An enduring problem with today's generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, like ChatGPT, is that they often confidently assert false information. Computer scientists call this behavior "hallucination," and it's a key barrier to AI's usefulness. Hallucinations have led to some embarrassing public slip-ups. In February, AirCanada was forced by a tribunal to honor a discount that its customer-support chatbot had mistakenly offered to a passenger. In May, Google was forced to make changes to its new "AI overviews" search feature, after the bot told some users that it was safe to eat rocks. And last June, two lawyers were fined 5,000 by a U.S. judge after one of them admitted he had used ChatGPT to help write a court filing.

Aaronson, who was hired by OpenAI this year to tackle the provenance challenge, explained that words could be converted into a string of tokens, representing punctuation marks, letters or parts of words, making up about 100,000 tokens in total. The GPT system would then decide the arrangement of those tokens (reflecting the text itself) in such a way that they could be detected using a cryptographic key known only to OpenAI. "This won't make any detectable difference to the end user," Aaronson said.

CCTV and other kinds of security cameras have a strong Big Brother vibe, but for many of us that may be because we don't really understand or know how the footage they pick up ever gets used. Today, a startup called Spot AI that's built a system to help answer that question at least in part -- it provides a cloud-based analytics system that "reads" that footage to get insights about not just security, but also safety and operational activity -- is announcing $40 million in funding to grow. Scale Venture Partners is leading the round, with past backers Redpoint Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and new investors StepStone Group and Modern Venture Partners also investing. This brings the total raised by Spot AI to $62 million. Spot AI, appropriately for a security camera company, existed in stealth for years before it came out into the public in 2021: at that point it had already raised $22 million.