Table of contents for TIME Artificial Intelligence in TIME Magazine

To create is human. For the past 300,000 years we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before. Now we have company. While you’re reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice. Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer. This shift marks the most important technological breakthrough since…

THE CATASTROPHISTS GEOFFREY HINTON Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto Over the course of February 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the most influential AI researchers of the past 50 years, had a “slow eureka moment.” Hinton has spent his career trying to build AI systems that model the human brain, mostly in academia before joining Google in 2013. He had always believed that the brain was better than the machines that he and others were building, and that by making them more like the brain, they would improve. But early in 2023, he realized “the digital intelligence we’ve got now may be better than the brain already. It’s just not scaled up quite as big.” Developers around the world are currently racing to build the biggest AI systems that they can.…

DOCTOR IN YOUR POCKET Will chatbots replace your primary care physician? Not if patients have their way. A Pew Research survey reveals that few Americans want their doctors diagnosing disease or recommending treatments with the technology. And only 13% think AI would improve the patient-provider relationship, according to the February 2023 report. But Eric Topol, a practicing cardiologist at the Scripps Clinic and author of Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, is optimistic that AI’s large language models can transform medicine for the better—from automating administrative tasks that often take up the bulk of a practitioner’s time to getting to the bottom of difficult diagnoses. In the Q&A that follows, Topol makes the case to Annabel Vered for his vision of AI as a force…

In 2021, a 13-year-old signed up for a TikTok account and searched for “onlyfans,” the name of a site known for hosting adult entertainment. The user soon fell down a rabbit hole of sexual content, much of it labeled “adults only.” At one point, videos about bondage and sex made up more than 90% of the user’s feed. But this 13-year-old was not a real person—it was one of more than 100 automated accounts, or bots, created by investigators at the Wall Street Journal to test how TikTok algorithms could draw many of the youngest users down a pathway of exposure to inappropriate content. Louise Story, the paper’s former chief product and technology officer, tells TIME that the Journal’s computational journalism team used a variety of AI tools for…

Every day there’s a new headline about AI surprising us: passing the LSAT, winning an art contest, declaring undying love. But for Adrienne Mayor, historian of ancient science and author of Gods and Robots, our current fascination with artificial intelligence is part of a multimillennia-long human drive to get better, smarter, faster, and stronger. “Human enhancement technologies go all the way back to antiquity,” she tells TIME. We’ve come to rely on glasses, hearing aids, and artificial limbs, but when AI is fully realized, it will dramatically exceed today’s human limits, allowing us to fully transcend them. Already, the new slate of generative AI tools promises to make every human more productive, able to learn faster and communicate better—maybe even be a little more creative. The best is yet…

Peter Paccone, a social studies teacher in San Marino, Calif., has a new teacher’s aid helping him in the classroom this year. He plans to defer to his helper to explain some simpler topics to his class of high schoolers, like the technical aspects of how a cotton gin worked, in order to free up time for him to discuss more analytical concepts, like the effects of the first industrial revolution. His new assistant? ChatGPT. “What I feel that I don’t have to do any longer is cover all the content,” Paccone told a group of more than 40 educators in a May 2023 Zoom workshop, which he organized. If artificial intelligence is on the cusp of reshaping entire aspects of our society—from health care to warfare—the first realm…

Imagine being able to craft a funny poem for your sister’s birthday based on your mutual love of sweets, then including it in a card with an image of calico cats eating chocolate cake in space! Today, you can. With incredibly simple and intuitive interfaces, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney and DALL·E 3 can create outputs that range from the useful to the extraordinary. It’s a hallmark of human-machine synergy and collaboration that steers your creativity into uncharted—and exciting— territories you may not reach on your own. These systems offer endless possibilities for innovation by responding to prompts quickly and comprehensively in a conversational, human-like way. They use deep neural networks to learn patterns from massive amounts of data—billions of words and images—that they…

  DEMIS HASSABIS CEO and Co-Founder, Google DeepMind When Demis Hassabis was a young man, he helped design Theme Park, a computer game that gave the player a God’s-eye view of a sprawling fairground business. Ever since then, Hassabis, who leads Google DeepMind, one of the top AI labs, has been trying to attain a God’s-eye view of the world. Google DeepMind is developing a large AI model called Gemini, which Hassabis has hinted might be able to outperform OpenAI’s GPT-4. (The model, which at press time was rumored to be out in December, will be “multimodal:” meaning it is trained on—and can input and output—not just text but other media, like images.) Will Gemini be a bigger version of what has come before, or is there something architecturally different about…

Before last year, Jana Soldicic’s understanding of artificial intelligence was mostly limited to what she’d read on the pages of science fiction novels. But in the fall, after getting the chance to use the technology in real life as she played around with the generative AI tools ChatGPT and DALL·E, she got more curious. “I really wanted to know what was behind it. I knew it couldn’t be magic,” Soldicic said. She searched on her computer and found Elements of AI, a self-paced, online course created by MinnaLearn and the University of Helsinki that provides an introduction to artificial intelligence designed for people without a background in technology. Soldicic was surprised by how much she enjoyed the course. “I got a little bit addicted to it,” she says. “It…

Fictional humans have been falling in love with robots for decades, in novels like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and films like Her (2013). When those stories were written, machines were not quite advanced enough to spark emotional feelings from most users. But recently, a newly released spate of AI programs act like humans and reciprocate gestures of affection. And some humans have fallen for these bots—hard. As AIs become more and more sophisticated, the intensity and frequency of humans turning to AI to meet their relationship needs is likely to increase. AI companions could help people feel connected as they sort through psychological issues. But the rise of such tools could also deepen what some are calling an “epidemic of loneliness,” as humans become reliant on…