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Coding with AI? My 5 go-to tricks for vetting output - and avoiding trouble

filo / Getty Images Our story begins, as many stories do, with a man and his AI. The man, like many men, is a bit of a geek and a bit of a programmer. He also needs a haircut. The AI is the culmination of thousands of years of human advancement, all put to the service of making the man's life a little easier. The man, of course, is me. I'm that guy. Also: The best AI for coding in 2025 (and what not to use) Unfortunately, while AI can be incredibly brilliant, it also has a propensity to lie,

Topics: ai chatgpt help time use

Great, Grok is in cars now too

Just a day after the xAI team issued a comprehensive apology and explanation about why its chatbot was spreading antisemitic rhetoric, Tesla updated its software for its cars to include the supposedly fixed Grok. According to Tesla, all new vehicles delivered on or after July 12 will have Grok available in-car. There's no additional subscription cost, but Tesla is limiting Grok's availability to models in the US for now. For older models to run Grok, it requires a Tesla with an AMD processor, t

5 AI coding tips every pro should know to actually save time - and stay out of trouble

Erikona/Getty Images Our story begins, as many stories do, with a man and his AI. The man, like many men, is a bit of a geek and a bit of a programmer. He also needs a haircut. The AI is the culmination of thousands of years of human advancement, all put to the service of making the man's life a little easier. The man, of course, is me. I'm that guy. Also: The best AI for coding in 2025 (and what not to use) Unfortunately, while AI can be incredibly brilliant, it also has a propensity to lie

Topics: ai chatgpt help time use

Vast Numbers of Lonely Kids Are Using AI as Substitute Friends

Lonely children and teens are replacing real-life friendship with AI, and experts are worried. A new report from the nonprofit Internet Matters, which supports efforts to keep children safe online, found that children and teens are using programs like ChatGPT, Character.AI, and Snapchat's MyAI to simulate friendship more than ever before. Of the 1,000 children aged nine to 17 that Internet Matters surveyed for its "Me, Myself, and AI" report, some 67 percent said they use AI chatbots regularly

Study warns of ‘significant risks’ in using AI therapy chatbots

Therapy chatbots powered by large language models may stigmatize users with mental health conditions and otherwise respond inappropriately or even dangerously, according to researchers at Stanford University. While recent coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere has highlighted the role that ChatGPT may play in reinforcing delusional or conspiratorial thinking, a new paper titled “Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers” exam

Jack Dorsey’s New App Just Hit a Very Embarrassing Snag

Serial entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, who cofounded Twitter, Block, and Bluesky, has started yet another new app — and this one's got an embarrassing secret. As TechCrunch reports, Dorsey's new open source messaging app, Bitchat, is supposed to be decentralized, private, and secure. There's only one problem: the Bluetooth-based app, by the venture's admission, is probably lacking in that key regard. "This software has not received external security review and may contain vulnerabilities and does n

Researchers Find Grok 4 Checking Elon Musk’s Opinions Before Answering ‘Sensitive’ Questions

Earlier this week, xAI’s Grok chatbot went haywire, started praising Hitler, and had to be put in timeout. It was just the latest incident in what appears to be behind-the-scenes manipulation of the bot to make its responses “less woke.” Now it seems that developers are taking a simpler approach to manipulate Grok’s outputs: Checking out Elon Musk’s opinions before it provides a response. The weird behavior was first spotted by data scientist Jeremy Howard. A former professor and the founder of

Chat bubbles finally get the big-screen revamp they deserve in the Android Canary release

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority TL;DR Android is improving its chat bubble feature on large screen devices, pinning conversations to a new, more accessible “bubble bar” at the bottom corner. This new bubble bar remains discreetly hidden until you swipe up on it, which then expands the most recent chat bubble for you to view. While the feature is currently live for tablets and foldables in the latest Android Canary build, evidence suggests it could eventually come to phones. When you’re in

Experts Warn that People Are Losing Themselves to AI

AI users are spiraling into severe mental health crises after extensive use of OpenAI's ChatGPT and other emotive, anthropomorphic chatbots — and health experts are taking notice. In a recent CBC segment about the phenomenon, primary care physician and CBC contributor Dr. Peter Lin explained that while "ChatGPT psychosis" — as the experience has come to be colloquially known — isn't an official medical diagnosis just yet, he thinks it's on its way. "I think, eventually, it will get there," sai

AI chatbot’s simple ‘123456’ password risked exposing personal data of millions of McDonald’s job applicants

In Brief Security researchers found that they could access the personal information of 64 million people who had applied for a job at McDonald’s, in large part by logging into the company’s AI job hiring chatbot with the username and password “123456.” Ian Carroll and Sam Curry wrote in a blog post that “during a cursory security review of a few hours,” they found the password issue and another simple security vulnerability in an internal API, which allowed access to job applicants’ past conve

How I personalized my ChatGPT conversations - why it's a game changer

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ChatGPT offers several ways to customize and personalize your conversations. You can share details about your life, including your name, your profession, or other tidbits. You're able to tell it what traits it should possess, such as patience, sympathy, or understanding. You can add and save certain facts about yourself and tell it to reference memories from past conversations. That all sounds helpful. But what does ChatGPT do with the information it knows about yo

Turkey bans Grok over Erdoğan insults

The news comes as Grok faces widespread blowback over Nazi statements it produced in recent days. | Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images X’s chatbot under fire in Poland, too, over insulting comments targeted at Prime Minister Donald Tusk. A Turkish court on Wednesday blocked access to chatbot Grok, operated by Elon Musk’s xAI, after it generated offensive responses about President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, founder of the republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and religious values. The news comes as G

I'm an AI tools expert, and these are the only two I pay for (plus three I'm considering)

Vstock LLC/Getty Images It's only been almost three years since generative artificial intelligence (AI) hit the mainstream as a new paradigm of productivity, but here we are -- it's everywhere. I test AI tools as part of my work. I'll dig into just about any AI-related technology and see what I can make it do. Many of you have read my ongoing shootouts comparing AIs for programming and AI content checkers, among other kinds of tools. But that's using AI in a rigorous lab environment to provid

Elon Musk says Tesla is expanding Austin robotaxi service area and adding Grok 'next week at the latest'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is expanding its robotaxi service area and bringing xAI's Grok to vehicles as it rolled out a new iteration of the artificial intelligence chatbot. Shares gained about 3%. Musk said on X that Grok, his AI chatbot that praised Adolf Hitler and posted a barrage of antisemitic comments recently, will be available in Tesla vehicles "next week at the latest." xAI officially launched the Grok 4 update overnight as the company continued to face backlash for the v

These Are the AI Chatbots We Use Most, and Here's How We Use Them

If you have a particular artificial intelligence tool that you turn to, you're not alone. According to a new survey, 91% of people who use AI have a favorite chatbot they try first, whether it's ChatGPT, Gemini, Alexa or something else. A Menlo Ventures survey of 5,000 adults found that this "default tool dynamic" means most people using AI have chosen a general AI tool they'll try first for every job, even if it's not necessarily the best tool for the job. In the report, ChatGPT is the AI ass

ChatGPT made up a product feature out of thin air, so this company created it

On Monday, sheet music platform Soundslice says it developed a new feature after discovering that ChatGPT was incorrectly telling users the service could import ASCII tablature—a text-based guitar notation format the company had never supported. The incident reportedly marks what might be the first case of a business building functionality in direct response to an AI model's confabulation. Typically, Soundslice digitizes sheet music from photos or PDFs and syncs the notation with audio or video

ChatGPT hallucinated about music app Soundslice so often, the founder made the lie come true

Earlier this month, Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice, solved a mystery that had been plaguing him for weeks. Weird images of what were clearly ChatGPT sessions kept being uploaded to the site. Once he solved it, he realized that ChatGPT had become one of his company’s greatest hype men – but it was also lying to people about what his app could do. Holovaty is best known as one of the creators of the open-source Django project, a popular Python web development fram

Grok chatbot silenced as even Musk saw how awful it was

X owner Elon Musk recently implemented changes to the platform’s AI chatbot Grok, explicitly telling it not to trust mainstream media and to be less politically correct. Obviously there was no way anyone could possibly predict how that would turn out, so it’s a complete shock that Musk has been forced to silence it … Musk recently decided it would be a good idea to give Grok explicit instructions to be less “politically correct” in its responses. X users have been sharing a wide range of antis

Red Hat just expanded free access to RHEL for business developers

John Keeble/Getty Images It's always been easy for programmers to get started with Linux. Just download one of the many free distros, learn some C, and you're in business. Also: SUSE launches new European digital sovereignty support service to meet surging demand Learning how to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was a bit harder. Fortunately, Red Hat made it easy for developers to get started. In 2016, the Linux giant started offering free RHEL to members of its Red Hat Developer Program. T

Jack Dorsey made an encrypted Bluetooth messaging app

is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews. Twitter co-founder and Block Head Jack Dorsey launched a new peer-to-peer messaging app over the weekend called Bitchat that runs entirely over Bluetooth. Bitchat relies on Bluetooth Low Energy mesh networks to send encrypted communications directly to nearby devices without requiring internet or cellular service. “Bitchat addresses the nee

This sunrise alarm clock improved my sleep routine, and it's $30 off for Prime Day

ZDNET's key takeaways The Hatch Restore 3 retails for $170 and comes in three neutral colors. It has a new design with bigger buttons and an upgraded app with more bedtime routines. The device is rather large, and you'll have to pay for a monthly subscription to utilize the app's whole experience. $169.99 at Amazon $169.99 at Target $169.99 at Best Buy more buying choices The Hatch Restore 3 is $30 off for Amazon's Prime Day sales event, making it cost just $140. Also: The best Prime Day dea

Jack Dorsey’s New Private Messenger App Doesn’t Need an Internet Connection

What has Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter (now X) been up to lately? Among other things, creating experimental little projects, like a new private messenger that doesn’t need the internet to function. On Sunday, Dorsey announced the beta launch of a new messaging app that he says relies on mesh networks to pass messages from user to user via the power of Bluetooth technology. The service sounds vaguely like Amazon’s Sidewalk project (which similarly used mesh networks to power IoT devices),

The Morning After: The best deals from Prime Day 2025

Amazon’s mountain of Prime Day deals and discounts is finally live, and we’re already on it. As is tradition, if you’ve got gadgets on your wishlist, Engadget has you covered. The team is surfacing the best Prime Day deals on gadgets and gear we can find across the entire shopping event. There are the usual suspects of wireless earbuds, trackers and all things Kindle, but we’re digging deeper, finding strong discounts on our past recommendations, like Dyson vacuums, Mesh Wi-Fi systems and more.

I Tried Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, and This Is the One I'd Recommend

Key points: Most widely used messaging app Uses the same encryption protocol as Signal Collects heaps of your data Free, but owned and operated by Meta WhatsApp is the most popular private messaging app on this list, with about 2 billion monthly users, according to Exploding Topics. Because it's so popular, there's a higher chance that other people you might be chatting with have WhatsApp, and therefore your chats can be encrypted. And if the person you're chatting with doesn't have WhatsAp

Jack Dorsey’s new bet is a Bluetooth-based WhatsApp competitor that requires no internet

Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has announced bitchat, a new experimental peer-to-per messaging app that doesn’t require the internet or even an account to work. Here’s the idea behind it. Protocols, not platforms Ever since TechDirt‘s Mike Masnick released his 2019 paper “Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech,” Jack Dorsey seems to have truly taken it to heart. That paper led Dorsey to launch the Bluesky project within Twitter (before it was spun out

How ChatGPT actually works (and why it's been so game-changing)

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Back in the day (and by "in the day," I mean late 2022, before AI chatbots exploded on the scene), tools like Google and Wolfram Alpha interacted with users via a single-line text entry field and provided text results. Google returned search results -- a list of web pages and articles that would (hopefully) provide information related to the search queries. Wolfram Alpha generally provided answers that were mathematical and data analysis-related. ChatGPT, by contra

Jack Dorsey just released a Bluetooth messaging app that doesn't need the internet

Jack Dorsey just released a decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that functions entirely over Bluetooth networks, as reported by CNBC . It's called Bitchat and doesn't need the internet to work, as there are no central servers. The Twitter co-founder calls it an experiment in "Bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models and a few other things.” It works by enabling encrypted communication between nearby gadgets. Basically, it sends messages direc

Jack Dorsey working on Bluetooth messaging app, Bitchat

Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey wrote in an X post on Sunday night that he spent his weekend creating an app called Bitchat (presumably a combination of the words “bit” and “chat,” and not the other combination of words that it looks like). Bitchat is a messaging app that operates through Bluetooth mesh networks, allowing users to send messages without Wi-Fi or cell reception. Because of Bluetooth’s technical limitations, this kind of app generally only works at a range of around 1

ChatGPT is testing a mysterious new feature called ‘study together’

In Brief Some ChatGPT subscribers are reporting a new feature appearing in their drop-down list of available tools called “Study Together.” The mode is apparently the chatbot’s way of becoming a better educational tool. Rather than providing answers to prompts, some say it asks more questions and requires the human to answer, like OpenAI’s answer to Google’s LearnLM. Some also wonder whether it will have a mode where more than one human can join the chat in a study group mode. OpenAI did not r

How Meta's new AI chatbot could strike up a conversation with you

Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images Despite a major usage and monetization gap, Meta, like many AI companies, is going all in on AI chatbots -- even giving them the ability to strike up a conversation with you, unprompted. According to a report from Business Insider published last week, leaked documents indicate the company is now building AI chatbots that proactively initiate conversations with users. The new feature is intended to boost user engagement and retention at a time when many leading t