It is estimated that one language dies every 14 days, with it a world of concepts and ideas that could only be expressed in its words. Most of the languages at risk of extinction belong to Indigenous communities.

If you plug “AI” or “artificial intelligence” into Google Image Search, here’s what you get. Electric brains firing blue with neurons. Translucent robots and robot heads, code dribbling down their foreheads and noses.

And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this. This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Nobody likes an I-told-you-so.

Inside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”.

Workers hired via crowdsource services like Amazon Mechanical Turk are using large language models to complete their tasks – which could have negative knock-on effects on AI models in the future. Data is critical to AI.

On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule.

On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule.

The thing to know about the AI lan­guage mod­els, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fun­da­men­tally bull­shit­ters. The bull­shit has got­ten better and bet­ter, but at the core … well, there’s noth­ing at the core.

The thing to know about the AI lan­guage mod­els, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fun­da­men­tally bull­shit­ters. The bull­shit has got­ten better and bet­ter, but at the core … well, there’s noth­ing at the core.

The first social media — blogs — were built on the idea of “user-pull” (users would decide which creators to follow) and “reverse chrono” (users received the most recent posts first).

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger.

The first social media — blogs — were built on the idea of “user-pull” (users would decide which creators to follow) and “reverse chrono” (users received the most recent posts first).

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger.

Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?

In 2003, a team of scientists in China managed to create embryos containing a mix of rabbit and human DNA. Most of the biological matter was human, while the rabbit DNA was present only in the mitochondria, the energy-generators of the cells.

RISING Dispatches from the New American Shore By Elizabeth Rush Illustrated. 299 pp. Milkweed Editions. $26. A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story.

On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence, head of the National Space Council, outlined plans for creating the “Space Force” that President Donald Trump envisions as a space-dedicated military branch, complete with space warfighters and weapons, by the year 2020.

We have entered a post-truth, post-authenticity era, in which dichotomies like true/false or real/fake no longer serve us very well, especially on social media platforms.

If you plug “AI” or “artificial intelligence” into Google Image Search, here’s what you get. Electric brains firing blue with neurons. Translucent robots and robot heads, code dribbling down their foreheads and noses.