The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence called OpenAI, lets you type questions using natural language, to which the chatbot gives conversational, if somewhat stilted, answers. The bot remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. Its answers are derived from huge volumes of information on the internet. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there's good training data for it to learn from. It's not omniscient or smart enough to replace all humans yet, but it can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative.

The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence called OpenAI, lets you type questions using natural language, to which the chatbot gives conversational, if somewhat stilted, answers. The bot remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. Its answers are derived from huge volumes of information on the internet. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there's good training data for it to learn from. It's not omniscient or smart enough to replace all humans yet, but it can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative.

The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence, lets you type questions using natural language that the chatbot answers in conversational, if somewhat stilted, language. The bot remembers the thread of your dialog, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. Its answers are derived from huge volumes of information on the internet. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable if not omniscient. It can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative.

You'd better pay attention, because this one is a doozy. The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence, lets you type questions using natural language that the chatbot answers in conversational, if somewhat stilted, language. The bot remembers the thread of your dialog, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. Its answers are derived from huge volumes of information on the internet. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable if not omniscient.

The tool, from a power player in artificial intelligence, lets you type questions using natural language that the chatbot answers in conversational, if somewhat stilted, language. The bot remembers the thread of your dialog, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. Its answers are derived from huge volumes of information on the internet. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable if not omniscient. It can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative.

An expert on voice recognition and speech technologies responds to Ysabelle Cheung's "Galatea." When Joseph Faber invented the Euphonia, a mid-19th century analog voice synthesizer, people weren't impressed. They found Faber's invention to be a strange device with little to no purpose. In an attempt to create a machine that could mimic human speech, Faber was physically tethered to his invention, manipulating its bellows, gears, and hardware to produce human-like utterances--from short speeches to ghostly renditions of "God Save the Queen"--with a flat affect. One version of the machine was designed with a feminine face attached to its bellows, hair in ringlets and fair, smooth-looking skin.

Care and Feeding is Slate's parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group. My nephew Nicolas is 9 and only plays video games. He wakes up around 2:00 pm doesn't brush his teeth or shower and begins playing games.

My house is packed with video game consoles, phones, and computers hosting a world of shiny AAA games and quirky indies, yet my 8-year-old daughter spends the bulk of her time in a free-to-play game called Roblox on whatever screen is in front of her. She even spends a chunk of her allowance on a Roblox Premium subscription. Roblox is the most popular game with 5- to 12-year-olds in the US, according to Rooster Money, and it topped the pocket money spending charts in the UK in 2020 ahead of Fortnite. The company recently began trading on the New York Stock Exchange and was valued at a staggering $45 billion. You can play it virtually anywhere, from an Xbox to a phone, laptop, or PC, and it boasts more than 165 million monthly active users and 7 million active creators.

Philip Pullman is once again having a moment, thanks to the new blockbuster adaptation of His Dark Materials by the BBC and HBO. His fantasy classic--filled with witches, talking bears and "daemons" (people's alter-egos that take animal form)--is rendered in glorious steampunk detail. Pullman has also returned to the fictional world of his heroine, Lyra Belacqua, with a new trilogy, The Book of Dust, which probes more deeply into the central question of his earlier books: What is the nature of consciousness? Pullman loves to write about big ideas, and recent scientific discoveries about dark matter and the Higgs boson have inspired certain plot elements in his novels. The biggest mystery in these books--an enigmatic substance called Dust--comes right out of current debates among scientists and philosophers about the origins of consciousness and the provocative theory of panpsychism.

It is nearly impossible to traverse web news or popular media today without being assaulted by vast amounts of propaganda on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is perhaps the fad to end all fads as it supposedly encompasses almost every aspect of human existence, from economics and security to philosophy and art. According to mainstream claims, AI can do almost everything and do it better than any human being. And, the things AI can't do, it WILL be able to do eventually. Whenever the establishment attempts to saturate the media with a particular narrative, it is usually with the intent to manipulate public perception in a way that produces self fulfilling prophecy. In other words, they hope to shape reality by telling a particular lie so often it becomes accepted by the masses over time as fact.