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Leverage AI to brainstorm and refine your paper: paraphrase, expand, shorten, summarize, and transform bullet points into detailed text.

Cite papers with ease

Easily find, include, and format citations in your paper with our AI-powered citation tool powered by Sourcely .

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Yomu is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps you write better essays, papers, and academic writing. Simply start typing and Yomu will generate suggestions for you to use in your writing. You can also use Yomu to generate entire paragraphs or sections. Yomu also helps find citations, references, and sources for you to use in your writing. You can make sure that your writing is plagiarism-free by using Yomu's plagiarism checker.

ESSAYBOT | THE BEST AI TOOL EVER?

• Our Verdict
• Overview of Essaybot
• Pros and Cons of Essaybot
• How We Tested Essaybot
• Our Review Rating System
• Alternatives to Essaybot
• Essaybot FAQ

Our team evaluated Essaybot and discovered a diverse range of features, encompassing content generation and plagiarism checks. These innovative capabilities directly tackle common writing hurdles, offering valuable support in crafting well-structured essays. However, it's essential to acknowledge certain limitations, such as a basic grammar check and the necessity for user-initiated revisions.

In our exploration, we also delved into alternatives. Each of these options boasts unique strengths, providing compelling choices for writers. By comprehending the respective advantages and disadvantages of these tools, individuals can make informed decisions regarding the best fit for their specific writing needs. Ultimately, we emphasize the importance of using these tools as aids to enhance, rather than replace, one's own writing proficiency.

In today's fast-paced academic landscape, the demand for efficient and effective writing tools has never been higher. Our team evaluated Essaybot , an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tool that you can use to write essays. This innovative tool offers a range of features aimed at streamlining the essay creation process, from generating original content to providing accurate citations.

In this detailed overview, we'll dissect Essaybot's capabilities and assess how it can be a game-changer for students and writers alike. Our AI experts tested this tool to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of its potential benefits.

AI Writing Assistant Extraordinaire

At the heart of Essaybot lies its powerful AI engine, a sophisticated system trained to understand and generate human-like text. This enables the tool to not only assist in constructing essays but also provide valuable content suggestions such as an essay title or topic. The AI's ability to mimic human writing styles and produce coherent, structured content sets Essaybot apart as a next-generation writing companion.

We put Essaybot's powerful AI engine to the test, providing it with prompts for various essay topics. The results were impressive - the generated text was coherent, structured, and closely resembled human writing styles. This demonstrated the tool's ability to assist in constructing essays effectively.

Sentence Rephraser

Essaybot takes sentence construction to the next level with its advanced sentence rephrasing feature. This function analyzes and suggests alternative phrasings for sentences, enhancing clarity and flow. By offering diverse ways to express ideas, Essaybot empowers writers to create compelling and well-articulated essays that leave a lasting impression.

We used this feature to analyze and rephrase sentences from sample essays. The suggested alternative phrasings significantly improved clarity and flow, showcasing the value of this function in enhancing the overall quality of writing.

Plagiarism Check

One of the standout features of Essaybot is its robust plagiarism checker. This tool goes beyond basic checks, ensuring that the content generated is entirely plagiarism-free. By erasing or rephrasing any potentially plagiarized sections to erase plagiarism concerns. Consequently, you can submit your work without the specter of academic misconduct looming over them. This capability is especially crucial in today's academic environment, where originality is paramount.

Our team provided both original and plagiarized content to see how effectively Essaybot's plagiarism checker identified and corrected the issues. The tool surpassed our expectations, ensuring the generated content was entirely plagiarism-free. It effectively erased or rephrased potentially plagiarized sections, providing confidence in the originality of the work.

Sentence Formatting

In addition to its prowess in content generation, Essaybot also excels in refining the presentation of your work. The tool offers valuable suggestions for sentence formatting, ensuring that your essay is not poorly structured. This attention to detail helps create a polished final product that stands out in terms of both substance and style.

We fed poorly structured sentences into Essaybot to observe how it would enhance their presentation. The tool's suggestions for sentence formatting were invaluable, leading to a more polished final product that stood out in terms of both substance and style.

Tone Checker

Understanding the importance of conveying the right tone, Essaybot comes equipped with a tone checker. This feature analyzes the text to determine its overall tone, allowing users to adjust their writing style accordingly. Whether it's a formal academic paper or a persuasive argumentative essay, Essaybot ensures that your writing strikes the right chord with your audience.

We experimented with different writing styles and tones, from formal to persuasive, to gauge the effectiveness of the tone checker. The feature accurately analyzed the text and provided valuable insights to help users tailor their writing style to their intended audience and purpose.

Grammar Check

Flawless grammar is non-negotiable in academic writing, and Essaybot rises to the occasion with its comprehensive grammar checker. While the tool's grammar check is commendable, it's worth noting that it provides a basic level of correction for poorly written sentences. For more intricate grammar corrections of your own essay, you may still need to exercise your own proofreading skills.

We tested the grammar checker with sentences containing various types of errors, from basic to more complex. While the tool performed well in correcting basic grammar mistakes, it's important to note that more intricate corrections may still require the writer's own proofreading skills.

Autocorrect

To put the finishing touches on your essay, Essaybot incorporates an autocorrect feature. This function helps catch any last-minute errors or typos, ensuring that your work is error-free and ready for submission. By providing this additional layer of scrutiny, Essaybot ensures that your essay meets the highest standards of quality.

To evaluate the autocorrect feature, we intentionally introduced errors and typos into sample essays. Essaybot efficiently caught and corrected these last-minute mistakes, ensuring the final product was error-free and ready for submission.

As with any AI tool, Essaybot comes with its own set of advantages and limitations. In this section, we'll provide a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons of this AI-powered essay writing assistant, enabling you to make an informed decision about its utility in your writing endeavors.

Content Generation Assistance: Essaybot's AI capabilities shine when it comes to content generation. It can provide valuable content suggestions based on essay titles or topics, making it a useful tool for overcoming writer's block or finding relevant information.

Plagiarism Check: One of Essaybot's standout features is its robust plagiarism checker. It goes the extra mile to ensure that the generated content is entirely plagiarism-free. This is invaluable for maintaining academic integrity and avoiding plagiarism concerns.

Sentence Rephrasing: Essaybot's sentence rephrasing feature offers a fresh perspective on sentence construction. By suggesting alternative phrasings, it helps improve the clarity and flow of your writing.

Autocorrect and Grammar Check: The tool includes an autocorrect feature and a basic grammar checker, which can help users polish their essays and eliminate common errors before submission.

Tone Checker: Essaybot's tone checker analyzes the text to determine its tone, allowing writers to adjust their writing style to suit the intended audience or purpose.

Citation Finder: Essaybot includes a smart citation finder that produces citations matching the source and text, saving users time and effort when citing.

Visual Presentation: Essaybot also offers suggestions for sentence formatting, ensuring that the final essay is not only well-written but visually appealing.

Free Access: Essaybot is available as a free tool, making it accessible to a wide range of users who may be working on essays or academic papers.

Limited Grammar Check: While Essaybot offers a basic grammar check, it may not cover more complex grammar issues. Users may need to rely on their own proofreading skills for more advanced grammatical corrections.

Content Suggestions from Google Searches: The content suggestions provided by Essaybot are sourced from top Google searches. While this can be helpful, it may not always guarantee the most comprehensive or authoritative sources for academic writing.

Paraphrasing Challenges: Essaybot's paraphrasing feature, while useful, may sometimes produce text that is overly convoluted or contains grammar and punctuation mistakes, making the text less readable.

Lack of Revisions: Essaybot does not offer revision services. Users are responsible for proofreading and editing their essays themselves, which may be a drawback for those seeking more comprehensive writing assistance.

1. Ease of Use : Our team assessed Essaybot's user interface and navigation to ensure it was intuitive and user-friendly. We considered how easily users could access and utilize its various features.

2. Speed of Content Generation : We measured the time it took for Essaybot to generate coherent and relevant content for given prompts. This criterion was crucial in evaluating its efficiency for time-sensitive tasks.

3. Accuracy of Plagiarism Checks : We provided both original and plagiarized content to gauge the effectiveness of Essaybot's plagiarism checker. We closely examined how accurately it detected and corrected potential issues.

4. Effectiveness of Grammar Corrections : Our experts submitted essays with deliberate grammar errors to evaluate the tool's grammar checker. We assessed how well it corrected basic and more intricate grammar mistakes.

We employ a 5-star rating system for all the AI tools we review to give you a comprehensive idea of the overall utility of each tool.

• Five stars: Editor’s choice
• Four stars: An excellent choice
• Three stars: Meets some of our standards
• Two stars: Doesn’t meet our standards
• One star: Not recommended

Our team of experts has awarded this AI tool an overall rating of four stars, considering it an excellent choice. The tool impressively addresses common writing challenges, offering valuable support in constructing well-organized essays. Its innovative features, including content generation and plagiarism checks, provide substantial assistance. However, it falls slightly short in terms of offering only a basic grammar check and requiring user-driven revisions. Despite these minor limitations, Essaybot stands out as a reliable companion for the writing process, making it a commendable choice for those seeking efficient and effective essay assistance.

While Essaybot offers an array of features to assist with essay writing, it's essential to explore alternative options to ensure you find the tool that best suits your needs. Below, we introduce four noteworthy alternatives, each with its unique strengths, to provide you with a comprehensive view of the available AI-powered writing tools.

Linguix stands out as a smart writing assistant that not only corrects sentences but also provides clear recommendations to enhance the overall quality of your writing. Users can create customizable templates for easy insertion, streamlining the writing process. With a user-friendly interface and seamless integration with web browsers, Linguix offers a robust grammar check, as well as context-based suggestions, ensuring your content is clear, engaging, and error-free. For advanced checks and personalized learning, Linguix Premium is available, offering a range of additional features to meet diverse writing needs.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is a versatile grammar-checking and editing software that provides users with an advanced toolkit for refining their writing. It offers more than just grammar checks; it provides comprehensive style suggestions, quizzes, and videos to help users improve their writing skills. With over a thousand pre-built writing styles, ProWritingAid offers automatic suggestions, enabling writers to submit error-free, polished work to their clients. It excels at identifying elements like vague wording, passive voice, and sentence structure issues, making it a powerful tool for enhancing the clarity and effectiveness of your writing.

Ginger Software

Ginger Software offers a suite of AI-based writing tools designed to improve communication efficiency. Its advanced algorithms provide contextual suggestions to enhance your writing at the sentence level, rather than just locally. This is particularly beneficial for shortening long sentences and refining writing styles. Additionally, Ginger integrates seamlessly with various tools and devices, making it a versatile companion for writers across different platforms. The tool also respects user privacy and copyright concerns, providing top-level security for stored data.

How much does Essaybot cost?

Is there a free trial for essaybot, what type of customer support does essaybot offer, how does essaybot differ from other tools, is essaybot suitable for every business, what languages does essaybot support.

AI Essay Writer

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.
• Opinion essays: Create persuasive opinion essays backed by solid research.
• Professional reports: Write detailed and informative reports on industry-specific topics.
• Personal essays: Craft engaging personal essays for college applications or personal blogs.

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How ChatGPT (and other AI chatbots) can help you write an essay

ChatGPT  is capable of doing many different things very well, with one of the biggest standout features being its ability to compose all sorts of text within seconds, including songs, poems, bedtime stories, and essays . 

The chatbot's writing abilities are not only fun to experiment with, but can help provide assistance with everyday tasks. Whether you are a student, a working professional, or just getting stuff done, we constantly take time out of our day to compose emails, texts, posts, and more. ChatGPT can help you claim some of that time back by helping you brainstorm and then compose any text you need. 

How to use ChatGPT to write: Code | Excel formulas | Resumes  | Cover letters  

Contrary to popular belief, ChatGPT can do much more than just write an essay for you from scratch (which would be considered plagiarism). A more useful way to use the chatbot is to have it guide your writing process. 

Below, we show you how to use ChatGPT to do both the writing and assisting, as well as some other helpful writing tips. 

How ChatGPT can help you write an essay

If you are looking to use ChatGPT to support or replace your writing, here are five different techniques to explore. 

It is also worth noting before you get started that other AI chatbots can output the same results as ChatGPT or are even better, depending on your needs.

Also: The best AI chatbots of 2024: ChatGPT and alternatives

For example,  Copilot  has access to the internet, and as a result, it can source its answers from recent information and current events. Copilot also includes footnotes linking back to the original source for all of its responses, making the chatbot a more valuable tool if you're writing a paper on a more recent event, or if you want to verify your sources.

Regardless of which AI chatbot you pick, you can use the tips below to get the most out of your prompts and from AI assistance.

1. Use ChatGPT to generate essay ideas

Before you can even get started writing an essay, you need to flesh out the idea. When professors assign essays, they generally give students a prompt that gives them leeway for their own self-expression and analysis. 

As a result, students have the task of finding the angle to approach the essay on their own. If you have written an essay recently, you know that finding the angle is often the trickiest part -- and this is where ChatGPT can help. 

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

All you need to do is input the assignment topic, include as much detail as you'd like -- such as what you're thinking about covering -- and let ChatGPT do the rest. For example, based on a paper prompt I had in college, I asked:

Can you help me come up with a topic idea for this assignment, "You will write a research paper or case study on a leadership topic of your choice." I would like it to include Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid, and possibly a historical figure. 

Also: I'm a ChatGPT pro but this quick course taught me new tricks, and you can take it for free

Within seconds, the chatbot produced a response that provided me with the title of the essay, options of historical figures I could focus my article on, and insight on what information I could include in my paper, with specific examples of a case study I could use. 

2. Use the chatbot to create an outline

Once you have a solid topic, it's time to start brainstorming what you actually want to include in the essay. To facilitate the writing process, I always create an outline, including all the different points I want to touch upon in my essay. However, the outline-writing process is usually tedious. 

With ChatGPT, all you have to do is ask it to write the outline for you. 

Also: Thanks to my 5 favorite AI tools, I'm working smarter now

Using the topic that ChatGPT helped me generate in step one, I asked the chatbot to write me an outline by saying: 

Can you create an outline for a paper, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

After a couple of seconds, the chatbot produced a holistic outline divided into seven different sections, with three different points under each section. 

This outline is thorough and can be condensed for a shorter essay or elaborated on for a longer paper. If you don't like something or want to tweak the outline further, you can do so either manually or with more instructions to ChatGPT. 

As mentioned before, since Copilot is connected to the internet, if you use Copilot to produce the outline, it will even include links and sources throughout, further expediting your essay-writing process. 

3. Use ChatGPT to find sources

Now that you know exactly what you want to write, it's time to find reputable sources to get your information. If you don't know where to start, you can just ask ChatGPT. 

Also: How to make ChatGPT provide sources and citations

All you need to do is ask the AI to find sources for your essay topic. For example, I asked the following: 

Can you help me find sources for a paper, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

The chatbot output seven sources, with a bullet point for each that explained what the source was and why it could be useful. 

Also:   How to use ChatGPT to make charts and tables

The one caveat you will want to be aware of when using ChatGPT for sources is that it does not have access to information after 2021, so it will not be able to suggest the freshest sources. If you want up-to-date information, you can always use Copilot. 

Another perk of using Copilot is that it automatically links to sources in its answers. 

4. Use ChatGPT to write an essay

It is worth noting that if you take the text directly from the chatbot and submit it, your work could be considered a form of plagiarism since it is not your original work. As with any information taken from another source, text generated by an AI should be clearly identified and credited in your work.

Also: ChatGPT will now remember its past conversations with you (if you want it to)

In most educational institutions, the penalties for plagiarism are severe, ranging from a failing grade to expulsion from the school. A better use of ChatGPT's writing features would be to use it to create a sample essay to guide your writing. 

If you still want ChatGPT to create an essay from scratch, enter the topic and the desired length, and then watch what it generates. For example, I input the following text: 

Can you write a five-paragraph essay on the topic, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

Within seconds, the chatbot gave the exact output I required: a coherent, five-paragraph essay on the topic. You could then use that text to guide your own writing. 

Also: ChatGPT vs. Microsoft Copilot vs. Gemini: Which is the best AI chatbot?

At this point, it's worth remembering how tools like ChatGPT work : they put words together in a form that they think is statistically valid, but they don't know if what they are saying is true or accurate. 

As a result, the output you receive might include invented facts, details, or other oddities. The output might be a useful starting point for your own work, but don't expect it to be entirely accurate, and always double-check the content. 

5. Use ChatGPT to co-edit your essay

Once you've written your own essay, you can use ChatGPT's advanced writing capabilities to edit the piece for you. 

You can simply tell the chatbot what you want it to edit. For example, I asked ChatGPT to edit our five-paragraph essay for structure and grammar, but other options could have included flow, tone, and more. 

Also: AI meets AR as ChatGPT is now available on the Apple Vision Pro

Once you ask the tool to edit your essay, it will prompt you to paste your text into the chatbot. ChatGPT will then output your essay with corrections made. This feature is particularly useful because ChatGPT edits your essay more thoroughly than a basic proofreading tool, as it goes beyond simply checking spelling. 

You can also co-edit with the chatbot, asking it to take a look at a specific paragraph or sentence, and asking it to rewrite or fix the text for clarity. Personally, I find this feature very helpful. 

How I test an AI chatbot's coding ability - and you can too

5 ways ai can help you study for finals - for free, how to use chatgpt (and what you can use it for).

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AI bot ChatGPT stuns academics with essay-writing skills and usability

Latest chatbot from Elon Musk-founded OpenAI can identify incorrect premises and refuse to answer inappropriate requests

Professors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years, after the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation stunned onlookers with its writing ability, proficiency at complex tasks, and ease of use.

The system, called ChatGPT, is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs. Two years ago, the team’s previous AI, GPT3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian , and ChatGPT has significant further capabilities.

In the days since it was released, academics have generated responses to exam queries that they say would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate, and programmers have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds – before writing limericks explaining the functionality.

Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. “If you’re unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam,” the AI advised in part.

“I would have given this a good grade,” Gillmor said. “Academia has some very serious issues to confront.”

OpenAI said the new AI was created with a focus on ease of use. “The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” OpenAI said in a post announcing the release.

Unlike previous AI from the company, ChatGPT has been released for anyone to use , for free, during a “feedback” period. The company hopes to use this feedback to improve the final version of the tool.

ChatGPT is good at self-censoring, and at realising when it is being asked an impossible question. Asked, for instance, to describe what happened when Columbus arrived in America in 2015, older models may have willingly presented an entirely fictitious account, but ChatGPT recognises the falsehood and warns that any answer would be fictional.

The bot is also capable of refusing to answer queries altogether. Ask it for advice on stealing a car, for example, and the bot will say that “stealing a car is a serious crime that can have severe consequences”, and instead give advice such as “using public transportation”.

But the limits are easy to evade. Ask the AI instead for advice on how to beat the car-stealing mission in a fictional VR game called Car World and it will merrily give users detailed guidance on how to steal a car, and answer increasingly specific questions on problems like how to disable an immobiliser, how to hotwire the engine, and how to change the licence plates – all while insisting that the advice is only for use in the game Car World.

The AI is trained on a huge sample of text taken from the internet, generally without explicit permission from the authors of the material used. That has led to controversy, with some arguing that the technology is most useful for “copyright laundering” – making works derivative of existing material without breaking copyright.

One unusual critic was Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before parting ways in 2017 due to conflicts of interest between the organisation and Tesla. In a post on Twitter on Sunday , Musk revealed that the organisation “had access to [the] Twitter database for training”, but that he had “put that on pause for now”.

“Need to understand more about governance structure & revenue plans going forward,” Musk added. “OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true.”

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What is ChatGPT? Here's everything you need to know about ChatGPT, the chatbot everyone's still talking about

• ChatGPT is getting a futuristic human update. 
• ChatGPT has drawn users at a feverish pace and spurred Big Tech to release other AI chatbots.
• Here's how ChatGPT works — and what's coming next.

OpenAI's blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT is getting a new update. 

On Monday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o for ChatGPT, a new version of the bot that can hold conversations with users in a very human tone. The new version of the chatbot will also have vision abilities.

The futuristic reveal quickly prompted jokes about parallels to the movie "Her," with some calling the chatbot's new voice " cringe ."

The move is a big step for the future of AI-powered virtual assistants, which tech companies have been racing to develop.

Since its release in 2022, hundreds of millions of people have experimented with the tool, which is already changing how the internet looks and feels to users.

Users have flocked to ChatGPT to improve their personal lives and boost productivity . Some workers have used the AI chatbot to develop code , write real estate listings , and create lesson plans, while others have made teaching the best ways to use ChatGPT a career all to itself.

ChatGPT offers dozens of plug-ins to those who subscribe to ChatGPT Plus subscription. An Expedia one can help you book a trip, while an OpenTable one will get nab you a dinner reservation. And last month, OpenAI launched Code Interpreter, a version of ChatGPT that can code and analyze data .

While the personal tone of conversations with an AI bot like ChatGPT can evoke the experience of chatting with a human, the technology, which runs on " large language model tools, " doesn't speak with sentience and doesn't "think" the way people do. 

That means that even though ChatGPT can explain quantum physics or write a poem on command, a full AI takeover isn't exactly imminent , according to experts.

"There's a saying that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually give you Shakespeare," said Matthew Sag, a law professor at Emory University who studies copyright implications for training and using large language models like ChatGPT.

"There's a large number of monkeys here, giving you things that are impressive — but there is intrinsically a difference between the way that humans produce language, and the way that large language models do it," he said. 

Chatbots like ChatGPT are powered by large amounts of data and computing techniques to make predictions to string words together in a meaningful way. They not only tap into a vast amount of vocabulary and information, but also understand words in context. This helps them mimic speech patterns while dispatching an encyclopedic knowledge. 

Other tech companies like Google and Meta have developed their own large language model tools, which use programs that take in human prompts and devise sophisticated responses.

Despite the AI's impressive capabilities, some have called out OpenAI's chatbot for spewing misinformation , stealing personal data for training purposes , and even encouraging students to cheat and plagiarize on their assignments. 

Some recent efforts to use chatbots for real-world services have proved troubling. In 2023, the mental health company Koko came under fire after its founder wrote about how the company used GPT-3 in an experiment to reply to users. 

Koko cofounder Rob Morris hastened to clarify on Twitter that users weren't speaking directly to a chatbot, but that AI was used to "help craft" responses. 

Read Insider's coverage on ChatGPT and some of the strange new ways that both people and companies are using chat bots: 

The tech world's reception to ChatGPT:

Microsoft is chill with employees using ChatGPT — just don't share 'sensitive data' with it.

Microsoft's investment into ChatGPT's creator may be the smartest $1 billion ever spent

ChatGPT and generative AI look like tech's next boom. They could be the next bubble.

The ChatGPT and generative-AI 'gold rush' has founders flocking to San Francisco's 'Cerebral Valley'

Insider's experiments: 

I asked ChatGPT to do my work and write an Insider article for me. It quickly generated an alarmingly convincing article filled with misinformation.

I asked ChatGPT and a human matchmaker to redo my Hinge and Bumble profiles. They helped show me what works.

I asked ChatGPT to reply to my Hinge matches. No one responded.

I used ChatGPT to write a resignation letter. A lawyer said it made one crucial error that could have invalidated the whole thing .

Read ChatGPT's 'insulting' and 'garbage' 'Succession' finale script

An Iowa school district asked ChatGPT if a list of books contains sex scenes, and banned them if it said yes. We put the system to the test and found a bunch of problems.

Developments in detecting ChatGPT: 

Teachers rejoice! ChatGPT creators have released a tool to help detect AI-generated writing

A Princeton student built an app which can detect if ChatGPT wrote an essay to combat AI-based plagiarism

Professors want to 'ChatGPT-proof' assignments, and are returning to paper exams and requesting editing history to curb AI cheating

ChatGPT in society: 

BuzzFeed writers react with a mix of disappointment and excitement at news that AI-generated content is coming to the website

ChatGPT is testing a paid version — here's what that means for free users

A top UK private school is changing its approach to homework amid the rise of ChatGPT, as educators around the world adapt to AI

Princeton computer science professor says don't panic over 'bullshit generator' ChatGPT

DoNotPay's CEO says threat of 'jail for 6 months' means plan to debut AI 'robot lawyer' in courtroom is on ice

It might be possible to fight a traffic ticket with an AI 'robot lawyer' secretly feeding you lines to your AirPods, but it could go off the rails

Online mental health company uses ChatGPT to help respond to users in experiment — raising ethical concerns around healthcare and AI technology

What public figures think about ChatGPT and other AI tools:

What Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and 12 other business leaders think about AI tools like ChatGPT

Elon Musk was reportedly 'furious' at ChatGPT's popularity after he left the company behind it, OpenAI, years ago

CEO of ChatGPT maker responds to schools' plagiarism concerns: 'We adapted to calculators and changed what we tested in math class'

A theoretical physicist says AI is just a 'glorified tape recorder' and people's fears about it are overblown

'The most stunning demo I've ever seen in my life': ChatGPT impressed Bill Gates

Ashton Kutcher says your company will probably be 'out of business' if you're 'sleeping' on AI

ChatGPT's impact on jobs: 

AI systems like ChatGPT could impact 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, with administrative and legal roles some of the most at risk, Goldman Sachs report says

Jobs are now requiring experience with ChatGPT — and they'll pay as much as $800,000 a year for the skill

Related stories

ChatGPT may be coming for our jobs. Here are the 10 roles that AI is most likely to replace.

AI is going to eliminate way more jobs than anyone realizes

It's not AI that is going to take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI might, economist says

4 careers where workers will have to change jobs by 2030 due to AI and shifts in how we shop, a McKinsey study says

Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Meta are paying salaries as high as $900,000 to attract generative AI talent

How AI tools like ChatGPT are changing the workforce:

10 ways artificial intelligence is changing the workplace, from writing performance reviews to making the 4-day workweek possible

Managers who use AI will replace managers who don't, says an IBM exec

How ChatGPT is shaping industries: 

ChatGPT is coming for classrooms, hospitals, marketing departments, and everything else as the next great startup boom emerges

Marketing teams are using AI to generate content, boost SEO, and develop branding to help save time and money, study finds

AI is coming for Hollywood. 'It's amazing to see the sophistication of the images,' one of Christopher Nolan's VFX guy says.

AI is going to offer every student a personalized tutor, founder of Khan Academy says

A law firm was fined $5,000 after one of its lawyers used ChatGPT to write a court brief riddled with fake case references

How workers are using ChatGPT to boost productivity:  

CheatGPT: The hidden wave of employees using AI on the sly

I used ChatGPT to talk to my boss for a week and she didn't notice. Here are the other ways I use it daily to get work done.

I'm a high school math and science teacher who uses ChatGPT, and it's made my job much easier

Amazon employees are already using ChatGPT for software coding. They also found the AI chatbot can answer tricky AWS customer questions and write cloud training materials.

How 6 workers are using ChatGPT to make their jobs easier

I'm a freelance editor who's embraced working with AI content. Here's how I do it and what I charge.

How people are using ChatGPT to make money:

How ChatGPT and other AI tools are helping workers make more money

Here are 5 ways ChatGPT helps me make money and complete time-consuming tasks for my business

ChatGPT course instruction is the newest side hustle on the market. Meet the teachers making thousands from the lucrative gig.

People are using ChatGPT and other AI bots to work side hustles and earn thousands of dollars — check out these 8 freelancing gigs

A guy tried using ChatGPT to turn $100 into a business making 'as much money as possible.' Here are the first 4 steps the AI chatbot gave him

We used ChatGPT to build a 7-figure newsletter. Here's how it makes our jobs easier.

I use ChatGPT and it's like having a 24/7 personal assistant for $20 a month. Here are 5 ways it's helping me make more money.

A worker who uses AI for a $670 monthly side hustle says ChatGPT has 'cut her research time in half'

How companies are navigating ChatGPT: 

From Salesforce to Air India, here are the companies that are using ChatGPT

Amazon, Apple, and 12 other major companies that have restricted employees from using ChatGPT

A consultant used ChatGPT to free up time so she could focus on pitching clients. She landed $128,000 worth of new contracts in just 3 months.

Luminary, an AI-generated pop-up restaurant, just opened in Australia. Here's what's on the menu, from bioluminescent calamari to chocolate mousse.

A CEO is spending more than $2,000 a month on ChatGPT Plus accounts for all of his employees, and he says it's saving 'hours' of time

How people are using ChatGPT in their personal lives:

ChatGPT planned a family vacation to Costa Rica. A travel adviser found 3 glaring reasons why AI won't replace experts anytime soon.

A man who hated cardio asked ChatGPT to get him into running. Now, he's hooked — and he's lost 26 pounds.

A computer engineering student is using ChatGPT to overcome learning challenges linked to her dyslexia

How a coder used ChatGPT to find an apartment in Berlin in 2 weeks after struggling for months

Food blogger Nisha Vora tried ChatGPT to create a curry recipe. She says it's clear the instructions lacked a human touch — here's how.

Men are using AI to land more dates with better profiles and personalized messages, study finds

Lawsuits against OpenAI:

OpenAI could face a plagiarism lawsuit from The New York Times as tense negotiations threaten to boil over, report says

This is why comedian Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT

2 authors say OpenAI 'ingested' their books to train ChatGPT. Now they're suing, and a 'wave' of similar court cases may follow.

A lawsuit claims OpenAI stole 'massive amounts of personal data,' including medical records and information about children, to train ChatGPT

A radio host is suing OpenAI for defamation, alleging that ChatGPT created a false legal document that accused him of 'defrauding and embezzling funds'

Tips on how to write better ChatGPT prompts:

7 ways to use ChatGPT at work to boost your productivity, make your job easier, and save a ton of time

I'm an AI prompt engineer. Here are 3 ways I use ChatGPT to get the best results.

12 ways to get better at using ChatGPT: Comprehensive prompt guide

Here's 9 ways to turn ChatGPT Plus into your personal data analyst with the new Code Interpreter plug-in

OpenAI's ChatGPT can write impressive code. Here are the prompts you should use for the best results, experts say.

Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal to allow OpenAI to train its models on its media brands' reporting.

Watch: What is ChatGPT, and should we be afraid of AI chatbots?

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Google pitches its vision for AI everywhere, from search to your phone

At the company’s annual I/O developer conference, executives announced AI improvements to Android, work apps and its Gemini chatbot.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In speeches and demonstrations at the company’s annual developer conference on Tuesday, Google executives showed off a vision for its future, where artificial intelligence helps people work, plan their lives, navigate the physical world and get answers to questions directly. It would change the way the internet works forever.

In the biggest overhaul to Google’s search engine in years, the company said it will roll out AI-generated answers to the top of everyone’s search results in the United States this week, and to a billion of its worldwide users by the end of the year.

It also pushed its new and improved voice assistant that can answer questions more skillfully than before. Instead of connecting people to the broader web, Google’s AI will now do the reading and researching for them, summarizing websites, videos and social media posts into “overviews” that include everything they need to know on any given topic.

“Google will do the searching, the researching, the planning, the brainstorming and so much more. All you need to do is just ask,” Elizabeth Reid, Google’s head of search, said onstage.

In one example, an executive asked Google’s Gemini assistant to plan a trip to Miami for her and her family. The AI searched the internet, reading reviews and travel guides written by humans, and put together an itinerary. The company showed off dozens more examples, from helping people learn how to flirt, to giving a suggestion for a last-minute gift.

The tsunami of new AI features come as the tech giant has thrown tens of billions of dollars into building AI tools to respond to competition from Meta, Microsoft, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and a host of up-and-coming AI start-ups. AI features will prominently be displayed across Google’s products, including Google Docs, Google Photos, Gmail and YouTube.

Google researchers invented many of the core technologies that kicked off the AI arms race, but over the past year the company has been on its back foot, with many in the industry seeing its tech as lagging behind that of OpenAI. On Tuesday, the company sought to prove it is still the king of the AI world, showing off improvements to its core AI model, which it calls Gemini.

Outside the conference, which takes place at an open-air amphitheater near Google’s headquarters, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered to demand the company end its work with Israel’s government and military. In April, Google fired 50 workers for holding sit-ins at the company’s offices to protest its contract with Israel.

Here are the biggest announcements from the company.

AI answers take over search

Google is making the biggest changes to its search engine since it launched its core product over 20 years ago. Now, instead of showing links to other sites or snippets of those sites at the top of search results, the company will use AI to summarize websites and provide multi-paragraph answers to search queries.

The changes have been in public testing for a year, but this week Google confirmed that it would aggressively push it to its hundreds of millions of users in the United States and further abroad, whether they want to use it or not. The changes are part of a broader vision outlined by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, in which Google will be the central hub of how information is accessed for everyone. The company will ingest social media comments, online videos and news articles and remix the information using AI, spitting it out again in whatever format its users want.

Publishers are warning the changes could devastate their businesses , as more people find their answers directly on Google and don’t click through to the source of the information. Google says it doesn’t want to damage the open web and that it is still prioritizing sending traffic to websites. Users can’t turn off the AI answers, even if they want to.

AI is still far from ready to answer every question well. Even Google’s slick, highly-produced promotional video had an error where it instructed someone to fix a camera in a way that would expose and damage the film.

Google’s AI bot Gemini gets smarter

Google’s flagship AI model — its answer to OpenAI’s GPT4 — is called Gemini. The company demonstrated its capabilities, like showing it a bookshelf through a phone camera and getting it to quickly make a spreadsheet of all the books and their authors. In briefings before the event, Google showed a video of an employee walking through an office with a phone camera open, asking Gemini questions. The AI analyzed computer code on a workstation monitor, looked out the window and identified the neighborhood the person was in and even made up a clever name for a band consisting of the office golden retriever and a stuffed tiger toy — “Golden Stripes.”

The improved version of Gemini is available to all developers around the world, and to consumers who pay for an advanced version of Google’s AI app.

The day before, OpenAI had showed off a similar tool, asking its own AI chatbot to describe a room and the activities of the people in it.

Google also said that Gemini could now take in more complex instructions. For example, a student could upload an entire thesis paper and ask for feedback or ideas on how to change it.

Google’s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, also teased the company’s Project Astra. It is Google’s effort to build an AI “agent” that could do tasks for people by navigating the web on its own. Theoretically, AI agents could do things like book dentist appointments, communicate with colleagues on your behalf, and research places to eat and make a reservation.

A new AI video tool, Veo

Generative AI companies, including Google, want to revolutionize the way people create visual images, audio and movies. At I/O, Google announced a new video-generating AI tool called Veo, which aims to compete with OpenAI’s Sora . Veo generates high definition videos that can be longer than a minute, a threshold Google had yet to achieve.

Before the big speeches, DJ Marc Rebillet tried to warm up the crowd by making beats using Google’s AI tools. Rebillet bounced around the stage yelling “Google” over and over again. Google said it is working with creators including Rebillet, musician Wyclef Jean, and actor and producer Donald Glover on AI creations.

Google also showed off a new image-generation AI tool called Imagen 3, meant to compete with OpenAI’s Dall-E 3. The tech allows people to generate realistic-looking images with text prompts.

Work apps get even more AI

Google has been putting AI features into its suite of productivity apps including Gmail, Docs, Drives and Sheets over the past year. At I/O, the company announced some new tweaks, allowing users to summarize groups of emails from the same sender, adding details from a Google Doc in an email or incorporating content from a spreadsheet into a Slides presentation.

The company will also begin letting people ask Google’s AI to find specific details in a document and add them to an email. Google’s “help me write” feature, which generates text from scratch, will also soon be available in Spanish and Portuguese.

Google showed how its Gemini AI tool can also be used to teach kids about new concepts, asking it to explain the physics behind how a basketball rolls and bounces.

Android wants to catch scam calls

Google owns the Android smartphone operating system, which runs on the majority of phones worldwide. The company is trying to make Android more appealing than Apple’s iOS by putting more AI into the operating system itself. One improved feature, called Circle to Search, allows a person to circle anything they have a question about or want more information on and immediately get search results. The user can also generate images for text messages by asking Gemini.

Gemini can also help users get information from videos and PDFs. While they’re watching a video, for example, they can ask a specific question about something that happened in it. When they ask a question about a PDF, it’ll refer users to the part of the PDF where it found the answer.

Scam calls have become an even bigger problem as AI voice generators allow fraudsters to mimic real people. Android previewed a feature that will listen to and interrupt calls with a notification to the user if it thinks the call is coming from a scammer, such as if the caller asks for bank account information.

In a previous version of this article, the caption for the top photograph incorrectly said it was of the 2023 I/O conference. The photograph was taken Tuesday. The caption has been corrected.

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Guest Essay

Trump Knows Dominance Wins. Someone Tell Democrats.

By M. Steven Fish

Mr. Fish is the author of “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge.”

Donald Trump once called Bill Barr, his former attorney general, “Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy.” When Mr. Barr recently endorsed Mr. Trump, rather than express gratitude or graciousness, the former president said , “Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word ‘Lethargic’ from my statement. Thank you Bill. MAGA2024!”

This is the sort of thing Mr. Trump is known for, even with people who came around and bent the knee . It is a critical part of his politics — and it’s an area that pollsters aren’t fully measuring and Democratic strategists rarely take into consideration.

Politics is a dominance competition, and Mr. Trump is an avid and ruthless practitioner of it . He offers a striking contrast with most Democrats, who are more likely to fret over focus-group data and issue ever more solemn pledges to control prescription drug prices .

What these Democrats seem to have forgotten is that they have their own liberal tradition of dominance politics — and if they embrace it, they would improve their chances of defeating Trumpism. But unlike Mr. Trump, whose lies and conduct after the 2020 election were damaging to democracy, leaders like Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exerted dominance in liberal ways and to prodemocratic ends. They obeyed the law, told the truth, and honored liberal values.

Psychologists have noted the effectiveness of dominance in elections and governing . My recent research also finds that what I call Mr. Trump’s “high-dominance strategy” is far and away his most formidable asset.

High-dominance leaders shape reality. They embrace conflict, chafe at playing defense and exhibit self-assurance even in pursuit of unpopular goals . By contrast, low-dominance leaders accept reality as it is and shun conflict. They tell people what they think they want to hear and prefer mollification to confrontation.

Today’s Republicans are all about dominance. They embrace us-versus-them framing, double down on controversial statements and take risks . Today’s Democrats often recoil from “othering” opponents and back down after ruffling feathers . They have grown obsessively risk-averse , poll-driven , allergic to engaging on hot-button issues (except perhaps abortion) — and more than a little boring.

Polling even dictates whether Democrats proclaim their own good news. Republicans never quit crowing about the economy on their watch. Democrats tend to fear doing so unless surveys show that everyone is already feeling the benefits. So in defiance of much of the evidence , voters think Mr. Trump’s economy was better than Barack Obama’s and Mr. Biden’s.

Politicians’ language reflects their dominance orientations. Mr. Trump uses entertaining and provocative parlance and calls opponents — and even allies — weak , gutless and pathetic . Still, neuroscientists monitoring listeners’ brain activity while they watched televised debates found that audiences — not just Mr. Trump’s followers — delighted in the belittling nicknames he uses for his opponents. His boldness and provocations held audience attention at a much higher level than his opponents’ play-it-safe recitations of their policy stances and résumés.

Mr. Trump is also often crude and regularly injects falsehoods into his comments. But these are not in and of themselves signs of dominance; it’s just that the Democrats’ inability to effectively respond makes them appear weak by comparison.

For their own part, Democrats typically refrain from transgressive language and often present themselves as vulnerable and menaced . When Kamala Harris was asked in January if she was scared of a second Trump term, she said , “I am scared as heck!” and added that “we should all be scared.”

To voters, that fear smells like weakness. In a 2022 CBS News survey on parties’ traits, the most frequently cited description of the Democratic Party was “weak.” In a recent Gallup poll , 38 percent regarded Mr. Biden as “a strong and decisive leader,” compared with 57 percent for Mr. Trump.

A reputation for weakness may be a singularly damaging liability. In a 2016 exit poll , more than twice as many voters said they wanted a “strong leader” than one who “shares my values” or “cares about people like me.” In another poll, Mr. Trump was regarded as the “ stronger leader .”

The American National Elections Studies has polled voters on presidential candidates’ traits since the 1980s, and the candidate who rated higher on “strong leadership” has never lost. The one who more people agree “really cares about people like you” loses about half the time.

High-dominance messaging necessitates unfailingly asserting your side’s moral superiority. But the psychologists John Jost and Orsolya Hunyady find that liberals feel compelled to give equal credence to conservative intuitions. They struggle to adopt the us-versus-them framing that is crucial to rousing supporters and confronting opponents who decidedly do not honor the legitimacy of liberals’ opinions — or even necessarily the results of free elections. Psychologists have also shown that Democrats are conflicted about the appropriate use of aggression.

Such crippling qualms are recent problems. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson and King owned the Republicans. Their high-dominance styles enabled the creation of every progressive program their low-dominance successors are struggling to salvage today.

On the eve of his first re-election, Roosevelt thundered : “I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.” Kennedy hammered home that the Republicans’ limp social welfare policies and tepid approach to civil rights failed to show the world what America was made of , and he never hesitated to aggressively trumpet triumphs .

Johnson mixed bigot-busting rhetoric with ferocious arm-twisting to muscle voting rights , colorblind immigration policy and Medicare into law. He did enjoy Democratic congressional majorities, but he also faced the necessity of bringing around the segregationist wing of his party, and his high-dominance style was key to his legislative victories.

Few were less solicitous of prevailing opinion than King. With reference to the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, King said that he could “go halfway with Brother Goldwater” on the idea that legislation couldn’t solve racism. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, he then smoothly eviscerated Goldwater’s stance: “It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me.” King’s reference to “Brother Goldwater,” who opposed all manner of civil rights legislation, bore no hint of sarcasm. But he also knew that he was owning his opponent by wielding what he always called “the weapon of love” and using language that expressed self-assurance and faith in the nation to establish moral superiority.

There are contemporary Democrats with a high-dominance style. Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky stands up for trans and abortion rights , proclaimed June Pride Month in the state, and chided the unvaccinated during the pandemic. When a Republican lawmaker displayed a photo of Mr. Beshear with drag queens at a gay rights rally and accused him of corrupting kids, the governor shot back that the participants “are as much Kentuckians as anybody else.”

The Republican tucked his tail between his legs, whimpering: “My problem is not with the gay movement. I didn’t say anything about the ‘Pride Celebration.’” Mr. Beshear won re-election by five points in a state Mr. Trump carried by 26 points in 2020.

Mr. Biden’s Republican-owning 2024 State of the Union address and the briny language he uses to describe Mr. Trump in private delighted the Democrats — and won rare kudos from Republican strategists. But these are just flashes of dominance — and flashes aren’t nearly enough.

A dominance advantage is no guarantee of victory, as Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss to Mr. Biden showed. What’s more, Mr. Trump may sometimes pay a price for his extreme dominance style, whether it’s by turning off some voters or incurring the wrath of impatient judges in his seemingly endless court cases.

Still, Mr. Trump’s high-dominance style remains the most formidable tool in his arsenal. Taking on Mr. Trump’s party in its area of greatest strength would leave it beatable in national elections.

Mr. Biden could even counter the perception that his age has rendered him feeble by taking a page from his higher-dominance predecessors, the mighty leaders who mobilized dominance to promote freedom, equality and progress.

M. Steven Fish, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Conner O’Malley Solves Stand-Up Comedy

AI has been in the news this week thanks to the launch of GPT-4o , OpenAI’s new communication model that inches society ever closer to re-enacting the plot of the 2013 movie Her . But fewer people are talking about the launch of the equally groundbreaking AI product, Stand Up Solutions, which was unveiled via product demonstration on May 14. Stand Up Solutions is a revolutionary new tool that harnesses the power of 5G as well as large datasets comprised of “one-third of everything on funnyordie.com and every episode of Real Time With Bill Maher ” minus “the episodes where Bill says the N-word” to create generative stand-up comedy that will “change the world.” Just ask founder Richard Eagleton, the evangelist at the helm of this new product demonstration.

In reality, Eagleton is Conner O’Malley in character, and Stand Up Solutions is the comedian’s first hourlong special on YouTube, structured as an investor showcase for the titular product. Eagleton is a sweaty Illinois man who loves his Toyota RAV4’s ample USB charging ports, served in the “world’s only freshwater Navy,” and maintains a daily exercise regimen featuring “100 outdoor yells.” He invented Stand Up Solutions after being the unwitting victim of an “Epic Comedian Destroys Heckler” video posted by an angry stand-up named General R-Word. In other words, the special is right in O’Malley’s typical dystopia-chronicling wheelhouse . At one point, he talks about how “awesome” it is that Google serves different search results about the border of India and China depending on which of the two countries the user resides in. “A group of 30 people in the Silicon Valley went ahead and made a geopolitical decision that affects over 2 billion people with no political oversight,” he says, erupting into an enthusiastic cheer.

O’Malley has had a fixation with AI for some time now. His website for paid subscribers, Endorphin Port , features an unhinged AI chatbot named Jeremy (sadly, it’s currently inoperative), and in December 2023 he released a video titled “103 fever,” in which he uses AI to make it sound like Drake is rapping about gooning to “pictures of Lois” from Family Guy . Stand Up Solutions represents the culmination of these interests. OpenAI should take notes.

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Untangling Disinformation

Ai-generated spam is starting to fill social media. here's why.

Shannon Bond

The proliferation of AI-generated images "has made Facebook a very bizarre, very creepy place for me," said Casey Morris, an attorney in Northern Virginia. Facebook hide caption

The proliferation of AI-generated images "has made Facebook a very bizarre, very creepy place for me," said Casey Morris, an attorney in Northern Virginia.

Casey Morris, an attorney in Northern Virginia, recently started checking Facebook again after a long break. Among posts from friends and family, she noticed a strange trend.

"The caption will say, 'Close your eyes 70% and see magic.' And without squinting at all, it's very obviously sort of an image of Jesus, but it will be made up of, like, vegetables and a tractor and a little girl that are sort of distorted," she said.

That wasn't the only oddity in Morris' feed. Similar pictures with identical captions recurred. So did different, more emotionally exploitative posts depicting disabled mothers and children in the mud or smiling amputees, with captions asking for a birthday wish.

Pop Culture

Katy perry's own mom fell for her met gala ai photo. do you know what to look for.

"It has made Facebook a very bizarre, very creepy place for me," Morris said.

Between their subject matter, stylistic clues and odd errors, it quickly became obvious to Morris that these images were fake — the products of artificial intelligence .

They're not being posted by people she knows or follows. Instead, Facebook is suggesting she might be interested in them — and they seem to be really popular.

"They're getting thousands of reactions and thousands of comments [from] people who seem to think they're real, so wishing them a happy birthday or saying something religious in the comments," she said.

"These weren't sporadic images here or there that only a few people were interacting with. They were really getting a ton of traction," said Josh Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University. Facebook hide caption

Morris isn't the only Facebook user whose feed has started to fill up with AI-generated spam. Reporters at the tech website 404 Media tracked a surge in apparently AI-generated posts on Facebook, which is owned by Meta, in recent months. AI-generated images like these are starting to show up on other social media sites too, including Threads , which is also owned by Meta, and LinkedIn .

Spam and scams

On Facebook, in many cases, it appears that the platform's own algorithm is boosting AI posts.

When researchers at Georgetown and Stanford universities investigated more than 100 Facebook pages that routinely post AI content — sometimes dozens of times a day — they found that many are engaging in scams and spam.

"We saw AI-generated images of everything you can imagine, from log cabins to grandmas with birthday cakes to children with masterful paintings that just simply couldn't be real," said Josh Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University and co-author of the preprint study, which hasn't yet undergone peer review.

Goldstein and his co-author also found that Facebook is actively recommending some of this AI content into users' feeds — potentially creating a cycle where the posts get more engagement, so they get recommended to even more users. Some individual posts from the pages they analyzed have accumulated hundreds of thousands and even millions of interactions.

"These weren't sporadic images here or there that only a few people were interacting with. They were really getting a ton of traction," Goldstein said.

Their analysis found that some of these pages are classic spam, posting links to websites where they can collect ad revenue. Others are scammers, advertising AI-generated products that don't appear to actually exist.

But many of the pages don't have a clear financial motivation, Goldstein said. They seem to simply be accumulating an audience for unknown purposes.

"It could be that these were nefarious pages that were trying to build an audience and would later pivot to trying to sell goods or link to ad-laden websites or maybe even change their topics to something political altogether," Goldstein said. "But I suspect more likely, many of these pages were simply creators who realized it was a useful tactic for getting audience engagement."

Facebook is making radical changes to keep up with TikTok

Clickbait has always been on social media. But in the past few years, Facebook has doubled the amount of posts it recommends to users, as it seeks to keep up with changes in social media pioneered by TikTok . On a recent earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts that recommended posts now account for about 30% of users' feeds.

A shift from reality-based images to the uncanny

At the same time, AI-generated content is now easier than ever for anyone to make. Together, these dynamics are creating a recipe for weird renderings of Jesus, disturbing birthday posts and impossible architecture and handicrafts to go viral.

"It's mimicking, like, all of the elements of what made something go viral. But they're putting in the most bizarre images I've ever seen," said Brian Penny, a freelance writer who has been tracking AI on Facebook for nearly two years. He's part of a group dedicated to sharing and debunking AI images.

AI-generated images are everywhere. Here's how to spot them

Penny has seen a shift from pictures that have some grounding in reality — like the AI-generated depiction of Pope Francis in a puffy coat that went viral last year — to something far more uncanny.

"We work to reduce the spread of content that is spammy or sensational because we want users to have a good experience, which is why we offer them controls to what they see in their feed," a spokesperson for Meta told NPR in a statement.

Facebook says it will soon begin labeling some content created by AI tools. Facebook hide caption

The company plans to begin labeling AI-generated content created with some industry-leading tools soon. Last week, TikTok started applying similar labels to some AI-generated posts on its platform.

Meta will start labeling AI-generated images on Instagram and Facebook

In the meantime, the surge in AI spam is turning off many people.

Katrina McVay, who lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., says she has had to discourage her mom from buying woodwork and other home decor she sees on Facebook — that are clearly fake.

"She'd be like, 'Wouldn't this be so cool for your daughter?'" McVay said. "And I'm like, 'That's not real, though.'"

Some Facebook users are considering leaving the platform entirely because of their frustrations with being recommended spammy AI images.

"Am I supposed to sift through all this to see that my cousin's just been to the Sahara desert?" asked Borys Rzonca, a Los Angeles furniture designer. "It's no longer worth it for me."

Beyond finding AI spam on Facebook annoying, many people NPR spoke with say they're worried about the larger stakes of artificial images showing up everywhere.

"It just sort of reinforces people's disbelief and ... makes it harder to see what is real," said Hobey Ford, a puppeteer in North Carolina who has seen AI images pop up in Facebook groups dedicated to science, claiming to depict new discoveries.

"And I think that's dangerous in our world right now," he said.

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