personalised product company OpenAI said its selections would be "chosen independently and are not ads". The company, which sparked the frenzy over AI in 2022 with its technological advances, debuted its search tool last year. It said it was among its most popular and fastest growing features, with over one billion web searches in the last is still by far the dominant player in search, capturing roughly 89% of global traffic, according to analyst estimates. But its share of the market has been slowly slipping in recent months. Adding shopping to its search puts OpenAI into even more direct competition with Google, as well other websites that offer product reviews, such as the New York Times and other publishers. Amazon unveiled its own generative AI shopping assistant last year, while rival AI firm Perplexity also has a shopping said the goal of its update was to make it "faster to find, compare, and buy products". It said the feature would be available to all users but it would take a few days for the rollout to be change was one of several announced on Monday as part of a wider update to its search product. OpenAI also unveiled a feature that would allow users to text chatGPT for live sports scores and would provide multiple citations in its answers.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Gov. Josh Shapiro details findings of AI pilot program, announces Phase 2
Governor Josh Shapiro will visited Carnegie Mellon University to unveil the results of the Shapiro Administration's Generative AI Pilot Program with ChatGPT. The pilot program - the first program of its kind in the country - was designed to empower Commonwealth employees to use new tools to better and more quickly deliver services to Pennsylvanians. (Commonwealth Media Services) A little over 18 months after signing the executive order, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced the findings of a pilot program that made Pennsylvania the first state in the nation to partner with OpenAI. 'Gen AI is one of the most significant technological developments of our time. It will likely lead to a new era, just as the agricultural revolution and industrial revolution did in this country over the last century or so,' Shapiro said in Pittsburgh on Friday. Shapiro said 175 Commonwealth employees from 14 different agencies used OpenAI's ChatGPT during the pilot program. He said t even though 48% of them never used ChatGPT before, 85% of them reported they had a positive experience utilizing i tfor their jobs. 'We heard the same feedback from workers from across all different ages, all different backgrounds and all different types of roles of Commonwealth service,' Shapiro said. 'From our lawyers who had chat GPT in their hands to our construction project managers who were using these open AI tools.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE He added the employees who took part saved 95 minutes per day with the help of AI. 'That's nearly eight hours a week that they got back, 30 hours a month that they got back,' Shapiro said. Another example the governor mentioned was the AI program helped the state simplify job descriptions and speed up hiring times, reducing the amount of time to onboard an employee from 90 days to 60 days. Joined by elected leaders, unions, tech employees, and academia, Shapiro announced 'Phase Two' will expand the use of AI for commonwealth employees on June 1, which is one day after the initial effort ends. 'We will involve more employees and give them more generative AI tools to get more stuff done for the good people of Pennsylvania,' Shapiro said. 'I'm excited about the opportunities that generative AI has in our efforts to serve the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It's shown that it is a big difference maker in our work.' Shapiro emphasized AI is 'not a replacement for the employees experience and expertise.' 'We confirmed this tool is a job enhancer, not a job replacer. We believe that is critically important to remember as we go forward,' Shapiro said. Shapiro also took a not-so-subtle jab at the federal government, claiming that 'some there want to berate and belittle public servants.' 'That's not okay,' he said. 'I want you know here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, we respect public service and we respect those who have made a decision in their lives to serve others, to help their fellow Pennsylvanians, and rather than eliminating their jobs haphazardly, we are methodically working with them to help them be more effective and efficient stewards of taxpayer money and to more quickly meet the needs of our fellow Pennsylvanians.'
Yahoo
26-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
China's shoestring AI humiliates US and could undermine Trump
A Chinese AI model built on a shoestring budget has shocked Silicon Valley and presented a major challenge to Donald Trump. DeepSeek, a language model that can generate human-like conversation, was released on the same day as Mr Trump's inauguration. It has since been tested against some of America's most powerful AI (artificial intelligence) models, such as chatGPT, and in some cases has come out on top. Experts warned that the breakthrough was a 'wake-up call to America', which has been battling to prevent China competing at the top level of an AI arms race. Concerns have also been raised that DeepSeek has built-in censorship and refuses to answer sensitive political questions about China and Xi Jinping, the country's leader. Shortly after his inauguration, Mr Trump announced a $500 billion (£400 billion) AI investment project, dubbed 'Stargate', in co-operation with US firms including OpenAI, which created ChatGPT. DeepSeek's new model comes despite a plan by Joe Biden's administration to hamper China's AI capabilities, in hopes of denying it the political influence and military supremacy which could come from being the first to achieve what is known as superintelligence. DeepSeek said it had taken just two months and less than $6 million (£4.8 million) to build a model more advanced than many of its Western competitors. It was developed as a side project by a maverick hedge fund manager who invested heavily in Nvidia, one America's most sophisticated makers of the computer chips that are crucial for AI models. Liang Wenfeng reportedly has close links to the Chinese Communist Party. Mr Trump placed America's ambition to become the 'world capital of artificial intelligence' at the centre of his inauguration last week, reserving the front row at the Capitol Rotunda for tech billionaires developing AI. On the same day, DeepSeek released its breakthrough R1 open source language model to little fanfare. Wenfeng's start-up appeared to have immediately and unexpectedly closed the gap with the US and publicly thwarted the US government's attempts to stifle Chinese innovation. 'Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I've ever seen,' warned Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has been advising Mr Trump. DeepSeek claimed to have used 2,048 second-rate Nvidia H800 chips and $5.6 million (£4.5 million) to build what is known as a reasoning-focused model. For comparison, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta used 16,000 first-class Nvidia H100 chips to build its Llama 3.1 model. In an interview with Time magazine earlier this year, Dario Amodei, chief executive of the Amazon-backed AI developer Anthropic, estimated the cost of building a frontier model in 2024 as $1 billion (£800 million), with the next generation costing closer to $10 billion (£8 billion). Yet DeepSeek outperformed Meta and Anthropic's model, as well as OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o, in some benchmarks such as accuracy, coding and complex problem-solving. 'DeepSeek is a wake-up call for America,' Alexandr Wang, chief executive of San Francisco-based Scale AI, said, calling for the US to innovate faster and tighten export controls on chips. Mr Wang, who attended Mr Trump's inauguration and previously secured a $250 million (£200 million) defence contract, took out a whole page advertisement in The Washington Post last week imploring the president to 'win the AI war'. 'DeepSeek ... is the top-performing, or roughly on a par with the best American models,' he warned in an interview with CNBC, adding his belief that China had obtained thousands of first-class chips despite export bans. Mr Biden curtailed exports of the best chips for training AI models to block China from competing with the US. Yet Mr Wang believes thousands of first-class chips still found their way to China. Gina Raimondo, the former US secretary of commerce, initially championed the ban and sanctions but later conceded that 'trying to hold China back is a fool's errand', instead advocating for rampant innovation to stay ahead. Announcing his $500 billion (£400 billion) 'Stargate' AI investment last week, Mr Trump said the four-year project was 'big money and high-quality people'. Mr Zuckerberg followed suit by announcing plans to spend up to $65 billion (£52 billion) on AI infrastructure in 2025, while Elon Musk's xAI set out intentions to expand its Colossus supercomputer to use more than one million computer chips to train his own Grok AI language model. The Chinese government has announced a comparatively modest $8.2 billion (£6.6 billion) investment fund for AI projects, according to the South China Morning Post. Yet DeepSeek's intent has been matched by Alibaba, which launched its QwQ model in November and is said to be hot on the heels of its US counterparts, while Chinese homegrown chips including those designed by Huawei are also improving rapidly. 'The only strike against it is some half-baked PRC censorship,' Barrett Woodside, co-founder of AI hardware company Positron, told the Wall Street Journal, referring to the People's Republic of China. The model has drawn criticism online by appearing to refuse to answer sensitive questions about China or mention Xi Jinping. Mr Woodside explained that such responses could actually be removed as other developers can freely modify the code. Nevertheless, Mr Wenfeng enjoys a close relationship with the CCP, having been invited on Jan 20 by Li Qiang, China's second-most powerful leader, to discuss how homegrown companies could close the gap with the US. 'We have to develop the top talent ourselves', Mr Wenfeng said in an interview last year. Mr Wenfeng made a fortune by harnessing AI to identify patterns which affect stock prices. 'When humans make investment decisions, it's an art, and they just do it by the seat of their pants. When computer programs make such decisions, it's a science, and it has the optimal solution,' the eccentric billionaire said in a 2019 speech. In 2021, he started bulk-buying Nvidia graphics processing units on the side, while running his High-Flyer trading fund. 'When we first met him, he was this very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his own models. We didn't take him seriously,' one of Mr Wenfeng's business partners told The Financial Times. His DeepSeek model was published not for commercial success but rather research propagation – as he reveals the secrets and explains the breakthroughs in an accompanying paper, instead of protecting them as intellectual property. By doing so, DeepSeek has reinvigorated AI developers – sending excitement and anxiety to Silicon Valley in equal measure. Jim Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia, hailed the breakthrough, saying a 'non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive – truly open, frontier research that empowers all'. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
