A New York judge recently called out an expert witness for using Microsoft's Copilot chatbot to inaccurately estimate damages in a real estate dispute that partly depended on an accurate assessment of damages to win. In an order Thursday, judge Jonathan Schopf warned that "due to the nature of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and its...

On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today. Friends and associates remember...

The Internet Archive has brought its Wayback Machine back online "in a provisional, read-only manner" as it continues to recover from attacks that took the site down last week, founder Brewster Kahle said in a post last night. The archive.org home page points users to the now-functional Wayback Machine but notes that other Internet Archive services...

Has your dentist ever told you that it's recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist's office did this year—in writing, even. And they claimed that the recommendation came from the American Dental Association. It's a common refrain from dentists, but it's false. The American Dental Association does not recommend annual...

What if there was a way to sneak malicious instructions into Claude, Copilot, or other top-name AI chatbots and get confidential data out of them by using characters large language models can recognize and their human users can’t? As it turns out, there was—and in some cases still is. The invisible characters, the result of a quirk in the Unicode text...

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a...