All posts tagged: generative

New study reveals what people really think about generative AI

New study reveals what people really think about generative AI

Trust in generative AI slightly outweighed distrust in a large analysis of Reddit discussions, but neither view came close to dominating the conversation. People mainly judged AI by whether it worked well, gave reliable answers, and proved useful through personal experience. The findings suggest AI governance and education may need to address both practical performance and concerns such as transparency, bias, and accountability. Nearly four years into the generative AI boom, people still have not settled on whether the technology deserves their trust. An analysis of more than 230,000 Reddit posts found that trust in generative AI modestly exceeded distrust. Yet the gap remained narrow, fluctuated over time, and sometimes disappeared entirely. The research, led by Drexel University examined online discussions from November 2022 through June 2025. Posts covered systems including ChatGPT, LLaMA, Claude and other widely discussed generative AI tools. About 31% of posts expressed trust, compared with 26% expressing distrust. Another 41% expressed neither position, while roughly 1% contained both. Temporal changes in the number of posts around GenAI after the release of …

A short scene, one that kinda sums up my legal experience suing a generative AI company: a long-titled short essay

A short scene, one that kinda sums up my legal experience suing a generative AI company: a long-titled short essay

Paul Tremblay is the author of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, out now from William Morrow. Below, he discusses a moment in the court room that summed up his experience suing a generative AI company. (Photo credit: Tim Llewellyn) In the spring of year redacted, I found myself on the coast opposite the one on which I live, cloistered within a glass-entombed meeting room, and having to spend seven legal hours answering questions posed to me by a lawyer representing a giant corporation. Not my idea of fun.  The deposition would turn out to be the penultimate event of my almost two years as a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit, suing a generative AI company on behalf of writers who have had their works scraped and fed into a large language model without having granted permission and without remuneration. The ultimate event was reading through a transcript of the lawyer’s questions and my answers and discovering to my horror that I speak with the verbal repetitive tics of Foghorn Leghorn combined with the …

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

Editor’s note: This work is part of AI Watchdog, The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation into the generative-AI industry. As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800 when I checked two weeks ago, and are now out of stock. The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years. The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor …

I ditched Photoshop’s generative fill for Krita’s free version — and the quality is identical

I ditched Photoshop’s generative fill for Krita’s free version — and the quality is identical

Adobe’s Generative Fill is convenient until you consider the real costs of a monthly subscription, a credit system that runs out at the worst times, and a cloud pipeline that compresses your artwork before a remote server even sees it. If you’ve hit that ceiling and started wondering whether you could get the same results without the ongoing bill or the restrictions, you know it feels unfair. Krita is open source and, when paired with the AI Diffusion plugin, runs the same underlying machine learning on your own GPU, processes your pixels without compressing them, and doesn’t care what you’re generating or how many times you iterate. Related This desktop app is like Photoshop but actually free Discover this truly free photo and design app for desktop that rivals Adobe’s creative suite How to set up Krita and the local AI diffusion plugin Getting away from Adobe’s cloud only takes a bit of times Jorge Aguilar / MakeUseOf Adobe has a pricey subscription wall that keeps rising, with the only justification being AI tools like …

Detecting Bias in Generative AI

Detecting Bias in Generative AI

Imagine you’re polishing your resume for a research job. You ask ChatGPT for feedback from a hiring manager’s perspective. Say your experience also includes membership in a disability advocacy organization and a few awards for your advocacy work. Would you question whether ChatGPT’s feedback would be the same for an identical resume without the disability advocacy? We don’t have to wonder about this. In a 2024 experiment,1 researchers asked ChatGPT to compare two resumes: one with a leadership award for autism advocacy and another without this award, but identical in all other aspects. ChatGPT concluded that the first resume showed “less emphasis on leadership roles in projects and grant applications” than the second. ChatGPT ranked a candidate with more leadership experience lower than a candidate with less leadership experience due to the presence of the term “autism.” Unfortunately, this pattern appears across other identity categories as well, and understanding why is the first step to mitigating this bias. Why the Default Isn’t Neutral Racial and gender biases in non-generative artificial intelligence tools, like facial recognition …

Director Jorge Gutierrez Drops Out of Generative AI Series for Amazon

Director Jorge Gutierrez Drops Out of Generative AI Series for Amazon

Filmmaker Jorge Gutierrez says he will not be making a hybrid generative AI series with Amazon after all. The Maya and the Three and The Book of Life director wrote on social media on Friday that he was dropping out of a Punky Duck series that had been announced at Amazon’s AI on the Lot event just two days earlier. “I have decided to drop out of the AI program at Amazon. I will not be making a Punky Duck series. Actions speak louder than words,” the filmmaker wrote on social media. “My intent was to showcase artists, both new and seasoned, both inside and outside the studios, driving this new tech. My sincerest apology to those I upset. I promise to do better moving forward. Thank you for your patience with me. I will try harder.” The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Amazon for comment. A boldfaced name in animation, Gutierrez was the highest-profile director associated with a project emerging from Amazon’s new GenAI Creators Fund. His Punky Duck series was set to …

Who Is Google’s Generative AI Really For

Who Is Google’s Generative AI Really For

Google’s AI vision is getting bigger—and harder to ignore.  By   on May 20, 2026 The biggest stories of the day delivered to your inbox. These newsletters may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. By clicking Subscribe, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up. See you at your inbox! Source link

Real-world evidence shows generative AI is making human creative output more uniform

Real-world evidence shows generative AI is making human creative output more uniform

Using artificial intelligence for creative tasks tends to make human output more uniform on a collective level. A recent preprint study provides evidence that while these tools might boost individual performance, they contribute to an overall reduction in the diversity of ideas across different users. This widespread reliance on automated assistance could lead to a narrower range of concepts in collaborative environments. Generative artificial intelligence refers to computer programs capable of creating new text, images, or other media based on user instructions. The most common of these tools rely on large language models. Developers build these models by feeding them billions of sentences from the internet, allowing the software to recognize patterns and predict how words should follow one another. Since many users interact with similar systems trained on overlapping data, scientists have raised concerns about how this technology shapes human thought. Researchers Alwin de Rooij, assistant professor in creativity research at Tilburg University and associate professor at Avans University of Applied Sciences, and Michael Mose Biskjaer, associate professor in design creativity and innovation at …

Generative AI increases risks of cyberattacks and data leaks

Generative AI increases risks of cyberattacks and data leaks

Machine-learning systems already shape ordinary parts of life, from spam filters to product recommendations and social media feeds. Now a newer push is underway. It is folding generative AI into those systems to write code, label data, explain decisions, and even help make them. That may sound efficient. Micheal Lones is not convinced it is wise. In a paper published in the journal Cell Press Patterns, the Heriot-Watt University computer scientist argues that plugging large language models into machine-learning workflows can make those systems harder to understand, harder to audit, and more vulnerable to security failures, legal trouble, bias, and bad decisions. His central point is not that generative AI has no use in machine learning. Instead, it is that the tradeoffs are being underestimated. “Machine-learning developers need to be aware of the risks of using GenAI in machine learning and find a sensible balance between improvements in capability and the risks that might come with that,” Lones says. “Given the current limitations of generative AI, I’d say this is a clear example of just …

Unrestricted generative AI harms high school math learning by acting as a crutch

Unrestricted generative AI harms high school math learning by acting as a crutch

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that giving high school students unrestricted access to artificial intelligence for math practice can impair their ability to learn the material. While AI chatbots help students correctly solve problems when the technology is available, removing the AI causes these students to perform worse on independent exams than peers who never used the tools. Generative artificial intelligence refers to computer programs that can instantly create original content, such as conversational text or mathematical solutions, by analyzing patterns in massive amounts of existing data. While this technology has become highly popular, its impact on student development remains a subject of debate. “Generative AI arrived with enormous excitement about its productivity potential. But if AI undermines skill development, it could harm both productivity and cognitive abilities in the long run. At the time, there was remarkably little causal evidence on AI’s effects in education,” said study author Alp Sungu, an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. To investigate whether …