In May, I asked Google's chatbot, Gemini, to write a birthday letter to my best friend. Within seconds, it spat out the most impressive piece of AI writing I have ever encountered. Instead of reading as soulless, machine-generated text, the letter felt unnervingly like something I might've actually written. "You're probably rolling your eyes," the letter read, after a sentence that my friend would most definitely have rolled his eyes at. All I had typed into the chatbot was a nine-word prompt containing my friend's first name and the age he was turning.

I'm Peter Singer AI," the avatar says. I am almost expecting it to continue, like a reincarnated Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to solve a problem. The problem I am trying to solve is why Peter Singer, the man who has been called the world's most influential living philosopher, has created a chatbot. And also, whether it is any good. Me: Why do you exist?

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Two winters ago, more than a year after my old college roommate and dear friend Paul was diagnosed with ALS, he started making pictures. By then, he was gradually losing the ability to do almost everything else. He could still walk at that point, often through the leafy corner of his Boston neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, where the old tree limbs cradled the houses and the streets were barely wide enough for a car, but only with the help of a cane. A condition of the disease called bulbar palsy slowed his tongue to the point his words wobbled enough that he sounded as if he were drunk. He could eat solid foods, albeit with some trouble, and could drink the Relyvrio medication powder he swirled with a spoon into a glass of water twice daily--a prescription for ALS that last year clinical trials suggested was ineffective, and a cocktail so bitter it made him physically wince--but he began coughing more and more as he labored to swallow anything at all.

The enduring mystery about William Henry Gates III is this: how did a precocious and sometimes obnoxious kid evolve into a billionaire tech lord and then into an elder statesman and philanthropist? This book gives us only the first part of the story, tracing Gates's evolution from birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft in 1975. For the next part of the story, we will just have to wait for the sequel. In a way, the volume's title describes it well. In the era before machine learning and AI, when computer programs were exclusively written by humans, the term "source code" meant something.

For years now, an online shop called Super Yaki has been selling T-shirts and hats printed with the message "Judy Greer should've been the lead." That there is a market for such merch is a testament to just how beloved an actress Greer is, despite her reputation for always playing the sidekick rather than the main character. This month, though, all those T-shirt wearers' wishes have come true, sort of: The 49-year-old receives top billing in a movie that debuted on more than 3,000 screens last week. If you're wondering why you haven't heard of it, here comes the catch: Greer's lead role is in a Christian family movie from the son of the guy who co-wrote the Left Behind books. Greer plays a mother who takes on the challenge of directing her church's annual Christmas play in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, directed by Dallas Jenkins, creator of Christian miniseries The Chosen, and based on the 1972 children's book of the same name.

Care and Feeding is Slate's parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? I've just been informed of an assignment my son "Patrick" was given in middle school. He's to select a topic from a pre-approved list, ask ChatGPT to write an essay about it, submit that essay to the teacher, and then fact-check the essay, looking for things the AI got wrong. I do not want Patrick doing this assignment.

Deception detection is gaining increasing interest due to ethical and security concerns. This paper explores the application of convolutional neural networks for the purpose of multimodal deception detection. We use a dataset built by interviewing 104 subjects about two topics, with one truthful and one falsified response from each subject about each topic. In particular, we make three main contributions. First, we extract linguistic and physiological features from this data to train and construct the neural network models. Second, we propose a fused convolutional neural network model using both modalities in order to achieve an improved overall performance. Third, we compare our new approach with earlier methods designed for multimodal deception detection. We find that our system outperforms regular classification methods; our results indicate the feasibility of using neural networks for deception detection even in the presence of limited amounts of data.

Kurt "The CyberGuy" Knutsson explains how you can keep unwanted rodents from entering through the cat flap. Despite rising concerns over artificial intelligence, pet owners may have actually found a new best friend in AI for their best friend. Cats are known to be proud predators who often show their affection and prowess through hunting, killing and bringing their prey back home. While a lovely gesture, this primal feline habit often leaves bewildered pet owners with bloody messes or partial or fully live birds, rodents and bugs in their homes. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK VIDEO TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER Many pet owners love their furry companions, but they also want to keep their homes clean and safe from unwanted visitors.

Tucker, the story's canine protagonist, is the center of his owner Caro's world. When Caro buys an A.I.-enabled dog trainer that promises to help both her and Tucker live their best lives, everything starts to fall into place--the A.I. takes care of Tucker when he's sick, trains him to walk without a leash, and even helps Caro get a girlfriend. But as Tucker's bond with the A.I. deepens, optimizing for their best lives starts to mean something much different than what Caro originally had in mind. After the story, Maddie asks Andrew about how his own experiences as a dog owner--and a pediatric neurologist--influenced the story. Plus, Maddie talks with canine behavioral scientist Clive Wynne, who wrote a response essay to Andrew's story, about whether a dog could really fall in love with a robot.

In the 1990 fantasy drama - Truly, Madly, Deeply, lead character Nina, (Juliet Stevenson), is grieving the recent death of her boyfriend Jamie (Alan Rickman). Sensing her profound sadness, Jamie returns as a ghost to help her process her loss. If you've seen the film, you'll know that his reappearance forces her to question her memory of him and, in turn, accept that maybe he wasn't as perfect as she'd remembered. Here in 2023, a new wave of AI-based "grief tech" offers us all the chance to spend time with loved ones after their death -- in varying forms. But unlike Jamie (who benevolently misleads Nina), we're being asked to let artificial intelligence serve up a version of those we survive.