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Essay Writer - AI Tool To Enhance Academic Writing Process

Essay Writer is a groundbreaking AI tool that streamlines the academic writing process. Its intelligent features support students, researchers, and academics from brainstorming to formatting and citation. Save time and improve the quality of your essays with Essay Writer.

Essay Writer is compatible with the following platforms and devices:

Essay Writer can be integrated with the following third-party platforms and tools:

• Google Sheets

* For the complete list of available integrations visit Essay Writer website.

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There are 1 membership packages at Essay Writer.

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Essay Writer Review: An In-Depth Overview

What is it.

Writing Essay is an advanced AI-powered tool designed to assist users in crafting high-quality essays. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology, it provides comprehensive support in generating essay topics, structuring outlines, and sourcing credible research. Tailored to meet the needs of students, academics, and professionals, Writing Essay simplifies the process of writing persuasive, analytical, and descriptive essays.

How It Works

Utilizing advanced AI technology, Writing Essay offers features to streamline the essay-writing process. The tool suggests relevant essay topics based on the user's input and provides detailed outlines to organize the content logically. It sources credible research from respected databases such as DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and Google Scholar, ensuring users can access high-quality references.

Writing Essay guides users through each stage of the essay composition, offering structured assistance with writing compelling hooks, thesis statements, and conclusions. The AI ensures that each part of the essay is cohesively developed and logically structured, enhancing the overall quality and readability of the final product.

Writing Essay is ideal for a variety of academic and professional scenarios. It benefits students working on academic assignments, helping them produce well-researched and excellently structured essays. For those preparing theses or dissertations, the tool provides indispensable support in organizing extensive research and presenting arguments coherently. Professionals drafting publications or reports will also find Writing Essay a valuable assistant in ensuring their work is polished and plagiarism-free.

Writing Essay offers a range of products designed to cater to different writing needs. These include basic essay templates, advanced research tools, and premium features for in-depth writing assistance. The tool's versatility makes it suitable for users at various academic and professional levels, providing customized solutions that enhance writing efficiency and effectiveness.

Top Highlights

• AI-Powered Topic Suggestions : Generates relevant essay topics tailored to user input.
• Detailed Outlines : Provides structured outlines to organize essay content logically.
• Credible Research Sources : Accesses high-quality research from DOAJ and Google Scholar.
• Structured Writing Guidance : Offers assistance with writing hooks, thesis statements, and conclusions.
• Cross-Platform Compatibility : Works seamlessly across various operating systems and devices.
• Accessibility Features : Supports screen readers and keyboard navigation for users with disabilities.

Accessibility and Developer Options

Writing Essay is designed with user accessibility in mind. Its intuitive interface is easy to navigate, making it accessible to users of all skill levels, including those with disabilities. The platform supports various accessibility features, such as screen readers and keyboard navigation, ensuring everyone can benefit from its functionalities.

Compatibility

The tool seamlessly integrates with standard academic tools and software, enhancing its utility without complicating the user experience. It is compatible with multiple operating systems and devices, allowing users to work on their essays at home or on the go. This cross-platform compatibility ensures that Writing Essay can fit into any workflow seamlessly. 

However, keep in mind that it requires ChatGPT Plus to operate.

Developed by a team committed to promoting academic integrity and excellence, Writing Essay is backed by a legacy of empowering students and professionals through technological innovation. The company behind Writing Essay strives to enhance the academic writing process, making it more efficient, accessible, and reliable.

Writing Essay transforms the process of academic writing, making it straightforward and stress-free. Its advanced features and user-centric design make it a powerful tool for anyone looking to enhance their essay writing capabilities.

Features & Highlights

• Topic Selection Assistance: Essay Writer offers personalized suggestions for essay topics based on the latest trends and user interests, ensuring relevance and engagement.
• Detailed Essay Outlining: Users can generate comprehensive outlines that structure their thoughts systematically, providing a solid foundation for writing.
• In-depth Research Tools: Access to a wide range of credible sources from directories like DOAJ and Google Scholar, facilitating robust research and authoritative citations.
• Interactive Writing Samples: Provides well-structured writing samples and guides on various essay types, enhancing understanding and skill development.
• Expert Consultation Referrals: Integrated suggestions to consult with PapersOwl experts for specialized topics, ensuring depth and accuracy in your essays.

FAQ: Answers to Your Burning Questions

AI Tool FAQ: Answers to top questions about Essay Writer.

Writing Essay is versatile and can assist in writing various types of essays, including persuasive, analytical, descriptive, and argumentative essays. The AI provides tailored guidance for each type, ensuring your essay meets the specific requirements and standards.

Writing Essay sources its research from reputable databases such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Google Scholar. This ensures that all referenced materials are credible, peer-reviewed, and reliable, providing a strong foundation for your essay.

Yes, Writing Essay is ideal for thesis and dissertation writing. It helps in organizing extensive research, structuring content logically, and ensuring coherence in arguments, making it easier to tackle complex and lengthy academic projects.

Absolutely. Writing Essay is compatible with multiple operating systems and devices, including Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. This allows you to work on your essays from your desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, providing flexibility and convenience.

Writing Essay offers comprehensive support through its dedicated support team, available to assist with any queries or technical issues. Additionally, users can join an online community of fellow academics to exchange ideas, receive feedback, and discuss essay writing strategies.

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Toolpilot.ai - Unlocking the Power of AI.

toolpilot is an AI Tools directory platform that serves as a centralized hub for discovering and exploring a wide range of AI-powered tools and resources. Our directory features a diverse collection of tools that leverage artificial intelligence to enhance productivity, automate processes, and drive innovation across various industries.

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Automated essay writing made easy.

• Academic essays: Generate well-structured essays on any academic topic, from literature to science.
• Research papers: Develop comprehensive research papers with well-referenced information.
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Free AI Paragraph Generator

Get your writing process off to a great start by generating fully coherent, compelling paragraphs.

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Use cases of ahrefs’ paragraph generator.

Content creation. Ahrefs’ Paragraph Generator can be utilized to quickly generate engaging and informative paragraphs for various types of content. Whether it's blog posts, articles, product descriptions, or social media captions, the tool can assist in generating compelling paragraphs, saving time and effort for content creators.

Academic writing. Students and researchers can benefit from Ahrefs’ Paragraph Generator when working on papers, essays, or research articles. By providing the necessary instructions, the tool can generate well-structured paragraphs that present key arguments, evidence, and analysis, aiding in the writing process.

Personal writing and communication. Individuals who need to write emails, personal letters, or other forms of written communication can leverage Ahrefs’ Paragraph Generator. It can help in composing coherent and well-structured paragraphs, ensuring effective expression of thoughts and ideas, while also saving time by providing a starting point for the writing process.

The technology behind Ahrefs’ Paragraph Generator

Ahrefs’ Paragraph Generator uses a language model that learns patterns, grammar, and vocabulary from large amounts of text data – then uses that knowledge to generate human-like text based on a given prompt or input. The generated text combines both the model's learned information and its understanding of the input.

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Turnitin's AI writing detection available now

Turnitin’s ai writing detection helps educators, publishers and researchers identify when ai writing tools such as chatgpt may have been used in submitted work..

Academic integrity in the age of AI writing

Over the years, academic integrity has been both supported and tested by technology. Today, educators are facing a new frontier with AI writing and ChatGPT.

Here at Turnitin, we believe that AI can be a positive force that, when used responsibly, has the potential to support and enhance the learning process. We also believe that equitable access to AI tools is vital, which is why we’re working with students and educators to develop technology that can support and enhance the learning process. However, it is important to acknowledge new challenges alongside the opportunities.

We recognize that for educators, there is an immediate need to know when and where AI and AI writing tools have been used by students. This is why we are now offering AI detection capabilities for educators in our products.

Gain insights on how much of a student’s submission is authentic, human writing versus AI-generated from ChatGPT or other tools.

Reporting identifies likely AI-written text and provides information educators need to determine their next course of action. We’ve designed our solution with educators, for educators.

AI writing detection complements Turnitin’s similarity checking workflow and is integrated with your LMS, providing a seamless, familiar experience.

Turnitin’s AI writing detection capability available with Originality, helps educators identify AI-generated content in student work while safeguarding the interests of students.

Turnitin ai innovation lab.

Welcome to the Turnitin AI Innovation Lab, a hub for new and upcoming product developments in the area of AI writing. You can follow our progress on detection initiatives for AI writing, ChatGPT, and AI-paraphrasing.

Understanding the false positive rate for sentences of our AI writing detection capability

We’d like to share more insight on our sentence level false positive rate and tips on how to use our AI writing detection metrics.

Understanding false positives within our AI writing detection capabilities

We’d like to share some insight on how our AI detection model deals with false positives and what constitutes a false positive.

Have questions? Read these FAQs on Turnitin’s AI writing detection capabilities

Helping solve the ai writing puzzle one piece at a time.

AI-generated writing has transformed every aspect of our lives, including the classroom. However, identifying AI writing in students’ submissions is just one piece in the broader, complex, ever-evolving AI writing puzzle.

Research corner

We regularly undertake internal research to ensure our AI writing detector stays accurate and up-to-date. If you are interested in what external testing has revealed about Turnitin's AI-writing detection capabilities, check out the links below. Notably, these studies position Turnitin among the foremost solutions in identifying AI-generated content within academia.

Research shows Turnitin's AI detector shows no statistically significant bias against English Language Learners

• In response to feedback from customers and papers claiming that AI writing detection tools are biased against writers whose first language is not English, Turnitin expanded its false positive evaluation to include writing samples of English Language Learners (ELL) and tested another nearly 2,000 writing samples of ELL writers.
• What Turnitin found was that in documents meeting the 300 word count requirement, ELL writers received a 0.014 false positive rate and native English writers received a 0.013.
• This means that there is no statistically significant bias against non-native English speakers.

Turnitin’s AI writing detector identified as the most accurate out of 16 detectors tested

• Two of the 16 detectors, Turnitin and Copyleaks, correctly identified the AI- or human-generated status of all 126 documents, with no incorrect or uncertain responses.
• Three AI text detectors – Turnitin, Originality, and Copyleaks, – have very high accuracy with all three sets of documents examined for this study: GPT-3.5 papers, GPT-4 papers, and human-generated papers.
• Of the top three detectors identified in this investigation, Turnitin achieved very high accuracy in all five previous evaluations. Copyleaks, included in four earlier analyses, performed well in three of them.

Teaching in the age of AI writing

As AI text generators like ChatGPT quickly evolve, our educator resources will, too. Curated and created by our team of veteran educators, our resources help educators meet these new challenges. They are built for professional learning and outline steps educators can take immediately to guide students in maintaining academic integrity when faced with AI writing tools.

A guide to help educators determine which resource is more applicable to their instructional situation: the AI misuse checklist or the AI misuse rubric.

A guide sharing strategies educators can consider to help when confronted with a false positive.

A guide sharing strategies students can consider to help when confronted with a false positive.

The Turnitin Educator Network is a space to meet, discuss and share best practices on academic integrity in the age of AI.

Learn more about ai writing in our blog.

Written by experts in the field, educators, and Turnitin professionals, our blog offers resources and thought leadership in support of students, instructors, and administrators. Dive into articles on a variety of important topics, including academic integrity, assessment, and instruction in a world with artificial intelligence.

In this blog post, we’re going to address frequently asked questions about AI writing tool misuse for students. Specifically, what does AI writing tool misuse look like? How can you self-check to make sure you’re using AI writing tools properly?

Stay up to date with the latest blog posts delivered directly to your inbox.

Turnitin ai tools in the news.

Never miss an update or announcement. Visit our media center for recent news coverage and press releases.

Cheat GPT? Turnitin CEO Chris Caren weighs in on combating A.I. plagiarism | CNBC Squawk Box

Since the inception of AI-generated writing, educators and institutions are learning how to navigate it in the classroom. Turnitin’s CEO Chris Caren joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss how it is being used in the classroom and how educators can identify AI writing in student submissions.

Trouble viewing? View the video on YouTube or adjust your cookie preferences .

Some U.S. schools banning AI technology while others embrace it | NBC Nightly News

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence program, can write college-level essays in seconds. While some school districts are banning it due to cheating concerns, NBC News’ Jacob Ward has details on why some teachers are embracing the technology.

BestColleges

Artificial intelligence, it seems, is taking over the world. At least that's what alarmists would have you believe . The line between fact and fiction continues to blur, and recognizing what is real versus what some bot concocted grows increasingly difficult with each passing week.

ThriveinEDU Podcast

On this episode of the ThriveinEDU podcast, host Rachelle Dené Poth speaks with Turnitin’s Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli about her role in the organization, her experience as a parent with school-age children learning to navigate AI writing, and the future of education and original thought.

District Administration

Following the one year anniversary of the public launch of ChatGPT, Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli sits down with the publication to discuss Turnitin’s AI writing detection feature and what the educational community has learned.

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AI Essay Writer

AI Essay Writer by Editpad is a free essay generator that helps you write narrative, persuasive, argumentative and descriptive essays online in seconds.

How to use AI Essay Writer by Editpad?

To use Editpad's AI Essay Writer, you need to follow these simple steps below:

• Type or paste your essay topic or requirements in the input box provided.
• Select the required essay length and writing tone.
• You can also select the " Add References " option if required.
• Click on " Write My Essay " button.
• After that, our essay generator will automatically generate your essay and provide results in the output box.

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Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming education, in both worrisome and beneficial ways. On the positive side of the ledger, new research shows how AI can help improve the way instructors engage with their students, by way of a cutting-edge tool that provides feedback on their interactions in class.

The M-Powering Teachers tool provides feedback with examples of dialogue from the class to illustrate supportive conversational patterns. Click on image to enlarge. (Image credit: Courtesy Dora Demszky)

A new Stanford-led study , published May 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, found that an automated feedback tool improved instructors’ use of a practice known as uptake, where teachers acknowledge, reiterate, and build on students’ contributions. The findings also provided evidence that, among students, the tool improved their rate of completing assignments and their overall satisfaction with the course.

For instructors looking to improve their practice, the tool offers a low-cost complement to conventional classroom observation – one that doesn’t require an instructional coach or other expert to watch the teacher in action and compile a set of recommendations.

“We know from past research that timely, specific feedback can improve teaching, but it’s just not scalable or feasible for someone to sit in a teacher’s classroom and give feedback every time,” said Dora Demszky , an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and lead author of the study. “We wanted to see whether an automated tool could support teachers’ professional development in a scalable and cost-effective way, and this is the first study to show that it does.”

Promoting effective teaching practices

Recognizing that existing methods for providing personalized feedback require significant resources, Demszky and colleagues set out to create a low-cost alternative. They leveraged recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) – a branch of AI that helps computers read and interpret human language – to develop a tool that could analyze transcripts of a class session to identify conversational patterns and deliver consistent, automated feedback.

For this study, they focused on identifying teachers’ uptake of student contributions. “Uptake is key to making students feel heard, and as a practice it’s been linked to greater student achievement,” said Demszky. “But it’s also widely considered difficult for teachers to improve.”

Dora Demszky is an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education. (Image credit: Courtesy Stanford GSE)

The researchers trained the tool, called M-Powering Teachers (the M stands for machine, as in machine learning), to detect the extent to which a teacher’s response is specific to what a student has said, which would show that the teacher understood and built on the student’s idea. The tool can also provide feedback on teachers’ questioning practices, such as posing questions that elicited a significant response from students, and the ratio of teacher/student talk time.

The research team put the tool to work in the Spring 2021 session of Stanford’s Code in Place , a free online course now in its third year. In the five-week program, based on Stanford’s popular introductory computer science course, hundreds of volunteer instructors teach basic programming to learners worldwide, in small sections with a 1:10 teacher-student ratio.

Code in Place instructors come from all sorts of backgrounds, from undergrads who’ve recently taken the course themselves to professional computer programmers working in the industry. Enthusiastic as they are to introduce beginners to the world of coding, many instructors approach the opportunity with little or no prior teaching experience.

The volunteer instructors received basic training, clear lesson goals, and session outlines to prepare for their role, and many welcomed the chance to receive automated input on their sessions, said study co-author Chris Piech , an assistant professor of computer science education at Stanford and co-founder of Code in Place.

“We make such a big deal in education about the importance of timely feedback for students, but when do teachers get that kind of feedback?” he said. “Maybe the principal will come in and sit in on your class, which seems terrifying. It’s much more comfortable to engage with feedback that’s not coming from your principal, and you can get it not just after years of practice but from your first day on the job.”

Instructors received their feedback from the tool through an app within a few days after each class, so they could reflect on it before the next session. Presented in a colorful, easy-to-read format, the feedback used positive, nonjudgmental language and included specific examples of dialogue from their class to illustrate supportive conversational patterns.

The researchers found that, on average, instructors who reviewed their feedback subsequently increased their use of uptake and questioning, with the most significant changes taking place in the third week of the course. Student learning and satisfaction with the course also increased among those whose instructors received feedback, compared with the control group. Code in Place doesn’t administer an end-of-course exam, so the researchers used the completion rates of optional assignments and course surveys to measure student learning and satisfaction.

Testing in other settings

Subsequent research by Demszky with one of the study’s coauthors, Jing Liu, PhD ’18, studied the use of the tool among instructors who worked one-on-one with high school students in an online mentoring program called Polygence . The researchers, who will present their findings in July at the 2023 Learning at Scale conference, found that on average the tool improved mentors’ uptake of student contributions by 10%, reduced their talk time by 5%, and improved students’ experience with the program as well as their relative optimism about their academic future.

Demszky is currently conducting a study of the tool’s use for in-person, K-12 school classrooms, and she noted the challenge of generating the high-quality transcription she was able to obtain from a virtual setting. “The audio quality from the classroom is not great, and separating voices is not easy,” she said. “Natural language processing can do so much once you have the transcripts – but you need good transcripts.”

She stressed that the tool was not designed for surveillance or evaluation purposes, but to support teachers’ professional development by giving them an opportunity to reflect on their practices. She likened it to a fitness tracker, providing information for its users’ own benefit.

The tool also was not designed to replace human feedback but to complement other professional development resources, she said.

Along with Dora Demszky, Jing Liu, and Chris Piech, the study was co-authored by Dan Jurafsky , a professor of linguistics and of computer science at Stanford, and Heather C. Hill, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Media Contacts

Dora Demszky, Stanford Graduate School of Education: [email protected]

Carrie Spector, Stanford Graduate School of Education: [email protected]

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean?

ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.

When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.

ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form .

What is ChatGPT and why does it matter? Here's what you need to know

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot with natural language processing (NLP) that allows you to have human-like conversations to complete various tasks. The  generative AI  tool can answer questions and assist you with tasks such as composing emails, essays, code, and more.

Also :  How to use ChatGPT: What you need to know now

It's currently  open to use for free . A paid subscription version called ChatGPT Plus launched in February 2023 with access to priority access to OpenAI's latest models and updates.

Who made ChatGPT?

AI startup OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. OpenAI has also developed  DALL-E 2  and DALL-E 3 , popular  AI image generators , and Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system. 

Who owns ChatGPT currently?

OpenAI owns ChatGPT. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI thanks to multiyear, multi-billion dollar  investments. Elon Musk was an investor when OpenAI was first founded in 2015, but has since completely severed ties with the startup and created his own AI chatbot, Grok .

How can you access ChatGPT?

On April 1, 2024, OpenAI stopped requiring you to log in to use ChatGPT. Now, you can access ChatGPT simply by visiting  chat.openai.com . You can also access ChatGPT  via an app on your iPhone  or  Android  device.

Once you visit the site, you can start chatting away with ChatGPT. A great way to get started is by asking a question, similar to what you would do with Google. You can ask as many questions as you'd like.

Also: ChatGPT no longer requires a login, but you might want one anyway. Here's why

There are still some perks to creating an OpenAI account, such saving and reviewing your chat history and accessing custom instructions. Creating an OpenAI account is entirely free and easy. You can even log in with your Google account.

For step-by-step instructions, check out ZDNET's guide on  how to start using ChatGPT . 

Is there a ChatGPT app?

Yes, an official ChatGPT app is available for both iPhone and Android users. 

Also: ChatGPT dropped a free app for iPhones. Does it live up to the hype?

Make sure to download OpenAI's app, as there are a plethora of copycat fake apps listed on Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store that are not affiliated with the startup.

Is ChatGPT available for free?

ChatGPT is free to use, regardless of what you use it for, including writing, coding, and much more. 

There is a subscription option , ChatGPT Plus, that users can take advantage of that costs $20/month. The paid subscription model guarantees users extra perks, such as priority access to GPT-4o and the latest upgrades. 

Also: ChatGPT vs ChatGPT Plus: Is it worth the subscription fee?

Although the subscription price may seem steep, it is the same amount as Microsoft Copilot Pro and Google One AI, Microsoft's and Google's premium AI offerings. 

The free version is still a solid option as it can access the same model and most of the same perks. One major exception: only subscribers get guaranteed access to GPT-4o when the model is at capacity. 

I tried using ChatGPT and it says it's at capacity. What does that mean?

The ChatGPT website operates using servers. When too many people hop onto these servers, they may overload and can't process your request. If this happens to you, you can visit the site later when fewer people are trying to access the tool. You can also keep the tab open and refresh it periodically. 

Also: The best AI chatbots

If you want to skip the wait and have reliable access, you can subscribe to  ChatGPT Plus  for general access during peak times, faster response times, and priority access to new features and improvements, including priority access to GPT-4o.

You can also try using Bing's AI chatbot, Copilot . This chatbot is free to use, runs on GPT-4, has no wait times, and can access the internet for more accurate information.

What is ChatGPT used for?

ChatGPT has many functions in addition to answering simple questions. ChatGPT can compose essays , have philosophical conversations, do math, and even code for you . 

The tasks ChatGPT can help with also don't have to be so ambitious. For example, my favorite use of ChatGPT is for help creating basic lists for chores, such as packing and grocery shopping, and to-do lists that make my daily life more productive. The possibilities are endless. 

ZDNET has published many ChatGPT how-to guides. Below are some of the most popular ones. 

Use ChatGPT to: 

• Write an essay
• Create an app
• Build your resume
• Write Excel formulas
• Summarize content
• Write a cover letter
• Start an Etsy business
• Create charts and tables
• Write Adruino drivers

Can ChatGPT generate images?

Yes, ChatGPT can generate images, but only for ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Since OpenAI discontinued DALL-E 2 in February 2024, the only way to access its most advanced AI image generator, DALL-E 3, through OpenAI's offerings is via its chatbot and ChatGPT Plus subscription.

Also: DALL-E adds new ways to edit and create AI-generated images. Learn how to use it

Microsoft's Copilot offers image generation, which is also powered by DALL-E 3, in its chatbot for free. This is a great alternative if you don't want to shell out the money for ChatGPT Plus.

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT runs on a large language model (LLM) architecture created by OpenAI called the  Generative Pre-trained Transformer  (GPT). Since its launch, the free version of ChatGPT ran on a fine-tuned model in the GPT-3.5 series until May 2024, when the startup upgraded the model to GPT-4o. 

Also:   Here's a deep dive into how ChatGPT works  

With a subscription to ChatGPT Plus , you can access GPT-3.5, GPT-4, or  GPT-4o . Plus, users also have the added perk of priority access to GPT-4o, even when it is at capacity, while free users get booted down to GPT-3.5. 

Generative AI models of this type are trained on vast amounts of information from the internet, including websites, books, news articles, and more.

What does ChatGPT stand for?

As mentioned above, the last three letters in ChatGPT's namesake stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), a family of large language models created by OpenAI that uses deep learning to generate human-like, conversational text. 

Also: What does GPT stand for? Understanding GPT 3.5, GPT 4, GPT-4 Turbo, and more

The "Chat" part of the name is simply a callout to its chatting capabilities. 

Is ChatGPT better than a search engine?

ChatGPT is a language model created to converse with the end user. A search engine indexes web pages on the internet to help users find information. One is not better than the other, as each suit different purposes. 

When searching for as much up-to-date, accurate information as you can access, your best bet is a search engine. It will provide you with pages upon pages of sources you can peruse. 

Also: The best AI search engines of 2024: Google, Perplexity, and more

As of May, the free version of ChatGPT can get responses from both the GPT-4o model and the web. It will only pull its answer from, and ultimately list, a handful of sources, as opposed to showing nearly endless search results.

For example, I used GPT-4o to answer, "What is the weather today in San Francisco?" The response told me it searched four sites and provided links to them. 

If you are looking for a platform that can explain complex topics in an easy-to-understand manner, then ChatGPT might be what you want. If you want the best of both worlds, there are plenty of AI search engines on the market that combine both.

What are ChatGPT's limitations?

Despite its impressive capabilities, ChatGPT still has limitations. Users sometimes need to reword questions multiple times for ChatGPT to understand their intent. A bigger limitation is a lack of quality in responses, which can sometimes be plausible-sounding but are verbose or make no practical sense. 

Instead of asking for clarification on ambiguous questions, the model guesses what your question means, which can lead to poor responses. Generative AI models are also subject to hallucinations, which can result in inaccurate responses.

Does ChatGPT give wrong answers?

As mentioned above, ChatGPT, like all language models, has  limitations  and can give nonsensical answers and incorrect information, so it's important to double-check the data it gives you.

Also: 8 ways to reduce ChatGPT hallucinations

OpenAI recommends that you provide feedback on what ChatGPT generates by using the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons to improve its underlying model. You can even join the startup's Bug Bounty program , which offers up to $20,000 for reporting security bugs and safety issues.

Can ChatGPT refuse to answer my prompts?

AI systems like ChatGPT can and do reject  inappropriate requests . The AI assistant can identify inappropriate submissions to prevent the generation of unsafe content.

Also:  6 things ChatGPT can't do (and another 20 it refuses to do)

These submissions include questions that violate someone's rights, are offensive, are discriminatory, or involve illegal activities. The ChatGPT model can also challenge incorrect premises, answer follow-up questions, and even admit mistakes when you point them out.

These guardrails are important. AI models can generate advanced, realistic content that can be exploited by bad actors for harm, such as spreading misinformation about public figures and influencing elections .

Can I chat with ChatGPT?

Although some people use ChatGPT for elaborate functions, such as writing code or even malware , you can use ChatGPT for more mundane activities, such as having a friendly conversation. 

Also:  Do you like asking ChatGPT questions? You could get paid (a lot) for it

Some conversation starters could be as simple as, "I am hungry, what food should I get?" or as elaborate as, "What do you think happens in the afterlife?" Either way, ChatGPT is sure to have an answer for you. 

Is ChatGPT safe?

People are expressing concerns about AI chatbots replacing or atrophying human intelligence. For example, a chatbot can write an article on any topic efficiently (though not necessarily accurately) within seconds, potentially eliminating the need for human writers.

Chatbots can also write an entire essay within seconds, making it easier for students to cheat or avoid learning how to write properly. This even led  some school districts to block access  when ChatGPT initially launched. 

Also:  Generative AI can be the academic assistant an underserved student needs

Now, not only have many of those schools decided to unblock the technology, but some higher education institutions have been  catering their academic offerings  to AI-related coursework. 

Another concern with AI chatbots is the possible spread of misinformation. ChatGPT itself says: "My responses are not intended to be taken as fact, and I always encourage people to verify any information they receive from me or any other source." OpenAI also notes that ChatGPT sometimes writes "plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers."

Also:  Microsoft and OpenAI detect and disrupt nation-state cyber threats that use AI, report shows

Lastly, there are ethical concerns regarding the information ChatGPT was trained on, since the startup scraped the internet to train the chatbot. 

It also automatically uses people's interactions with the free version of the chatbot to further train its models, raising privacy concerns. OpenAI lets you turn off training in ChatGPT's settings.

Does ChatGPT plagiarize?

Yes, sort of. OpenAI scraped the internet to train ChatGPT. Therefore, the technology's knowledge is influenced by other people's work. Since there is no guarantee that when OpenAI outputs its answers it is entirely original, the chatbot may regurgitate someone else's work in your answer, which is considered plagiarism. 

Is there a ChatGPT detector?

Concerns about students using AI to cheat mean the need for a ChatGPT text detector is becoming more evident. 

In January 2023, OpenAI released a free tool to target this problem. Unfortunately, OpenAI's "classifier" tool could only correctly identify 26% of AI-written text with a "likely AI-written" designation. Furthermore, it provided false positives 9% of the time, incorrectly identifying human-written work as AI-produced. 

The tool performed so poorly  that, six months after being released, OpenAI it shut down "due to its low rate of accuracy." Despite the tool's failure, the startup claims to be researching more effective techniques for AI text identification.

Also: OpenAI unveils text-to-video model and the results are astonishing

Other AI detectors exist on the market, including GPT-2 Output Detector ,  Writer AI Content Detector , and Content at Scale's AI Content Detection  tool. ZDNET put these tools to the test, and the results were underwhelming: all three were found to be unreliable sources for spotting AI, repeatedly giving false negatives. Here are  ZDNET's full test results .

What are the common signs something was written by ChatGPT?

Although tools aren't sufficient for detecting ChatGPT-generated writing, a  study  shows that humans could detect AI-written text by looking for politeness. The study's results indicate that  ChatGPT's writing style is extremely polite . And unlike humans, it cannot produce responses that include metaphors, irony, or sarcasm.

Will my conversations with ChatGPT be used for training?

One of the major risks when using generative AI models is that they become more intelligent by being trained on user inputs. Therefore, when familiarizing yourself with how to use ChatGPT, you might wonder if your specific conversations will be used for training and, if so, who can view your chats.

Also:  This ChatGPT update fixed one of my biggest productivity issues with the AI chatbot

OpenAI will use your conversations with the free chatbot to automatically training data to refine its models. You can opt out of the startup using your data for model training by clicking on the question mark in the bottom left-hand corner, Settings, and turning off "Improve the model for everyone."

What is GPT-4?

GPT-4 is OpenAI's language model that is much more advanced than its predecessor, GPT-3.5. Users can access GPT-4 by subscribing to ChatGPT Plus for $20 per month or using Microsoft's Copilot.

Also: What does GPT stand for? Understanding GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and more

GPT-4 has advanced intellectual capabilities, meaning it outperforms GPT-3.5 in a series of simulated benchmark exams. The newer model also supposedly produces fewer hallucinations. 

What is GPT-4o?

GPT-4o is OpenAI's latest, fastest, and most advanced flagship model. As the name implies, it has the same intelligence as GPT-4. However, the "o" in the title stands for "omni," referring to its multimodal capabilities, which allow it to understand text, audio, image, and video inputs and output text, audio, and image outputs. 

Also:  6 ways OpenAI just supercharged ChatGPT for free users

The model is 50% cheaper in the API than GPT-4 Turbo while still matching its English and coding capabilities and outperforming it in non-English languages, vision, and audio understanding -- a big win for developers.

Are there alternatives to ChatGPT worth considering?

Although ChatGPT gets the most buzz, other options are just as good -- and might even be better suited to your needs. ZDNET has created a list of the best chatbots, which have all been tested by us and show which tool is best for your requirements. 

Also: 4 things Claude AI can do that ChatGPT can't

Despite ChatGPT's extensive abilities, there are major downsides to the AI chatbot. If you want to try the technology, there are plenty of other options: Copilot , Claude , Perplexity ,  Jasper , and more.  

Is ChatGPT smart enough to pass benchmark exams?

Yes, ChatGPT is capable of passing a series of benchmark exams. A professor at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania's business school, used ChatGPT to take an MBA exam and the results were quite impressive. 

ChatGPT not only passed the exam, but the tool scored between a B- and a B. The professor, Christian Terwiesch, was impressed at its basic operations management, process analysis questions, and explanations.

OpenAI also tested the chatbot's ability to pass benchmark exams. Although ChatGPT could pass many of these benchmark exams, its scores were usually in the lower percentile. However, with GPT-4, ChatGPT can score much higher.

For example, ChatGPT using GPT-3.5 scored in the lower 10th percentile of a simulated Bar Exam, while GPT-4 scored in the top 10th percentile. You can see more examples from OpenAI in the chart below.

Can ChatGPT be used for job application assistance?

Yes, ChatGPT is a great resource to help with job applications. Undertaking a job search can be tedious and difficult, and ChatGPT can help you lighten the load. ChatGPT can build your resume  and write a cover letter .

Also :  How to use ChatGPT to write an essay

If your application has any written supplements, you can use ChatGPT to help you write those essays or personal statements . 

What are the most common ChatGPT plugins, and how do I use them?

Plugins allowed ChatGPT to connect to third-party applications, including access to real-time information on the web. The plugins expanded ChatGPT's abilities , allowing it to assist with many more activities, such as planning a trip or finding a place to eat. 

Also:  My two favorite ChatGPT Plus features and the remarkable things I can do with them

On March 19, 2024, however, OpenAI stopped allowing users to install new plugins or start new conversations with existing ones. Instead, OpenAI replaced plugins with GPTs , which are easier for developers to build. 

Users can find 3 million ChatGPT chatbots, also known as GPTs, on the GPT store. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of spam in the GPT store.

What is Microsoft's involvement with ChatGPT?

Microsoft was an early investor in OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT, long before ChatGPT was released to the public. Microsoft's first involvement with OpenAI was in 2019, when the company invested $1 billion, and then another $2 billion in the years after. In January 2023, Microsoft extended its partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multi-billion dollar investment .

Also: ChatGPT vs. Copilot: Which AI chatbot is better for you?

 Neither company disclosed the investment value, but unnamed sources told Bloomberg that it could total $10 billion over multiple years. In return, OpenAI's exclusive cloud-computing provider is Microsoft Azure, powering all OpenAI workloads across research, products, and API services.

Microsoft has also used its OpenAI partnership to revamp its Bing search engine and improve its browser. 

On February 7, 2023, Microsoft unveiled a new Bing tool , now known as Copilot, that runs on OpenAI's GPT-4, customized specifically for search.

What does Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) have to do with ChatGPT?

In February 2023,  Microsoft unveiled  a new version of Bing -- and its standout feature was its integration with ChatGPT. When it was announced, Microsoft shared that Bing Chat, now Copilot, was powered by a next-generation version of OpenAI's large language model, making it "more powerful than ChatGPT." Five weeks after the launch, Microsoft revealed that Copilot had been running on GPT-4 before the model had even launched. 

How does Copilot compare to ChatGPT?

Copilot uses OpenAI's GPT-4, which means that since its launch, it has been more efficient and capable than the standard, free version of ChatGPT. At the time, Copilot boasted several other features over ChatGPT, such as access to the internet, knowledge of current information, and footnotes.

In May 2024, however, OpenAI supercharged the free version of its chatbot with GPT-4o. The upgrade gave users GPT-4 level intelligence, the ability to get responses from the web via ChatGPT Browse with Bing, analyze data, chat about photos and documents, use GPTs, access the GPT Store, and Voice Mode. Therefore, after the upgrade, ChatGPT reclaimed its crown as the best AI chatbot. 

What is Gemini and how does it relate to ChatGPT?

Gemini is Google's AI chat service, a rival to ChatGPT. On February 6, 2023, Google introduced its experimental AI chat service, which was then called Google Bard. Over a month after the announcement, Google began rolling out  access to Bard first via a waitlist . Now, it is available to the general public. 

Artificial Intelligence

Chatgpt vs. copilot: which ai chatbot is better for you, how to use chatgpt (and how to access gpt-4o), what does gpt stand for understanding gpt-3.5, gpt-4, gpt-4o, and more.

The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing

Beware technology that makes us less human.

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”

When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself. And then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people. If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.” When her audience lets out a peal of uneasy laughter, the CEO continues undeterred, heart-shape earrings bouncing with each sweep of her hands. “No, no, truly. And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It will then scan all of San Francisco for you and say, These are the three people you really ought to meet. ”

What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food. Implicit in Herd’s proclamation—that her app will “ teach you how to date”—is the assumption that AI will soon understand proper human behavior in ways that human beings do not. Despite Herd’s insistence that such a service would empower us, what she’s actually describing is the replacement of human courtship rituals: Your digital proxy will go on innumerable dates for you, so you don’t have to practice anything so pesky as flirting and socializing.

Read: America is sick of swiping

Hypothetical AI dating concierges sound silly, and they are not exactly humanity’s greatest threat. But we might do well to think of the Bumble founder’s bubbly sales pitch as a canary in the coal mine, a harbinger of a world of algorithms that leave people struggling to be people without assistance. The new AI products coming to market are gate-crashing spheres of activity that were previously the sole province of human beings. Responding to these often disturbing developments requires a principled way of disentangling uses of AI that are legitimately beneficial and prosocial from those that threaten to atrophy our life skills and independence. And that requires us to have a clear idea of what makes human beings human in the first place.

In 1977, Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born philosopher, vagabond priest , and ruthless critic of metastatic bureaucracies, declared that we had entered “the age of Disabling Professions.” Modernity was characterized, in Illich’s view, by the standardization and professionalization of everyday life. Activities that were once understood to be within the competencies of laypeople—say, raising children or bandaging the wounded—were suddenly brought under the purview of technical experts who claimed to possess “secret knowledge,” bestowed by training and elite education, that was beyond the ken of the untutored masses. The licensed physician displaced the local healer. Child psychologists and their “cutting edge” research superseded parents and their instincts. Data-grubbing nutritionists replaced the culinary wisdom of grandmothers.

Illich’s singular insight was that the march of professional reason—the transformation of Western civilization into a technocratic enterprise ruled by what we now call “best practices”—promised to empower us but actually made us incompetent, dependent on certified experts to make decisions that were once the jurisdiction of the common man. “In any area where a human need can be imagined,” Illich wrote , “these new professions, dominant, authoritative, monopolistic, legalized—and, at the same time, debilitating and effectively disabling the individual—have become exclusive experts of the public good.” Modern professions inculcate the belief not only that their credentialed representatives can solve your problems for you, but also that you are incapable of solving said problems for yourself. In the case of some industries, like medicine, this is plainly a positive development. Other examples, like the ballooning wellness industry, are far more dubious.

If the entrenchment of specialists in science, schooling, child-rearing, and so on is among the pivotal developments of the 20th century, the rise of online dating is among the most significant of the 21st. But one key difference between this more recent advancement and those of yesteryear is that websites such as Tinder and Hinge are defined not by disabling professionals with fancy degrees, but by disabling algorithms . The white-coated expert has been replaced by digital services that cut out the human middleman and replace him with an (allegedly) even smarter machine, one that promises to know you better than you know yourself.

Faith Hill: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’

And it’s not just dating apps. Supposed innovations including machine-learning-enhanced meal-kit companies such as HelloFresh, Spotify recommendations, and ChatGPT suggest that we have entered the Age of Disabling Algorithms as tech companies simultaneously sell us on our existing anxieties and help nurture new ones. At the heart of it all is the kind of AI bait-and-switch peddled by the Bumble CEO. Algorithms are now tooled to help you develop basic life skills that decades ago might have been taken as a given: How to date. How to cook a meal. How to appreciate new music. How to write and reflect. Like an episode out of Black Mirror , the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. We have reason to be worried.

As conversations over the dangers of artificial intelligence have heated up over the past 18 months—largely thanks to the meteoric rise of large language models like ChatGPT—the focus of both the media and Silicon Valley has been on Skynet scenarios. The primary fear is that chat models may experience an “intelligence explosion” as they are scaled up, meaning that LLMs might proceed rapidly from artificial intelligence to artificial general intelligence to artificial superintelligence (ASI) that is both smarter and more powerful than even the smartest human beings. This is often called the “fast takeoff” scenario, and the concern is that if ASI slips out of humanity’s control—and how could it not—it might choose to wipe out our species, or even enslave us.

These AI “existential risk” debates—at least the ones being waged in public —have taken on a zero-sum quality: They are almost exclusively between those who believe that the aforementioned Terminator-style dangers are real, and others who believe that these are Hollywood-esque fantasies that distract the public from more sublunar AI-related problems, like algorithmic discrimination , autonomous weapons systems , or ChatGPT-facilitated cheating . But this is a false binary, one that excludes another possibility: Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things.

The epochal impact of online dating is there for all to see in a simple line graph from a 2019 study . It shows the explosive growth of online dating since 1995, the year that Match.com, the world’s first online-dating site, was launched . That year, only 2 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting online. By 2017, that figure had jumped to 39 percent as other ways of meeting—through friends or family, at work or in church—declined precipitously.

Besides online dating, the only way of meeting that increased during this period was meeting at a bar or restaurant. However, the authors of the study noted that this ostensible increase was a mirage: The “apparent post-2010 rise in meeting through bars and restaurants for heterosexual couples is due entirely to couples who met online and subsequently had a first in-person meeting at a bar or restaurant or other establishment where people gather and socialize. If we exclude the couples who first met online from the bar/restaurant category, the bar/restaurant category was significantly declining after 1995 as a venue for heterosexual couples to meet.” In other words, online dating has become hegemonic. The wingman is out. Digital matchmaking is in.

But even those selling online-dating services seem to know there’s something unsettling about the idea that algorithms, rather than human beings, are now spearheading human romance. A bizarre Tinder ad from last fall featured the rapper Coi Leray playing the role of Cupid, perched on an ominously pink stage, tasked with finding a date for a young woman. A coterie of associates, dressed in Hunger Games chic, grilled a series of potential suitors as Cupid swiped left until the perfect match was found. These characters put human faces on an inhuman process.

Leif Weatherby, an expert on the history of AI development and the author of a forthcoming book on large language models, told me that ads like this are a neat distillation of Silicon Valley’s marketing playbook. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships. The rhetoric of AI empowerment is sheep’s clothing for Silicon Valley wolves who are deliberately nurturing the public’s dependence on their platforms.” Curtailing human independence, then, is not a bug, but a feature of the AI gold rush.

Of course, there is an extent to which this nurtured dependence isn’t unique to AI, but is an inevitable by-product of innovation. The broad uptake of any new technology generally atrophies the human skills for the processes that said technology makes more efficient or replaces outright. The advent of the vacuum was no doubt accompanied by a corresponding decline in the average American’s deftness with a broom. The difference between technologies of convenience, like the vacuum or the washing machine, and platforms like Tinder or ChatGPT is that the latter are concerned with atrophying competencies, like romantic socializing or thinking and reflection, that are fundamental to what it is to be a human being.

Read: AI has lost its magic

The response to our algorithmically remade world can’t simply be that algorithms are bad, sensu stricto. Such a stance isn’t just untenable at a practical level—algorithms aren’t going anywhere—but it also undermines unimpeachably positive use cases, such as the employment of AI in cancer diagnosis . Instead, we need to adopt a more sophisticated approach to artificial intelligence, one that allows us to distinguish between uses of AI that legitimately empower human beings and those—like hypothetical AI dating concierges—that wrest core human activities from human control. But making these distinctions requires us to re-embrace an old idea that tends to leave those of us on the left rather squeamish: human nature.

Both Western intellectuals and the progressive public tend to be hostile to the idea that there is a universal “human nature,” a phrase that now has right-wing echoes . Instead, those on the left prefer to emphasize the diversity, and equality, of varying human cultural traditions. But this discomfort with adopting a strong definition of human nature compromises our ability to draw red lines in a world where AI encroaches on human territory. If human nature doesn’t exist, and if there is no core set of fundamental human activities, desires, or traits, on what basis can we argue against the outsourcing of those once-human endeavors to machines? We can’t take a stand against the infiltration of algorithms into the human estate if we don’t have a well-developed sense of which activities make humans human , and which activities—like sweeping the floor or detecting pancreatic cancer —can be outsourced to nonhuman surrogates without diminishing our agency.

One potential way out of this impasse is offered by the so-called capability approach to human flourishing developed by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and others. In rejection of the kind of knee-jerk cultural relativism that often prevails in progressive political thought, Nussbaum’s work insists that advocating for the poor or marginalized, at home or abroad, requires us to agree on universal “basic human capabilities” that citizens should be able to develop. Nussbaum includes among these basic capabilities “being able to imagine, to think, and to reason” and “to engage in various forms of familial and social interaction.” A good society, according to the capability approach, is one in which human beings are not just theoretically free to engage in these basic human endeavors, but are actually capable of doing so.

As AI is built into an ever-expanding roster of products and services, covering dating, essay writing, and music and recipe recommendations, we need to be able to make granular, rational decisions about which uses of artificial intelligence expand our basic human capabilities, and which cultivate incompetence and incapacity under the guise of empowerment. Disabling algorithms are disabling precisely because they leave us less capable of, and more anxious about, carrying out essential human behaviors.

Of course, some will object to the idea that there is any such thing as fundamental human activities. They may even argue that describing behaviors like dating and making friends, critical thinking, or cooking as central to the human condition is ableist or otherwise bigoted. After all, some people are asexual or introverted. Others with mental disabilities might not be adept at reflection, or written or oral communication. Some folks simply do not want to cook, an activity which is historically gendered besides. But this objection relies on a sleight of hand. Identifying certain activities as fundamental to the human enterprise does not require you to believe that those who don’t or can’t engage in them are inhuman, just as embracing the idea that the human species is bipedal does not require you to believe that people born without legs lack full personhood. It only asks that you acknowledge that there are some endeavors that are vital aspects of the human condition, taken in the aggregate, and that a society where people broadly lack these capacities is not a good one.

Without some minimal agreement as to what those basic human capabilities are—what activities belong to the jurisdiction of our species, not to be usurped by machines—it becomes difficult to pin down why some uses of artificial intelligence delight and excite, while others leave many of us feeling queasy.

What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. AI dating concierges would not enhance our ability to make romantic connections with other humans, but obviate it. In this case, technology diminishes us, and that diminishment may well become permanent if left unchecked. Over the long term, human beings in a world suffused with AI-enablers will likely prove less capable of engaging in fundamental human activities: analyzing ideas and communicating them, forging spontaneous connections with others, and the like. While this may not be the terrifying, robot-warring future imagined by the Terminator movies, it would represent another kind of existential catastrophe for humanity.

Whether or not the Bumble founder’s dream of artificial-intelligence-induced dalliances ever comes to fruition is an open question, but it is also somewhat beside the point. What should give us real pause is the understanding of AI, now ubiquitous in Big Tech, that underlies her dystopian prognostications. Silicon Valley leaders have helped make a world in which people feel that everyday social interactions, whether dating or making simple phone calls, require expert advice and algorithmic assistance. AI threatens to turbocharge this process. Even if your personalized dating concierge is not here yet, the sales pitch for them has already arrived, and that sales pitch is almost as dangerous as the technology itself: AI will teach you how to be a human.

OpenAI starts training a new AI model while forming a safety committee

Amid turmoil, the company also announced it is forming a new committee to evaluate the safety and security of its artificial intelligence products.

Artificial intelligence company OpenAI said Tuesday that it has started training its newest AI model that will fuel the popular ChatGPT chatbot.

In a statement released on its website, OpenAI said this new model, which would replace GPT-4 technology, will bring the company closer to achieving “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, a hotly contested idea that refers to computers matching the power of human brains.

OpenAI also announced that it is forming a new committee, including CEO Sam Altman, to evaluate the safety and security of its products, and pledged to release recommendations sometime after a 90-day review of its technology.

“We welcome a robust debate at this important moment,” the company said.

The San Francisco-based company is one of the leading players in artificial intelligence, with widely used tools such as ChatGPT and image creator Dall-E. The technology behind them has been adopted by large companies such as Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest financial backers.

Tuesday’s announcements come amid turmoil for the San Francisco-based company as it faces mounting lawsuits, high-profile staff departures and concerns that AI technology will spread election disinformation, eliminate jobs and infringe on copyrights.

Earlier this month, the company released an update to its latest AI technology, called GPT-4o or “GPT-4 omni,” that enhances ChatGPT’s ability to listen and respond by voice. Actress Scarlett Johansson said one of the voices OpenAI released, called “Sky,” was “ eerily similar ” to hers, and that after declining overtures by Altman to voice the assistant, she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” to find it sounding nearly identical to her speech.

OpenAI said the voice was not hers, and documents shared with The Washington Post show the company hired a voice actor. Johansson has threatened to file legal action against OpenAI.

The company already faces lawsuits from news organizations , including local papers and the New York Times , saying that the way OpenAI trains its chatbot technology — by ingesting vast amounts of online data such as news stories, Wikipedia articles and even Reddit forums — is infringing on the copyrights of news organizations.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who co-led a team focused on the societal threats of AI, resigned from the company in May amid concern from critics that OpenAI was dismissing the dangers of its technology while chasing profit. His team co-lead, Jan Leike, also departed this month.

Sutskever was one of the board members who voted to oust co-founder Altman in November. Altman was reinstated a few days later, and Sutskever and the other directors who voted against him resigned from the board.

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The new safety committee will be led by board Chairman Bret Taylor, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, former Sony Entertainment executive Nicole Seligman and Altman, OpenAI said.

The announcement of its formation comes just days after two former OpenAI board members said in an Economist article Sunday that more regulation of AI is needed because companies like OpenAI can’t be trusted to govern themselves.

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Louise Matsakis

Google Taps AI to Show Shoppers How Clothes Fit Different Bodies

One of the worst parts of online shopping is trying to figure out whether an item of clothing will actually fit. While some brands have begun hiring models with more diverse body types, the process still often requires a leap of faith—or making a lot of returns .

Google announced Tuesday that it’s rolling out a new way to tackle the fit guessing problem using generative artificial intelligence. Brands that run ads for women’s or men’s shirts will now have the ability to show shoppers how the products look on dozens of different real models, without taking additional photos. (Other types of apparel items aren’t eligible yet, and Google didn’t share a timeline for when they might be added.)

The new feature means that typing in “eyelet crop top” on Google’s search engine, for example, could return an ad with a clickable gallery that shows what an item looks like on women with different skin tones and body types. The technology is intended to give people browsing for clothes a better idea of how a shirt will look on someone who resembles them or the person they’re shopping for, Matt Madrigal, vice president of merchant shopping at Google, told WIRED in an interview.

The new ad format is an extension of the free virtual try-on tool that Google released to brands last year in organic search results. It works by using AI to combine product images from the merchant with existing photos of models and is an early example of Google adapting its generative AI technology to serve its core online advertising business.

Google says brands don’t need to share detailed dimensions of the clothes with the company for it to generate new images of models wearing them. That makes the try-on tool easier for advertisers to use but also means it can’t replace an old-fashioned tape measure if you want to know for certain whether that crop top will be long enough for your torso.

The try-on ad format is one of a number of new generative AI shopping tools announced today at Google’s annual event for advertisers, Marketing Live. Google has spent the past year experimenting with ways generative AI could enhance its lucrative online ads business, which raked in $61.7 billion in revenue last quarter, up 13 percent from the same period in the year prior.

Shopping has become a focus area for Google as some merchants shift their ad dollars to Amazon, which saw its ad revenue increase a whopping 24 percent last quarter from the same period in 2023. Google is also facing competition from TikTok, as younger consumers increasingly use the app as a product search engine that can quickly surface videos of people trying on items and testing them for their followers.

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One of the new ad formats Google announced today will allow brands to link short-form videos they made—or ones they hired creators to film—to their advertisements in Google’s search engine. AI-generated text summaries of the clips will be included below. “I’ve got three Gen Z-ers at home, and watching them shop, it’s very video-based,” said Madrigal.

Google also launched a tool that allows companies to create entirely new, AI-generated product images based on photos from earlier marketing campaigns and pictures that represent their brand identity. For example, a home goods brand could upload a picture of one of its candles and an image of a beach, then ask Google to “put the candle on a beach that looks like this one under some palm trees.”

Shannon Smyth, the founder of a perfume and body-care company called A Girl’s Gotta Spa, said she began using Google’s AI image tools last year when the company first began rolling them out as part of software called Product Studio. Initially, Google only allowed merchants to swap the backgrounds on existing product photos and make small tweaks, like increasing the resolution.

“It coincided with struggling to keep up on our social channels with professional-looking photography, and as finances became more strapped I decided to give it a try,” Smyth says. She uses it to generate images for use on social media, in an email newsletter, and on her Amazon store. (Google put Smyth in touch with WIRED to discuss her experiences with its AI products.)

Smyth said Google’s AI tools save time and have gotten better as she has continued using them. “I admit, I was frustrated at first if it would generate images without shadows or reflections, or have an unidentifiable object in the photo,” she explained. “I've found that as I give feedback on every image, those issues begin to get resolved.”

Google is trying to help advertisers create compelling imagery without needing to spend as much of their time and budget on graphic designers, photographers, set designers, and models. That may not be good news for those workers, and if the product images aren’t accurate, shoppers could be left disappointed. But Google hopes AI imagery will make ads more engaging and draw more clicks—boosting its revenue.

Yet the company and its competitors may also be simply helping retailers avoid paying for expensive software like Photoshop or spending so much on creative services. It’s not clear how many customers will necessarily feel compelled to advertise more. Smyth said her company doesn’t purchase ads on Google, despite how much she appreciates Product Studio.

AI-generated advertising is increasingly becoming a fixture of the internet. Earlier this month, Meta began giving advertisers on Facebook and Instagram the ability to generate new versions of existing product photos using AI, after previously offering just AI-generated backgrounds . Meta and Google also allow advertisers to generate marketing copy for their ads.

Amazon announced a similar beta image-generation tool last fall that can also create backgrounds for product photos. Instead of advertising a garden hose against a plain white backdrop, it allows brands to create, say, a scene of a backyard with a garden and trees—no actual dirt required.

The looming question is whether consumers will find AI-generated ads off-putting, if they notice them in the first place. Some fashion brands, including Levi’s and the dressmaker Selkie , have faced backlash from customers after they announced they were experimenting with artificial intelligence. But for many smaller ecommerce companies, the potential benefits of using AI may outweigh the risks.

“Let's face it, small businesses are crumbling like a house of cards. We're barely hanging on,” said Smyth. “It has helped me to stay top of mind to customers and potential customers visually. I'm pretty confident my aesthetic would've tanked or I would've abandoned many social channels without it as an option.”

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At The Brink

An Introduction: It’s Time to Protest Nuclear War Again

Kathleen Kingsbury, Opinion Editor

The threat of nuclear war has dangled over humankind for much too long. We have survived so far through luck and brinkmanship. But the old, limited safeguards that kept the Cold War cold are long gone. Nuclear powers are getting more numerous and less cautious. We’ve condemned another generation to live on a planet that is one grave act of hubris or human error away from destruction without demanding any action from our leaders. That must change.

In New York Times Opinion’s latest series, At the Brink, we’re looking at the reality of nuclear weapons today. It’s the culmination of nearly a year of reporting and research. We plan to explore where the present dangers lie in the next arms race and what can be done to make the world safer again.

W.J. Hennigan, the project's lead writer, begins that discussion today by laying out what’s at stake if a single nuclear weapon were used, as well as revealing for the first time details about how close U.S. officials thought the world came to breaking the decades-long nuclear taboo.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, threatened in his 2024 annual speech that more direct Western intervention in Ukraine could lead to nuclear conflict. Yet an American intelligence assessment suggests the world may have wandered far closer to the brink of a nuclear launch more than a year earlier, during the first year of Mr. Putin's invasion.

This is the first telling of the Biden administration’s efforts to avoid that fate, and had they failed, how they hoped to contain the catastrophic aftermath. Mr. Hennigan explores what happened during that tense time, what officials were thinking, what they did and how they’re approaching a volatile future.

In the first essay of the series, W.J. Hennigan lays out the risks of the new nuclear era and how we got here. You can listen to an adaptation of the piece here .

Within two years, the last major remaining arms treaty between the United States and Russia is to expire. Yet amid mounting global instability and shifting geopolitics, world leaders aren’t turning to diplomacy. Instead, they have responded by building more technologically advanced weapons. The recent intelligence on Russia’s development of a space-based nuclear weapon is the latest reminder of the enormous power these weapons continue to wield over our lives.

There is no precedent for the complexity of today’s nuclear era. The bipolarity of the Cold War has given way to a great-power competition with far more emerging players. With the possibility of Donald Trump returning as president, Iran advancing its nuclear development and China on track to stock its arsenal with 1,000 warheads by 2030, German and South Korean officials have wondered aloud if they should have their own nuclear weapons, as have important voices in Poland, Japan and Saudi Arabia.

The latest generation of nuclear technology can still inflict unspeakable devastation. Artificial intelligence could someday automate war without human intervention. No one can confidently predict how and if deterrence will work under these dynamics or even what strategic stability will look like. A new commitment to what could be years of diplomatic talks will be needed to establish new terms of engagement.

Over the past several months, I’ve been asked, including by colleagues, why I want to raise awareness on nuclear arms control when the world faces so many other challenges — climate change, rising authoritarianism and economic inequality, as well as the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Part of the answer is that both of those active conflicts would be far more catastrophic if nuclear weapons were introduced into them. Consider Mr. Putin’s threat at the end of February: “We also have weapons that can strike targets on their territory,” the Russian leader said during his annual address. “Do they not understand this?”

The other answer lies in our recent history. When people around the world in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s began to understand the nuclear peril of that era, a vocal constituency demanded — and achieved — change.

Fear of mutual annihilation last century spurred governments to work together to create a set of global agreements to lower the risk. Their efforts helped to end atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, which, in certain cases, had poisoned people and the environment. Adversarial nations started talking to each other and, by doing so, helped avoid accidental use. Stockpiles were reduced. A vast majority of nations agreed to never build these weapons in the first place if the nations that had them worked in good faith toward their abolishment. That promise was not kept.

In 1982 as many as a million people descended on Central Park calling for the elimination of nuclear arms in the world. More recently, some isolated voices have tried to raise the alarm — Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said last year that “the most serious thing facing mankind is nuclear proliferation” — but mostly such activism is inconceivable now. The once again growing threat of nuclear weapons is simply not part of the public conversation. And the world is less secure.

Today the nuclear safety net is threadbare. The good news is that it can be restitched. American leadership requires that Washington marshal international support for this mission — but it also requires leading by example. There are several actions that the U.S. president could take without buy-in from a Congress unlikely to cooperate.

As a first step, the United States could push to reinvigorate and establish with Russia and China, respectively, joint information and crisis control centers to ensure that misunderstandings and escalation don’t spiral. Such hotlines have all but gone dormant. The United States could also renounce the strategy of launching its nuclear weapons based only on a warning of an adversary’s launch, reducing the chance America could begin a nuclear war because of an accident, a human or mechanical failure or a simple misunderstanding. The United States could insist on robust controls for artificial intelligence in the launch processes of nuclear weapons.

Democracy rarely prevents war, but it can eventually serve as a check on it. Nuclear use has always been the exception: No scenario offers enough time for voters to weigh in on whether to deploy a nuclear weapon. Citizens, therefore, need to exert their influence well before the country finds itself in such a situation.

We should not allow the next generation to inherit a world more dangerous than the one we were given.

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