Author: NY TIMES

Like Google, Meta and Microsoft, OpenAI offers online chatbots and other A.I. tools that can write social media posts, generate photorealistic images and write computer programs. In its report, the company said its tools had been used in influence campaigns that researchers had tracked for years, including a Russian campaign called Doppelganger and a Chinese campaign called Spamouflage.An influence campaign’s post on Telegram that OpenAI said had been generated with its tools.Credit…via OpenAIThe Doppelganger campaign used OpenAI’s technology to generate anti-Ukraine comments that were posted on X in English, French, German, Italian and Polish, OpenAI said. The company’s tools were…

Post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses among college students more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, climbing most sharply as the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and upended young adults’ lives, according to new research published on Thursday.The prevalence of PTSD rose to 7.5 percent from 3.4 percent during that period, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed responses from more than 390,000 participants in the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey.“The magnitude of this rise is indeed shocking,” said Yusen Zhai, the paper’s lead author, who heads the community counseling clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His clinic had…

In making an honest go at reviving the movie western, Viggo Mortensen — who directed, wrote and stars in “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” in addition to composing its score — delivers a few different westerns in one.Not counting a deathbed prologue, the film initially seems to be staking out a claim in the law-and-order corner of the genre. Mortensen, as a bereaved sheriff named Holger Olsen, appears skeptical when a town dullard stands accused of six murders and apparently claimed not to remember any of them. The local courthouse — a makeshift affair cobbled together in the saloon — is…

When the two puppies arrived at a makeshift shelter in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, their rail-thin legs buckled from exhaustion. They had treaded water for hours, fighting to survive as floods submerged the city, turning streets into rivers.“We tried to get them to walk, but they couldn’t,” said Dr. Daniel Guimarães Gerardi, a veterinarian volunteering at the shelter. “Your heart aches at times like these, for these poor animals suffering.”Two days after being rescued, the 6-month-old mutts — one tiger-striped, the other jet black — mostly dozed on donated blankets amid chew toys, still drained from their…

The U.S. economy has been an enigma over the past few years. The job market is booming, and consumers are still spending, which is usually a sign of optimism. But if you ask Americans, many will tell you that they feel bad about the economy and are unhappy about President Biden’s economic record.Call it the vibecession. Call it a mystery. Blame TikTok, media headlines or the long shadow of the pandemic. The gloom prevails. The University of Michigan consumer confidence index, which looked a little bit sunnier this year after a substantial slowdown in inflation over 2023, has again soured.…

“The Great Lillian Hall” is not afraid to embrace its classicism; had it been made in the 1940s, it would have starred Bette Davis. Like many of the best golden-age melodramas, this HBO film fully commits to both unabashed emotion and a complicated female lead, a role filled by Jessica Lange with a finely tuned mix of showmanship and nuance.Lange’s Lillian Hall is a theater grande dame playing the charismatic matriarch in a Broadway revival of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” She is on shaky ground, suffering from memory lapses that affect the rehearsals, but she stubbornly, proudly soldiers on. Even…

While excavating an ancient Greek palace in eastern Libya in the 1930s, an archaeologist dug up a large earthen storage jar, looked inside and spotted something unexpected — a 2,200-year-old sculpture of a bearded man carved from basalt, a dark volcanic stone.The two-foot-tall antiquity, most likely chiseled during ancient Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty, was a rare find. Known as a striding male figure, it is one of only 33 statues like it known to exist, Egyptologists say.But it wasn’t long before thieves got ahold of the bearded figure and took it on an illicit odyssey that brought it, in 1991, to…

Spain’s Parliament approved a landmark law on Thursday that grants amnesty to Catalan separatists involved in the illegal October 2017 independence referendum, a reprieve that could apply to hundreds of people, including Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan leader who has been living in self-imposed exile for seven years.The measure had met with resistance from opposition parties in recent months, and led to widespread anger and huge demonstrations in cities around Spain, with opponents denouncing it as a ploy by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to remain in power. Mr. Sánchez brokered the amnesty deal with the Catalan separatist party Together for…

[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]A mediados de marzo, Reebok organizó su cumbre anual de la marca para unos 500 socios comerciales en el Artists for Humanity EpiCenter, un espacio para eventos de Boston donde Todd Krinsky, el director ejecutivo de la empresa, reveló un secreto.Krinsky le dijo a su audiencia que Shaquille O’Neal, el nuevo presidente de la división de baloncesto de Reebok, la cual pronto iba a resucitar, había querido asistir. Pero, en vez de ir en persona, había enviado un mensaje de video pregrabado.Y ahí, en una gran pantalla, apareció la inconfundible presencia de O’Neal, con…

More than a million borrowers who were defrauded by for-profit schools have had billions of dollars in federal student loans eliminated through a government aid program. But people with private loans have generally been excluded from any relief — until recently.Navient, a large owner of private student loan debt, has created, but not publicized, a program that allows borrowers to apply to have their loans forgiven. Some who succeeded have jubilantly shared their stories in chat groups and other forums.“I cried, a lot,” said Danielle Maynard, who recently received notice from Navient that nearly $40,000 in private loans she owed…