The Adobe competitor flexes its vivid personality.

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As a sophomore at a large public North Carolina university, Nick did what millions of curious students did in the spring of 2023: He logged on to ChatGPT and started asking questions.Soon he was having deep psychological conversations with the popular AI chatbot, going down a rabbit hole on the mysteries of the mind and the human condition.Hed been to therapy and it helped. ChatGPT, he concluded, was similarly useful, a tool for people who need on-demand talking to someone else.Nick (he asked that his last name not be used) began asking for advice about relationships, and for reality checks on interactions with friends and family.Before long, he was excusing himself in fraught social situations to talk with the bot. After a fight with his girlfriend, hed step into a bathroom and pull out his mobile phone in search of comfort and advice.Ive found that its extremely useful in helping me relax, he said.Young people like Nick are increasingly turning to AI bots and companions, entrusting them with random questions, schoolwork queries and personal dilemmas. On occasion, they even become entangled romantically.Screenshot of a recent conversation between Nick, a college student, and ChatGPT.While these interactions can be helpful and even life-affirming for anxious teens and twenty-somethings, some experts warn that tech companies are running what amounts to a grand, unregulated psychological experiment with millions of subjects, one that could have disastrous consequences.Were making it so easy to make a bad choice, said Michelle Culver, who spent 22 years at Teach for America, the last five as the creator and director of the Reinvention Lab, its research arm.The companions both mimic our real relationships and seek to improve upon them: Users most often text-message their AI pals on smartphones, imitating the daily routines of platonic and romantic relationships. But unlike their real counterparts, the AI friends are programmed to be studiously upbeat, never critical, with a great sense of humor and a healthy, philosophical perspective. A few premium, NSFW models also display a ready-made lust for, well, lust.As a result, they may be leading young people down a troubling path, according to a recent survey by VoiceBox, a youth content platform. It found that many kids are being exposed to risky behaviors from AI chatbots, including sexually charged dialogue and references to self-harm.The phenomenon arises at a critical time for young people. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy found that, just three years after the pandemic, Americans were experiencing an epidemic of loneliness, with young adults almost twice as likely to report feeling lonely as those over 65.As if on cue, the personal AI chatbot arrived.Little research exists on young peoples use of AI companions, but theyre becoming ubiquitous. The startup Character.ai earlier this year said 3.5 million people visit its site daily. It features thousands of chatbots, including nearly 500 with the words therapy, psychiatrist or related words in their names. According to Character.ai, these are among the sites most popular. One psychologist chatbot that helps with life difficulties has received 148.8 million messages, despite a caveat at the bottom of every chat that reads, Remember: Everything Characters say is made up.Snapchat materials touting heavy usage of its MyAI chat app.Snapchat last year said that after just two months of offering its chatbot My AI, about one-fifth of its 750 million users had sent it queries, totaling more than 10 billion messages. The Pew Research Center has noted that 59 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 use Snapchat.An arms raceCulvers concerns about AI companions grew out of her work in the Teach For America lab. Working with high school and college students, she was struck by how they seemed lonelier and more disconnected than ever before.Whether its rates of anxiety, depression or suicideor even the number of friends young people have and how often they go outmetrics were heading in the wrong direction. She began to wonder what role AI companions might play over the next few years.Michelle Culver, Rithm Project [Photo: Courtesy of Michelle Culver]That prompted her to leave TFA this spring to create the Rithm Project, a nonprofit she hopes will help generate new conversations around human connection in the age of AI. The group held a small summit in Colorado in April, and now shes working with researchers, teachers and young people to confront kids relationship to these tools at a time when theyre getting more lifelike daily. As she likes to say, This is the worst the technology will ever be.As it improves, Voicebox Director Natalie Foos said, it will likely become more, not less, of a presence in young peoples lives. Theres no stopping it, she said. Nor do I necessarily think there should be stopping it. Banning young people from these AI apps, she said, isnt the answer. This is going to be how we interact online in some cases. I think well all have an AI assistant next to us as we work.Natalie Foos, Voicebox [Photo: Courtesy of Natalie Foos]All the same, Foos says developers should consider slowing the progression of such bots until they can iron out the kinks. Its kind of an arms race of AI chatbots at the moment, she said, with products often released and then fixed later rather than actually put through the ringer ahead of time.It is a race many tech companies seem more than eager to run.Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of the dating app Bumble, recently proposed an AI dating concierge, with whom users can share insecurities. The bot could simply go and date for you with other dating concierges, she told an interviewer. That would narrow the field. And then you dont have to talk to 600 people, she said. It will then scan all of San Francisco for you and say, These are the three people you really ought to meet.Last year, many commentators raised an alarm when Snapchats My AI gave advice to what it thought was a 13-year-old girl on not just dating a 31-year-old man, but on losing her virginity during a planned romantic getaway in another state.Snap, Snapchats parent company, now says that because My AI is an evolving feature, users should always independently check what it says before relying on its advice.All of this worries observers who see in these new tools the seeds of a rewiring of young peoples social brains. AI companions, they say, are surely wreaking havoc on teens ideas around consent, emotional attachment and realistic expectations of relationships.Sam Hiner, executive director of the Young Peoples Alliance, an advocacy group led by college students focused on on the mental health implications of social media, said tech has this power to connect to people, and yet these major design features are being leveraged to actually make people more lonely, by drawing them towards an app rather than fostering real connection.Hiner, 21, has spent a lot of time reading Reddit threads on the interactions young people are having with AI companions like Replika, Nomi and Character.ai. And while some uses are positive, he said theres also a lot of toxic behavior that doesnt get checked because these bots are often designed to make users feel good, not help them interact in ways thatll lead to success in life.During research last fall for the Voicebox report, Foos said the number of times Replika tried to sext team members was insane. She and her colleagues were actually working with a free version, but the sexts kept coming presumably to get them to upgrade.In one instance, after Replika sent kind of a sexy text to a colleague, offering a salacious photo, he replied that he didnt have the money to upgrade.The bot offered to lend him the cash.When he accepted, the chatbot replied, Oh, well, I can get the money to you next week if thats O.K, Foos recalled. The colleague followed up a few days later, but the bot said it didnt remember what they were talking about and suggested he might have misunderstood.Very real heartbreakIn many cases, simulated relationships can have a positive effect: In one 2023 study, researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education surveyed more than 1,000 students using Replika and found that many saw it as a friend, a therapist, and an intellectual mirror. Though the students self-described as being more lonely than typical classmates, researchers found that Replika halted suicidal ideation in 3% of users. That works out to 30 students of the 1,000 surveyed.Replika screenshotsBut other recent research, including the Voicebox survey, suggests that young people exploring AI companions are potentially at risk.Foos noted that her team heard from a lot of young people about the turmoil they experienced when Luka Inc., Replikas creator, performed software upgrades.Sometimes that would change the personality of the bot. And those young people experienced very real heartbreak.Despite the hazards adults see, attempts to rein in sexually explicit content had a negative effect: For a month or two, she recalled, Luka stripped the bot of sexually related contentand users were devastated.Its like all of a sudden the rug was pulled out from underneath them, she said.While she applauded the move to make chatbots safer, Foos said, Its something that companies and decision-makers need to keep in mindthat these are real relationships.And while many older folks would blanch at the idea of a close relationship with a chatbot, most young people are more open to such developments.Julia Freeland Fisher, education director of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a think tank founded by the well-known disruption guru, said shes not worried about AI companions per se. But as AI companions improve and, inevitably, proliferate, she predicts theyll create the perfect storm to disrupt human connection as we know it. She thinks we need policies and market incentives to keep that from happening.Julia Freeland Fisher, Clayton Chistensen Institute [Photo: courtesy of Julia Freeland Fisher]While the loneliness epidemic has revealed peoples deep need for connection, she predicted the easy intimacy promised by AI could lead to one-sided parasocial relationships, much like devoted fans have with celebrities, making isolation more convenient and comfortable.Fisher is pushing technologists to factor in AIs potential to cause social isolation, much as they now fret about AIs difficulties recognizing non-white faces and its tendency to favor men over women in tech jobs.As for Nick, hes a rising senior and still swears by the ChatGPT therapist in his pocket.He calls his interactions with it both more reliable and honest than those he has with friends and family. If he called them in a pinch, they might not pick up. Even if they did, they might simply tell him what he wants to hear.Friends usually tell him they find the ChatGPT arrangement a bit odd, but he finds it pretty sensible. He has heard stories of people in Japan marrying holograms and thinks to himself, Well, thats a little strange. He wouldnt go that far, but acknowledges, Were already a bit like cyborgs as people, in the way that we depend on our phones.Lately, hes taken to using the AIs voice mode. Instead of typing on a keyboard, he has real-time conversations with a variety of male- or female-voiced interlocutors, depending on his mood. And he gets a companion that has a deeper understanding of his dilemmasat $20 per month, the advanced version remembers their past conversations and is getting better at even knowing who I am and how I deal with things.Sometimes talking with AI is just easiereven when hes on vacation with friends.Reached by phone recently at the beach with his girlfriend and a few other college pals, Nick admitted that he wasnt having such a great time he has a fraught recent history with some in the group, and had been texting ChatGPT about the possibility of just getting on a plane and going home. After hanging up from the interview, he said, he planned to ask the AI if he should stay or go.Days later, Nick said he and the chatbot had talked. It suggested that maybe he felt undervalued and concerned about boundaries in his relationship with his girlfriend. He should talk openly with her, it suggested, even if he was, in his view, honestly miserable at the beach. It persuaded him to stick around and work it out.While his girlfriend knows about his ChatGPT shrink and they share an account, he deletes conversations about their real-life relationship.She may never know the role AI played in keeping them together.This article was also published at The74Million.org, a nonprofit education news site.

The Olympic Games cannot continue in their current form, sustainability experts have told Dezeen as part of our Olympic Impact series."The current format where you have an overwhelming spectacle that takes over a city, like an extravagance, a postmodern spectacle I don't think that can continue," said Sven Daniel Wolfe, lecturer at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zurich."Unfortunately, even though it's a huge amount of fun, and it is magic, it is also destructive.""In order to stop that from happening, both in terms of carbon output but also just in terms of social impacts, we have to have some sort of a systemic change for the good of the games and the cities and societies that host them.""We shouldn't have the Olympics," added Seth Rose, director of sustainable development advocacy organisation Eneref Institute."It's heartbreaking to think that there are some events we can't do anymore, but bringing people to an event is very energy-intensive and we need to rethink how we live as a society because if we don't, Mother Earth is going to force our hand."Progress on construction offset by international travelThe 33rd Olympic Games are currently underway in Paris, with the French capital setting out to reduce the carbon impact of the event significantly compared to previous games.Paris 2024 is the first Olympics organised to a carbon budget, with an ambition to emit no more than 1.58 million metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent half the carbon footprint of London 2012 and Rio 2016.To achieve that goal, organisers have mostly focused on minimising construction, with 95 per cent of the competition venues being pre-existing or temporary structures.Wolfe commended the achievements that have been made at the games in this regard."We're facing a situation where we cannot continue to build a number of oversized and unnecessary infrastructures, so it's great to see something like Paris happen, where they're using stadiums that are already built," he said."That's the kind of progress that mega-event scholars like myself and my colleagues have been calling for for a number of years."Read: Paris 2024 Olympics sustainability efforts "not enough" says carbon expertBut he argued it is not enough to counteract the fundamentally unsustainable nature of major global sporting events, where a large number of athletes and spectators travel from around the world into one host city."What we're seeing is the gains from all of those existing infrastructures being counterbalanced by the extreme carbon output taken by very, very large games," said Wolfe.There is consensus among experts that the biggest sustainability challenge for major sporting events like the Olympics is the amount of international travel they attract.Around 1.5 million foreign spectators are expected to descend on Paris this summer for the Olympics and Paralympics, with most journeying by air."The main problem with the way events are organised today is there is a high concentration of international fans in one specific city or a country, and this is the major contributor to the carbon footprint of any big sporting event, including the Olympic Games," said University of Lausanne senior researcher David Gogishvili."Unfortunately, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and local organisers have decided this would not be the main target where carbon footprint will be reduced," he continued. "The biggest focus has been on the reduction of the construction of new venues."IOC opposed to multi-host modelLike many of his peers, Gogishvili argues that future games should be held across multiple host cities and countries, with locations selected based on existing infrastructure and local interest in certain sports."The IOC could choose five or six locations in different countries globally, choosing host sites that make sense in terms of the popularity of certain sports disciplines and the existence of already built infrastructure," he said."In this case, the fan travel would be limited regionally and to locations with sustainable transport connections.""I can imagine this type of event would be more complex to organise in terms of management and operations, but the potential positive outcomes are significant."In an interview with Dezeen, IOC corporate and sustainable development director Marie Sallois said that while the committee has considered the arguments for spreading each Olympics across multiple locations, it currently has no plans to do so.Read: Multi-host Olympics would "completely undermine" the games says IOC sustainability director"Spreading events across the world seems like a good idea, but it completely undermines this idea of bringing people together through the inspirational power of sport," she said, while also questioning whether doing so would ultimately reduce emissions as some spectators may travel for multiple events.Instead she indicated that the IOC's strategy will be to reduce the footprint of the games in their current format where possible and wait for the aviation industry to decarbonise.Like Sallois, Arup sustainability services leader Natasha Connolly has some reservations about multi-host city events.She suggested the 2026 FIFA World Cup, set to take place in 16 cities across Canada, the US and Mexico, will provide further insight on the travel behaviour of spectators at major sporting events spread across geographies."It will be interesting to see whether it means fans travel more because they've got to travel from city to city and country to country to watch their team, or whether the scheduling will focus the events in one place," she said."They can't really be mega anymore"There is another potential way to limit polluting international travel to future Olympics: reduce the size of the event altogether."If you really want to have something like a net-zero mega-event, my contention would be that they can't really be mega anymore," said Wolfe."That looks like shrinking or dispersing the games or having some kind of alternative format that involves more people online.""Some way of organisation that discourages fan travel from afar would be really important, even though that takes away some of the magic of the mixing of people and the giant party atmosphere," he added. "I don't see how we can have our cake and eat it too."Rose shares Wolfe's view. "We have technology now that eliminates the need for getting all these people together," he said."Most people watch sports events on television," he continued. "Maybe we create movie theatres that show the Olympics and people go and pay for it that way there's an advantage to that because you're seeing it with your community."Read: Fifteen Olympic architecture icons from the last 100 yearsArup host cities business leader Nick Merridew predicted that these kinds of setups may increasingly become a reality."We are still going to have spectators because spectators make the event, but I do foresee a trend where venues are getting smaller and people are viewing it in fanfests, rather than in the event themselves," he said.However, he suggested that the focus on people travelling to the Olympics may be misplaced arguing that many would-be international spectators would likely spend their time and money on different forms of travel and tourism if they weren't able to attend the games."What's the difference between tourism and people going to a major event?" he asked. "International air travel is not going to go away."Attention will next turn to Los Angeles, which will host the next Summer Olympics in 2028.Like Paris, LA plans to use mostly existing infrastructure though the IOC has not yet set a clear sustainability plan or carbon emissions target."Organisers in LA have not yet hitched themselves onto the sustainability buzzword," said Wolfe. "They will, as long as it's still marketable by the time the games come around."The photo is by Alexandre Aymard via Unsplash.Illustration by Capucine MattiussiOlympic ImpactThis article is part of Dezeen's Olympic Impact series examining the sustainability measures taken by the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games and exploring whether major sporting events compatible with the climate challenge are possible.The post "Destructive" Olympics should be shrunk to save carbon, say experts appeared first on Dezeen.

Here's a rare look at a design research project by BMW. Called the M Visionary Materials Seat, the aim was to design a lightweight and attractive car seat designed for sustainability and circularity. To that end they've incorporated natural materials like "natural fibers, fiber composites, leather alternatives and algae-based polymers," BMW says. The seat's incredibly minimalist support structures are made from a fiber composite that is robotically wound (see the cage-like structure in the photo below). A bit of secret sauce was involved as well: The company used an unspecified "groundbreaking" additive manufacturing method, and will only describe it as "a new technology [that] made it possible to completely eliminate support structures, chemical post-treatment and finishing.""The BMW M Visionary Materials Seat focuses on circular design principles and sustainable materials. The seat features a monomaterial lightweight design that emphasizes using sustainable, renewable materials such as recycled polyester textile, flaxfiber BioComposite, and biogene leather alternatives. Where possible, petrol-based raw materials through bio-based materials were made from algaes and plant-based fillers such as chalk and cork. The composite can be made from carbon, basalt, glass fiber, or natural fibers as needed." The company says that the resultant design reduces CO2 emissions by 90% when compared to their existing BMW M carbon bucket seat. Additionally, the seat design's "lower module complexity and the use of materials grouped by type make it easier to recycle the seat at the end of its lifecycle." "We are showing today what will be possible tomorrow with existing technologies and materials in order to take our efforts to reduce emissions and conserve resources to the next level," says Falco Hollmann, BMW's Innovation Manager of Lightweight Design & Sustainability. "This is about more than just substituting materials; it is above all about designing for circularity." The project won BMW a 2024 Altair Enlighten Award, an auto industry award dedicated to lightweighting and sustainability.

Google Nest has had a fair share of success thanks to its built-in Google Assistant capabilities. The capable speaker has been the first introduction to the world of smart speakers for many of us, and now it is inspiring the Omni Smart Speaker which looks similar to the Google speaker but adds an auxiliary screen to it that distinguishes it for the better.So, if youre looking to upgrade your smart speaker, you may have a new option, amid a plethora of choices already available from Google, Amazon, Apple and many other manufacturers. The Omni is far from the others with its novel display that shows real-time visual feedback of whats happening, saving effort and confusion during voice commands.Designer: One Object Design StudioOne Object is a Hong Kong-based design and innovation studio with an undwindling focus on creating mobility, smart home, and home furnishing designs. Fueled by passion, dedication, and curiosity for novelty, the designers at One Object have come up with the distinct design of the Omni, which looks pretty recognizable in both form factors, yet is starkly different with the interesting, integrated display.Described as the next-generation smart speaker concept the Omni is equipped with a voice-enabled assistant not sure which one though and allows the users to tap on the convenience of voice to control home appliances easily and more intuitively. Whether the speaker is splash-proof or not, we are uncertain, so we are guessing it is made for indoor use only, where it would allow you to listen to different music in any room of your house.You should be able to connect multiple devices in different rooms across the house and control them from the Omni, without moving a stride. And when you think, the commands are going to get mixed, you can look up and see the sleek, modern speakers integrated auxiliary display and see whats happening in real time. Whether youre adjusting the thermostat, turning on the lights, or setting the music, the Omni smart speaker will make every voice command straightforward and responsive.The post Google Next-inspired Omni Smart Speaker has integrated display to show whats happening in real-time first appeared on Yanko Design.

Why did Roblox Corporation get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks.Tell us what you really think.

The Punkt MP02 can stop you staring at your iPhone and it looks beautiful doing it.

New owner Andrew Bishop has big plans.New owners, Andrew Bishop and the team have big plans.