Pulitzer Prize winners and AI

May 10, 2024

The Pulitzer Prize is the biggest award in journalism, and two winners this year used AI. Was it to … A.) Write their first drafts, B.) Analyze aerial photography, C.) Survey police files and/or D.) Generate images? Two are right!

The answer: B.) Analyze aerial photography and C.) Survey police files. Two winning investigations teams — one from the New York Times and another from the City Bureau and Invisible Institute — each built proprietary AI models to help with their analyses. About 10% of this year’s Pulitzer Prize finalists shared they’d used AI in their reporting. Think ChatGPT will win a Pulitzer one day? Me, neither.

Tags: AI (artificial intelligence), files, Images, models, New York, photography, Police, prize, reporting, survey, Teams

Sit, shoot, roll over: The U.S. Marines’ special ops division is testing armed robot dogs. Seriously. For now, they’ll still need a human to pull the trigger. The “Terminator”-like pups rely on AI to identify targets before asking their human operators whether to fire.

25 years in orbit

The journey of a long-lost spy satellite. The U.S. launched the satellite in 1974, lost track of it in the ’90s, and rediscovered it this month when its sensor came back online. Guess it wasn’t MIA — just MIO (missing in orbit).

Lost the thread: Neuralink says its brain chip has already malfunctioned in its first human patient. Some of the “threads” — hair-thin electrodes meant to monitor his brain activity — stopped working. Neuralink tweaked the chip’s algorithm and now says its performance is “better than ever.” I hope this is true and not PR BS.

Too much power: Advertisers can now use Walmart’s shopping data for targeted ads on Disney+ and Hulu. Disney Advertising and Walmart Connect’s partnership gives marketers access to 145 million customers. They say they’ll match users’ data “without violating their privacy,” but they always say that.

Clippy’s back …: … Kind of. Winpilot, a third-party tool that helps optimize your Windows OS, now includes a built-in assistant called — you guessed it — Clippy. Much like the original Office 97 assistant, it mostly assists with stuff you can do already in your Settings menu. But it can help you remove Windows 11’s built-in AI assistant, Copilot. Assistant-on-assistant crime: You hate to see it.

Don’t waste your money: Meta’s now pitching its built-in AI features that help you create full ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. That includes image and text generation. I wouldn’t trust it, but watch your ads and spending very carefully if you do.

200 injuries so far: The FDA has recalled the Tandem Diabetes Care t:connect iOS app. It’s been crashing and relaunching, causing the compatible t:slim X2 insulin pump to shut down prematurely. If you’re affected, update your app to version 2.7.1 or later ASAP.

Little Tokes: The internet is swarming with fake Little Tikes websites. Ads on Google, Instagram and Facebook offer amazing “deals” but link to lookalike sites with hard-to-catch typos. Yeah, you never get what you order. Be safe: The official site is littletikes.com.

0 job openings at Tesla

Way down from the 3,400 roles posted just a week ago. Elon Musk says he’s being “absolutely hardcore” about job cuts, trimming 20,000 folks over four weeks. Ex-employees were reportedly laid off over email, and let’s just say they’re hardcore pissed about it.

A Dell, rolling in the deep: A new data breach affects up to 49 million Dell customers. Names, physical addresses, Dell hardware and order information all were swiped. Good news: Financial deets, emails and phone numbers are safe. Stay alert for phishing scams and suspicious mail now that scammers know where you live.