Does AI actually belong in an art museum? For several months, something discomfiting has been creeping onto San Francisco's lampposts, bulletin boards, and restaurant windows: more and more signs, for run clubs and a July 4 parade and tacos, all of which are obviously entirely produced by generative AI. But does it bother me? A ChatGPT-generated poster for a garage sale seems legitimately dispiriting compared with a handwritten flyer, or even a haphazardly formatted Word document. What about a bodega using an AI-generated image of a hamburger instead of a random piece of clip art pulled from the internet?

Luckily, the cruel experiment never happened. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Cheetah the Chimp, Johnny Sheffield as Boy, Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan, and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane sit on a tree branch in an undated publicity still. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. I'm reclining in a large blue chair in a small dark room: earbuds in, tinted glasses on, eyelids closed. Clasping my head is a swimmer's cap of electrodes fastened under my chin. My fingers are wrapped in sensors.

AI's recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all AI agents are not yet creative enough to carry out genuinely innovative open-ended AI research, it seems. The AI industry's boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic data for training, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-improvement is on the horizon. But a new study suggests that it might take a while for us to get there. The researchers behind it found that AI agents are not yet capable of conducting open-ended AI research--free-form investigations that have no clear-cut answers and require judgment and taste, which may be integral to building self-improving AI.

These'Masturbation Consultants' Were Hired to Pleasure Themselves With AI Joi AI hired 10 people to masturbate using AI companions as part of a monthlong "wellness" study. The company claims the practice could help "solve male loneliness." For 28 days, Keshav had a new item on his daily to-do list: masturbate for research purposes. Both before and after self-pleasuring, he logged his mood, energy levels, cravings for various vices, and whether he was procrastinating. Keshav was taking part in AI companion company Joi AI's experiment assessing what happens if erotic self-stimulation becomes "an AI-guided wellness ritual."

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Booth is a reporter at TIME.

Why one of the world's best mathematicians is joining OpenAI One of the winners of this year's Fields Medal is headed to OpenAI. Last Thursday, Jacob Tsimerman was one of four mathematicians awarded the prestigious honor, which is sometimes called the Nobel Prize of mathematics. The same day that he won the Fields, Tsimerman announced that he would be going on leave from the University of Toronto to work on AI safety. As my colleague Rose Horowitch and I wrote last week, top AI companies now employ a range of academics, including physicists, philosophers, economists, and, of course, mathematicians . But given Tsimerman's renown, his decision in particular seemed to catch many people by surprise. "It's like hiring Lionel Messi as project manager," one machine-learning professor posted on X. Tsimerman's expertise is in number theory, and he won the Fields for his work on the André-Oort conjecture, among other contributions.

People often make decisions through "satisficing," gathering just enough information to make a satisfactory prediction of a likely outcome. A series of experimental games shows that people also employ satisficing to learn social rules and conventions. This finding offers new insight into social learning and reveals a key difference between how humans and LLMs make predictions. The premise of AI large language models is that any problem can be solved by vacuuming up as much information as possible, running it through probability models, and performing complex calculations to make predictions and come up with the optimal solution. Another premise behind LLMs is that they emulate the way human brains operate.

An evolutionary psychologist is challenging the popular understanding of kids and technology. W hen the 82-year-old psychologist Peter Gray describes the way he grew up, he punctuates the anecdotes by saying that modern parents would be arrested for letting a child have such fun. When he was 4 years old, he would walk to a store in Minneapolis to buy cigarettes for his grandmother. When he was 11, he would sometimes stay home from school in Hill City, Minnesota, to operate a newspaper printing press owned by his mother and stepfather. His parents were not arrested, and that's because the childhood they permitted him to have was basically normal at the time, even if his family did have a newspaper printing press in the house. As a boy, Peter was obsessed with fishing and baseball; neighborhood friends taught him how to ride his bike and catch grasshoppers. Although Gray's career as a scientist would begin with laboratory studies of rat hormones, he eventually found his way to writing about his childhood, in a fashion.

Occam's razor has lost its edge. Can we sharpen our search for truth? Seeking out the simplest, most elegant explanations has served scientists well for centuries, but cognitive scientist Marina Dubova's experiments are revealing better ways to uncover reality Limited by the knowledge of his time, the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy imagined that the planets and sun of our solar system orbited Earth. Every new observation that pushed against this image required a slight tweak to that theory, until centuries later Nicolaus Copernicus's reimagining toppled it once and for all. A more elegant explanation proposed that all the planets orbited the sun, kicking off a scientific revolution that changed our understanding of the entire universe.