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3 weeks ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
We are in the midst of the first major U.S. election of the generative AI era. The people who want to win your vote have easy access to tools that can create images, video or audio of real people doing or saying things they never did — and slap on weird appendages or other make-believe effects along with targeted slogans. But the potential for deception has led about two dozen states to enact some form of regulation requiring political ads that use artificial intelligence to include a label.
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3 weeks ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency. And the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as the owner of X, does have a record of wringing efficiencies out of his businesses. But the move raises many questions, like should someone whose companies benefit from federal dollars have a hand in making budget decisions?
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3 weeks ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
Mar 28, 2025Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino for “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”AI company Anthropic recently added web search to its chatbot Claude. It joins other artificial intelligence tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT in delivering one clear answer to a web search query instead of pages and pages of links.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
There’s a movement to make it possible to repair our gadgets ourselves instead of having to send them back to the company that makes them or, you know, just get a new one. The “right to repair” movement in consumer electronics has made real gains in recent years. Several states, like California, New York and Oregon, have passed legislation requiring it. And it looks like Apple’s newest iPhone — the 16 — has made strides in that department.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
After another polarizing presidential election, Americans with widely ranging views are getting ready to sit across the Thanksgiving table from one another. And we’re anticipating some potentially tense conversations with friends and family about politics, beliefs and misinformation. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke to Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, about how to navigate awkward conversations this holiday season.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
All those fancy artificial intelligence systems need a lot of data centers to run, and those data centers need a lot of energy. One estimate from the Electric Power Research Institute suggests that U.S. data center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, making up about 9% of all energy use. But the AI sector is coming up against the energy-hungry tech innovation of yesteryear — crypto mining.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
In this tense election year, polling is top of mind. But collecting polling data is harder than it used to be. First, it often relies on people actually answering the phone and then speaking frankly to a pollster, both of which are becoming less common. The result has been data that is less predictive, such as the significant underestimates of support for former President Donald Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. And those repeated misses have made the public much more skeptical.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
Artificial intelligence tech needs a lot of electricity. One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggests that largely because of AI, data centers will require 160% more electricity by 2030. That spike in energy demand has Big Tech fired up about an option that’s never really been the cool kid of the clean energy class: nuclear power.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
Until about a decade ago, independent cybersecurity researchers in the United States weren’t allowed to examine voting machines for potential vulnerabilities. But that ban was essentially lifted in 2015. Two years later, DEF CON — one of the largest hacker conventions — decided to invite hackers, cybersecurity researchers and election officials to find those flaws during its annual Voting Village event.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
A lot of personal data — stuff like your home address, phone number, marital status and more — is out there on the internet. Anyone can buy it from sites like Whitepages, PeopleFinders or Intelius, which aggregate data from public records and social media. You can contact each of these “people search” sites and request they take down your information. Then you might find yourself double-checking that they actually do it, then triple-checking that your identifiers aren’t popping up again.
