📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: New Parents Mocked for Letting ChatGPT Name Their Baby

Naming your child isn’t a task to be taken lightly. It’s a crucial step in the child-rearing process that could fundamentally shape a child’s identity, influence first impressions, and reflect the parents’ heritage and values.

That hasn’t stopped some from taking some baffling technological shortcuts. As the Baltimore Sun reports, one couple — and doubtless countless more — used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to name their firstborn son.

“We were looking up on ChatGPT boy names that go well with the last name Winkler,” Sarah and Stephen Winkler told the publication. “And then once we found Hudson Winkler, we’re like, ‘give us a good middle name.’”

The resulting baby ended up with a name that sounds like a grey millennial porridge: Hudson Oakley Winkler.

The choice to use an AI model for that particular purpose was immediately met with outrage online, highlighting a fierce debate over using the technology as a crutch to avoid hard decisions.

“What amazes me is how quickly people are losing either the confidence or the willingness to complete basic human tasks,” author and NPR podcast host Linda Holmes wrote in a post on Bluesky.

“It’s all so gross,” another user wrote. “I keep trying to relate to this, and I just can’t.” Others poked fun at the name “Oakley,” a name closely associated with a popular brand of sunglasses.

The main gripe: not that any name is intrinsically bad, but that the process of interacting with another human to devise one is an important part of parenthood.

“With naming kids, talking it out with your partner is fun!” author Lauren Morrill argued. “You get to share stories about why this name is good, but that name is out! So much of AI is meant to keep us from just talking to each other.”

The incident highlights how commonplace the use of AI has become just over the past three years since ChatGPT was first made available to the public. Thanks to its prowess in generating limitless amounts of text, the tool has been used to write not only essays and assignments, but also scripts for far more personal circumstances as well, such as obituaries for recently deceased loved ones or flirtations with strangers on dating apps.

A paper released by OpenAI in September found that the proportion of people using ChatGPT for personal use had risen considerably since the tool first launched in late 2022. As of July this past year, around 70 percent of ChatGPT consumer queries were “unrelated to work,” suggesting the tool is increasingly being used as an assistant in everyday life.

The rise of tools like ChatGPT has sparked a debate over whether we’ve become too dependent on these tools in both our professional and personal lives. Experts argue it’s a slippery slope.

“[Large language models] are specifically built to be conversational masters,” AI ethicist James Wilson told TechRadar in June. “Combine that with our natural tendency to anthropomorphize everything, and it makes building unhealthy relationships with chatbots like ChatGPT all too easy.”

In extreme cases, we’ve already seen a strong emotional attachment to AI chatbots being linked to a series of teen suicides, with surviving parents suing OpenAI and competing AI companies as a result.

This perceived overreliance on the tech has also inspired a passionate countermovement, as the latest reactions to the Winklers naming their son with ChatGPT go to show. As the lines between human expression and content generated by an AI model continue to blur, many say they’ve had enough, arguing that we’re losing something innate to the human experience.

“Offloading something as sentimental as naming your child to a glorified chatbot is representative of the era of rewarmed s*** we live in,” one user mourned on Bluesky.

More on OpenAI: People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions

The post New Parents Mocked for Letting ChatGPT Name Their Baby appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: New tech could make grocery receipts, paper tickets from n

Researchers at EPFL have demonstrated that wood-derived materials can meet the technical requirements for thermal paper coatings. This research shows that lignin, a primary element of wood, can be paired with a sensitizer made from plant sugars to produce functional paper for receipts and labels. 

The study follows previous work by Luterbacher involving the extraction of lignin from plants without causing its structural destruction. These plant-based formulations are intended to serve as a substitute for traditional chemicals that carry toxic signatures.

Thermal paper is a widely utilized material found in shipping labels, medical records, and tickets. The global market for this product was valued at $4 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $6 billion by 2030. 

Despite its utility, the chemicals used in its production often enter water and soil through handling and recycling processes. 

“For decades, the most common developers have been bisphenol A (BPA) and, more recently, bisphenol S (BPS),” said the researchers in a press release.

Both substances are known to disrupt hormone signaling in living organisms and are frequently detected in individuals who handle receipts often.

Replacement is quite challenging

Replacing these bisphenols is a technical challenge because any alternative must remain stable, printable, and cost-effective. A suitable developer must react at the specific temperature used by printers, mix effectively with other coating ingredients, and prevent background discoloration during storage. 

While many bio-based materials have been proposed in the past, they typically fail to meet these specific stability and reactivity requirements.

To create a viable alternative, the EPFL team utilized lignin because it contains chemical groups capable of acting as color developers. However, isolated lignin is naturally dark and chemically irregular, which usually makes it unsuitable for high-quality printing. 

To resolve this, the researchers applied a controlled extraction technique known as sequential aldehyde-assisted fractionation. This method produces light-colored lignin polymers by reducing the presence of dark, color-absorbing groups that would otherwise interfere with the visual clarity of the printed text.

In addition to the developer, thermal paper requires a sensitizer to facilitate the interaction between the dye and the developer when heat is applied. The team avoided petroleum-based sensitizers by using diformylxylose, a molecule derived from a plant cell wall sugar called xylan. 

“They then applied the resulting mixtures as thin coatings onto paper and tested them using controlled heating and commercial printers,” added the press release.

Impressive performance and safety

The resulting lignin-based coatings produced clear images with color density values that align with the requirements for commercial thermal paper. During stability testing, the paper remained functional after being stored near a window for several months, and printed logos remained readable after one year. 

While the image contrast did not yet reach the level of fully optimized commercial paper, the results matched the performance of existing BPA-based products.

Safety evaluations showed that these lignin developers have estrogen-like activity that is two to four orders of magnitude lower than that of BPA. Additionally, the sugar-based sensitizer demonstrated no estrogenic or toxic profile under the conditions tested by the researchers. 

This study indicates that non-edible biomass can be processed through simple steps to create safer formulations for everyday items like labels and receipts.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com