Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Homework faces an existential crisis. Has AI made it pointless? Students wait for a celebration of high test scores to begin at La Tijera Academy of Excellence in Inglewood on Wednesday. This is read by an automated voice.

When the chief executive of the Financial Times suggested at a media conference this summer that rival publishers might consider a "Nato for news" alliance to strengthen negotiations with artificial intelligence companies there was a ripple of chuckles from attendees. Yet Jon Slade's revelation that his website had seen a "pretty sudden and sustained" decline of 25% to 30% in traffic to its articles from readers arriving via internet search engines quickly made clear the serious nature of the threat the AI revolution poses. Queries typed into sites such as Google, which accounts for more than 90% of the search market, have been central to online journalism since its inception, with news providers optimising headlines and content to ensure a top ranking and revenue-raising clicks. But now Google's AI Overviews, which sit at the top of the results page and summarise responses and often negate the need to follow links to content, as well as its recently launched AI Mode tab that answers queries in a chatbot format, have prompted fears of a "Google zero" future where traffic referrals dry up. "This is the single biggest change to search I have seen in decades," says one senior editorial tech executive.

A couple of years ago, Grimes thought art might be dying. She worried that TikTok was overwhelming attention spans; that transgressive artists were becoming more sanitized; that gimmicky NFTs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club--digital cartoon monkeys which were selling for millions of dollars--were warping value systems. "I just went through this whole big'art isn't worth anything' internal existential crisis," the Canadian singer-songwriter says. "But I've come out the other end thinking, actually, maybe it's the main thing that matters. In the last year, I feel like things became way more about artists again." The rise of AI, Grimes believes, has played a role in that shift, perhaps paradoxically. Earlier this month, Grimes was honored at the TIME100 AI Impact Awards in Dubai for her role in shaping the present and future of the technology. While many other artists are terrified of AI and its potential to replace them, Grimes has embraced the technology, even releasing an AI tool allowing people to sing through her voice. Grimes' penchant for seriously engaging with what others fear or distrust makes her one of pop culture's most singular--and at times divisive--figures. But Grimes wears her contrarianism as a badge of honor, and doesn't hesitate to offer insights and perspectives on a variety of issues. "I'm so canceled that I basically have nothing left to lose," she says. She argues that hyper-partisan hysteria has consumed social media, and wishes people would have more measured, nuanced conversations, even with people that they disagree with. "A lot of people think I'm one way or the other, but my whole vibe is just like, I just want people to think well," she says.

As Robots become ever more important in our daily lives there's growing need for understanding how they're perceived by people. This study aims to investigate how the user perception of robots is influenced by displays of personality. Using LLMs and speech to text technology, we designed a within-subject study to compare two conditions: a personality-driven robot and a purely task-oriented, personality-neutral robot. Twelve participants, recruited from Socially Intelligent Robotics course at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, interacted with a robot Nao tasked with asking them a set of medical questions under both conditions. After completing both interactions, the participants completed a user experience questionnaire measuring their emotional states and robot perception using standardized questionnaires from the SRI and Psychology literature.

For a man funnelling billions into the development of AI, Elon Musk seems extremely concerned about the dangers of the technology. The tech billionaire said today that he forecasts a '10 to 20 per cent probability' of a scenario in which AI annihilates humanity. Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Musk told audiences that even AI's most positive outcomes would lead to an'existential crisis' for humanity. However, Musk also said that people should remain positive despite the impending risk of destruction. Musk said: 'The glass is 80% full. Look on the bright side.' Musk has been a long-standing critic of AI, often saying that unchecked development could lead to the destruction of humanity.

As impressive as they are, sometimes AI chatbots like ChatGPT can be really, really dumb. Leaning into that dumbness, and away from the potentially terrifying and easily abused power of an amoral intelligence hooked straight into the internet, is a goofy little chatbot called "2dumb2destroy." Instead of ginormous datasets, it's trained on crap like all seven "Police Academy" movies, Pauly Shore features, Ralph Wiggum quotes, and a bunch of other useless schlock. And thankfully, as its name suggests, it's probably too incompetent to ever do humanity any harm. "Everyone's talking about AI right now, and our impulse is, how can we make this stupid?"

Thanks to 1MM readers of this newsletter, I hope that you enjoy the latest AI news, and insights, don't miss the Web3 section at the end! Tesla's long-anticipated AI robot made its official debut by dancing and waving on stage at the company's AI Day. "The robot can actually do a lot more than we showed you. We just didn't want it to fall on its face," Elon Musk said. At last year's AI Day, Musk announced his plans for the bot by having a human in a robot costume dance onstage.

On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard's campus. As a purplish-red sun set, I sat brooding over my dataset on rat brains. I thought of the cold windowless rooms in downtown Boston, home to Harvard's high-performance computing center, where computer servers were holding on to a precious 48 terabytes of my data. I have recorded the 13 trillion numbers in this dataset as part of my Ph.D. experiments, asking how the visual parts of the rat brain respond to movement. Printed on paper, the dataset would fill 116 billion pages, double-spaced. When I recently finished writing the story of my data, the magnum opus fit on fewer than two dozen printed pages. Performing the experiments turned out to be the easy part. I had spent the last year agonizing over the data, observing and asking questions. The answers left out large chunks that did not pertain to the questions, like a map leaves out irrelevant details of a territory.

Named after mathematician and computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da is the world’s first humanoid AI robot artist that can create artistic pieces from sight using her robotic eyes and hands. Ai-Da…

A general artificial intelligence may be far in the future, but we have reasons to be extremely careful. For some years now, important public figures have raised concerns about the potential dangers of AI. The discourse revolves around the idea of superintelligent AI freeing itself from our control. Some skeptics argue that the scenario of AI "enslaving" us is so distantly dystopic that it isn't worth considering. For instance, Gary Marcus ridiculed it saying that "it's as if people in the fourteenth century were worrying about traffic accidents, when good hygiene might have been a whole lot more helpful."