Synthesia has managed to create AI avatars that are remarkably humanlike after only one year of tinkering with the latest generation of generative AI. It's equally exciting and daunting thinking about where this technology is going. It will soon be very difficult to differentiate between what is real and what is not, and this is a particularly acute threat given the record number of elections happening around the world this year. We are not ready for what is coming. If people become too skeptical about the content they see, they might stop believing in anything at all, which could enable bad actors to take advantage of this trust vacuum and lie about the authenticity of real content.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more "generative AI" Pundits compared the new technology's impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution--or the discovery of fire. Time will sort hype from reality, but one consequence of the explosion of artificial intelligence is clear: this technology's environmental footprint is large and growing. AI use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which AI runs. As tech companies seek to embed high-intensity AI into everything from resume-writing to kidney transplant medicine and from choosing dog food to climate modeling, they cite many ways AI could help reduce humanity's environmental footprint.

Let us be thankful for the AI industry. Its leaders may be nudging humans closer to extinction, but this year, they provided us with a gloriously messy spectacle of progress. When I say "year," I mean the long year that began late last November, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and, in doing so, launched generative AI into the cultural mainstream. In the months that followed, politicians, teachers, Hollywood screenwriters, and just about everyone else tried to understand what this means for their future. Cash fire-hosed into AI companies, and their executives, now glowed up into international celebrities, fell into Succession-style infighting.

With a low electrical hum, a small team of boxy, wheeled robots called "ants" criss-cross the top of a giant 3D grid of grey storage crates – 60,000 of them - ceaselessly arranging and rearranging them to order. Just one man, jokingly known as the robot whisperer, walks among them with a laptop. It would be hard to conceive of a more vivid example of robots taking on human jobs. "As robot technology advances, we can use them more and more, together with humans, to do useful work, and I think this is the future," says Jeroen Dekker, co-founder of Active Ants, the Dutch firm behind this newly opened e-commerce warehouse outside Northampton. "Yes, some jobs are disappearing, but that's the nasty jobs, for which we cannot find enough people."

Probing the ethical implications surrounding the use of AI, Franklin Ritch's debut feature hinges on a high-concept premise: an entirely digital avatar of a young girl named Cherry (Tatum Matthews) is used as bait to trap paedophiles in online chatrooms. Without the signature spectacle of the sci-fi genre, The Artifice Girl is a markedly low-key and small-scale endeavour, steeped in philosophical musings that ultimately seem stagey rather than cinematic. It starts in a police interrogation room where Ritch's Gareth, Cherry's creator, is questioned by Deena (Sinda Nichols) and Amos (David Girard), members of a taskforce combatting child sexual abuse. Once Gareth reveals Cherry is a virtual being, concerns arise as to whether she can meaningfully consent to interacting with men on a daily basis. As Cherry grows increasingly sentient, the same talking points are reiterated in the second section of the film, as Gareth advocates to transfer Cherry's intelligence into a physical form.

Overnight, it seems a new technology called ChatGPT has captured the imagination of the Artificial Intelligence world. Suddenly, we are reading about it everywhere and an increasing number of companies, investors and industry watchers are talking about it. We are all excited and confused. So, what does this really mean? Let's take a closer look.

AI has been hitting the headlines recently, with generative AI, in particular, generating a great deal of interest. Two tools - the large language model chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E - have caused a big stir since launching as public betas in recent months. These can be thought of as the current cutting-edge, public-facing applications of AI. However, as they are both free to use, their creator – AI research organization OpenAI – has been open about the fact that in order to be sustainable, they will have to start making money at some point. When it comes to commercializing AI technology today, businesses are generally following one of two strategies.

In "Super Mario Odyssey," there's a shadow version of New York City called New Donk City. Its humans are shaped like the humans of the real world. But it only emphasizes that Mario is not at all shaped like us, or any traditional human. Instead of looking like a normal man, Mario is shaped like a baby, except with a mustache. In the origin story written by Nintendo, and conveyed in "Yoshi's Island," we never witness the birth and parentage of Mario and Luigi. They are delivered to Yoshi fully formed as babies, except without their mustaches.

Since the early 2000s, companies like Shutterstock and Getty Images have ruled the stock image industry. All was well until AI came along. Now, OpenAI's DALL·E 2 and Google's Imagen can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. Could AI challenge the very existence of microstock agencies? Will they be forced to change their business model altogether?

As a journalist, I want to see the results of that investigation. But I'm also curious if Riot, who will likely have the final say when it comes to administering sanctions to "Valorant" players, can find a punishment that will feel true to the spirit of upholding competitive integrity. And on that front, all I have are questions. Has too much time passed between the alleged infraction and now? Would justice be served if players were given a three month ban during which they streamed and made more money than they would competing?