Stories by Lauren Leffer

A Google experiment to improve stoplights shows early positive results. But AI-assisted software won’t replace human traffic engineers just yet

Heat and mood are closely linked, which may explain summertime depression—and how to treat it

Claims of artificial general intelligence are increasingly common. But can anyone agree on what it is?

Thirty-year-old Noland Arbaugh says the Neuralink chip has let him “reconnect with the world”

Experiments with optical illusions have revealed surprising similarities between human and AI perception

This eight-legged probe would scour Mars’s underground lava tubes for places where explorers might camp—or for signs of past life

More U.S. states are requiring online ID checks. A proposed French strategy aims to balance child safety with users’ privacy rights

Some amount of chatbot hallucination is inevitable. But there are ways to minimize it

AI-generated art is creating new ethical issues—and competition—for digital artists. Nightshade and Glaze are two tools helping creators fight back.

An assessment of hundreds of thousands of songs confirms that choruses and hooks have taken over—but simpler isn’t necessarily worse

Proposed restrictions on TikTok would be “security theater” in the face of the staggering amounts of data that foreign and domestic tech companies collect

It’s vital to “keep humans in the loop” to avoid humanizing machine-learning models in research

A machine-learning tool that transforms text prompts into detailed video has generated excitement—and skepticism

Digital cloaking tools such as Nightshade and Glaze help artists take back control from generative AI—but they’re no forever fix

A recent study on risk-taking and bisexuality made assumptions that some experts don’t agree with.

The release of Apple’s mixed-reality headset raises questions about hours spent in a virtual replacement of our world

The controversy over a recent paper on human bisexual behavior emphasizes how important it is not to overinterpret genetic studies of sexuality—and how easy it is to do so

Most machine-learning models rely on mountains of data to replicate human text, but new research suggests the recipe for learning language might be simpler

An alleged voice recording of racist remarks exemplifies the challenges of our new AI normal

A colorful new video technique lets scientists see the world like birds and bees

A new study used machine learning to “autocomplete” the life trajectories of six million Danish people—and forecast when they might kick the bucket.

Amid the machine-learning boom, model developers have built an all-purpose digital oracle from a trove of big data

GraphCast and other artificial intelligence-based forecasting tools offer a whole new way to predict the weather, but they have limits

In the digital age, some scientists argue the emojisphere should better represent Earth’s biosphere—tardigrades, flatworms and all