We’re kicking this week off with news about OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which became available for everyone to demo last week.
While the chatbot produces some pretty convincing answers to complex questions, mods of the popular question-and-answer site for developers, Stack Overflow, are temporarily banning answers generated by the tool, citing “a high rate of being incorrect.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says ChatGPT has already surpassed 1 million users.
In other news, we got a boatload of trailers for upcoming shows and movies from Brazil’s CCXP pop culture convention over the weekend. That includes previews for The Boys spinoff Gen V, The Last of Us, The Witcher: Blood Origin, and more.
And now, here’s a silly tweet:
Stay tuned as we continue to update this list with the most important news of today: December 5th, 2022.
The St. Louis Apple union election would’ve failed.
Last month, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union announced that it was canceling its union drive at an Apple Store in St. Louis. Now, 66 of the store’s 90 employees have said they wouldn’t want to join the union, and have no interest in doing so in the future, according to Bloomberg.
The employees say their decision wasn’t because of pressure from management, which unions have alleged in the past.
PUBG is heading to the Epic Games Store this week.
PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS will be available on the Epic Games Store (EGS) on December 7th at 4PM PT / 7PM ET. The game went free-to-play almost a year ago, and the addition of EGS includes full cross-play with PC players on Steam. There’s even a free PUBG Founder’s Pack with cosmetic items and DLC that you can claim from EGS from today until January 4th.
H&R Block customers sue Meta for collecting their financial data.
That didn’t take long! On November 22nd, we co-published an in-depth report from The Markup that revealed multiple tax filing websites had been quietly sending a bunch of sensitive financial info to Meta through the Meta Pixel. While Meta says it doesn’t want to receive that kind of information, the suit alleges that the company did basically nothing to stop it.
Don’t bet on AI replacing Google just yet.
With the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, many are proclaiming the death of Google is nigh. Why search when you can chat with an all-knowing AI? Well, because, as we wrote last year, those AIs have a tendency to make up their answers. If you need proof of the trouble this can cause: Stack Overflow just banned responses from ChatGPT for being plausibly wrong too often.
“Metaverse” lost word of the year to “goblin mode.”
In what can only be bad news for Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual-reality dreams, the publisher behind Oxford English Dictionary announced the results of its word of the year poll. In a three-way matchup between “metaverse,” “goblin mode,” and “#istandwith,” metaverse took home just 4 percent of the vote.
Goblin mode — a phrase I have exclusively seen on TikTok, Twitter, and news articles about its use on TikTok and Twitter — came in first with an overwhelming 93 percent. I look forward to Meta’s 2023 pivot to Goblin, Inc.
