This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Every day or two for the past seven months, I've received a "personalized" email containing a bunch of recent, user-generated questions from the website Quora. "I caught my son playing his Xbox at 12:00 in the morning on a school night. As a result, I broke his console and now he won't talk to me. How can I tell him that it is his fault?"

Violet Crown City Church Pastor Jay Cooper said that using AI to conduct a service at his church did not capture the essential elements required for Christian worship. A prominent Black megachurch in New York City is being accused of discriminating against a woman who lost her bid to become its senior pastor. Yale Divinity School Professor Eboni Marshall Turman filed a lawsuit against Abyssinian Baptist Church alleging she was rejected from the final round of candidates applying to lead the church after the death of Rev. Calvin O. Butts III in 2022. Marshall Turman previously served as the late reverend's assistant and was the church's youngest female Assistant Minister from 2002-2012. In her Dec. 29 lawsuit, she accuses the church and search committee chair Valerie S. Grant of acting inappropriately by "pressing issues not broached with [Marshall Turman's] male counterparts" during the interview process, the Associated Press reported.

Artificial Intelligence is now recognized as a general-purpose technology with ample impact on human life. This work aims at understanding the evolution of AI and, in particular Machine learning, from the perspective of researchers' contributions to the field. In order to do so, we present several measures allowing the analyses of AI and machine learning researchers' impact, influence, and leadership over the last decades. This work also contributes, to a certain extent, to shed new light on the history and evolution of AI by exploring the dynamics involved in the field's evolution by looking at papers published at the flagship AI and machine learning conferences since the first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) held in 1969. AI development and evolution have led to increasing research output, reflected in the number of articles published over the last sixty years. We construct comprehensive citation collaboration and paper-author datasets and compute corresponding centrality measures to carry out our analyses. These analyses allow a better understanding of how AI has reached its current state of affairs in research. Throughout the process, we correlate these datasets with the work of the ACM Turing Award winners and the so-called two AI winters the field has gone through. We also look at self-citation trends and new authors' behaviors. Finally, we present a novel way to infer the country of affiliation of a paper from its organization. Therefore, this work provides a deep analysis of Artificial Intelligence history from information gathered and analysed from large technical venues datasets and suggests novel insights that can contribute to understanding and measuring AI's evolution.

Kara Frederick, tech director at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the need for regulations on artificial intelligence as lawmakers and tech titans discuss the potential risks. A Nobel Prize-winning economist is sounding the alarm about the future of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers amid the rapid development of artificial intelligence, arguing that many of the currently in-demand jobs could soon be obsolete. "The skills that are needed now -- to collect the data, collate it, develop it and use it to develop the next phase of AI, or more to the point, make AI more applicable for jobs -- will make the skills that are needed now obsolete because it will be doing the job," said Christopher Pissarides, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, in a recent interview, according to a report from Time. "Despite the fact that you see growth, they're still not as numerous as might be required to have jobs for all those graduates coming out with STEM because that's what they want to do." The comments come as 2023 became a breakthrough year for AI technology, which has rapidly developed and gained increased mainstream applications.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Google Bard have garnered significant attention in the academic community. Previous research has evaluated these LLMs for various applications such as generating programming exercises and solutions. However, these evaluations have predominantly been conducted by instructors and researchers, not considering the actual usage of LLMs by students. This study adopts a student-first approach to comprehensively understand how undergraduate computer science students utilize ChatGPT, a popular LLM, released by OpenAI. We employ a combination of student surveys and interviews to obtain valuable insights into the benefits, challenges, and suggested improvements related to ChatGPT. Our findings suggest that a majority of students (over 57%) have a convincingly positive outlook towards adopting ChatGPT as an aid in coursework-related tasks. However, our research also highlights various challenges that must be resolved for long-term acceptance of ChatGPT amongst students. The findings from this investigation have broader implications and may be applicable to other LLMs and their role in computing education.

A general strike has been called across the cities of the occupied West Bank in protest against the assassination of seven members of Hamas, including the deputy head of its political bureau, Saleh al-Arouri. The strike was called by Palestinian armed groups that asked people to stay home on Wednesday and only leave to march in demonstrations against the drone attack on the outskirts of Beirut. The slain men are Saleh al-Arouri, who was also the commander of the Qassam Brigades in the occupied West Bank; Samir Fendi, who commanded the Qassam Brigades in Lebanon; Azzam al-Aqraa, who commanded the Qassam Brigades in southern Lebanon; and members Mahmoud Shaheen, Mohammed al-Rayes, Mohammed Bashasha and Ahmed Hamoud. All seven will be buried in Lebanon. Funerals will be held for Hamoud and Shaheen on Wednesday in the Burj al-Barajneh camp for Palestinian refugees and Taalbaya, respectively.

More than a decade before an AI-powered chatbot could do your homework, help you make dinner or pass the bar exam, there was @Horse_ebooks. The primitive predecessor to today's chatbot renaissance began as a Twitter account in 2010, tweeting automated excerpts from ebooks that, decontextualized, took on unexpected and strangely poetic meanings. Purportedly a spambot, the account surfaced quotes from ebooks that went viral for their absurdist fragments – phrases like "Hello saxophone," "COULD THIS BE THE", and "Today we are lucky to be talking". It amassed more than 200,000 followers at its peak and now, despite being inactive for a decade, the account still holds 131,000 followers. Its most memorable quip – "everything happens so much" – still resonates today.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) plays an important role in our daily lives, particularly due to the enormous progress of Large Language Models (LLM). However, NLP has many fairness-critical use cases, e.g., as an expert system in recruitment or as an LLM-based tutor in education. Since NLP is based on human language, potentially harmful biases can diffuse into NLP systems and produce unfair results, discriminate against minorities or generate legal issues. Hence, it is important to develop a fairness certification for NLP approaches. We follow a qualitative research approach towards a fairness certification for NLP. In particular, we have reviewed a large body of literature on algorithmic fairness, and we have conducted semi-structured expert interviews with a wide range of experts from that area. We have systematically devised six fairness criteria for NLP, which can be further refined into 18 sub-categories. Our criteria offer a foundation for operationalizing and testing processes to certify fairness, both from the perspective of the auditor and the audited organization.

A Nobel Prize-winning labor market economist has cautioned younger generations against piling into studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, saying "empathetic" and creative skills may thrive in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, said that workers in certain IT jobs risk sowing their "own seeds of self-destruction" by advancing AI that will eventually take the same jobs in the future. While Pissarides is an optimist on AI's overall impact on the jobs market, he raised concerns for those taking STEM subjects hoping to ride the coattails of the technological advances. He said that despite rapid growth in the demand for STEM skills currently, jobs requiring more traditional face-to-face skills, such as in hospitality and healthcare, will still dominate the jobs market. "The skills that are needed now -- to collect the data, collate it, develop it, and use it to develop the next phase of AI or more to the point make AI more applicable for jobs -- will make the skills that are needed now obsolete because it will be doing the job," he said in an interview.

Partway through 2023, I caught up with a respected, high-ranking tech writer at another publication. We gossiped and nattered, and, a bit exasperated, empathised with each other: we were run ragged. The last two years have raised the stakes for what tech journalists do from serving a small niche community to covering stories that have an impact on the wider world. It's also down to the characters involved and what's at stake. Tech journalists have lived on fast-forward since Elon Musk first lodged his bid to take over Twitter – now X – in April 2022.