Renée DiResta is the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new "first" in its corporate history. It wasn't an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists--including players from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel--using their generative AI tools for deceptive tactics that ranged from creating large volumes of social media comments in multiple languages to turning news articles into Facebook posts. The use of these tools, OpenAI noted, seemed intended to improve the quality and quantity of output.

$ $The usage of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools based on large language models, including ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude, for text generation has many exciting applications with the potential for phenomenal productivity gains. One issue is authorship attribution when using AI tools. This is especially important in an academic setting where the inappropriate use of generative AI tools may hinder student learning or stifle research by creating a large amount of automatically generated derivative work. Existing plagiarism detection systems can trace the source of submitted text but are not yet equipped with methods to accurately detect AI-generated text. This paper introduces the idea of direct origin detection and evaluates whether generative AI systems can recognize their output and distinguish it from human-written texts. We argue why current transformer-based models may be able to self-detect their own generated text and perform a small empirical study using zero-shot learning to investigate if that is the case. Results reveal varying capabilities of AI systems to identify their generated text. Google's Bard model exhibits the largest capability of self-detection with an accuracy of 94\%, followed by OpenAI's ChatGPT with 83\%. On the other hand, Anthropic's Claude model seems to be not able to self-detect.

Speaking to German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, Google vice president Prabhakar Raghavan warned that users may be delivered complete nonsense by chatbots, despite answers seeming coherent. Google is set to launch its own rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, a language model that can answer your questions and queries. Named Bard, the chatbot will roll out to the public in the coming weeks according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Ahead of the launch, Google demonstrated the powers of Bard in a promo video. Unfortunately, people noticed that the chatbot – a scaled-down version of their Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) which convinced one engineer it was sentient – came up with incorrect statements about the JWST.

Shares of Google's parent company lost more than $100bn in market value on Wednesday after its Bard chatbot advertisement showed inaccurate information and analysts said its AI search event lacked details on how it will answer Microsoft's ChatGPT challenge. Reuters was the first to point out the error in Google's advertisement, which debuted Monday, about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system. Shares of the company's parent Alphabet fell 8 percent or $8.59 a share to $99.05 and was one of the most actively traded on US exchanges. The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a "launchpad for curiosity" that would help simplify complex topics, but it delivered an inaccurate answer that was spotted just hours before the launch event for Bard in Paris. "This is a hiccup here and they're severely punishing the stock for it, which is justified because obviously everybody is pretty excited to see what Google's going to counter with Microsoft coming out with a pretty decent product," said Dennis Dick, founder and market structure analyst at Triple D Trading.

If the unofficial debut of Google's Bard chatbot is any indication, misinformation is about to get a lot worse. The company posted an ad to Twitter this week showing off the natural-language AI model displaying false information about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In the advertisement (via Reuters), a short GIF shows an example of a Q&A with Bard. "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about?" the query reads. The machine quickly spits out three ideas, including the last one that says, "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.

An advert for Google Bard, the tech giant's experimental conversational AI, inadvertently shows the tool providing a factually inaccurate response to a query. It is evidence that the move to use artificial intelligence chatbots like this to provide results for web searches is happening too fast, says Carissa Véliz at the University of Oxford. "The possibilities for creating misinformation on a mass scale are huge," she says. Google announced this week that it was launching an AI called Bard that will be integrated into its search engine after a testing phase, providing users with a bespoke written response to their query rather than a list of relevant websites. Chinese search engine Baidu has also announced plans for a similar project, and on 7 February, Microsoft launched its own AI results service for its Bing search engine.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has recorded another inaugural milestone: its first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet. LHS 475 b is just 41 light years away and has a diameter 99 percent of Earth's. But there's more work to be done. The JWST should be able to figure out the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. The research team is still working to determine what, if any, sort of atmosphere the rocky mass may have.

On a cloudy Christmas morning last year, a rocket carrying the most powerful space telescope ever built blasted off from a launchpad in French Guiana. After reaching its destination in space about a month later, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending back sparkling presents to humanity--jaw-dropping images that are revealing our universe in stunning new ways. Every year since 1988, Popular Science has highlighted the innovations that make living on Earth even a tiny bit better. And this year--our 35th--has been remarkable, thanks to the successful deployment of the JWST, which earned our highest honor as the Innovation of the Year. But it's just one item out of the 100 stellar technological accomplishments our editors have selected to recognize. The list below represents months of research, testing, discussion, and debate. It celebrates exciting inventions that are improving our lives in ways both big and small. These technologies and discoveries are teaching us about the ...

In recent announcement by NASA, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) science team released five spectacular images in its first science package. Astronomers, researchers and scientists smarter and more educated than me have spent a lot of time providing their thoughts on what we can see in each of these images. But let's take a moment to look at what NASA released and understand why NASA chose this set of images for the first science release. Image 1 – The spikes seen above are not artistic, but rather an artifact of the actual telescope. One of the unique characteristics that will grace nearly every image taken from the JWST will be the iconic "diffraction spikes" that appear around stars in an image.

The news: A volunteer in New Zealand has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in order to lower their blood cholesterol, a step that may foreshadow wide use of the technology to prevent heart attacks. How did they do it?: The experiment involved injecting a version of the gene-editing tool CRISPR in order to modify a single letter of DNA in the patient's liver cells. According to the company, that tiny edit should be enough to permanently lower a person's levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol, the fatty molecule that causes arteries to clog and harden with time. While the patient had an inherited risk for extra-high cholesterol and was already suffering from heart disease, the company believes the same technique could eventually be used to prevent cardiovascular disease.