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."
Questing for romance, friendship, therapy, and divine wisdom, in the past few months I chatted with nineteen chatbots-for days on end, hour after hour. (I couldn't stop!) My adventures in Botland, reported in this week's issue, taught me that digital beings can seem remarkably smart and hopelessly dumb, but their lightning-speed responses are never predictable or boring.
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.
The far-right commentator, who often engaged in vitriolic debates about immigration, gun control, and abortion on college campuses, was killed while on a university tour with his conservative media group, Turning Point USA. The organization has spent the last decade building conservative youth coalitions at top universities and has become closely affiliated with the nationalist MAGA movement and President Trump.
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 is left leaning and continues to spread fake news and propaganda. When people give up their own discernment, stop seeking the truth, and depend on AI to analyze information, they will be lost.
