The Metaverse, Zuckerberg’s Tech Obession, Is Officially Dead. ChatGPT Killed It.
The Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in…
Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Metaverse, the once-buzzy technology that promised to allow users to hang out awkwardly in a disorientating video-game-like world, has died after being abandoned by the business world. It was three years old. The capital-M Metaverse, a descendant of the 1982 movie “Tron” and the 2003 video game “Second Life,” was born in 2021 when…
The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names…
How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder. Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photo by ISerg/Getty Images Plus. Millions of Americans were using telehealth company and prescription drug provider GoodRx—yet probably didn’t know that it was sharing their prescription medications and health conditions with…
The media bet its future on Facebook. Did it learn from that mistake? Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images BuzzFeed, the archetypal new media company of the 2010s, announced last week that it was shutting down its news division. In 2012, the small “web buzz” start-up started hiring reporters. The newsroom…
“What Cheese Are You?” was a quiz that appeared online in February 2014. BuzzFeed, the digital media company that published the quiz, returned to the same theme in December 2016 (“What Delicious Cheese Are You Based on Your Zodiac Sign?”), February 2018 (“Everyone Has a Cheese That Matches Their Personality—Here’s Yours”), August 2019 (“This…
Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our brains. Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. April 18, 2023 Listen to This Article Audio Recording by Audm The trouble began, as it usually does, when I saw…
For a long time we have existed in a weird world where if as a human you want to use a website you agreed to a long terms-of-service either explicitly or implicitly… But if you were a robot accessing a website the rules of the road were pretty basic: 1. There was some usual blanket…
A photographer is refusing a prestigious award after admitting to being a “cheeky monkey” and generating the prize-winning image using artificial intelligence. The German artist Boris Eldagsen revealed on his website that he was not accepting the prize for the creative open category, which he won at the Sony world photography awards. The winning photograph…
The Biden administration on Thursday proposed new regulations that would allow schools to bar transgender athletes from participating in competitive high school and college sports, but disallow blanket bans on the athletes that have been approved across the country. The proposal was met with mixed reaction from transgender rights activists, with some saying that it…
In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a…