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New data reveals the hidden network of African workers powering AI, as they push for transparency from the global companies that employ them indirectly.

How We Redesigned Technical Interviews for the AI Era

Climate change is driving rising global temperatures, ecological degradation, and widespread human suffering. Yet, as a collective, humanity has failed to imple...

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From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?

An unprecedented look at the state of AI’s energy and resource usage, where it is now, where it is headed in the years to come, and why we have to get it right.

Hardly anyone is paying attention.

The tool scans for users writing certain keywords on Reddit and assigns those users a so-called “radical score,” before deploying an AI-powered bot to automatically engage with the users to de-radicalize them.

The OpenAI CEO said there are clear generational differences in how people use ChatGPT — and younger users may be in deepest

AI will do the thinking, robots will do the doing. What place do humans have in this arrangement – and do tech CEOs care? says Ed Newton-Rex, founder of Fairly Trained

A deeper dive on our findings, what went wrong, and future changes we’re making.

Recent research suggests our brain power is in decline. Is offloading our cognitive work to AI driving this trend?

And brain scans show that it's not all in your head.

Think about how you experience the world—you touch, you hear, you move.

If a tree could talk, what would it say? And what would you say to it?

Massive Blue is helping cops deploy AI-powered social media bots to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protesters.”

On prosocial short-form content, collective knowledge building potential of short form social media, and why your video essay could have been a tiktok

Hayao Miyasaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio known worldwide for their stunning, emotional, beautiful stories and movies. At the core of Studio Ghibli’s work is a deep engagement with questions of humanity. About what it means to be a human, about how to care for one another and the world […]

A mythopoetic take on the GTC keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

Spring is here and so is authoritarianism, and I recommend your serious attention to both. We may be at this resistance business for a while, so take care of yourself so you can keep taking care of human rights, truth, justice, and the natural world. What that means for each

The tiny municipality of Kamikatsu achieved an 81% recycling rate in 2016. Can it serve as a model of sustainable living for the world?

Decolonial Work: Pruning Bonsai vs. Metabolizing Decay Many approaches to decolonial work focus on the visible structures of knowledge, power, and legitimacy—pruning, shaping, or grafting elements …

Welcome to The Overview, a weekly newsletter in which Editor-in-Chief Willow Defebaugh turns to nature for lessons.

Aka, how to design online async learning experiences that learners can't afford to delegate to AI agents

What do we do when all looks lost, and disaster appears inevitable? We activate the trim tabs to push gently and intuitively against existing leverage points. Small, subtle moves can be powerful!

Josef Fares has found big success with co-operative two player games. Why aren't others doing the same?

One way of thinking about the job of a philosophy instructor is that it’s about teaching students to disagree well. Yet when it comes to some moral, social, and political issues, students may seem reluctant to voice their own views in the classroom, let alone argue about them there. To help encourage and facilitate constructive disagreement among their students, a pair of philosophers have developed a new teaching tool: an AI-based chat platform that has already shown some promising results, and that they are making available to other teachers for free. In the following guest post, Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella (both at Carnegie Mellon) introduce us to this technology, which they’ve named Sway. Sway: an AI-Based Teaching Tool to Promote Constructive Disagreement by Simon Cullen and Nicholas DiBella Over half of American college students are afraid to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict on campus, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Other important issues like abortion, gun control, and affirmative action aren’t that far behind. Clearly, campuses need more respectful, scaffolded environments where students can practice constructive disagreement, honing skills like intellectual humility, perspective-taking, and critical thinking. We created a new kind of chat platform—called Sway—to address this need. Sway connects pairs of students who disagree over topics chosen by their instructor and then uses AI to facilitate more open, reasonable conversations between them. Sway scaffolds discussions in two main ways: Discussion guidance. An AI Guide participates in every chat. We’ve designed Guide to de-escalate tense moments, ensure students aren’t talking past each other, and make sure everyone’s voice gets heard. More importantly, Guide aims to improve student reasoning: it poses challenging questions, prompts students to clarify vague or incomplete arguments, unearths implicit assumptions, detects tensions and inconsistencies, and provides relevant factual information. Charitable rephrasing. When a student composes a message that contains unconstructive language, the platform suggests a better way for the student to make their point. This feature aims to preserve the core meaning of the original message while providing immediate feedback to help students develop a habit of clear and respectful communication. Students are free to dismiss suggested rephrasings, but doing so will invoke Guide; this ensures the conversation doesn’t get derailed. You can see Sway..

I believe that art and other forms of creative expression, including pop culture, can serve as catalysts for social change. Often artists are among the first to sense changes in societal currents and speculate about the future, and we have the imagination to find creative ways to communicate those topics to broad audiences.

visualization of everything on earth