Marketplace Tech

Substack, the platform popular for online newsletters, recently launched an artificial intelligence detection feature powered by Pangram.

The detector allows users to scan text and get an estimate for how much of it was likely written by AI. But some creators are concerned about the tool’s accuracy and its potential to prompt a “witch hunt” for writers who use AI.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Substack CEO Chris Best about the new feature.

More on this:

AI Content Is Everywhere on Social Media, Especially LinkedIn from Pangram

I Test-Drove Substack’s New AI Detection Tool, and It Mostly Worked from CNET

Is your shirt-folding technique good enough to train a robot how to do it? Could MySpace be creeping back into our browsers? We get into all this on today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

But first, the rocket ship/satellite internet/AI company SpaceX reported this week that it spent over $18 billion in capital expenditures in the second quarter. That’s six times what it spent the same time last year. Most of that was on AI infrastructure. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Joanna Stern, founder of the media company New Things, to discuss all these topics.

Everything we talked about:

“Here's the mark a SpaceX rocket crash left on the moon” from CBC

“SpaceX posts loss of $541 million in first report since record-setting IPO” from The Washington Post

“Train robots and make money” from The New Things

“Could Myspace be making a return” from CNN

Let’s say you're chatting away with AI — perfect grammar, great vocabulary. Then, boom: a random word in another language! That's the topic for today's “Uncanny AI.” Those moments where it becomes really clear that AI doesn't think like us. Janelle Shane, who writes the AI Weirdness blog, helps explain why AI chatbots do this.

More on this:

“ChatGPT users flummoxed after AI bot starts inserting Arabic into responses” from The New York Post

“ChatGPT is mixing languages or Answers are Wrong!” from OpenAI Developer Community

AI has already changed the legal field, bringing new efficiencies — along with some high-profile mistakes — to tasks like research and drafting contracts. But law professor Benjamin Alarie at the University of Toronto has a bigger transformation in mind.

He wants to see AI tackle some of the biggest failings of our justice system, like the lack of access to legal resources, slow processes and inconsistencies in how law is applied. He lays out his vision in a new book called "Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."

More on this:

“Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” from Oxford University Press

“Judge Punishes 4 Lawyers After Catching Both Sides Using A.I. in Lawsuit” from The New York Times

Last month, President Xi Jinping spoke at an AI conference in Shanghai, China. There he promoted AI accessibility for the world, touting China’s adoption of open-weighted models.

After OpenAI’s rogue model incident in which a training model hacked into the company HuggingFace and stole confidential information, the discussion over whether models should be open or closed has intensified.

“Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carion spoke with Adam Segal at the Council of Foreign Relations about China’s soft power play in the global AI arms race.