A student builds an app to detect essays written by ChatGPT, Louisiana law requires users to undergo age verification to access porn, and scalpers struggle to sell RTX 4080 GPUs.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Thursday, January 5th, and I am your host, Samira Balsara.
Edward Tian, a Princeton student has built GPTZero, an app that aims to determine if essays were written with AI programs like ChatGPT, the Business Insider reported. GPTZero scores text on its “perplexity and burstiness” – referring to how complicated it is and how randomly it is written. In a Twitter demonstration, Tian compared the app’s analysis of a New Yorker article and a letter written by ChatGPT. It correctly identified that they were respectively written by a human and AI. Tian said he wanted to build GPTZero after seeing an increase in AI plagiarism. Tian’s app became so popular that the website hosting the app crashed due to high traffic but is still available to use on Tian’s Streamlit page.
Source: Business Insider
Louisiana law now requires users to go through age verification before accessing porn, PCMag reported. Websites containing more than 33 per cent or more pornographic content are responsible for checking their users’ age, using a government-issued form of identification. The new law, HB 142—introduced last year by Rep. Laurie Schlegel seeks to keep anyone under the age of 18 from watching porn and hold accountable the websites that readily supply it. Users can however use a VPN to conceal their location and use a fake ID while websites can reduce the content percentage under the legal limit.This idea, introduced a few years ago in the UK, was ultimately canceled due to privacy and data protection concerns.
Source: PCMag
Scalpers are struggling to resell RTX 4080 GPUs, Videocardz reported. RTX 4080, a high-end, overpriced GPU struggled to appeal to gaming and NVIDIA enthusiasts, after its launch. Nothing more affordable even appeared after its launch, and instead NVIDIA canceled the cheaper $899 RTX 4080 12GB model, leaving both available RTX 40 GPUs at a $1200+ price range. This has not paid off for scalpers who are now left with the choice to either sell the GPUs at manufacturer’s suggested retail price or ship it back off to the retailer and incur shipping and restocking fees. Videocardz said that the problem of scalpers returning cards has become so big that some retailers are now removing the option to apply for refunds.
Source: Videocardz
Randall Reid, a 28-year-old Black man, was accused of stealing $10,000 worth of Chanel and Louis Vuitton bags and arrested in a New Orleans suburb while he was on his way to a Thanksgiving dinner with his mother. The scene of the crime was in Louisiana, three states and seven hours away. All that was needed for the police to make an arrest and lock Reid in jail for a week was a facial recognition tool that wrongly identified Reid as the suspect. The technology, although useful, is not perfect or does not justify arrests, Gizmodo explained. According to numerous studies, the technology is especially inaccurate when identifying people of color. Police officers acknowledge that fact but there are few rules governing the use of the technology.
Source: Gizmodo
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Samira Balsara.