AI-generated "letters to the editor" are flooding academic publications
Dr. Carlos Chaccour, physician scientist at the University of Navarra, noticed something fishy about a letter to the editor the New England Journal of Medicine received shortly after it published a paper of his on malaria treatment in July.The letter was riddled with strange errors such as critiques supposedly based on other research Chaccour himself had written. So he and his co-author Matthew Rudd decided to dig deeper.They analyzed patterns of letters to the editor over the last decade and found a remarkable increase in what they call "prolific debutantes" — new authors who suddenly had dozens, even hundreds of letters published, starting right around the time OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out.Why would academics want to do this? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Chaccour to find out.
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Bytes: Week in Review — Meta wins antitrust case
The holiday shopping season is here, and AI companies are pushing new chatbot retail partnerships. But, can these tools deliver on their promises to make shopping easier? Plus, the return of Vine, the beloved video app known for its ultra-short absurdist memes.But first, Meta is not a monopoly, according to a federal judge’s ruling this week in the longstanding antitrust case against the social media giant, which claimed Meta had stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp.Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to discuss all of the above on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”
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The difference between Grokipedia and Wikipedia
Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched by Elon Musk's xAI last month, promises to be an ideological alternative to Wikipedia. But the tool doesn't just have a different political flavor, argues Ryan McGrady, senior fellow at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.He recently wrote, for Tech Policy Press, that Grokipedia takes a more top-down approach to knowledge, one that harks back to less democratized eras.
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This school trains the workforce behind China's automated factories
China recently came out with its latest five-year plan for growth, which will guide the world’s second largest economy through 2030. In it, top Communist Party leaders have pushed to boost the country's strength in manufacturing to the next level by upgrading older factories with advanced technologies for automation.The challenge, according to the Chinese ministry of education, is that the sector has tens of millions of open jobs because there aren't enough skilled workers in the labor force to fill them.One school is trying to bridge that gap. Marketplace China correspondent Jennifer Pak visited it in Nanjing city.
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For politicians, what makes a successful TikTok?
One thing almost everyone can agree on about Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York City: he's very good at vertical short-form video.Love it or hate it, the format has a stylistic language all its own. So, we asked Joshua Scacco, professor of communications and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to help us dissect what exactly makes a political short form video effective.
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