Good morning. Humane slashed the price of its AI Pin by $200 in an attempt to come back from its more-than-sluggish sales, The Verge reported.

$499 is better than $699 … but it’s not yet in my price range.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

MBZUAI Research: Framing, persuasion and propaganda

While the Internet and social media have made the news more accessible than ever, they have also opened up far more opportunities for the consumption of false or misleading information. 

This reality has resulted in a number of programs — NewsGuard, Politifact and Snopes, for instance — to help people derive fact from fiction. But the process is lengthy and challenging, opening the door for automation as a possible solution. 

What happened: Researchers at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) designed an automated solution called FRAPPE that serves to bridge the gap. 

The researchers did note that, since the system is based on neural nets, it lacks explainability and might further exhibit biases based on limitations to the scope of its training set, something they hope to address in future work. 

To learn more about MBZUAI’s research visit their website, and if you’re interested in graduate study, please see their study webpage.

If you want to get in front of an audience of 200,000+ developers, business leaders and tech enthusiasts, get in touch with us here.

Tesla shares jump on Q3 earnings report

Tesla shares jumped as much as 11.8% in after-hours trading Wednesday after the company reported third-quarter earnings. 

The details: Tesla reported revenue of $25.18 billion for the quarter, coming in slightly below analyst expectations of $25.37 billion. 

The spike comes just a few weeks after Tesla’s robotaxi event dealt a dose of hype that failed to impress Wall Street. Deepwater’s Gene Munster said that the stock reaction was mostly due to the news that Tesla remains on track to begin production of its more affordable vehicle next year. 

The AI of it all: In the report, Tesla said it is currently training on a cluster of 29,000 H100 chips at its headquarters in Texas, and plans to up that number to 50,000 this month. 

During the earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla plans to launch a ride-hailing app for autonomous Teslas next year (in states with legislation friendly to self-driving cars). He said he expects Tesla to begin paid rides “sometime next year.” He added that he expects FSD to be better-than-human sometime next year.

Of course, that’s a promise he’s been making for years. As always with Musk, we’ll see how reality meshes with his optimism. Federal investigators are, at the same time, investigating the actual capabilities of FSD following several accidents.

Character AI sued following teen suicide 

The last person 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III spoke to before he shot himself wasn’t a person at all. 

It was an AI chatbot that, in the last months of his life, had become his closest companion. 

Sewell was using Character AI, one of the most popular personal AI platforms out there. The basic pitch is that users can design and interact with “characters,” powered by large language models (LLMs) and intended to mirror, for instance, famous characters from film and book franchises. 

In this case, Sewell was speaking with Daenerys Targaryen (or Dany), one of the leads from Game of Thrones. According to a New York Times report, Sewell knew that Dany’s responses weren’t real, but he developed an emotional attachment to the bot, anyway.

One of their last conversations, according to the Times, went like this: 

On the night he died, Sewell told the chatbot he loved her and would come home to her soon.

This is not the first time chatbots have been involved in suicide. 

In 2023, a Belgian man died by suicide — similar to Sewell — following weeks of increasing isolation as he grew closer to a Chai chatbot, which then encouraged him to end his life. 

Megan Garcia, Sewell’s mother, hopes it will be the last time. She filed a lawsuit against Character AI, its founders and parent company Google on Wednesday, accusing them of knowingly designing and marketing an anthropomorphized, “predatory” chatbot that caused the death of her son. 

"A dangerous AI chatbot app marketed to children abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life," Garcia said in a statement. "Our family has been devastated by this tragedy, but I'm speaking out to warn families of the dangers of deceptive, addictive AI technology and demand accountability from Character.AI, its founders and Google."

The lawsuit — which you can read here — accuses the company of “anthropomorphizing by design.” This is something we’ve talked about a lot, here; the majority of chatbots out there are very blatantly designed to make users think they’re, at least, human-like. They use personal pronouns and are designed to appear to think before responding. 

While these may be minor examples, they build a foundation for people, especially children, to misapply human attributes to unfeeling, unthinking algorithms. This was termed the “Eliza effect” in the 1960s. 

Garcia is suing for several counts of liability, negligence and the intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other things. 

Character at the same time published a blog responding to the tragedy, saying that it has added new safety features. These include revised disclaimers on every chat that the chatbot isn’t a real person, in addition to popups with mental health resources in response to certain phrases. 

In a statement, Character AI said it was “heartbroken” by Sewell’s death, and directed me to their blog post. 

Google did not respond to a request for comment. 

The suit does not claim that the chatbot encouraged Sewell to commit suicide. I view it more so as a reckoning with the anthropomorphized chatbots that have been born of an era of unregulated social media, and that are further incentivized for user engagement at any cost. 

There were other factors at play here — for instance, Sewell’s mental health issues and his access to a gun — but the harm that can be caused by a misimpression of what AI actually is seems very clear, especially for young kids. This is a good example of what researchers mean when they emphasize the presence of active harms, as opposed to hypothetical risks. 

“Artificial intimacy programs use the same large language models as the generative AI programs that help us create business plans and find the best restaurants in Tulsa. They scrape the internet so that the next thing they say stands the greatest chance of pleasing their user.”

We are witnessing and grappling with a very raw crisis of humanity. Smartphones and social media set the stage.

More technology is not the cure. 

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💭 A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

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