There’s been ever-increasing talk about an “AI bubble,” perhaps meaning a business shakeout but to some ways of thinking, concern that it will all prove illusory. It may well fall short of being a massive, overarching technological change, but over 2025, and especially over the past three months, it has produced a steady flow of valuable applications. Here are some worthy of your attention.
To stanch a
problem that had been causing deaths and threatened huge lawsuit settlements,
we saw as “OpenAI announces measures to protect teens using ChatGPT” (Stephen
Sorace, Fox Business, September 16th). These “strengthened protections for teens
will allow parents to link their ChatGPT account with their teen’s account,
control how ChatGPT responds to their teen with age-appropriate model behavior
rules and manage which features to disable, including memory and chat
history.” It is now in place, and is at
least a commendable start.
On another gigantic
corporate side, “Elon Musk Gambles on Sexy A.I. Companions” (Kate Conger, The
New York Times, October 6th).
And they are certainly trying to be.
Musk’s firm xAI offered “cartoonish personas” which “resemble anime
characters and offer a gamelike function:
As users progress through “levels” of conversation, they unlock more
raunchy content, like the ability to strip (them) down to lacy lingerie.” They
would also talk about sex, and have kindled romantic, as opposed to
pornographic, user interest. As for the
latter, “ChatGPT to allow ‘erotica for verified adults,’ Altman says” (Anders
Hagstrom, Fox Business, October 15th). Their CEO Sam claimed he implemented this
capability partly as a response to successfully limiting teens as above, and
expected that “In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of
our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more.”
In a rather
unrelated achievement, “Researchers create revolutionary AI fabric that
predicts road damage before it happens” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News,
October 15th). “Researchers
at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute have developed a fabric embedded with sensors
and AI algorithms that can monitor road conditions from beneath the surface,”
which would “make costly, disruptive road repairs far more efficient and
sustainable” by assessing “cracks and wear in the layers below the
asphalt.” The fabric “continuously
collects data,” and “a connected unit on the roadside stores and transmits this
data to an AI system that analyzes it for early warning signs.” Seems conceptually solid, and is now being
tested.
If you want
more than just hot other-sex representations, now “People are talking with ‘AI
Jesus.’ But do they have a prayer?”
(Scott Gunn, Fox News, October 26th). The author named concerns with that app, some
from his Christian perspective, such as “your conversation might take a strange
turn when “Jesus” says something that’s just not true or makes up a Bible verse
or reference that doesn’t exist,” and that using it constitutes “replacing the
living and true God with a false God.” He also noted that “people in church…
will answer your questions and support you through uncertain times.” This program could be used as an attempt to
learn Christian teachings, and end up helping people “grow in faith and love,”
but, per Gunn, it’s no substitute for the old-fashioned means.
Medical-related
AI uses have been growing exponentially, and, in the October 30th New
York Times, Simar Bajaj gave us “5 Tips When Consulting ‘Dr.’ ChatGPT.” Although “ChatGPT can pass medical licensing
exams and solve clinical cases more accurately than humans can,” and “are great
at creating a list of questions to ask your doctor, simplifying jargon in
medical records and walking you through your diagnosis or treatment plan,” they
“are also notorious for making things up, and their faulty medical advice seems
to have also caused real harm.” The
pieces of advice are “practice when the stakes are low,” “share context –
within reason,” “check in during long chats” by asking it to summarize what it
“knows,” “invite more questions,” and “pit your chatbot against itself” by
requesting and verifying sources.
Back to
romantic uses with “How A.I. Is Transforming Dating Apps” (Eli Tan, The New
York Times, November 3rd).
The area of online dating, per a mountain of articles and anecdotal
reports, is now a disaster zone of dissatisfaction, so the appearance of
“artificial intelligence matchmakers” must at least have potential. People are entering information about what
kind of partner they want, the tool distills them down to one candidate, and
the user pays individually for that. I
don’t think this is really anything new, just an adjustment from providing a
smaller number of recommendations to just one, but perceptions are powerful,
and sending $25 for a crack at meeting “the one” may turn out to have great
emotional, and even logistical, appeal.
Another
personal thing AI has been doing is counseling.
But “Are A.I. Therapy Chatbots Safe to Use?” (Cade Metz, The New York
Times, November 6th). The
question here is not whether the products are useful, but if they “should be
regulated as medical devices.” The day
this article was published, as “how well therapy chatbots work is unclear,” “the
Food and Drug Administration held its first public hearing to explore that
issue.” At the least, such programs will
be usable only unofficially for psychiatric counseling; at best, certain ones
will be formally, and perhaps legally, approved.
The other
side of one of the technology’s most-established setting came out in “I’m a
Professor. A.I. Has Changed My
Classroom, but Not for the Worse” (Carlo Rotella, also in the Times,
November 25th). The author, a
Boston College English instructor, related how his students “want to be capable
humans” and “independent thinkers,” and “the A.I. apocalypse that was expected
to arrive in full force in higher education has not come to pass just
yet.” He had told his learners that
“reading is thinking and writing is thinking,” “using A.I. to do your thinking
for you is like joining the track team and doing your laps on an electric
scooter,” and “you’re paying $5 a minute for college classes; don’t spend your time
here practicing to be replaceable by A.I.”
Those things, and the “three main elements” of “an A.I.- resistant
English course,” “pen-and-paper and oral testing, teaching the process of
writing rather than just assigning papers, and greater emphasis on what happens
in the classroom” have seen this contributor through well.
In the same
publication on the same day, Gabe Castro-Root asked us “What Is Agentic A.I.,
and Would You Trust It to Book a Flight?”
Although not ready now, its developers claim it “will be able to find
and pay for reservations with limited human involvement,” once the customer
provides his or her credit card data and “parameters like dates and a price
range for their travel plans.” For now,
agentic A.I. can “offer users a much finer level of detail than searches using
generative tools.” One study found that
earlier this year, “just 2 percent of travelers were ready to give A.I.
autonomy to book or modify plans after receiving human guidance.” If hallucinated flights, hotels, and
availability prove to be a problem, that may not get much higher.
Another not
here now but perhaps on the way is “Another Use for A.I. – Talking to Whales”
(David Gruber, again in the Times, November 30th). Although the hard part of understanding whale
sounds is only in the future, AI has proved handy in anticipating “word
patterns” as it does with human language, and can also “accurately predict” the
clicks they make “while socializing,” “the whale’s vocal clan, and the
individual whale with over 90 percent accuracy.” We don’t know how long it will take for
humans to decode this information, but AI is helping to clear conceptual
problems in advance.
Once more in
the November 25th New York Times was the revelation that
“A.I. Can Do More of Your Shopping This Holiday Season” (Natalie Rocha and
Kailyn Rhone). Firms providing “chatbots
that act as conversational stylists and shopping assistants” include Ralph
Lauren, Target, and Walmart. Customers
with ChatGPT can use an “instant checkout feature” so they “can buy items from
stores such as Etsy without leaving the chat.”
Google’s product “can call local stores to check if an item is in
stock,” and “Amazon rolled out an A.I. feature that tracks price drops and
automatically buys an item if it falls within someone’s budget.” While “many of the A.I. tools are still
experimental and unproven,” per a Harris poll “roughly 42 percent of shoppers
are already using A.I. tools for their holiday shopping.”
And so it is
going. Most of these innovations don’t
require more expensively expanded large language models. Why would people stop using them? Why would companies stop improving them in
other ways? They are here to stay, and
so, it must be, is artificial intelligence.
