It’s become strangely difficult to attend a work meeting without the presence of an AI recording tool that’s carefully jotting down what every single participant is saying.
Some people in tech circles are taking the trend to perverse ends by recording every single conversation they’re having — not just at work but in their private lives as well, as the Wall Street Journal reports.
Worse yet, many of them aren’t even asking for permission first, which could technically put them at risk of violating state laws, depending on where the conversation is taking place.
It’s a bizarre extension of our newfound obsession with keeping track of every single thing that’s being said around us, a trend that could have severe privacy implications, from people being shocked to find their therapist has been recording them to wearers of Meta’s AI glasses harassing strangers.
Apps like the transcription service Granola have seen a steady rise in popularity. AI tech executives are growing increasingly reliant on these tools — sometimes to an astonishing degree.
“In the office, we actually get really bummed when we realize we’re having a conversation and we forgot to turn on Granola,” AI marketing platform Flint CEO and cofounder Michelle Lim told the WSJ. “I wish there was a Granola in every room.”
Lim admitted that she simply assumed she was being recorded, noting that being asked “almost kills the mood.”
Others, like AI sales company Yuzu Labs founder Emmie Chang, go even further. Chang admitted to the WSJ that she records most of her first dates by putting her phone on the table or chair. Afterwards, she asks Anthropic’s Claude how the date went, wondering if she could be “more engaging or empathetic.”
It’s a baffling new trend that highlights how pervasive AI and surveillance have become in our daily lives, particularly for those working in tech. And while researchers are still investigating the effects on our lives, there are reasons to be concerned. For instance, experts warn of the dangers of “cognitive offloading” through the extensive use of AI chatbots, a trend that can have corrosive effects on our mental abilities.
Then there are the glaring privacy implications of recording every single conversation, not just with colleagues but with strangers on dates. Unlike Zoom’s built-in recording feature, which announces itself with a robotic voice, Granola does not make its presence known at all.
In the workplace, workers have little recourse, and will likely have to accept being recorded, as privacy law expert Alex Alben told the WSJ.
Nonetheless, “companies need to be careful about technologies that are automatically recording, especially when it involves third parties,” he said.
Other experts put it a lot more bluntly, pointing out the risk of leaking confidential personnel information, the possibility of remarks that could later be interpreted as incriminating, or even trade secrets.
“There are huge risks to the organization on AI note takers,” human resources firm HRCI executive Amy Dufrane told the Associated Press earlier this month. “I don’t think companies should use it at all.”
More on recording and AI: Woman Alarmed When Her Trusted Therapist Starts Recording Her With AI
The post People Are Starting to Record Every Conversation They Have Without Disclosing It, and It’s Gross appeared first on Futurism.
Meta is testing an app that uses AI to automate bedtime stories for children. The future is here, folks — and boy, is it depressing.
The app, first caught by 9to5Mac, is called “StoryKit.” (It’s not yet available in the US; Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s currently testing StoryKit in pilot countries.) Per a webpage for the app, parents pick a character either by creating one or taking a “photo of their favorite toy or person to bring them to life,” then describe a setting or world for the story to take place in. They can also ask the story to include a specific lesson or moral, which the app says will allow it to “weave in values like kindness, courage, or empathy without it feeling like a lecture.”
The resulting story can be read aloud by a human — or, of course, an AI voice can narrate instead. According to Meta, this is a lifeline for exhausted parents.
“Tired after a long day but want to give your kids a special bedtime story?” reads the app’s webpage. “StoryKit uses Al to help you create personalized bedtime stories in seconds. No more guilt about screen time. Just beautiful, unique stories made with love.”
Let’s be real: this app is amazingly sad. There are a lot of busy and exhausted parents, but outsourcing the emotional and creative labor of bedtime stories to machines is a wildly bleak proposition. Meta claims that this app will help parents feel less guilty about their kids’ screen time, but is having an AI voice read an AI-generated bedtime story to your kids that much different from plopping them in front of an iPad?
There are also countless human-written children’s books out there to choose from, if parents don’t enjoy coming up with stories with their kids on the spot. If you’re feeling guilty about screens, perhaps the answer is paper-bound books, not robots.
All in all: kids’ bedtime stories — bonding moments between parents and their children, in which parents can foster creativity and impart what they believe to be important lessons — aren’t exactly spaces begging for tech disruption. In fact, this is an area where we probably need less tech, not more.
More on kids and AI:The Proliferation of Deepfakes Is Profoundly Changing the Way Teenagers Use the Internet
The post Meta Working on Crushingly Sad AI App That Tells Bedtime Stories to Children, for “Tired” Parents appeared first on Futurism.
By now, it should be pretty clear that the corporate executives of the world aren’t exactly into AI because they think it’ll cure cancer.
They’re making a different calculation, motivated by simple economics: pretty soon, they believe, AI will be efficient enough to do many or even all workers’ job, removing employee payroll from the corporate equation. That means more money for those at the top, and less time dealing with pesky annoyances like labor rights and health coverage.
For that to happen would take a series of technological miracles — as a recent study out of the University of California Berkeley shows, today’s cutting-edge AI tools are still incapable of completing the bulk of real-world tasks at a level comparable to humans.
Still, it’s clear executives are hungry for the kind of cost-savings AI could provide. Luckily, a new AI site offers a solution: OverpAId, a distinctly tongue-in-cheek project that facetiously claims to offer an AI-powered replacement for your company’s CEO — or as the site’s landing page puts it, the “world’s first Chief Executive Replacement Engine”.
“OverpAId is an Artificial Intelligence built from the ground up to do your CEO’s entire job — strategy, ‘vision,’ motivational all-hands emails — better, faster, and without ever once asking the board for a bigger jet,” the site exclaims.
The parodic offering claims to offer helpful features to help your team transition from an expensive human executive to a cheap AI equivalent. These include a “jargon bingo,” an AI-hype press release translator, a “talk to a real executive” chat widget (currently busted), and an ROI calculator that helps users distribute CEO pay packages equally across every remaining employee.
It hammers that point repeatedly, pointing out the fact that the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio is an astonishing 290 to 1 at large public companies (which is actually true, incredibly.)
While OverpAId is clearly a piece of satire, it gets at something very real: the fact that CEO pay has grown at an astonishing rate, while rank-and-file wages and salaries have crawled at a snails pace, in many cases not even keeping pace with inflation.
“Somewhere along the way, the story became: pay the person at the top enough, and the value will trickle down to everyone else,” the site explains. There’s just one problem with that telling: “It hasn’t. It doesn’t. It never really did.”
More on AI automation:AI Is Pushing Older Employees Straight Out of the Workforce, New Report Finds
The post New Parody Site Threatens to Replace CEOs With AI for Tiny Fraction of Their Bloated Salaries appeared first on Futurism.
Who could’ve guessed that students who use AI to cheat on their assignments are incredibly lazy?
Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.
Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.
“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he explained in a viral TikTok, sounding incredulous. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”
The hidden prompt told the AI to sneak in random digressions about Madagascar. The midterm, by the way, was about the Industrial Revolution. And apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all. All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.
Gibson shared some of the most examples in a follow-up video. After introducing how AI and other technologies have impacted society, for instance, one midterm included this puzzling non sequitur: “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon.” (“Okay,” Gibson says, after a pause.)
Another droned on about something related to AI and social inequality, followed by: “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling.”
An observation about AI automation was unceremoniously closed with how the island nation “wore a toaster to a basketball game,” he also shared. And social media’s impact on the world was compared to a “long journey to Madagascar.”
Gibson makes it clear that humiliating his students wasn’t the point. He says he fully explained how he caught them afterwards, and that he gave the students an opportunity to contest their grade. (Only two did, showing at least that they do feel shame.)
“I get no gratification out of seeing students fail. It’s not my intent to see you fail — that’s weird,” he said.
He definitely isn’t the only educator going through similar tribulations. Teachers and professors across the country are constantly complaining that their pupils are using AI to generate essays and cheat on tests. One Brown University professor discovered that over half his students were using AI to cheat on an exam, and Princeton University has even dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing exams to be supervised after being mired in its own chatbot cheating scandal.
“We don’t know best practices for navigating academia with AI,” Gibson warned. “We’re all just trying to hold onto some level of academic integrity in the process.”
More on AI: Law School Bans Laptops and Phones as AI Cheating Scandal Grows
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