Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Through a stroke of good fortune, Elon Musk's otherwise disastrous purchase of Twitter has turned into one of the great business acquisitions of all time. Buying control of a president was a start. What if the deal bought him something even more valuable? Musk's purchase of Twitter, which closed in the fall of 2022, has undergone an odyssey.

Around one in five people in the US believe that artificial intelligence is already sentient, while around 30 per cent think that artificial general intelligences (AGIs) capable of performing any task a human can are already in existence. Both beliefs are false, suggesting that the general public has a shaky grasp of the current state of AI – but does it matter?

As games like Baldur's Gate 3, Alan Wake II, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, and so many more marked 2023 as a year of instant hits and commercial success, developers were suffering. Layoffs rolled across the industry worldwide, knocking out a reported 6,500 jobs from studios like Amazon Games, Ubisoft, Epic Games, and Niantic. Roughly one-third of developers were affected either directly or indirectly by job losses in 2023, according to new data released today by organizers of the Game Developers Conference, and the industry impacts will be felt for months to come. Each year, GDC polls attendees about issues facing the industry, from layoffs to generative AI to diversity efforts. For the current survey, they polled 3,000 developers from game studios large and small.

For the past five years, engineers at Sony have been developing the PlayStation 5's answer to the Xbox Adaptive Controller, finally completing a triumvirate of accessibility-focused controllers for all three current-gen consoles, including the Nintendo-licensed Hori Flex. The palm-sized, turtle-shaped Access controller arrives three years into the lifecycle of the PS5, bringing with it an impressive amount of customization and flexibility. Flexibility that costs $90 at launch--$20 more than a DualSense, which is included with the PS5 as standard. In other words, flexibility comes at a cost. It's a price reflected in its Xbox and Switch counterparts with the Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC) slightly costlier at $99.99, though both are dwarfed by the Hori Flex's retail price of $249.99.

In a lengthy blog post last week, Turnitin Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli said the company wants to be transparent about its technology, but she didn't back off from deploying it. She said that for documents that its detection software thinks contain over 20 percent AI writing, the false positive rate for the whole document is less than 1 percent. But she didn't specify what the error rate is the rest of the time -- for documents its software thinks contain less than 20 percent AI writing. In such cases, Turnitin has begun putting an asterisk next to results "to call attention to the fact that the score is less reliable."

Last Monday, I began looking into why artificial intelligence is still so bad at creating hands. In recent weeks, lots of people have been sharing images that could be mistaken for photos of actual humans--until your eyes wander to the subjects' misshapen fingers. A.I.'s inability to create realistic hands is a long-standing issue, highlighting both that the technology needs refining and that fingers are extraordinary things. To compare various A.I. tools' hand skills, I entered this prompt into five different art generators: "A couple that has been together for 50 years holding hands after a fight." The hands were not stellar.

OpenAI is ready to start capitalizing on ChatGPT's buzz. On Wednesday, the firm announced it will offer a pilot $20-a-month subscription version of the chatbot called ChatGPT Plus, which gives priority access to users during peak time and faster responses. The free version remains available but is so popular that it is often at capacity or slow to give responses. In a clear push for commercialization, OpenAI also said it will roll out an API waitlist, different paid tiers, and business plans. OpenAI, it seems, believes enterprises will be willing to pay for its chatbot's capabilities.

As 2022 starts to draw to a close, we thought it was high time to take a look back over the most popular stories we've published in the past 12 months. From a biotech scoop to a thoughtful interrogation of whether digital replicas of our deceased loved ones can really help to ease the grieving process, our readers have enjoyed the full gamut of our technology coverage. If you missed them the first time round, here's our top five most-read stories of the year. We hope you keep reading into the new year, and beyond. The pig heart transplanted into an American patient earlier this year in a landmark operation carried a porcine virus that may have derailed the experiment and contributed to his death two months later.

To mitigate the negative effects of false information more effectively, the development of automated AI (artificial intelligence) tools assisting fact-checkers is needed. Despite the existing research, there is still a gap between the fact-checking practitioners' needs and pains and the current AI research. We aspire to bridge this gap by employing methods of information behavior research to identify implications for designing better human-centered AI-based supporting tools. In this study, we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with Central European fact-checkers. The information behavior and requirements on desired supporting tools were analyzed using iterative bottom-up content analysis, bringing the techniques from grounded theory. The most significant needs were validated with a survey extended to fact-checkers from across Europe, in which we collected 24 responses from 20 European countries, i.e., 62% active European IFCN (International Fact-Checking Network) signatories. Our contributions are theoretical as well as practical. First, by being able to map our findings about the needs of fact-checking organizations to the relevant tasks for AI research, we have shown that the methods of information behavior research are relevant for studying the processes in the organizations and that these methods can be used to bridge the gap between the users and AI researchers. Second, we have identified fact-checkers' needs and pains focusing on so far unexplored dimensions and emphasizing the needs of fact-checkers from Central and Eastern Europe as well as from low-resource language groups which have implications for development of new resources (datasets) as well as for the focus of AI research in this domain.

If you're not in the know, artificial intelligence and data science may sound like especially nerdy subsets of the already pocket-protector infused field of computer science. But anyone who is serious about expanding computer science education--a list that includes Fortune 500 company CEOs and policymakers on both sides of the aisle--should be thinking carefully about emphasizing AI, in which machines are trained to perform tasks that simulate some of what the human brain can do, and data science, in which students learn to record, store, and analyze data. That means making sure kids have access to well-designed resources to learn those subjects, bolstering professional development for those who teach them, exposing career counselors to information about how to help students pursue jobs in those fields, and much more. That imperative is at the heart of a list of recommendations by CSforALL, an education advocacy group presented last month at the International Society for Technology in Education's annual conference. Leigh Ann DeLyser, CSforALL's co-founder and executive director, spoke with Education Week about some big picture ideas around the push for a greater focus on AI and data science within computer science education.