Marketplace Tech

U.S. ports could be facing another strike as the deadline looms next Wednesday to settle a union contract for 45,000 dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts. A major sticking point has been automation. Proponents argue that technology can make ports cleaner and more efficient; critics point to lost jobs, high costs and mixed productivity results. While the cost-benefit analysis of port automation is complicated, there are places where the model appears to be succeeding, like Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

By now you probably know the term “large language model.” They’re the systems that underlie artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. They’re called “large” because typically the more data you feed into them — like all the text on the internet — the better those models perform. But in recent months, there’s been chatter about the prospect that ever bigger models might not deliver transformative performance gains. Enter small language models. MIT Technology Review recently listed the systems as a breakthrough technology to watch in 2025. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to MIT Tech Review Executive Editor Niall Firth about why SLMs made the list.

A battle is brewing over the restructuring of OpenAI, the creator of pioneering artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. It was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with the goal of developing AI to benefit humanity, not investors. But advanced AI requires massive processing power, which gets expensive, feeding into the company’s decision to take on major investors. Recently, OpenAI unveiled a plan to transition into a for-profit public benefit corporation. That plan has drawn objections from the likes of Elon Musk, Meta and Robert Weissman, co-president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, which urged California authorities to ensure that as OpenAI reorganizes, it will repay much of the benefits it received as a nonprofit.

OpenAI closed the year with a bang, announcing a new, powerful AI model called o3. It could mark a significant step toward artificial general intelligence — an advanced form of AI that can learn or understand anything a human can. Plus, we’re mulling another tech prediction for 2025 — will AI assistants actually make our lives easier this year? But first, President-elect Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to put the TikTok ban on hold so he might negotiate a deal to save the app in the United States. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these topics for this week’s Tech Bytes.

Artificial intelligence and promises about the tech are everywhere these days. But excitement about genuine advances can easily veer into hype, according to Arvind Narayanan, computer science professor at Princeton who along with PhD candidate Sayash Kapoor wrote the book “AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference.” He says even the term AI doesn’t always mean what you think.

This episode originally aired on August 19th, 2024. Six years ago, Apple introduced a new feature on iPhones and iPads: The Screen Time Report. The feature promised to empower users to manage their device time and balance the things that are really important. But is it actually doing that? Caroline Mimbs Nyce, a staff writer at The Atlantic, recently wrote about why she thinks Screen Time is the worst feature Apple has ever made. She told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that it sometimes feels like Screen Time is doing more guilt-tripping than empowering these days.

2024 was all about the artificial intelligence boom. That was true for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, but also the case on a wider, more practical level, with AI becoming increasingly visible in our schools, offices and social media feeds. AI advances are sure to remain a massive part of the tech economy, but in the coming year, we could see more sci-fi-like tech becoming reality, according to futurist Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Webb about some of the emerging trends she’s watching for in 2025, including a potential evolution in AI tech that she calls living intelligence.

Have you ever found yourself angry or outraged at a piece of content on social media? A disgusting recipe or shocking opinion? It could be intentional. Social media influencer Winta Zesu freely admits that she provokes for profit — and made $150,000 last year by posting content meant to elicit “hate comments.” She’s part of a growing group of online creators making rage-bait content, where the goal is simple: record videos, produce memes and write posts that make other users viscerally angry, then bask in the thousands, or even millions, of shares and likes. The BBC’s Megan Lawton reports.

It’s fair to say China dominates in electric vehicle sales. The country is the world’s biggest consumer of electric cars and has dozens of automakers competing in the space. Last year, Chinese companies sold about 9.5 million EVs and plug-in hybrid cars. But the industry faces mounting trade pressures. The Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs which President-elect Donald Trump is expected to continue. Meanwhile the European Union recently raised tariffs up to 45%, citing concerns that Chinese government subsidies give the companies an unfair advantage. Subsidies certainly help but there are other factors giving Chinese EV’s an edge. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty spoke with Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak about how those factors could keep Chinese EV makers competitive, even in a more restrictive global market.

As we close out the year and look ahead at 2025, we wanted to mark an anniversary of sorts: 20 years ago, the online review site Yelp was launched — the name reportedly a mashup of “help” and “Yellow Pages.” In the two decades since the site launched, the website has changed the business of online reviews and our relationship to review culture, even has fake review continue being generated.

This episode originally aired Sept. 23, 2024.

You might say online gambling has been on a winning streak since a Supreme Court decision in 2018 cleared the way for states to allow sports betting. It’s now legal in 30 states and its influence is hard to miss: Online sportsbook companies like DraftKings and FanDuel are on billboards, commercials even college campuses, many of which have made deals with sports betting companies. Yanely Espinal, host of Marketplace’s “Financially Inclined” podcast, recently covered this topic on her show and she explained to Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino how these online betting companies are reeling in younger users.

This episode is a rerun and originally aired Sept. 11, 2024.

Over the last couple of years, the tech industry has slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of them in recruiting and other departments working to improve diversity. Companies like Meta and Google, which earlier set ambitious hiring and investment goals, have pulled resources from those efforts. As a result, many nonprofit groups set up to train and recruit underrepresented workers are struggling to stay afloat. One prominent person in the field is Lisa Mae Brunson, founder of the nonprofit Wonder Women Tech. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino asked her how things have changed.

Raise your hand if you kind of forgot where the word podcast comes from. The now-catchall term for digital audio shows goes back to the Apple iPod. And it’s been almost two decades now since Apple helped bring podcasts mainstream by adding them to iTunes. “We’re going to list thousands of podcasts and you’ll be able to click on them, download them for free, and subscribe to them right in iTunes,” said then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. So, what was the business of podcasting like at the beginning, and where might it go from here? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty asked Nicholas Quah, podcast critic for Vulture and New York Magazine.

The House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence released a lengthy report this week that doesn’t recommend any specific policies or bills. We’ll also look ahead at what the new year could bring the robotaxi business. But first, the TikTok ban is heading to the Supreme Court. A federal appeals court last week upheld the law that would ban the short-form video app if its Chinese owners don’t sell it by Jan. 19. TikTok asked the court to weigh in, and this week SCOTUS agreed. Lily Jamali, tech correspondent at the BBC, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.

Voice cloning is becoming easier, faster and more convincing. Artificial Intelligence makes it possible to change the age of an actor’s voice, translate words into any language, and replace a voice lost through illness. But it’s also increasingly being used by criminals to impersonate a loved one, extort money or compromise bank accounts. It’s changing how we communicate with each other and how we trust each other. And experts say we’re already at the point where AI voice cloning can be used for real time conversations. So how are the U.S., the U.K. and Europe handling regulation of this rapidly-evolving new technology?

About 170 million U.S. users could be TikTokless as soon as Jan. 19. Early this month, a federal appeals court upheld a law that could ban the very popular short-form video app unless its Chinese owners agree to sell it. They have a willing buyer, though, in billionaire Frank McCourt, who has assembled a consortium of investors ready to put down more than $20 billion. He’s the founder of the internet reform initiative Project Liberty. You may also know him as a real estate developer who once owned the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The artificial intelligence boom and its hunger for electricity has brought a surge of interest in nuclear power. Microsoft, for instance, made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Google and Amazon have invested in companies developing small, modular reactors. The Joe Biden administration’s Department of Energy aims to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, but the sector will need a lot more workers to make that happen. By some estimates there’s a gap of more than 200,000 jobs to fill over the next decade. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Craig Piercy, CEO of the American Nuclear Society, to learn more about the hunt for talent.

As we approach President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next month, questions are coming up about how his second administration might deal with tech. A lot has changed in the industry and its relationship to the former president since his first go-round. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Reed Albergotti, tech editor at the news site Semafor, to help us decode some of the signals, starting with artificial intelligence and the man Trump has named as his AI czar, venture capitalist David Sacks.

There’s been a lot of discussion about health insurance over the last week. And one practice could be seeing more oversight: the use of artificial intelligence in coverage decisions. Plus, the FDA issues final guidance for makers of AI-enabled medical devices so they can now update their software after approval. And it was a good year for health tech startups — after a not-so-good year in 2023 — especially for those with the letters “AI” attached to their business. Our regular contributor Christina Farr, managing director with Manatt Health, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.

Some low-income consumers have trouble qualifying for loans, due to a variety of reasons — lacking the required paperwork, or the documentation banks require for loan applications.  Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall-Genzer explores whether AI could be used to help consumers access traditional banking systems.

As consumers, we leave trails of personal data all over the internet. And collecting and selling it is big business. Sensitive information, like our Social Security numbers, incomes and credit scores, are often sold by so-called data brokers to the highest bidder. Sometimes that’s a bank, sometimes it’s a scammer. This month, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a rule that would crack down on the practice. It would bar companies from selling sensitive data or hold them to the same legal standards that apply to credit reporting agencies. Rohit Chopra, director of the CFPB, explained the proposal in more detail to Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

The push to integrate artificial intelligence — like large language models — in the workplace is hitting almost every industry these days. And that includes policing. Reporter James O’Donnell with MIT Technology Review got an inside look at the ways in which many departments are experimenting with the new technology when he visited the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police conference back in October. O’Donnell attended to see how artificial intelligence was being discussed. He said police are using or thinking about AI in a wide range of applications. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with O’Donnell to learn more about those use cases.

One of the industries that is adopting artificial intelligence tools the fastest is the legal field. A recent report from the legal tech company Clio showed almost 80% of legal professionals are using AI in some way in their practice, up from about 30% last year. Joshua Lenon, a lawyer in residence at Clio, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino the profession is particularly ripe for tech disruption.

The CEO of Intel resigned this week, likely with a push from the company’s board. We’ll take a look at the landscape for U.S. chip manufacturing on today’s “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Amazon is trying to make good on its net zero carbon emission pledges with a pilot to capture carbon at one of its data centers. But first, OpenAI announced this week it’s partnering with a military technology startup called Anduril. It’s just the latest AI company to get into the defense business. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, about all these stories and more.

We talk a lot about how the internet is filling up with AI content. And, of course, that includes the sort guaranteed to generate clicks and dollars: the adult variety. Platforms like Instagram have seen an explosion in sexy AI-generated influencers, and the people running those accounts sometimes steal content from real creators and mash them up with AI. The practice is called “AI pimping,” Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

The Quayside development on Toronto’s waterfront was supposed to be the shining example of a tech-optimized smart city, an urban environment reinvented “from the internet up,” as it was described by Sidewalk Labs. That was a sister company to Google, which won a government bid in 2017 to modernize the 12 acres of former dockland. There would be robotaxis, heated sidewalks, adaptive traffic lights and lots of data collection. But in 2020, Sidewalk Toronto suddenly shut down before a single ribbon had been cut, turning a shining example into a cautionary tale. It’s all chronicled in a new book from Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane called “Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with O’Kane about what went on behind the scenes of the Sidewalk Toronto project.

Ever since ChatGPT hit the scene a couple years ago, there’s been a nagging sense of dread for many: what will this mean for jobs? Well, new research from Imperial College London finds a shift already underway. Between July 2021 and July 2023, the report found freelance job postings for writing and coding decreased by about 20%. There was also a slowdown in freelance jobs for visual art. And it’s happening more quickly than past technological disruptions, Ozge Demirci, one of the coauthors of that report and a business professor at Imperial College London, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

The internet has been overrun by AI content. The weirdly glowing and inadvertently surreal airbrushed images, the generic and oddly formal sentences peppered with factual errors and distracting phrases like “as of my last knowledge update.” So much of social media content these days has the unmistakable stench of “AI slop,” hastily spit out by image generators or chatbots to get a few likes. And while the phenomenon might seem harmless or sometimes even charming, the AI slop takeover of the internet is crowding out real information and human perspectives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox, about how AI slop is transforming social media.

OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT turns two years old tomorrow. So how has it changed the tech industry and what’s next for the company? We’ll get into it in today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, we look into rumblings that improvements in AI have slowed, raising questions about whether we’ve hit a wall when it comes to training more advanced AI systems. But first, the Commerce Department finalized nearly $7.9 billion in subsidies for Intel. It’s the largest award yet under the CHIPS and Science Act and a potentially game-changing sum for the company right now. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, to break down these stories.

A survey by nonprofit organization Common Sense Media shows 42% of children in the U.S. have a phone by the age of 10. And numbers like this are causing concern for educators, including a group of headteachers in Greystones, a town in Ireland. That group was so worried by the increased levels of anxiety among children using smartphones and social media that last year they asked parents to sign a voluntary pledge to delay buying cellphones for their children until at least the age of 11. The BBC’s Leanna Byrne checks in to see what effect it had.

A 58-year-old Mike Tyson may have come up short in his ballyhooed comeback match against YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul. But Netflix emerged as a big winner, boasting 108 million viewers for the Nov. 15 spectacle, the most streamed sporting event in history. Unfortunately for viewers, Netflix’s livestream of the fight suffered buffering and lag problems. It wasn’t a great start for the platform, which will be livestreaming some much-anticipated NFL games on Christmas Day. But the streaming service has been leaning into more and more live content. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Lucas Shaw, who writes the Screentime newsletter at Bloomberg, about the event and what it portends for Netflix’s future live endeavors.

It’s an interesting time for many in the U.S. Some people feel great about President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, while others don’t. This week, people from both sides are sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner. And while it’s one thing to ignore a family member’s social media posts or online rants, that can be a bit more challenging face-to-face, sometimes leading to awkward conversations about beliefs, truth and misinformation. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke to Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, about how to navigate awkward conversations this holiday season.

The push for electric vehicle adoption got a bit more uncertain with the election of Donald Trump. While reports of “EV death” have been greatly exaggerated, sales growth has slowed, and carmakers have pulled back on aggressive targets. Now, it seems Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino may be part of that trend. She recently spoke with Jack Stewart, a former Marketplace reporter and the man who convinced her to buy an EV, about her decision to trade in her EV for a gas-powered car.

The social media app Bluesky is flying high this week as users disenchanted with Elon Musk’s X flee that platform post-election. That’s just one of the topics for today’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” We’ll also get into Big Tech’s big-money lobbying effort to slow down a federal bill aimed at protecting kids online. But first, the latest in the potential Google breakup. This week, the Department of Justice proposed forcing the company to sell its Chrome browser. It’s one possible resolution to an antitrust case that has already ruled Google’s search business a monopoly. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.

Some of the biggest health insurers in the country are turning to an algorithm to help determine if a medical claim will be approved. That’s according to a recent investigation led by ProPublica into EviCore, a contractor used to outsource prior approval requests for much of the insurance industry. The investigation found that EviCore tweaks an algorithm to increase the likelihood those claims will be denied, which means lower costs for insurers but more patients losing access to potentially lifesaving care. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller, who co-reported this story.

Remember the old mantra from the early days of social media, “pics or it didn’t happen”? For more than a century, photographic evidence was about as close to a physical representation of the real world as we’ve had. But, thanks to new AI-powered photo editing tools – like the one now available on Google’s newest Pixel phones – anyone can create convincing pics of things that didn’t happen. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Sarah Jeong, a features editor at The Verge, who recently wrote about these cutting edge tools. Jeong says no one’s ready for the impact of this technology.

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. And the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who is also the owner of X, does have a record of wringing efficiencies out of his businesses. But the move raises many questions, like should someone whose companies benefit from federal dollars have a hand in making budget decisions? SpaceX alone has secured about $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the last decade, helping it become the dominant player in the industry. So, how has SpaceX rocketed ahead of the competition, and can anyone catch up? Ashlee Vance, the author of “When the Heavens Went on Sale” and a writer for Bloomberg, pointed to reusable rockets, an innovation that was on spectacular display when SpaceX tested its Starship system last month.

Advancements in artificial intelligence have made it possible for the technology to mimic humans in ever-more convincing ways. But even far less sophisticated tools than today’s chatbots have been shown in research to trick our brains, in a sense, into projecting human thought processes and emotions onto these systems. It’s a cognitive failure that can leave people open to deception and manipulation, which makes the increasingly human-like technologies proliferating in our daily lives particularly dangerous, Rick Claypool, research director at the nonprofit Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

It’s been almost eight months since Reddit went public, and since then, the platform known as the front page of the internet has been going gangbusters. We’ll get into why on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, crypto surges to new highs in the wake of the election. But first up, Silicon Valley is going to Washington. This week, President-elect Donald Trump tapped his favorite tech CEO, Elon Musk, as the co-lead of a new Department of Government Efficiency along with Vivek Ramaswamy, the former biotech entrepreneur and GOP presidential candidate.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Anita Ramaswamy, financial analysis columnist at The Information, for her take on these stories.

Apple is reportedly facing a fine from the European Union, and it could be a hefty one. It’s the first Big Tech company to be slapped with a financial penalty under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect last year. The law, aimed at spurring competition in digital markets, requires Big Tech companies designated as “gatekeepers” to change policies that lock consumers into their products. Like, say, the walled garden of the Apple App Store. EU regulators ruled that Apple violated the DMA by failing to fully support app developers “steering” consumers to alternative marketplaces. It’s a story Matt Binder, a senior tech reporter for Mashable, has been following.

Gary Marcus is worried about AI. The professor emeritus at NYU doesn’t count himself a luddite or techno-pessimist. But Marcus has become one of the loudest voices of caution when it comes to AI. He’s chronicled some of the funniest and most disturbing errors made by current tools like ChatGPT, calling out the many costs – both human and environmental – of an industry that continues to accrete money and power. In his new book “Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us,” Marcus lays out his vision for a responsible path forward. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Marcus about that path and how it may be further out of reach, though not impossible, given the results of this year’s presidential election.

Do the free speech protections guaranteed by the First Amendment apply to online discourse? What if that online discourse spreads misinformation? Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, about how we should understand the right to free speech in the internet era.

This fall, California became the latest state to adopt a law banning cellphone use in schools. The Golden State joins more than a dozen that have imposed restrictions as alarm grows about the potentially harmful effects of smartphone use on students’ learning and mental health. Support for these policies spans the political spectrum. But one important constituency sometimes has a hard time adjusting: parents. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a columnist for The Cut, wrote about the challenges of disconnecting.

The president-elect is also a former president who’s been a fixture in national politics for the last decade. But predicting what Donald Trump might have in mind for the tech industry in his second term based on that history, well, that’s a tough call. Trump has, at times, had strong words for some tech titans, cozied up to others, and pushed for — and then against — a TikTok ban. His first administration initiated several antitrust cases against tech companies, but Trump recently expressed skepticism about the potential breakup of Google after a federal judge ruled that its search business was a monopoly. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, a senior writer at Wired, about the future of tech antitrust policy and more in the second Trump term.

It has been almost two years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene and made teachers’ lives a whole lot harder. A report from Common Sense Media this fall showed that 70% of teenage students used artificial intelligence for school or fun. But a majority of those students’ parents and teachers were unaware. Leila Wheless, a seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher in North Carolina, asked her students how they use the technology.

The thing about the artificial intelligence boom is that the tech needs a lot of electricity. One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggests that largely because of AI, data centers will use 160% more electricity by 2030. It’s got Big Tech fired up about an option that’s never really been the cool kid of the clean energy class: nuclear power. Microsoft made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant, while Google and Amazon are investing in new types of reactors. It’s stirring something of a “nuclear revival” for the U.S. after decades of stagnation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anna Erickson, professor of nuclear and radiological engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about the push to revive the nuclear energy sector.

It’s Election Day and even though the campaign may be over, the battle over misinformation is not. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Derek Tisler, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, about some of the misleading online narratives voters should expect to see and how to deal with them. This conversation is part of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy.” Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.

In case you forgot, we’ve got Election Day tomorrow. But it was also a big year for elections in the rest of the world. About half of the global population is voting in national elections in 2024, and in many countries people have encountered shut down internet, blocked websites or manipulated content online, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Freedom House. Allie Funk leads Freedom House’s technology and democracy initiative, and she told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino this is the 14th consecutive year the report has documented a decline in human rights online.

An AI transcription tool used in health care has been found to frequently hallucinate things no one ever said, including making up medications. That’s just one of the topics for today’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Plus, we’ll get into what we learned from this week’s Big Tech earnings, including Google saying that it’s using AI to generate about 25% of its code.

But first, it’s been a busy week for Apple. The company launched some of its new Apple Intelligence features and released its new lineup of Mac computers along with some souped-up chips.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to get her take on this week’s tech news.

For almost a century, people have been going to the movies to get freaked out by fictional depictions of artificial intelligence. Back in 1968, there was Hal 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1980s gave us Skynet in “The Terminator.” And these days, movies about rogue bots are more popular than ever. Films like 2022’s “M3GAN” and this summer’s “AfrAId” seem to be channeling our worst fears about the intelligent technology increasingly embedded in our daily lives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Shira Ovide, a tech reporter and author of The Washington Post’s “Tech Friend” newsletter, about why AI is such a compelling horror villain.

We are in the midst of the first major U.S. election of the generative AI era. The people who want to win your vote have easy access to tools that can create images, video or audio of real people doing or saying things they never did — and slap on weird appendages or other make-believe effects along with targeted slogans. But the potential to deceive has led about two dozen states to enact some form of regulation requiring political ads that use artificial intelligence to include a label. So how do voters respond when they know a campaign has used AI? That’s what Scott Brennen and his team at New York University’s Center on Technology Policy set out to answer in a recent study.

We know from various studies that young people are, unsurprisingly, using generative AI tools like chatbots and image generators, sometimes for homework, sometimes for fun and sometimes for malicious purposes. A recent survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that artificial intelligence is being used among high school students to create nonconsensual, illicit imagery — in other words, sexually explicit deepfakes. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at CDT, to learn more.

With tech now able to clone voices in minutes, many people in creative industries are worried about what this could mean for their livelihoods. The BBC’s Ben Derico looks at what this AI revolution has meant for voice actors who claim to have had their likeness copied by an AI voice-generating company.

The next big thing in Silicon Valley might just be an old-fashioned concept: humanoid robots that can mimic our physical abilities. Developments in AI are triggering renewed interest in the robotics industry. And Anthropic’s latest Claude model can control a computer on its own, which could have implications for the future of work. But first, is the “best bromance in tech” starting to sour? That’s how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once described his company’s partnership with Microsoft, but recently the alliance has shown signs of tension. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Natasha Mascarenhas for her take on all this for our weekly segment “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

There’s a movement to make it possible to repair our gadgets ourselves instead of having to send them back to the company that makes them or, you know, just get a new one. The “right to repair” movement in consumer electronics has made real gains in recent years. Several states, like California, New York and Oregon, have passed legislation requiring it. And it looks like Apple’s newest iPhone — the 16 — has made strides in that department. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Kyle Wiens, CEO of the online repair guide iFixit, about the iPhone 16’s improved repairability.

A content creator who goes by the username Mrs. Frazzled recently noticed something strange happening on her Instagram account. With more than 370,000 followers, her videos sometimes score millions of views. Except, it seems, when she talks about the election. Mrs. Frazzled sensed she was being shadowbanned by Instagram, so Geoffrey Fowler, a tech columnist at The Washington Post, investigated. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Fowler about what he found.

Trying to vote when your disabled can present a series of obstacles but technology can help, even if integrating technology into our election system has its risks. Back in 2020, several states changed their voting rules with more mail-in, early, and remote voting options which increased turnout among disabled voters. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams recently spoke with Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager at the National Disability Rights Network, about finding the right balance of tech integration into our elections in order to empower more disabled voters in the U.S.

Artificial intelligence, according to its boosters, could help us unlock solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, like climate change. But in the meantime, it’s become a key tool for fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron to maximize the extraction of emissions-producing oil and gas. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to freelance reporter Karen Hao, who recently wrote in The Atlantic about how Microsoft has actively courted the fossil fuel industry.

Web crawlers scan and catalog sites all over the internet and, in the AI era, use that data to train chatbots. We’ll talk about why The New York Times is trying to put a stop to crawlers from the AI company Perplexity. We’ll also discuss the record share of venture capital dollars flowing into the AI sector and the difficulty of attracting investment for startups without those two magic letters. Plus, the ups and downs of SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, for her take on all this for our weekly segment “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

Vice President Kamala Harris sat for her first interview on Fox News Wednesday as the Democratic presidential candidate continued her media blitz ahead of the November election. And while it’s generating plenty of headlines, these kinds of big interviews just don’t hold the power they used to, according to Nick Quah, a podcast and culture critic at New York Magazine who’s been following the candidates’ interviews on the alternative media circuit. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Quah about how Kamala Harris’ appearance on more internet-native shows like the podcast “Call Her Daddy” or Donald Trump’s appearances on various “bro-centric” shows like Logan Paul ‘sYouTube channel represent a notable media shift compared to previous elections.

After years of hype, Tesla finally debuted a robotaxi called the Cybercab last week. CEO Elon Musk has been making and breaking promises about Tesla’s autonomous vehicle for years. So, did the debut of the Cybercab finally deliver? Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor for The Verge, tells Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino what the Cybercab unveiling means for Musk and for Tesla.

Online misinformation about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and about the relief response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have surged in recent weeks, including false narratives of aid being withheld from victims for their political beliefs and aid being stolen by undocumented immigrants. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Ethan Porter, professor of media, public affairs and political science at George Washington University, about why there’s been so much misinformation about these natural disasters and FEMA’s relief response.

TikTok has a lot going on legally these days. Last week, it saw a fresh round of lawsuits alleging the short-form video app harms children. And then there’s the federal law that could ban the app if ByteDance, its China-based owner, doesn’t divest by January. TikTok has sued to block that law. Oral arguments in TikTok Inc. v. Merrick Garland were heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in September. The company is joined by eight TikTok creators as plaintiffs in the case, and one of them is Talia Cadet. She has nearly 140,000 followers on TikTok, where she produces lifestyle videos focused on her love of books and travel. She talked with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about the case.

TikTok is facing yet another legal challenge. This week, attorneys general from 13 states plus Washington, D.C., sued the short-form video app, alleging that it harms children. We’ll be digging into the latest lawsuits on today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” our roundup of the week’s top tech headlines. Like the so-called Godfather of AI who is sharing the Nobel Prize in physics. Plus, the U.S. government is weighing what to do about Google after its search business was ruled a monopoly earlier this year. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.

The new kid on the block of social media, Meta’s Threads, hit 200 million active users in August. When it launched in the summer of 2023 as a rival to the platform formerly known as Twitter, Meta said the app would eventually be integrated into the so-called fediverse. This “federated universe” is the most prominent example of a decentralized social network in which users can join any affiliated platform and interact with content from all the others. Recently, Meta took some steps to integrate Threads into this ecosystem, and Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer for The Washington Post, has been following the developments.

A lot of personal data – stuff like your home address, phone number, marital status and more – is out there on the internet. Anyone can buy it from sites like Whitepages, PeopleFinders or Intelius, which aggregate data from public records and social media. You can contact each of these “people search” sites and request they take down your information, but it’s a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. Naturally, a whole industry of data-removal services has sprung up. For a price, they promise to do the dirty work for you. But do they deliver? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Yael Grauer, a researcher at Consumer Reports, who recently looked into the efficacy of the data-removal industry.

Until about a decade ago, independent cybersecurity researchers in the U.S. weren’t allowed to examine voting machines for potential vulnerabilities. But that ban was essentially lifted in 2015. Two years later, DEF CON — one of the largest hacker conventions — decided to invite hackers, cybersecurity researchers and election officials to find those flaws during its annual Voting Village event. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Catherine Terranova, executive director of Voting Village, about how they balance the well-intentioned work of finding vulnerabilities before bad actors do and the problem of misinformation around the security of voting machines.

It’s been more than 15 years since the digital currency bitcoin was launched, going from a fringe phenomenon in the dark corners of the internet to an asset traded on Wall Street. But the identity of bitcoin’s creator, known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained a mystery wrapped in a cryptographic enigma. Now, investigative filmmaker Cullen Hoback may have cracked the case. His last HBO series “Into the Storm” uncovered the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory. In his new documentary, “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” Hoback sets out to answer the elusive question: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? To prevent any spoilers, we’ll keep his conclusions secret.

Investors are once again pouring money into biotechnology startups. But this time, it feels different from the heyday of 2021. We’ll be digging into the latest data for today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” our roundup of the week’s top headlines, including some you might have missed.

We’ll also talk about a private equity deal with the country’s biggest digital pharmacy platform. But first, OpenAI closes a historic funding round. The maker of ChatGPT raised another $6.6 billion — valuing the company at $157 billion, double its worth earlier this year.

Our regular contributor Christina Farr, managing director with Manatt Health, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.

All those fancy artificial intelligence systems need a lot of data centers to run, and those data centers need a lot of energy. One estimate from the Electric Power Research Institute suggests that current data center electricity consumption in the U.S. will more than double by 2030, making up about 9% of all energy use. But the AI sector is coming up against the big energy-hungry tech innovation of yesteryear: crypto mining. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Reuters reporter Laila Kearney about the scramble to power up in both industries.

Today we’re talking about voting tech and the push in some areas to move away from machines and go back to hand counting ballots. A legal battle is brewing in Georgia over a new rule requiring ballots be hand counted on election night to ensure the tally matches electronic records. Arizona has added a similar requirement. The issue has become particularly mired in misinformation in recent years, with some election deniers questioning the security of the tech used in our elections. While some may believe hand counts are more accurate, the number of jurisdictions across the country relying on them on election night has been steadily dropping. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Pam Smith, president and CEO of the nonpartisan organization Verified Voting, about why the practice of counting ballots by hand is waning.

This week, we’re talking about how teenagers are using artificial intelligence tools like chatbots and image generators, often without the knowledge of their parents and teachers, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Common Sense Media. Monday we heard about that research from Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of the group. And now we want to home in on a specific piece of what he said: “If you look back at the advent of social media, about 20 years ago, we pretty much blew the regulatory side of that, but also the educating teachers and parents part of that. And we left kids on their own.” So we called up Nathan Sanders, an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, who has written about the overlapping risks of AI and social media.

As soon as ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, it became clear that artificial intelligence was going to send massive shockwaves through education. And, as with any new technology, young people were likely to adopt it more quickly. Well, now we have some data about that phenomenon. A new report from the non-profit Common Sense Media shows seven in 10 teenagers from ages 13-18 are using generative AI in some way. And Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino it’s not all about cheating.

It’s perhaps not a big surprise, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a very optimistic take on what his company’s technology could mean for the world. He shared his vision of a near future transformed by ever-advancing artificial intelligence systems in a much-discussed blog post earlier this week. Plus, Meta revealed more of its AI plans at its big developer conference including another go at celebrity chatbots. But first, X, formerly Twitter, finally released a new transparency report. It’s the first one since 2022, when Elon Musk bought the platform. And it’s full of data on reported abuse, harassment, how many accounts were suspended and more. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discussed these topics and more with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, on this week’s Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission made history this month with the first-ever commercial spacewalk. It seems space travel is no longer reserved for highly trained government astronauts, but increasingly open to anyone with the funds (and the courage) to try it. But before we all go strapping on our spacesuits, Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, says we need to be clear-eyed about the risks. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Impey about those risks and the rewards that might make them worth it.

The infrastructure that enabled Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence boom is not located in California, but rather in northern Virginia. How did the region become the data center capital of the world? And what does it mean for tech companies, the local economy and residents? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino has the story.

There have been a lot of rumors and misinformation recently about voter registration and voter list maintenance, adding confusion to what experts say are secure processes. And while election officials regularly update voter lists, it’s become increasingly important that individuals also keep their voter registration information up to date. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams recently spoke with Josh Visnaw,  project manager at a Harvard University initiative called VoteFlare, about the challenges of maintaining accurate voter lists and how VoteFlare is trying to help.

You might say online gambling has been on a winning streak since a Supreme Court decision in 2018 cleared the way for states to allow sports betting. It’s now legal in 30 states and its influence is hard to miss: online sportsbook companies like DraftKings and FanDuel are on billboards, commercials even college campuses, many of which have made deals with sports betting companies. Yanely Espinal, host of Marketplace’s “Financially Inclined” podcast, recently covered this topic on her show and she explained to Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino how these online betting companies are reeling in younger users.

This week, Meta announced teen accounts with a slew of new safety features. We’ve also got Apple news to talk about — no, not the latest iPhones or watches, but new functionality for AirPods that basically turns them into hearing aids. First, though, are we ready for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that could match or exceed human capabilities? It could be a mere one to three years away, according to testimony at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Tuesday. A number of AI insiders spoke, including former Google and OpenAI researchers and Georgetown’s Helen Toner, who explained the stakes. “That technology will be at a minimum extraordinarily disruptive and at a maximum could lead to literal human extinction,” she said. “So I would argue that a wait-and-see approach to policy is not an option.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, for her take on all this for our weekly segment “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

In this tense election year, polling is top of mind. But collecting polling data has become harder. It often relies on people actually answering the phone and then speaking frankly to a pollster, both of which are becoming less common. The result has been data that is less predictive, and repeated misses in recent elections have made the public much more skeptical. Polling, it seems, needs an update for the digital age. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Bruce Schneier, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, who says AI can help.

A federal appeals court heard arguments Monday in a case that pits the First Amendment against national security. TikTok sued to block a bipartisan-backed law that will ban the Chinese-owned app in the U.S. by January 19 — unless it finds a U.S. buyer. This week, the government argued the app gives China access to Americans’ sensitive data, as well as the ability to spread propaganda. While TikTok argued it’s been unfairly singled out and that a sale isn’t the only way to address security concerns. TikTok touts 170 million users in the U.S., and that includes both candidates for president. A group of U.S.-based creators have also joined as plaintiffs in this lawsuit. Anupam Chander, professor of law and technology at Georgetown University, walked Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino through the arguments in the case.

The bipartisan NO FAKES Act, aimed at regulating deepfakes created with the aid of artificial intelligence, moved forward in the House of Representatives last week after it was introduced in the Senate in July. But in the absence of federal rules, several states have already stepped in. Last month, California became the third to back legislation regulating digital replicas. The home of Hollywood follows Tennessee, which earlier this year passed a ban on unauthorized deepfakes known as the ELVIS Act, and Illinois, which enacted a similar law last month. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Steve Brachmann, a freelance journalist specializing in intellectual property law, to learn about how these bans work.

Late last month, the CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram was arrested in France. Authorities there have charged Pavel Durov with being complicit in illegal activities conducted on the platform due to a lack of content moderation. A recent report from the research group Cybersecurity for Democracy shows some of that activity is finding its way onto other platforms. Senior Fellow Yaël Eisenstat looked at advertisements on Meta platforms that linked back to Telegram, and found that a majority were promoting channels with potentially illegal activities.

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for our weekly review of some of the big stories making headlines in tech. First: No, you’re not having déjà vu all over again. Google really is back in court this week for its second antitrust trial of the year. Plus, a startup in Silicon Valley wants to make AI data centers more sustainable by putting them underwater in the San Francisco Bay, but regulators have questions. And Taylor Swift announced she is endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election. She took to Instagram on Tuesday night to publish her stance, citing artificial intelligence-enabled misinformation as a driving force. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, for his take on this week’s tech news.

The cryptocurrency industry has been fairly quiet recently, with the scandals around the bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX and its former chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, fading from the headlines. But behind the scenes, the industry has become a bit of a power player in the 2024 elections — funding political ads, endorsing House and Senate candidates and raising millions of dollars, according to a recent report from the nonprofit group Public Citizen. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Axios reporter Brady Dale, author of the Axios Crypto newsletter, to learn more.

Over the last couple of years, the tech industry has slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of them in recruiting and other departments working to improve diversity. Companies like Meta and Google, which earlier set ambitious hiring and investment goals, have pulled resources from those efforts. As a result, many nonprofit groups set up to train and recruit underrepresented workers are struggling to stay afloat. One prominent person in the field is Lisa Mae Brunson, founder of the nonprofit Wonder Women Tech. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino asked her how things have changed.

Among the trends of mis- and disinformation spreading ahead of the 2024 election is the narrative that large groups of noncitizens are illegally voting. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams recently spoke with Danielle Lee Tomson, a research manager with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, about how this narrative is affecting the November election.

This conversation is part of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy.” Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.

On Friday, a Boeing Starliner spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station to return to Earth without its crew. NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore stayed behind due to uncertainty about the safety of the Boeing craft. The duo will instead hitch a ride back on a SpaceX mission set to arrive at the ISS in February. It’s another win for the Elon Musk-owned company, which has come to dominate rocket launches in the U.S. But NASA’s reliance on SpaceX now is a bit of a reversal, according to Steven Feldstein, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict and Governance program.

If you’re an Apple fan, you probably didn’t miss the speculation surrounding the upcoming iPhone 16 launch event next week. Many expect the tech giant to reveal more about how its artificial intelligence will be integrated into its new hardware. We’ll be digging into that on this week’s Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Plus, airlines are upgrading their Wi-Fi, so you might be able to take a Zoom meeting on your six-hour flight. But first, Elon Musk’s satellite internet provider has agreed to block Elon Musk’s social media platform in Brazil. X has been banned in the country since last weekend, and now Starlink has agreed to enforce that ban for its roughly quarter-million internet subscribers in the country. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Wall Street Journal senior personal technology columnist Joanna Stern or her take on this week’s tech news.

Warning: This episode mentions suicide. If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

There seems to be growing momentum for efforts to protect kids from online harm. In June, the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a warning label on social media for children, and more recently the Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act with bipartisan support. On the show we’ve heard from lobbyists and advocates on different sides of the issue. Today we speak with Kristin Bride, for whom the debate is personal. In 2020, Bride’s 16-year-old son, Carson, died by suicide after being cyberbullied on the social media platform Snapchat. Since then, Bride has become a vocal advocate for social media reform because, she says, even the most vigilant parents can’t always protect their kids.

Depending on whom you ask, a bill passed by California lawmakers last week could either save us from imminent AI doom or strangle innovation in Silicon Valley. The bill, SB 1047, is one of the first significant attempts to regulate artificial intelligence in the U.S. It’s supported by some high-profile voices in tech like Elon Musk. But critics say the regulation could stifle growth in Silicon Valley. On the show today, Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is taking a closer look at the arguments for and against SB 1047 with Chase DiFeliciantonio, a reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle, who has been following the bill’s journey through the Legislature.

Dark patterns are everywhere on the web. These are design tricks that manipulate users in some way and prompt them to give up information, money or just more of their time. A recent study from the Federal Trade Commission found three-quarters of all subscription apps and websites use at least one dark pattern, and a majority use multiple such tricks. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Yanely Espinal, who covered the topic in this week’s episode of “Financially Inclined.” She said some common dark patterns include advertising that doesn’t look like advertising, online forms that come with check boxes pre-selected and something called confirm shaming.

Generative artificial intelligence can write essays and solve complicated math problems, but can it tell a decent joke? The BBC’s Megan Lawton says comedians who performed at this year’s fringe festival in Scotland are putting AI to the test.

This week: a report from venture capital firm SignalFire seems to show that despite all its problems, San Francisco is still the place to be for tech startups in the artificial intelligence space. Plus, why Meta is scrapping plans for a superpremium mixed-reality headset and aiming for a lite version instead. But first, the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France has sent shock waves through the tech world. Durov is facing a number of criminal charges. French authorities allege he is liable for illicit activities conducted on the encrypted messaging platform, including child sex abuse and drug trafficking, essentially because of a failure to moderate content. The case highlights longstanding tensions in the tech world between public safety and free speech. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, for her take on this week’s tech news.

U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that Iran was behind the recent cyberattack on former President Donald Trump’s election campaign. Using an approach called spear phishing, hackers sent personalized emails to campaign staff containing malware that allowed them to access private information and then leak it. Déjà vu, right? Javed Ali, a former senior counterterrorism official and a professor of practice at the University of Michigan, says Russia created the blueprint for this kind of attack. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino asked him for his reaction to Iran adopting the strategy.

By now you’ve probably heard that generative artificial intelligence has the potential to supercharge the spread of disinformation in this election year. But with 68 days until Election Day, we haven’t seen the kind of widespread AI misinformation campaigns that experts warned about. Instead, as Will Oremus pointed out in a recent analysis for The Washington Post, we’ve seen a whole lot of silly AI-generated memes. He told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that the most recent examples are coming from one particular presidential candidate.

The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, passed in 2022, would be among the most sweeping pieces of legislation to protect kids from online harms — if it hadn’t become tangled up in court. The law has two basic requirements: first, that tech companies analyze and report on whether their products are harmful for children; second, that they minimize how much data they collect from those under 18. Earlier this month a federal appeals court found that first part likely violates the First Amendment, and upheld a lower-court decision blocking that part of the law. But it vacated an injunction on the second component, the part dealing with data privacy. The decision could point a way forward for similar laws, many of which have also run into legal challenges, Aaron Mackey, free speech and transparency litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

The social media platform X recently launched a new artificial intelligence feature for premium users: Grok-2, an AI model that can also generate images. And the outputs are a bit less censored than you might see with other similar tools. Experimenters online have been able to generate images of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris brandishing guns, Mickey Mouse smoking a cigarette and some far more disturbing tableaus. Grok claims to avoid images that are pornographic, excessively violent or intended to deceive and added it’s cautious about representing content that might infringe on existing copyright. But the guardrails certainly seem to be on the looser side, in keeping with owner Elon Musk’s hands-off approach to content moderation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Adi Robertson, senior tech and policy editor at the Verge, about Grok-2 and what she found while she tested the AI’s limits.

On today’s show: Google deals with another legal headache. A federal appeals court revived a class-action lawsuit that had been dismissed concerning privacy violations by its Chrome browser. Plus, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has partnered up with another media brand, Condé Nast. But first, we can’t ignore the biggest happening of the week — the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the party formally nominated Vice President Kamala Harris for president with the help of big names in entertainment. Rapper Lil Jon revving up the presentation of the Georgia delegation’s votes was just one viral moment that came out of the convention. What didn’t come out of the gathering, though, were clear indications of the Harris campaign’s tech policy platform. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, about what that platform might look like.

New faces are mingling among the party faithful and the swarm of journalists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week. In a bid to reach younger, more online voters, the DNC invited 200 content creators to cover the convention. One of them is Malynda Hale, who’s been sharing her experience with her more than 50,000 followers on Instagram. Creators like her, she said, have their own part to play at the event. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Hale how it’s been going at the convention.

Earlier this year, the U.S. surgeon general called for a warning label minors on social media, and a growing number of states are requiring online age verification for certain sites. Now, many platforms are adding a safeguard that comes with its own set of trade-offs: facial scanning. These systems use artificial intelligence to analyze visual clues, sometimes in conjunction with a government-issued ID, to keep those it deems too young from accessing a site. In the process, they collect all kinds of identifying data, and like any tool, these are susceptible to errors. In this case, errors could potentially bar adults from parts of the internet. Tech reporter Drew Harwell recently wrote about the proliferation of these systems and the risks that come with them for The Washington Post. He told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that they’re getting hard to avoid for internet users.

On July 23, 1999, the Chandra X-Ray Telescope was launched into space aboard the shuttle Columbia, the first such mission to be commanded by a woman astronaut. The Chandra telescope differs from the Hubble telescope, which observes visible light. Or, the James Webb telescope, which captures frequencies in the infrared range. Chandra detects high energy X-rays. But NASA budget constraints could leave the mission going dark in coming years. To learn more about the Chandra Observatory, Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino called its program manager Megan Lin.

When Apple introduced its Screen Time report, it promised the feature would  empower users to manage their device time and balance the things that are really important. But is it actually doing that? Caroline Mimbs Nyce, a staff writer at The Atlantic, recently wrote about why she thinks Screen Time is the worst feature Apple has ever made. She told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that it sometimes feels like Screen Time is doing more guilt-tripping than empowering these days.

It’s Friday which means it’s time for Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review. On today’s show, Instagram is known for pretty pictures but a new report shows it lets a lot of ugly and abusive comments remain on the platform. Plus, Door Dash has dominated the food delivery race. Now it looks like Uber may be catching up. But first, the social media platform X relies on advertisers, so why is it going to war with them? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discusses all of this week’s biggest tech stories with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information.

Last month, senators from both sides of the aisle formally introduced what could become the first U.S. federal law regulating deepfakes. It’s called the No Fakes Act — short for the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act. It comes on the heels of controversies like the one involving the OpenAI voice assistant, which may or may not have sounded a little too much like actress Scarlett Johansson. GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee helped draft the bill, saying: “The No Fakes Act is vital for these entertainers. It protects their name, image, likeness, their vocal recordings.” The legislation has been applauded by many in creative industries, said Moiya McTier, senior adviser at the Human Artistry Campaign, a group advocating for stronger guardrails on artificial intelligence.

Generative artificial intelligence has made it possible to mimic someone’s voice and generate a script for that voice in real time. The tech, of course, is already used to scam and defraud people, but what if you just had it make a bunch of calls on your behalf? That’s what journalist Evan Ratliff did for his new podcast, “Shell Game.” He trained AI audio clones, gave them phone numbers and sat back as they took on customer service agents, family members, therapists and even a few scammers. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ratliff — and briefly with one of his AI agents — about his takeaways from producing the show and whether the clones succeeded in tricking people into thinking they were who they said they were.

Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, died last week at the age of 56. As a kid, she wanted to be an artist. As an adult, she discovered the “art of technology.”

Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” has shattered records, crashed websites and broken the hearts of fans vying for tickets. The BBC’s Sam Gruet says AI could help fans purchase tickets for a fair price and without the risk of fraud.

On today’s show: Olympians have taken to social media to celebrate, sometimes to trash talk, but also to discuss their mental health. And Google pulled a controversial Olympics ad featuring its Gemini artificial intelligence tool.

But first, what the stock market sell-off could be saying about the AI boom. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discusses all of this with Christina Farr, author of the health tech newsletter “Second Opinion,” who says there’s growing chatter that AI has gotten a bit overinflated.

Who will win the election? What will the vote margin be? Will Donald Trump post on X before November? People can place bets on all these real-world questions — and more — on prediction markets. And these online platforms like PredictIt and Polymarket are increasingly being looked to as crystal balls in this chaotic election, promising real-time political insights and the chance to make a few bucks. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Chris Cohen, the deputy site editor of GQ, who recently wrote about his experience getting in on the action of what appears to be a prediction market “gold rush.”

More than 20 years ago, executives at rival auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s were found guilty of coordinating a massive price-fixing scheme. Leaders from the companies held covert meetings, where they set identical commission fees. Today, active antitrust cases show that the ways in which companies might conspire are changing. Algorithms can replace secret meetings, but U.S. regulators say it’s still collusion, whether it’s a human or a bot pulling the strings. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Joe Harrington at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School about how antitrust law holds up against new technology.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a photo of two little girls in the parking lot of a California Taco Bell went viral. They were doing their schoolwork on laptops in that inconvenient location because the restaurant provided free Wi-Fi, which they didn’t have at home. The girls came to symbolize the digital underclass that’s emerged since the rise of the internet. There are millions of American kids like them, says Nicol Turner Lee, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her analysis of the digital divide is contained in her new book, “Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating the New Underclass.”

Large language models go through a lot of vetting before they’re released to the public. That includes safety tests, bias checks, ethical reviews and more. But what if, hypothetically, a model could dodge a safety question by lying to developers, hiding its real response to a safety test and instead giving the exact response its human handlers are looking for? A recent study shows that advanced LLMs are developing the capacity for deception, and that could bring that hypothetical situation closer to reality. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Thilo Hagendorff, a researcher at the University of Stuttgart and the author of the study, about his findings.

Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta is expanding AI offerings across its products, even as the company gets rid of AI features that haven’t quite landed with consumers. The bottom line? CEO Mark Zuckerberg says “Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year.”Then, the Wall Street Journal’s senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern shares surprises and regrets on her journey as an electric vehicle owner. But first, this week in Congress, the Senate passed the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, also known as COPPA 2.0, and the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, in a rare bipartisan vote — 91 senators voted in favor, with just three opposing these measures, which aim to reduce harm to kids on the internet.

There’s always been something aspirational about the term “smart home.” It was coined by a residential builder association here in the U.S. back in the mid-’80s, long before the inventions we now think of as hallmarks of the smart home. Today, 42% of American households with internet own at least one smart home device, according to the market research firm Parks Associates. In her new book, “Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out,” Heather Suzanne Woods of Kansas State University asks whether that’s a good thing.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, can be a lifesaving technology for patients whose organs have failed. It works, essentially, by performing the functions that a healthy person’s lungs and heart would normally do. While using the machine, many recipients of ECMO treatment can walk, talk, even ride a stationary bike, but they can’t leave the hospital with the machine, nor can they survive without it. In a recent article in The New Yorker, emergency physician and writer Clayton Dalton described these patients as “caught on a bridge to nowhere.” Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Dalton about the complicated ethics of this technology.

Companies competing in the chatbot wars are using something known in the industry as “the Pile” to train their large language models. It’s a trove of open-source data made up of text scraped from all around the internet, including Wikipedia and the European Parliament. Annie Gilbertson, investigative reporter for Proof News, recently took a deep dive into the Pile and discovered something else: a dataset called “YouTube Subtitles.” Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Gilbertson about her investigation and how YouTube creators feel about their content being used without their consent.

It’s a rare issue that can bring the political parties together in Congress, and the need to regulate social media companies ranks high on that very short list. Two industry veterans want Congress to create an agency that sets safety and privacy rules for platforms — and enforces them. The status quo, they argue, is like letting airlines fly without Federal Aviation Administration oversight. The idea comes from Anika Collier Navaroli and Ellen Pao. Pao, an attorney and now CEO of Project Include, pushed to ban revenge porn on Reddit during her tenure as interim CEO. Navaroli, an attorney and senior fellow at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, was involved in Twitter’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform in 2021, when she was a senior policy expert there. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Navaroli and Pao about their proposal.

On the show today: The ascent of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic Party ticket has stirred the KHive. We’ll look at what the Harris memes mean, in case you just fell out of a coconut tree. Plus, why Waymo is suing alleged vandals of its vehicles in San Francisco. We ask, why now? But first, cookies are here to stay — for a while, anyway. Google is backtracking on its plan, announced in 2020, to do away with the files that advertisers use to track us online. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired magazine, about why.

Back in 1990, then-President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, the world’s first comprehensive law for people with disabilities. It was seen as making up for an area in which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 fell short. “The stark fact remains that people with disabilities were still victims of segregation and discrimination, and this was intolerable,” Bush said. Now, the legislation passed at the dawn of the internet age is being adapted to ensure digital access for everyone. That means ensuring access to captions on web videos to support deaf Americans and the ability to resize text so people with low vision can read it. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with consultant Nicolas Steenhout, who explained how the Department of Justice is updating the rules.

What if receiving a medical diagnosis was as simple as shopping online? The growing home diagnostics industry says it can be. At-home testing was widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic, but more health tech companies also offer DIY kits that test for food allergies, fertility and thyroid function, among other things. Some medical experts are wary of this on-demand model, but health tech investors say it can make health care more accessible. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Chrissy Farr, author of the Second Opinion newsletter, and Anarghya Vardhana, a partner at the Maveron venture firm, about the prospects of the industry and how it affects relationships between patients and doctors.

Last Friday felt like something out of a Y2K nightmare after the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, pushed a software update to all its clients — including health care systems, banks and the federal government — that ended up crashing computer systems worldwide. The fallout is still being felt, particularly in the travel sector, as airliners try to reschedule canceled flights while trying to get everything back to normal. It’s also become something of a reminder that the internet and a lot of the online services we rely on are delicate. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Kate Conger, a reporter at The New York Times who recently wrote about this with her colleague David Streitfeld.

Online sales in the U.S. surpassed $14 billion during Amazon Prime Day last week, according to Adobe Analytics. Amazon’s heft and promotional power continue to drive sales, even for rivals, during the shopping jamboree. But in Europe, an important market for the e-commerce giant, lawmakers have become increasingly sensitive to Amazon’s relations with its rivals, as well as its partners and customers. They’ve requested that Amazon hand over information about its product recommendation algorithms, along with data on ads, by Friday. It’s part of compliance with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a sweeping set of tech regulations that took effect in recent years. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discussed it with Theo Wayt, who covers Amazon for The Information.

A new Senate report finds Amazon Prime Day is prime time for warehouse injuries. Plus, Starbucks is teaming up with Mercedes-Benz to supercharge electric vehicle infrastructure. But first, several Silicon Valley billionaires have thrown their support behind former President Donald Trump in his quest to reclaim the White House, thanks in part to his pick for vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, a managing partner at Collab Capital, for her take on these stories in Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

FBI officials are still looking into what motivated the 20-year-old gunman who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump on Saturday. As of this episode, investigators have yet to publicly share any conclusions about his reasons for the attack, which killed a rally attendee and injured the former president and two others. But the lack of information didn’t stop misinformation from flooding online channels. Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams, speaks with Molly Dwyer, director of insights at PeakMetrics, and Lisa Fazio, associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, about the false narratives surrounding the shooting and how to separate fact from fiction in the aftermath of a violent event.

This conversation is part of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy.” Watch the full episode here or on our YouTube channel.

Pop quiz: What’s a policy supported by political rivals in California and Florida? The answer is banning cellphones in school. Florida is among a handful of states that have restricted mobile devices in the classroom. California has not, though Gov. Gavin Newsom has pushed the Legislature to act. The policies are intended to reduce distraction and mitigate addiction and other mental health concerns attributed to phone use. But Liz Kolb, a clinical professor of education at the University of Michigan, tells Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino it’s not that simple.

Pop quiz: What’s a policy supported by political rivals in California and Florida? The answer is banning cellphones in school. Florida is among a handful of states that have restricted mobile devices in the classroom. California has not, though Gov. Gavin Newsom has pushed the Legislature to act. The policies are intended to reduce distraction and mitigate addiction and other mental health concerns attributed to phone use. But Liz Kolb, a clinical professor of education at the University of Michigan, tells Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino it’s not that simple.

In recent years, we’ve seen a surge of state laws and policies affecting trans people. Half of states have banned or restricted gender affirming care for minors, with some adding restrictions for adults. The ACLU is tracking more than 500 bills that have been introduced across the country. The enforcement of such laws, as with recent bans on abortion and related reproductive care, have raised concerns about tracking people’s digital footprints. So much of daily life is conducted online, and there are currently no federal data privacy protections. KB Brookins, a writer based in Austin, Texas, wrote about a personal experience that drove home concerns about their trail of digital data.

Sandwiched between some blockbuster Supreme Court rulings last month came a decision — or more so, a non-decision — that is reverberating through the tech world. NetChoice, big tech’s lobbying arm, challenged a pair of laws in Florida and Texas that sought to restrict how social media platforms moderate content. The high court kicked both cases back to lower courts with some added commentary. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Lauren Feiner, senior policy reporter with the Verge, who wrote about what this means for future attempts to regulate tech.

The Republican Party officially adopted former President Donald Trump’s 2024 platform this week. The GOP is now taking a friendly approach to cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, with plans to roll back regulation of both. Plus, Meta’s Threads platform celebrates its one-year anniversary this month. But first, the Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on the popular messaging app NGL. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Natasha Mascarenhas, reporter at The Information, for her take on this week’s tech news.

The internet is full of all manner of unsavoriness that is surely corroding our minds and societies. But the kind of rot we’re talking about here is link rot — the disappearance of online content when links turn into “404 Page Not Found.” A recent study from Pew Research suggests almost 40% of all webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. That includes important government links, citations on Wikipedia and hyperlinks in news articles. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently talked about this with Clare Stanton, product and research manager at Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, who also works on a webpage preservation project, perma.cc.