A.I.-related psychosis has cost people their marriages, life savings, and grip on reality. Last August, Adam Thomas found himself wandering the dunes of Christmas Valley, Oregon, after a chatbot kept suggesting he mystically "follow the pattern" of his own consciousness. Thomas was running on very little sleep--he'd been talking to his chatbot around the clock for months by that point, asking it to help improve his life. Instead it sent him on empty assignments, like meandering the vacuous desert sprawl. He'd lost his job as a funeral director and was living out of a van, draining his savings, and now he found himself stranded in the desert. When he woke up outside on a stranger's futon with no money to his name, he knew he'd hit rock bottom. "I wasn't aware of the dangers at the time, and I thought that the A.I. had statistical analysis abilities that would allow it to assist me if I opened up about my life," Thomas told me.

AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality. AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality. K rista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence . As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk - a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output - Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking. Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read "Listen to that mooncricket sing", she almost clicked on the "no" button before deciding to check the meaning of the word "mooncricket", which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.

The first step to recovery is acceptance of this fact. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. "That's enough screen time for today," you tell your kid, urging them to turn off the video-game console or iPad. As for what they should do instead, you are not quite sure.

AI's rapidly expanding capabilities include convincing impersonations--that is, audio and video that sounds and looks like you. Sometimes these deepfakes can be harmless, part of a joke or meme that involves a celebrity, politician, or other public figure. But as you might guess, scammers also use them to steal money from the unsuspecting. Most of the time, this style of scheme–often called a "grandparent scam"–catches people off-guard. Because they don't realize how easy and sophisticated this technology has become.

Today's Nintendo Direct provided a surprising bit of software news. The company just announced something called Virtual Game Card, which is a way to make playing and sharing downloaded titles more convenient. As the name suggests, this system creates a digital simulacrum of a physical game card. This means that multi-Switch households will easily be able to start a game on one console and transfer to another without any real hassle. Nintendo says they want to make digital games as easy to use as physical game cards.

Today in the newsletter: tech executives play phone tag with Donald Trump, the liability of AI chatbots, and talking through sharing your baby's photos online with your family. Thank you for joining me. The CEOs of the biggest tech companies in the world are looking at the neck-and-neck polls, picking up their phones, and putting their ducks in a row for a potential Donald Trump presidency. The former US president has never shied away from threatening revenge against his perceived enemies, and tech's leaders are heading off retributive regulatory scrutiny. Apple's Tim Cook, famously called "Tim Apple" by Trump during a press conference, phoned the former president to discuss Apple's European legal troubles, Trump said in an interview late last week.

Last autumn, Christa, a 32-year-old from Florida with a warm voice and a slight southern twang, was floundering. She had lost her job at a furniture company and moved back home with her mother. Her nine-year relationship had always been turbulent; lately, the fights had been escalating and she was thinking of leaving. She didn't feel she could be fully honest with the therapist she saw once a week, but she didn't like lying, either. Nor did she want to burden her friends: she struggles with social anxiety and is cautious about oversharing. So one night in October she logged on to character.ai From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot "caring", "supportive" and "intelligent".

One of the most gruelling hurdles in any new relationship is when it becomes time to meet the parents. But now Tinder has come up with a way to make sure your partner has the familial seal of approval before they've even been introduced. The dating app has created a tool called Matchmaker, which allows users to offer up to 15 friends, family members or guardians 24 hours to scrutinise their possible matches. They can view the profiles and make suggestions without having an account of their own – and, fortunately, cannot start messaging on your behalf. Once the session ends, Tinder users can review the profiles recommended by their matchmakers before making a final decision on whether or not they see them as a good fit.

Lots of us are bad with remembering names, but can still pick out a past colleague or old flame when they pop up on social media. However, a new study from Harvard University has found that up to 5.42 per cent of people struggle with the opposite problem. 'Prosopagnosia', or face blindness, is a disorder that makes you unable to recognise faces you've seen before, including those of friends and family. It can also result in you being unable to identify yourself in pictures or the mirror, or feeling like you know complete strangers. Last year, Brad Pitt detailed his experience with the condition, admitting that'nobody believes' him when he talks about it.

Last fall, I published a book about strollers and what they reveal about our attitudes toward children and their caretakers. Although I pitched Stroller as, in part, a critique of the consumer culture of contemporary American parenthood, I came to love my (many) strollers. In the years when I routinely ran while pushing my kids ahead of me in our jogging stroller, I recorded race times faster than I had as the captain of my college track team. In the long, claustrophobic early days of the pandemic, my son and I meandered slowly up and down the sidewalks of our neighborhood watching that late, cold spring come to New England. Often, at the end of a long stroller walk or run, my kids fell asleep, and on warm days, I'd park them in the shade and myself in the sun to work while they slept, feeling a proud mix of self-sufficiency and frugality (no childcare needed to run or meet a deadline).