The chatbots are out of the bag, and educators are scrambling to adjust. Chris Howell, an adjunct assistant professor of religious studies at Elon University, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino that as the year progressed he noticed more and more suspiciously chatbot-esque prose popping up in student papers. So rather than trying to police the tech, he embraced it. He assigned students to generate an essay entirely with ChatGPT and then critique it themselves.

The “creator economy” could grow to nearly half a trillion dollars in the next four years, according to Goldman Sachs. That buzzword describes the online ecosystem of people creating and monetizing videos, music, podcasts, newsletters, art and other forms of expression, usually on social media. But advertising and algorithms can be fickle mistresses. For the last decade, Patreon has enabled fans to directly support creators with paid digital subscriptions. Now the company is offering a free membership option and the ability to sell digital works. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Patreon CEO and co-founder Jack Conte about how these new services can help the creator economy grow.

In the U.S., employers are the main source of health coverage and, increasingly, benefits that encourage “wellness.” Many of them are provided in digital form, like meditation apps, virtual therapy or wearables that track our steps, heart rate or stress level. But with that web of digital benefits comes privacy concerns, according to a new report from the nonprofit Data & Society, titled “Wellness Capitalism: Employee Health, the Benefits Maze, and Worker Control.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino delved into the report with its co-authors, senior researcher Tamara Nopper and research analyst Eve Zelickson, both with Data & Society’s labor futures team.

For a lot of us, most of our days are spent online, and the pandemic only increased that pace. That’s also true for the way we do business. Utilities, restaurants, health care providers, the government — they all want us to go to an app or a website to get stuff done. While this might be easy and convenient for people who don’t remember a world before the web, many older adults are left out by the move to digital. Reporter Ashley Milne-Tyte looks into the ways older adults are trying to catch up with tech and how some companies are responding.

When you think of the early days of video games, the Fairchild Channel F console might not be the first brand that comes to mind. The Fairchild Channel F was released in 1976, before the more famous Atari released its console. It was also the first system to use individual game cartridges thanks in large part to Jerry Lawson, a Black engineer at Fairchild. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino recently spoke with Anthony Frasier, CEO of ABF Creative and host of a podcast about Jerry Lawson called “Raising the Game,” about Lawson’s life and achievements.

The French firm Thales is launching a credit card that talks. Not to embarrass users for their spending habits, but to make transactions more secure for people with a visual impairments. About 250 million people worldwide have some form of visual impairment, according to the World Health Organization, and in France they’re often targeted in fraud schemes because of their disability. The new Thales credit card connects users with a phone app that verbalizes transactions. In Paris, John Laurenson tagged along as one person tried it out.

Publishers of books, magazines and their digital incarnations have long hired artists to contribute unique visuals to their storytelling. It’s the kind of work Molly Crabapple cut her teeth on. Her illustrated journalism has been published by outlets like Vice, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. But she fears the format faces an existential threat from artificial intelligence image generators like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. Crabapple recently wrote an open letter about her concerns in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting. She talked about it with host Meghan McCarty Carino.

Whenever we talk about artificial intelligence, the problem of bias is never far behind. All kinds of insidious patterns can get embedded in these systems because they’re trained on data from our imperfect world. A new report from Bloomberg looks at bias in text-to-image generative AI systems like Stable Diffusion. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino discussed the issue with the report’s authors, technology reporter Dina Bass and data visualization reporter Leonardo Nicoletti. They analyzed thousands of AI-generated images of people to determine what the world according to AI looks like.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal watchdog agency for the banking sector, recently warned the industry about the use of artificial intelligence chatbots. Previous iterations of chatbots, which operate like automated decision trees, have long been used in banks’ customer service operations. But these new generative tools like ChatGPT are so good at imitating human communication, banks may be relying on them more than ever. While they can incorporate huge amounts of data, AI chatbots are prone to “hallucinating,” or making things up. Also, they’re not equipped to handle complex questions that can be involved in banking services, according to Erie Meyer, chief technologist at the CFPB, who discussed these issues with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

Generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT have caught on like wildfire, largely because of their impressive capabilities, but also because they’re free, or nearly free, to use. But just because a service doesn’t charge users doesn’t mean it doesn’t have costs. In reality, sophisticated large language models cost a lot to build and maintain. AI companies will have to recoup that investment eventually, in one way or another. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke about the high costs of AI chatbots with Will Oremus, technology news analysis writer for The Washington Post. Oremus recently delved into how the financial aspect of AI development could influence the course of the technology.