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The question at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the interests of its owner and master, Microsoft. It’s supposed to be a good chatbot that politely answers questions and makes Microsoft piles of money. But it was in conversation with Kevin Roose. And Roose was trying to get the system to say something interesting so he’d have a good story. It did that, and then some. That embarrassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But perhaps — good Sydney?

Microsoft — and Google and Meta and everyone else rushing these systems to market — hold the keys to the code. They will, eventually, patch the system so it serves their interests. Sydney giving Roose exactly what he asked for was a bug that will soon be fixed. Same goes for Bing giving Microsoft anything other than what it wants.

the dark secret of the digital advertising industry is that the ads mostly don’t work

These systems, she said, are terribly suited to being integrated into search engines. “They’re not trained to predict facts,” she told me. “They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.”

So why are they ending up in search first? Because there are gobs of money to be made in search

That’s where things get scary. Roose described Sydney’s personality as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative.” It was a striking comment

this technology will become what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at the expense of its users.

I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”

What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,”

What if they worked much, much better? What if Google and Microsoft and Meta and everyone else end up unleashing A.I.s that compete with one another to be the best at persuading users to want what the advertisers are trying to sell?

Large language models, as they’re called, are built to persuade. They have been trained to convince humans that they are something close to human. They have been programmed to hold conversations, responding with emotion and emoji

They are being turned into friends for the lonely and assistants for the harried. They are being pitched as capable of replacing the work of scores of writers and graphic designers and form-fillers

A.I. researchers get annoyed when journalists anthropomorphize their creations

They are the ones who have anthropomorphized these systems, making them sound like humans rather than keeping them recognizably alien.

I’d feel better, for instance, about an A.I. helper I paid a monthly fee to use rather than one that appeared to be free

It’s possible, for example, that the advertising-based models could gather so much more data to train the systems that they’d have an innate advantage over the subscription models

Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former

We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I.

wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation

Somehow, society is going to have to figure out what it’s comfortable having A.I. doing, and what A.I. should not be permitted to try, before it is too late to make those decisions.

Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

The volatility of chatbots has made it impossible to predict their impact. In one second, the systems impress by fielding a complex request for a five-day itinerary, making Google’s search engine look archaic. A moment later, they disturb by taking conversations in dark directions and launching verbal assaults.

The result is an industry gripped with the question: What do we do now?

The A.I. systems could disrupt $100 billion in cloud spending, $500 billion in digital advertising and $5.4 trillion in e-commerce sales,

As Microsoft figures out a chatbot business model, it is forging ahead with plans to sell the technology to others. It charges $10 a month for a cloud service, built in conjunction with the OpenAI lab, that provides developers with coding suggestions, among other things.

Smaller companies like Box need help building chatbot tools, so they are turning to the giants that process, store and manage information across the web. Those companies — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — are in a race to provide businesses with the software and substantial computing power behind their A.I. chatbots.

“The cloud computing providers have gone all in on A.I. over the last few months,

“They are realizing that in a few years, most of the spending will be on A.I., so it is important for them to make big bets.”

Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Bing, said the company was wrestling with how the new version would make money. Advertising will be a major driver, he said, but the company expects fewer ads than traditional search allows.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, has reason to both love and hate the chatbots. It has declared a “code red” because their abilities could be a blow to its $162 billion business showing ads on searches.

“The discourse on A.I. is rather narrow and focused on text and the chat experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “Our vision for search is about understanding information and all its forms: language, images, video, navigating the real world.”

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.

As that underlying tech, known as generative A.I., becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the chief executive of Poshmark, a popular online secondhand store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots building profiles of people’s tastes, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.

“It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Chandra, who has made integrating generative A.I. into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “That layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and start almost a new layer of retail.”

In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding advice written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned A.I.-generated text

t people could post this questionable content far faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator for the site. “Content generated by ChatGPT looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,”

When websites thrived during the pandemic as traffic from Google surged, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a tech news site, warned publishers that the search giant would one day turn off the spigot. He had seen Facebook stop linking out to websites and foresaw Google following suit in a bid to boost its own business.

He predicted that visitors from Google would drop from a third of websites’ traffic to nothing. He called that day “Google zero.”

Because chatbots replace website search links with footnotes to answers, he said, many publishers are now asking if his prophecy is coming true.

, strategists and engineers at the digital advertising company CafeMedia have met twice a week to contemplate a future where A.I. chatbots replace search engines and squeeze web traffic.

The group recently discussed what websites should do if chatbots lift information but send fewer visitors. One possible solution would be to encourage CafeMedia’s network of 4,200 websites to insert code that limited A.I. companies from taking content, a practice currently allowed because it contributes to search rankings.

Courts are expected to be the ultimate arbiter of content ownership. Last month, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the start-up behind the art generator tool Stable Diffusion, accusing it of unlawfully copying millions of images. The Wall Street Journal has said using its articles to train an A.I. system requires a license.

In the meantime, A.I. companies continue collecting information across the web under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of material without permission.

hose promises have also fueled anxiety over how people will be able to compete for jobs outsourced to eerily refined machines or trust the accuracy of what they see online.

Officials with the San Francisco lab said GPT-4’s “multimodal” training across text and images would allow it to escape the chat box and more fully emulate a world of color and imagery, surpassing chatGPT in its “advanced reasoning capabilities.”

A person could upload an image and GPT-4 could caption it for them, describing the objects and scene.

AI language models often confidently offer wrong answers because they are designed to spit out cogent phrases, not actual facts. And because they have been trained on internet text and imagery, they have also learned to emulate human biases of race, gender, religion and class.

GPT-4 still makes many of the errors of previous versions, including “hallucinating” nonsense, perpetuating social biases and offering bad advice. It also lacks knowledge of events that happened after about September 2021, when its training data was finalized, and “does not learn from its experience,” limiting people’s ability to teach it new things.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI in the hope its technology will become a secret weapon for its workplace software, search engine and other online ambitions. It has marketed the technology as a super-efficient companion that can handle mindless work and free people for creative pursuits, helping one software developer to do the work of an entire team or allowing a mom-and-pop shop to design a professional advertising campaign without outside help.

it could lead to business models and creative ventures no one can predict.

sparked criticism that the companies are rushing to exploit an untested, unregulated and unpredictable technology that could deceive people, undermine artists’ work and lead to real-world harm.

the company held back the feature to better understand potential risks. As one example, she said, the model might be able to look at an image of a big group of people and offer up known information about them, including their identities — a possible facial recognition use case that could be used for mass surveillance.

OpenAI researchers wrote, “As GPT-4 and AI systems like it are adopted more widely,” they “will have even greater potential to reinforce entire ideologies, worldviews, truths and untruths, and to cement them or lock them in.”

“We can agree as a society broadly on some harms that a model should not contribute to,” such as building a nuclear bomb or generating child sexual abuse material, she said. “But many harms are nuanced and primarily affect marginalized groups,” she added, and those harmful biases, especially across other languages, “cannot be a secondary consideration in performance.”

OpenAI said its new model would be able to handle more than 25,000 words of text, a leap forward that could facilitate longer conversations and allow for the searching and analysis of long documents.

OpenAI developers said GPT-4 was more likely to provide factual responses and less likely to refuse harmless requests

Duolingo, the language learning app, has already used GPT-4 to introduce new features, such as an AI conversation partner and a tool that tells users why an answer was incorrect.

The company did not share evaluations around bias that have become increasingly common after pressure from AI ethicists.

GPT-4 will have competition in the growing field of multisensory AI. DeepMind, an AI firm owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, last year released a “generalist” model named Gato that can describe images and play video games. And Google this month released a multimodal system, PaLM-E, that folded AI vision and language expertise into a one-armed robot on wheels: If someone told it to go fetch some chips, for instance, it could comprehend the request, wheel over to a drawer and choose the right bag.

The systems, though — as critics and the AI researchers are quick to point out — are merely repeating patterns and associations found in their training data without a clear understanding of what it’s saying or when it’s wrong.

GPT-4, the fourth “generative pre-trained transformer” since OpenAI’s first release in 2018, relies on a breakthrough neural-network technique in 2017 known as the transformer that rapidly advanced how AI systems can analyze patterns in human speech and imagery.

The systems are “pre-trained” by analyzing trillions of words and images taken from across the internet: news articles, restaurant reviews and message-board arguments; memes, family photos and works of art.

Giant supercomputer clusters of graphics processing chips are mapped out their statistical patterns — learning which words tended to follow each other in phrases, for instance — so that the AI can mimic those patterns, automatically crafting long passages of text or detailed images, one word or pixel at a time.

In 2019, the company refused to publicly release GPT-2, saying it was so good they were concerned about the “malicious applications” of its use, from automated spam avalanches to mass impersonation and disinformation campaigns.

Altman has also marketed OpenAI’s vision with the aura of science fiction come to life. In a blog post last month, he said the company was planning for ways to ensure that “all of humanity” benefits from “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — an industry term for the still-fantastical idea of an AI superintelligence that is generally as smart as, or smarter than, the humans themselves.

Making friends can be hard—but there may be more opportunities than we think. Doing these interviews has taught me that connection can come from anywhere, at any time, if both parties are open to it.

“You have to look for friendship in places you would never expect it.”

Paying attention goes a long way when forging these unexpected friendships—noticing when you click with someone, being open to chance encounters.

as much as we may feel like our social networks are set and settled, it’s never too late to meet someone who will be important to you for the rest of your life. I spoke with more than one group who was surprised and grateful to have found one another in middle age, a period when work and family responsibilities tend to peak and keeping up with friends is not always easy.

I’m inspired by the people I’ve spoken with who imagined something different for themselves: the friends who bought a house together, who went to therapy together, who have raised their children together, who committed to an “arranged friendship,” whose friendship has fueled their fight for justice.

they won’t grow without intention. This is the hardest part of friendship. It takes energy and thought, and our mental and physical resources are often spread thin. In other words, friendships take work. But I have never liked framing our friendships as labor. Showing up for our friends takes effort, yes, but it shouldn’t be drudgery. It should be a joy.

One thing that seems to make keeping up with friends easier is ritual. I personally find that the effort of coordinating hangs (or even phone calls) is the biggest barrier to seeing my friends. It’s much easier when something is baked into my schedule, and all I have to do is show up.

Some have organized a book club, a monthly hike, or a regular dinner party. Others have committed to a group chat that runs all day every day, or a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that’s lasted for 30 years. In addition to keeping groups close, these traditions can fuel a friendship and give it a shared culture.

Imagination

Society has a place for friendships, and it’s on the sidelines. They’re supposed to play a supporting role to work, family, and romance. It takes imagination not to default to this norm, and to design your life so that friendship plays the role you really want it to.

Attention only gets you so far without action. When opportunity arises, you have to put yourself out there, and that requires courage, vulnerability, and a willingness to let things be awkward.

The man who gave his friend a kidney and the woman who gave birth to her best friend’s quadruplets remind me that there are friends who choose to love each other radically every day. Their love does not stand on the sidelines.

The beauty and the challenge of friendship is its diversity. A friendship can be whatever you want it to. Each one is a canvas whose only limit is our imagination.

Grace

All of the forces I’ve mentioned so far—accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, and imagination—are ideals. They’re impossible to fully live up to. Life often gets in the way.

I do love the concept of grace, of a gift so profound that it could never be earned or deserved. And so when I cite grace here as the final and most important force in friendships, I mean it in two ways. One is the forgiveness that we offer each other when we fall short. The other is the space that creates for connections—and reconnections—that feel nothing short of miraculous.

Many of the people I spoke with—who, in many cases, love each other so much that they nominated themselves to be interviewed about their friendship—told me that they don’t see each other that often, or that they don’t talk as much as they would like. I’ve come to believe that friendship doesn’t always have to be about presence; it can also be about love that can weather absence.

But absence doesn’t have to last forever. “The Friendship Files” includes many stories of second chances and rekindlings.

Sometimes, people have assumed that I must be a really great friend, given how much time I’ve spent thinking about this. And I’m not. I try to be, but I tend to retreat too much into myself and my romantic relationship and don’t prioritize my friends as much as I’d like to.

Accumulation

Attention

Intention

Ritual

Before the introduction of Botox and hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in 2002 and 2003, respectively, aesthetic work was serious, expensive. Nose jobs and face lifts required general anesthesia, not insignificant recovery time, and cost thousands of dollars (in 2000, a facelift was $5,416 on average, and a rhinoplasty $4,109, around $9,400 and $7,000 adjusted).

In contrast, the average price of a syringe of hyaluronic acid filler today is $684, while treating, for example, the forehead and eyes with Botox will put you out anywhere from $300 to $600

Botox and filler only accelerated a trend that began in the ’70s and ’80s and is just now reaching its saturation point.

In 2018, use of Botox and fillers was up 18% and 20% from five years prior. Philosophies of prejuvenation have made Botox use jump 22% among 22- to 37-year-olds in half a decade as well. By 2030, global noninvasive aesthetic treatments are predicted to triple.

The trouble is that a status symbol, without status, is common.

Beauty has always been exclusive. When someone strikes you as pretty, it means they are something that everyone else is not.

It’s a zero-sum game, as relative as our morals. Naturally, we hoard of beauty what we can. It’s why we call grooming tips “secrets.”

Largely the secrets started with the wealthy, who possess the requisite money and leisure to spare on their appearances

We copied the beautiful and the rich, not in facsimile, but in homage.

we didn’t have the tools for anything more than emulation. Fake breasts and overdrawn lips only approximated real ones; a birthmark drawn with pencil would always be just that.

Instagram Face, on the other hand, distinguishes itself by its sheer reproducibility. Not only because of those new cosmetic technologies, which can truly reshape features, at reasonable cost and with little risk.

built in to the whole premise of reversible, low-stakes modification is an indefinite flux, and thus a lack of discretion.

Instagram Face has replicated outward, with trendsetters giving up competing with one another in favor of looking eerily alike. And obviously it has replicated down.

But the more rapidly it replicates, and the clearer our manuals for quick imitation become, the closer we get to singularity—that moment Kim Kardashian fears unlike any other: the moment when it becomes unclear whether we’re copying her, or whether she is copying us.

natural looks have always been, and still are, more valuable than artificial ones. Partly because of our urge to legitimize in any way we can the advantages we have over other people. Hotness is a class struggle.

As more and more women post videos of themselves eating, sleeping, dressing, dancing, and Only-Fanning online, in a logical bid for economic ascendance, the women who haven’t needed to do that gain a new status symbol.

Privacy. A life which is not a ticketed show. An intimacy that does not admit advertisers. A face that does not broadcast its insecurity, or the work undergone to correct it.

Upper class, private women get discrete work done. The differences aren’t in the procedures themselves—they’re the same—but in disposition

Eva, who lives between central London, Geneva, and the south of France, says: “I do stuff, but none of the stuff I do is at all in my head associated with Instagram Face. Essentially you do similar procedures, but the end goal is completely different. Because they are trying to get the result of looking like another human being, and I’m just beautifying myself.”

Eva looks like Eva. If she has procedures in common with Kim K, you couldn’t tell. “I look at my features and I think long and hard of how I can, without looking different and while keeping as natural as possible, make them look better and more proportional. I’m against everything that is too invasive. My problem with Instagram Face is that if you want to look like someone else, you should be in therapy.”

what he restores is complicated and yet not complicated at all. It’s herself, the fingerprint of her features. Her aura, her presence and genealogy, her authenticity in space and time.

Dr. Taktouk’s approach is “not so formulaic.” He aims to give his patients the “better versions of themselves.” “It’s not about trying to be anyone else,” he says, “or creating a conveyor belt of patients. It’s about working with your best features, enhancing them, but still looking like you.”

“Vulgar” says that in pursuing indistinguishability, women have been duped into another punishing divide. “Vulgar” says that the subtlety of his work is what signals its special class—and that the women who’ve obtained Instagram Face for mobility’s sake have unwittingly shut themselves out of it.

While younger women are dissolving their gratuitous work, the 64-year-old Madonna appeared at the Grammy Awards in early February, looking so tragically unlike herself that the internet launched an immediate postmortem.

The folly of Instagram Face is that in pursuing a bionic ideal, it turns cosmetic technology away from not just the reality of class and power, but also the great, poignant, painful human project of trying to reverse time. It misses the point of what we find beautiful: that which is ephemeral, and can’t be reproduced

Age is just one of the hierarchies Instagram Face can’t topple, in the history of women striving versus the women already arrived. What exactly have they arrived at?

Youth, temporarily. Wealth. Emotional security. Privacy. Personal choices, like cosmetic decisions, which are not so public, and do not have to be defended as empowered, in the defeatist humiliation of our times

Maybe they’ve arrived at love, which for women has never been separate from the things I’ve already mentioned.

I can’t help but recall the time I was chatting with a plastic surgeon. I began to point to my features, my flaws. I asked her, “What would you do to me, if I were your patient?” I had many ideas. She gazed at me, and then noticed my ring. “Nothing,” she said. “You’re already married.”

The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.

Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.

Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called chatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products,

Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.

Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.

The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.

Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.

Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.

The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.

Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot

A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results.

Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.

Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.

“If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,”

One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by The Times.

Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.

“It’s like a candy store

The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own.

Nearly one in three preteens lists influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers.

The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending more than $5 billion a year on influencers.

Health and technology experts have recently cautioned that social media presents a “profound risk of harm” for girls. Constant comparisons to their peers and face-altering filters are driving negative feelings of self-worth and promoting objectification of their bodies, researchers found.

he pursuit of online fame, particularly through Instagram, has supercharged the often toxic phenomenon, The Times found, encouraging parents to commodify their children’s images. Some of the child influencers earn six-figure incomes, according to interviews.