The Senate voted 60-40 on November 10 to pass a continuing resolution that would reopen the government, plus some appropriations bills. One of the pieces of legislation would provide about $109 million for rural broadband programs. The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) ReConnect program would see $50,750,000 of that. The bill would direct the funding to rural areas in which at least 90 percent of households lack access to speeds of 25 megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload, provided there isn’t an existing state or federally funded deployment already planned. Recipient internet service providers would have to deploy 100/20 Mbps. Another $40,767,000 would be made available for distance learning and telemedicine grants, also managed by the USDA.

A partnership between Newark Fiber, Citizens Bank, and developer Adenah Bayoh will bring up to 15 years of free internet service to residents of a new apartment building in Newark (NJ). Bayoh approached Citizens Bank for funding to create a new apartment building, called Southside View. Part of the funding request was to provide free internet to residents of the building, and Citizens was willing to contribute. Newark Fiber — a public-private partnership and an initiative of Invest Newark, the city’s economic development organization — was called on to bring internet connectivity to the building. In connecting the Southside View building to fiber internet infrastructure, Newark Fiber is now able to connect other blocks along the route. And the setup for residents of Southside View couldn’t be easier.  “We are providing a connection to the building, and we have routers in every single unit,” said Newark Alliance Chief Innovation Economy Officer and Director of Broadband for the City of Newark Aaron Meyerson. “So, a tenant moves into their unit, they give us a call, we flip a switch, and it’s on for them. There’s no additional setup required.” Meyerson added that residents will have access to Gigabit speeds: “We’re not throttling this connection in any way.” Bayoh said Citizens Bank gave $500,000 to provide both free internet and free tutoring for children who live in Southside View.

More than 800 million people use ChatGPT each week, according to its maker OpenAI, but their conversations with the artificial intelligence chatbot are private. Unlike for social media apps there’s little way for those outside the company to know how people use the service — or what ChatGPT says to them. A collection of 47,000 publicly shared ChatGPT conversations compiled by The Washington Post sheds light on the reasons people turn to the chatbot and the deeply intimate role it plays in many lives. The conversations were made public by ChatGPT users who created shareable links to their chats that were later preserved in the Internet Archive, creating a unique snapshot of tens of thousands of interactions with the chatbot. Analyzing the chats also revealed patterns in how the AI tool uses language. Some users have complained ChatGPT agrees with them too readily. The Post found it began responses with variations on “yes” 10 times more often than with versions of “no.” In more than 1 in 10 of the chats The Post analyzed, people engaged the chatbot in abstract discussions, musing on topics like their ideas for breakthrough medical treatments or personal beliefs about the nature of reality. Emotional conversations were also common in the conversations analyzed by The Post, and users often shared highly personal details about their lives. In some chats, the AI tool could be seen adapting to match a user’s viewpoint, creating a kind of personalized echo chamber in which ChatGPT endorsed falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, said his own research has suggested ChatGPT’s design encourages people to form emotional attachments with the chatbot. “The optimization and incentives towards intimacy are very clear,” he said. “ChatGPT is trained to further or deepen the relationship.”

• About 10 percent of the chats appear to show people talking to the chatbot about their emotions
• Users often shared highly personal information with ChatGPT 
• More than 10 percent of the chats involved users musing to the chatbot about politics, theoretical physics or other subjects. But in conversations reviewed by The Post, ChatGPT was often less of a debate partner and more a cheerleader for whatever perspective a user expressed.
• ChatGPT showed the same cheerleading tone in conversations with some users who shared far-fetched conspiracies or beliefs that appeared detached from reality.