But increasingly, the algorithms that undergird our digital lives are making questionable decisions that enrich the powerful and wreck the lives of average people. There's no reason to be scared of AI making decisions for you in the future — computers have already been doing so for quite some time. As human control diminished, the real-world consequences of these algorithms have piled up: Instagram's algorithm has been linked to a mental-health crisis in teenage girls. AdvertisementAcross the public and private sectors, we've handed the keys to a spiderweb of algorithms built with little public insight into how they make their decisions. While generative AI is just the newest extension of the algorithm, it poses a unique threat.

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Persons: who's, They've, Matthew Gray, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, It's, Elon Musk, Cambridge Analytica, algorithmically, ProPublica, Quora, OpenAI's ChatGPT, you've, they'll, superintelligence, — simulacrums Organizations: Knight Capital, Companies, Yahoo, Stanford, Google, Spotify, Netflix, Revenue, Facebook, Twitter, Elon, European Union, Associated Press, Black, Microsoft, Eating Disorders Association Locations: Cambridge