Consumer & Gadgets news

Consumer & Gadgets

Storytelling study provides a window into the inner workings, ongoing limitations of generative AI tools like ChatGPT

Imagine you decide to write a short story about a protagonist who creates an artificial human and then falls in love with it. What gender is your protagonist? What about the artificial human? Would you write a moving love ...

Consumer & Gadgets

More user control may help ease negative reactions to ads on voice assistants

Voice assistants (VAs) like Alexa and Siri continue to gain popularity in households and on personal devices. According to digital trends research company Emarketer, the number of VA users will surpass 150 million in 2025. ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Showing AI users diversity in training data can boost perceived fairness and trust

While artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as home assistants, search engines or large language models like ChatGPT, may seem nearly omniscient, their outputs are only as good as the data on which they are trained. ...

Consumer & Gadgets

DeepMind researchers find LLMs can serve as effective mediators

A team of AI researchers with Google's DeepMind London group has found that certain large language models (LLMs) can serve as effective mediators between groups of people with differing viewpoints regarding a given topic. ...

Consumer & Gadgets

New tool can detect malware on Android phones

Screen readers, voice-to-text, and other accessibility features have enabled people with disabilities to use smartphones. Yet these same features make the phones more accessible to hackers, too.

Consumer & Gadgets

Exploring the hidden costs of free apps

Procrastination, sleep deprivation and reduced focus are part of the price we pay for free mobile apps. This is according to researchers at Linköping University and RISE, who have investigated the costs hidden behind the ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Q&A: Generative AI embraced faster than internet, PCs

ChatGPT's debut in November 2022 caused a near-instant sensation. It gave most users their first opportunity to try out a new type of artificial intelligence that uses existing data and published materials to create content ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Will Meta's Orion smart glasses be the next 'iPhone moment'?

Meta supremo Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Orion smart glasses, a new augmented reality (AR) prototype, at the annual Meta Connect developer conference. Ten years in the making, and still not expected on high streets until 2027, ...

Consumer & Gadgets

What is Mastodon? A social media expert explains

In the wake of Elon Musk's noisy takeover of Twitter, people have been looking for alternatives to the increasingly toxic microblogging social media platform. Many of those fleeing or hedging their bets have turned to Mastodon, ...

Consumer & Gadgets

The world of deepfake advertising is coming this decade

Manipulated advertising is becoming an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in marketing. Techniques such as deepfakes leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate convincing, true-to-life, synthetic replicas ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Sony to begin plastic packaging phase-out next year

Sony will start phasing out plastic packaging for small electronic gadgets such as smartphones, cameras and audio accessories from next year, a company spokeswoman said Tuesday.