Marketplace Tech

When it comes to combating election-related misinformation online, sometimes the real world is the best place to start, but it isn’t always easy. On this week’s installment of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy,” Lily Jamali and senior Washington correspondent Kimberly Adams discuss the personal side of misinformation, take questions from colleagues and hear from experts about best practices for talking with loved ones about this sometimes sensitive topic.

Last week, more than 1,000 experts in science and technology signed an open letter to labs developing advanced artificial intelligence, asking them to pause the “out of control race” to train ever more powerful systems. The letter warns that these “non-human minds” might eventually outsmart us, risking the “loss of control of our civilization.” But such framing misses the mark, according to Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington who is skeptical of “AI hype.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Bender about what she sees as the real dangers in these models, starting with the way they use language itself.

The internet has been overrun by AI content. The weirdly glowing and inadvertently surreal airbrushed images, the generic and oddly formal sentences peppered with factual errors and distracting phrases like “as of my last knowledge update.” So much of social media content these days has the unmistakable stench of “AI slop,” hastily spit out by image generators or chatbots to get a few likes. And while the phenomenon might seem harmless or sometimes even charming, the AI slop takeover of the internet is crowding out real information and human perspectives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox, about how AI slop is transforming social media.

Ever since ChatGPT hit the scene a couple years ago, there’s been a nagging sense of dread for many: what will this mean for jobs? Well, new research from Imperial College London finds a shift already underway. Between July 2021 and July 2023, the report found freelance job postings for writing and coding decreased by about 20%. There was also a slowdown in freelance jobs for visual art. And it’s happening more quickly than past technological disruptions, Ozge Demirci, one of the coauthors of that report and a business professor at Imperial College London, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

Warning: This episode contains references to sexual abuse and violence.

Whether for a hookup or to find true love, 3 out of 10 American adults say they have used a dating app, according to the Pew Research Center. But an investigation out Wednesday from Mother Jones looks into how these apps can also incubate abuse, finding that companies like Grindr and Match Group have failed to protect some of their users from predators. At the heart of this story is this question: Is that the companies’ responsibility? The tech industry has long argued the answer is no, thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet companies from liability for content posted xx on their sites. Abby Vesoulis is the author of the Mother Jones investigation. Her story begins with Matthew Herrick, whose ex-boyfriend created fake profiles of him on Grindr.