The Pew survey results suggest that ChatGPT, at least for now, has not become the disruptive phenomenon in schools that proponents and critics forecast. Among the subset of teens who said they had heard about the chatbot, the vast majority -- 81 percent -- said they had not used it to help with their schoolwork. "Most teens do have some level of awareness of ChatGPT," said Jeffrey Gottfried, an associate director of research at Pew. "But this is not a majority of teens who are incorporating it into their schoolwork quite yet." Cheating has long been rampant in schools. In surveys of more than 70,000 high school students between 2002 and 2015, 64 percent said they had cheated on a test.

Whoever had the idea to combine three titans of the modern mass entertainment universe – Lego, Fortnite and Minecraft – into one experience is surely feeling rather smug right now. Launched on Thursday, Lego Fortnite is a new mode available within Fortnite, but it's essentially a whole new game – an open-world crafting survival sim in the unmistakable style of, yes, Minecraft. Players enter a procedurally generated world, unique to them, which somehow combines the aesthetic features of Lego and Fortnite, with its luscious, bright colours and toy-like charm. Like Minecraft, the main draw is the survival mode, where you can explore the wilderness, build houses, grow crops, tend to animals and combat a range of beasties. You start with a very limited set of building instructions and can only make a simple hut, but as you progress, gathering resources such as wood, granite and wool, you get access to more building materials.

The biggest fight of the generative AI revolution is headed to the courtroom--and no, it's not about the latest boardroom drama at OpenAI. Book authors, artists, and coders are challenging the practice of teaching AI models to replicate their skills using their own work as a training manual. But as image generators and other tools have proven able to impressively mimic works in their training data, and the scale and value of training data has become clear, creators are increasingly crying foul. At LiveWIRED in San Francisco, the 30th anniversary event for WIRED magazine, two leaders of that nascent resistance sparred with a defender of the rights of AI companies to develop the technology unencumbered. From left to right: WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs discussed creators' rights and AI with Mike Masnick, Mary Rasenberger, and Matthew Butterick at LiveWIRED in San Francisco,.

Inflatable squishy tubes could be used to build soft robots that move when air is pushed through them. Robotic hands made from metal frequently end up crushing delicate objects like fruit when trying to pick them up, so researchers often experiment with making them out of gentler materials. Pierre-Thomas Brun at Princeton University and his colleagues have found that soft, inflatable tubes may just do the trick. The team filled various moulds with a rubber-like material called polyvinyl siloxane that starts off liquid but becomes solid and elastic as time passes.

OpenAI fired its charismatic chief executive, Sam Altman, on 17 November -- but has now reinstated him.Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty OpenAI -- the company behind the blockbuster artificial intelligence (AI) bot ChatGPT -- has been consumed by frenzied changes for almost a week. On 17 November, the company fired its charismatic chief executive, Sam Altman. Five days, and much drama, later, OpenAI announced that Altman would return with an overhaul of the company's board. The debacle has thrown the spotlight on an ongoing debate about how commercial competition is shaping the development of AI systems, and how quickly AI can be deployed ethically and safely. "The push to retain dominance is leading to toxic competition. It's a race to the bottom," says Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a policy-research organization based in New York City.

The artificial-intelligence model that powers ChatGPT can create superficially plausible scientific data sets.Credit: Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Researchers have used the technology behind the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT to create a fake clinical-trial data set to support an unverified scientific claim. In a paper published in JAMA Ophthalmology on 9 November1, the authors used GPT-4 -- the latest version of the large language model on which ChatGPT runs -- paired with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that incorporates the programming language Python and can perform statistical analysis and create data visualizations. The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated -- wrongly -- that one treatment is better than the other. "Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported by real original data, and it is also opposite or in the other direction compared to the evidence that are available," says study co-author Giuseppe Giannaccare, an eye surgeon at the University of Cagliari in Italy. The ability of AI to fabricate convincing data adds to concern among researchers and journal editors about research integrity.

His experience was a sign of how self-driving taxis are increasingly starting to take a toll on city services. In San Francisco and Austin, Texas, where passengers can hail autonomous vehicles, the cars have slowed down emergency response times, caused accidents, increased congestion and added to the workloads of local officials, said police officers, firefighters and other city employees. In San Francisco, more than 600 self-driving vehicle incidents were documented from June 2022 to June 2023, according to the city's Municipal Transportation Agency. After one episode where a driverless car from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, ran over and dragged a pedestrian, California regulators ordered the company to suspend its service last month. Kyle Vogt, Cruise's chief executive, resigned on Sunday.

The founder of General Motors-owned Cruise has stepped down less than a month after the driverless car company paused operations after an accident and the loss of permission to operate in California. Kyle Vogt did not give a reason for his departure from the company that he started in 2013 before it was bought by the US automotive manufacturer General Motors in 2016. San Francisco-based Cruise is seen as one of the most advanced autonomous driving companies in the world, and it had started charging passengers for journeys in some US cities. However, it paused all of its driverless cars on 26 October after California regulators revoked its licence to transport passengers without a driver after an accident on 2 October. The company recalled nearly 1,000 vehicles to update their software after the incident.

To overcome this, a team has combined inkjet printing with an error-correction system guided by machine vision, to allow them to print sophisticated multi-material objects. They used this method to make a bio-inspired robotic hand that combines soft and rigid plastics to make mechanical bones, ligaments, and tendons, as well as a pump based on a mammalian heart. Citizen-scientists help identify an astronomical object that blurs the line between asteroid and comet, and how a Seinfeld episode helped scientists to distinguish the brain regions involved in understanding and appreciating humour. Type 2 diabetes affects hundreds of millions of people around the world and represents a significant burden on healthcare systems. But behaviour change programmes -- also known as lifestyle interventions -- could potentially play a large role in preventing people from developing type 2 diabetes. This week in Nature a new paper assesses how effective this kind of intervention might be.

Last month, educational psychologist Ronald Beghetto asked a group of graduate students and teaching professionals to discuss their work in an unusual way. As well as talking to each other, they conversed with a collection of creativity-focused chatbots that Beghetto had designed and that will soon be hosted on a platform run by his institute, Arizona State University (ASU). The bots are based on the same artificial-intelligence (AI) technology that powers the famous and conversationally fluent ChatGPT. Beghetto prompts the bots to take on various personas to encourage creativity -- for example, by deliberately challenging someone's assumptions. One student discussed various dissertation topics with the chatbots. Lecturers talked about how to design classes.