#ai-chatbots

#ai-chatbots

Before artificial intelligence had its big breakout, chatbots were those weird messaging tools that sat in the bottom corner of websites, rarely solving your problems and likely causing you more stress by blocking you from talking to a real person. But now, AI chatbots like have created a whole new category: It's search, but with conversation. You can use an AI chatbot as a thought partner, a research aid or a Google alternative for anything you want to know.

"Anybody who says that they know how to optimize for an answer on ChatGPT is probably feeding you some, you know, kind of snake oil,"

Beyond just ChatGPT, Shah is talking about going to apps like Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Anthropic's Claude to get information when you're researching an important purchase. While all of these platforms cite the places where they got the information in their natural language responses, in some cases they make their sources less prominent and not as easy to click through and verify. But Shah recommended that consumers go on that journey to make sure they understand which sources are shaping the information they are being fed by the chatbots in such a quick and digestible format.

"Character.ai is freeriding off the goodwill of Disney's famous marks and brands, and blatantly infringing Disney's copyrights," a Disney lawyer wrote in the cease-and-esist letter. "Even worse, Character.ai's infringing chatbots are known, in some cases, to be sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children, offending Disney's consumers and extraordinarily damaging Disney's reputation and goodwill."

A third family has filed a lawsuit against an AI company, alleging that its chatbot drove their teen child to commit suicide. As the Washington Post reports, the parents of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta are suing AI chatbot company Character.AI, saying the company's chatbot had persuaded her that it was "better than human friends" and that it isolated from her family and friends, discouraging her from seeking help.

The publishing company behind USA Today and 220 other publications is today rolling out a chatbot-like tool called DeeperDive that can converse with readers, summarize insights from its journalism, and suggest new content from across its sites. "Visitors now have a trusted AI answer engine on our platform for anything they want to engage with, anything they want to ask," Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett and the USA Today Network, said at the WIRED AI Power Summit in New York, an event that brought together voices from the tech industry, politics, and the world of media. "and it is performing really great."

This experience has given me a deep understanding of the challenges non-native English speakers face in navigating workplace learning, from dense onboarding modules to complex compliance training. Many eLearning programs are designed without fully considering these challenges. Even well-intentioned content can leave learners feeling confused, disengaged, or unsure how to apply what they've learned. For ESL employees, this gap becomes even wider as language nuances, technical terminology, and complex sentence structures add extra barriers to both comprehension and confidence.

On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission ordered several tech companies to cough up information about how they test, make, distribute and monetize their AI chatbots. ChatGPT's maker, San Francisco-headquartered OpenAI, is one target of the FTC's order. The inquiry also includes Google's parent company, Snapchat's parent company, Instagram and its owner Meta, Elon Musk's xAI, and the popular chatbot-maker Character.AI.

The number of people who turn to these three AI-powered chatbots grew from March to June this year, according to the latest stats from analytics provider Comscore. Though all three of the major AIs enjoyed growth, one left the other two in the dust. For the three months , use of Microsoft Copilot surged by 175%, making it the fastest growing chatbot of all. In second place was Google Gemini with a gain of 68%, followed by OpenAI's ChatGPT with an increase of 18%.

The domain of AI has quickly gone from seeking answers from a chatbot to getting multi-step web-based work done for you, like booking restaurant tables, adding stuff to your Amazon cart, and performing deep back-and-forth research. But it looks like the answers you get, especially when it comes to online shopping, depend on the AI chatbot you are using. "Platforms disagree on brand recommendations for 61.9% of queries," says an analysis conducted by BrightEdge.

Grok, the chatbot made by Elon Musk's xAI, incorrectly informed users that Hawaii's tsunami warning had been canceled, causing significant panic and confusion.