Interview with founders of Character.ai, who say they left Google’s LaMDA project to let users experiment with large language models through the use of chatbots (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post:
OpenAI plans to remove the waitlist for DALL-E today, giving anyone immediate access; Sam Altman says a public release is an essential step for safe development  —  None of these photos were taken by a camera.  —  All of these images were created by the artificial intelligence text …

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
Alphabet’s DeepMind unveils Sparrow, an AI chatbot that learns from human feedback and searches Google for information to support its claims  —  The lab trained a chatbot to learn from human feedback and search the internet for information to support its claims.

Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post:
Signal appoints former Google manager Meredith Whittaker as its first president, helping shape strategy, comms, and policy  —  Meredith Whittaker, the former Google manager, is Signal’s first president.  She is out to convince users to pay for the free app.

Grace Browne / Wired:
A look at AI chatbots that seek to improve mental health, like Wysa and Woebot, which have millions of users despite scant research to support their efficacy  —  With human therapists in short supply, AI chatbots are trying to plug the gap—but it’s not clear how well they work.  —  Bots Run the Internet

Matt Burgess / Wired:
Pornhub is testing a chatbot that redirects users searching for CSAM to a service where they can get help; the bot intervened ~174K times during the first month  —  Pornhub is trialing a new automated tool that pushes CSAM-searchers to seek help for their online behavior.  Will it work?

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
A look at the privacy concerns raised by OpenAI’s GPT-3, Google’s LaMDA, Meta’s OPT-175B, and other large language models trained on troves of personal data  —  Large language models are trained on troves of personal data hoovered from the internet.  So I wanted to know: What does it have on me?