For this week's Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled "Strange Playfellow." It was about an artificially intelligent machine named Robbie that acts as a companion for Gloria, a young girl. Asimov was not the first to explore such technology. In Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R.," which débuted in 1921 and introduced the term "robot," artificial men overthrow humanity, and in Edmond Hamilton's 1926 short story "The Metal Giants" machines heartlessly smash buildings to rubble.

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Turning text into videos is one of the latest AI skills creating a buzz. And Microsoft is offering a free way to transform your ideas into quick video clips. Introduced on Monday, the Bing Video Creator is now accessible through the Bing mobile app and is coming soon to Bing on the desktop and Copilot Search. "Bing Video Creator represents our efforts to democratize the power of AI video generation," Microsoft said in its blog post. "We believe creativity should be effortless and accessible to help you satisfy your answer-seeking process."

This week, I'm wondering what my first jobs in journalism would have been like had generative AI been around. In other news: Elon Musk leaves a trail of chaos, and influencers are selling the text they fed to AI to make art. Generative artificial intelligence may eliminate the job you got with your diploma still in hand, say executives who offered grim assessments of the entry-level job market last week in multiple forums. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which makes the multifunctional AI model Claude, told Axios last week that he believes that AI could cut half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send overall unemployment rocketing to 20% within the next five years. One explanation why an AI company CEO might make such a dire prediction is to hype the capabilities of his product.

NICE, a leading provider of contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions, today announced its new branding. The company has rebranded to NiCE, and one of the many factors driving this rebranding is emphasizing'intelligence' (a hallmark of AI) in customer conversations, with'i' marked in lower caps to stand out. During an exclusive analyst meeting, the company's leadership team also announced that the new brand will emphasize the human touch. Also: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your'super assistant' - what that means The emphasis on human touch is noteworthy because the company wants to reposition itself from being a leading CCaaS provider to an AI company under the leadership of new CEO, Scott Russell. Given that shift, the reference and emphasis on human touch are particularly important.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: "Veo 3 has proved hugely popular since its launch. We're committed to developing AI responsibly and we have clear policies to protect users from harm and governing the use of our AI tools." Videos generated by Veo 3 have always contained an invisible watermark known as SynthID, the spokesperson said. Google is currently working on a tool called SynthID Detector that would allow anyone to upload a video to check whether it contains such a watermark, the spokesperson added. However, this tool is not yet publicly available.

People may not be willing to pay for AI, but they're certainly willing to use it. How they use AI, though, seems to be changing. A new study from consultancy Accenture reveals some insights into how consumers perceive and use AI, and it's seen as a lot more than just a tool for work. Instead, AI is becoming a personal influencer that users want to have a relationship with. Also: OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be your'super assistant' - what that means The numbers from this study show that as AI improves, people are rapidly trusting it with their personal lives.

On June 3, Yoshua Bengio, the world's most-cited computer scientist, announced the launch of LawZero, a nonprofit that aims to create "safe by design" AI by pursuing a fundamentally different approach to major tech companies. Players like OpenAI and Google are investing heavily in AI agents--systems that not only answer queries and generate images, but can craft plans and take actions in the world. The goal of these companies is to create virtual employees that can do practically any job a human can, known in the tech industry as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Executives like Google DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis point to AGI's potential to solve climate change or cure disease as a motivator for its development. Bengio, however, says we don't need agentic systems to reap AI's rewards--it's a false choice.

The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. "I've only written nine," he says. "Always eager to please, it decided to invent three." The "nine inches" from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem.

Samsung users might have Perplexity-powered features on future devices. According to a report from Bloomberg, Samsung is "nearing a wide-ranging deal" to bring Perplexity search capabilities to the upcoming Galaxy S26 series. That could include the Perplexity app pre-loaded on Samsung devices, Perplexity search features within Samsung's web browser, and possibly integrating Perplexity with Samsung's Bixby virtual assistant. Samsung is also reportedly a major investor in Perplexity's latest funding round, which seeks to raise 500 million at a 14 billion valuation, said the outlet. Samsung was early to bring AI features to its devices, claiming the Galaxy S24 series was the "first AI phone."