Alma co-founder had such a bad immigration experience she founded a legal AI startup to fix it

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Alma co-founders, from left, Shuo Chen, Aizada Marat, and Assel Tuleubayeva

Image Credits: Alma / Alma co-founders, from left, Shuo Chen, Assel Tuleubayeva, and Aizada Marat

When Aizada Marat moved from New York to California in 2018 with her husband, KODIF co-founder and CEO Chyngyz Dzhumanazarov, she needed to sort out her immigration status. That’s when everything started going badly.

The Kyrgyzstan-born, Harvard-educated attorney came to the U.S. when she was 17 for an exchange year with FLEX (future leaders exchange) sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

After graduating from Harvard, Marat moved to London because of immigration issues. Now she was coming out to California with Dzhumanazarov, who had been admitted to Stanford Business School, and to take a job offer at leading law firm Cooley.

But she didn’t realize that immigration lawyers can be very buyer-beware. Through a Google search she found a lawyer in Palo Alto to help her with her visa. That turned out to be a bad move. Marat said the lawyer gave her wrong advice about when she could file authorization to work in California. That mistake caused her to not be able to work for more than a year. She also could not leave the country.

“I’m a lawyer, so I listen to what lawyers say,” Marat told TechCrunch. “Unfortunately, listening to them was devastating because months later, I was still unable to work. I had a job offer from Cooley.”

Marat did end up getting to work at Cooley for three years. And she went back to that immigration law firm and showed them the mistake they made with her. It also ignited an entrepreneurial fire in her.

After she left Cooley to work at McKinsey as a management consultant, Marat kept coming back to that horrible immigration experience. So much so that she started thinking about why immigration legal services were of poorer quality given the long and complicated immigration process.

Alma, immigration visa, advice
Alma’s digital immigration application management.
Image Credits: Alma

She learned that immigration law is “super fragmented,” meaning that 10% of the market is owned by one law firm while the other 90% is shared among over 20,000 law firms.

“Very few big law firms have immigration services today because it is mainly serving individuals, and those are small checks,” Marat said. “That’s why, to get a talent visa green card, the majority of the time, people can self-petition. They don’t even need an employer. Cooley, in my case, wouldn’t really sponsor visas, so I had to sort it out myself.”

And when she thought about what to do about it, Marat set out to start her own company developing software to sell to immigration attorneys. The goal was to help them deliver better services, so what happened to Marat wouldn’t happen again.

After four or five months of selling that software to five immigration law firms, Marat and her team made the decision to provide immigration services directly. In October 2023, they launched Alma, an AI-powered legal tech startup that she started with other immigrants, including former Uber engineering manager Shuo Chen and former Step product manager Assel Tuleubayeva.

The startup aims to simplify the visa process for technologists, founders and researchers by providing personal legal advisors, helping to speed up document processing and digitally organizing the entire process. And like other companies working in this area, including Migrun, Boundless and Lawfully, Alma wants to fast-track international talent into America’s tech ecosystem, Marat said.

Marat says Alma differs from some competitors by leverage proprietary technology to provide high-quality services faster and employing its own immigration attorney.

“Immigrants deserve high-quality services because so much depends on the immigration attorney that you find,” Marat said. “All the repetitive and mundane things that lawyers hate, we can automate so that lawyers actually focus on all clients and provide a really good strategy to get higher approval rates.”

Helping to move the company forward is $5.1 million in combined seed and pre-seed funding that Alma recently raised. The company is backed by Bling Capital, Forerunner, Village Global, NFX, Conviction, MVP, NEA and Silkroad Innovation Hub. Much of the funding will go toward new hires for product and technology development.

Alma co-founder had such a bad immigration experience she founded a legal AI startup to fix it

by with No Comment Tech

Alma co-founders, from left, Shuo Chen, Aizada Marat, and Assel Tuleubayeva

Image Credits: Alma / Alma co-founders, from left, Shuo Chen, Assel Tuleubayeva, and Aizada Marat

When Aizada Marat moved from New York to California in 2018 with her husband, KODIF co-founder and CEO Chyngyz Dzhumanazarov, she needed to sort out her immigration status. That’s when everything started going badly.

The Kyrgyzstan-born, Harvard-educated attorney came to the U.S. when she was 17 for an exchange year with FLEX (future leaders exchange) sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

After graduating from Harvard, Marat moved to London because of immigration issues. Now she was coming out to California with Dzhumanazarov, who had been admitted to Stanford Business School, and to take a job offer at leading law firm Cooley.

But she didn’t realize that immigration lawyers can be very buyer-beware. Through a Google search she found a lawyer in Palo Alto to help her with her visa. That turned out to be a bad move. Marat said the lawyer gave her wrong advice about when she could file authorization to work in California. That mistake caused her to not be able to work for more than a year. She also could not leave the country.

“I’m a lawyer, so I listen to what lawyers say,” Marat told TechCrunch. “Unfortunately, listening to them was devastating because months later, I was still unable to work. I had a job offer from Cooley.”

Marat did end up getting to work at Cooley for three years. And she went back to that immigration law firm and showed them the mistake they made with her. It also ignited an entrepreneurial fire in her.

After she left Cooley to work at McKinsey as a management consultant, Marat kept coming back to that horrible immigration experience. So much so that she started thinking about why immigration legal services were of poorer quality given the long and complicated immigration process.

Alma, immigration visa, advice
Alma’s digital immigration application management.
Image Credits: Alma

She learned that immigration law is “super fragmented,” meaning that 10% of the market is owned by one law firm while the other 90% is shared among over 20,000 law firms.

“Very few big law firms have immigration services today because it is mainly serving individuals, and those are small checks,” Marat said. “That’s why, to get a talent visa green card, the majority of the time, people can self-petition. They don’t even need an employer. Cooley, in my case, wouldn’t really sponsor visas, so I had to sort it out myself.”

And when she thought about what to do about it, Marat set out to start her own company developing software to sell to immigration attorneys. The goal was to help them deliver better services, so what happened to Marat wouldn’t happen again.

After four or five months of selling that software to five immigration law firms, Marat and her team made the decision to provide immigration services directly. In October 2023, they launched Alma, an AI-powered legal tech startup that she started with other immigrants, including former Uber engineering manager Shuo Chen and former Step product manager Assel Tuleubayeva.

The startup aims to simplify the visa process for technologists, founders and researchers by providing personal legal advisors, helping to speed up document processing and digitally organizing the entire process. And like other companies working in this area, including Migrun, Boundless and Lawfully, Alma wants to fast-track international talent into America’s tech ecosystem, Marat said.

Marat says Alma differs from some competitors by leverage proprietary technology to provide high-quality services faster and employing its own immigration attorney.

“Immigrants deserve high-quality services because so much depends on the immigration attorney that you find,” Marat said. “All the repetitive and mundane things that lawyers hate, we can automate so that lawyers actually focus on all clients and provide a really good strategy to get higher approval rates.”

Helping to move the company forward is $5.1 million in combined seed and pre-seed funding that Alma recently raised. The company is backed by Bling Capital, Forerunner, Village Global, NFX, Conviction, MVP, NEA and Silkroad Innovation Hub. Much of the funding will go toward new hires for product and technology development.

Epic plans to contest Apple's 'bad-faith' compliance with court ruling over App Store

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Epic Games Inc. Fortnite App As Gamers Flock

Image Credits: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg / Getty Images

Fortnite maker Epic Games is not happy about how Apple intends to comply with a district court’s injunction that permitted app developers to direct users to their own websites and payment platforms — a court order that came into effect following the Supreme Court’s decision to not hear the Apple antitrust case, leaving the current ruling to stand. Though Apple had largely won the case, as the court decided it was not a monopolist, a judge ruled that app makers should be able to steer their customers to the web from links or buttons inside their apps, something that forced Apple to change its App Store rules.

But Apple’s compliance doesn’t give app makers the victory they had hoped, as the tech giant aims to still charge commissions on purchases made outside of apps — a decision Epic aims to challenge in court.

According to statements made by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, shared on X, Apple’s “bad-faith” compliance undermines the judge’s order that would have allowed buttons or external links “in addition to [in-app purchases].”

The Ninth Circuit Court had ruled on one count of out 10 in favor of Epic in its decision, finding that Apple violated California’s Unfair Competition law. The decision meant Apple had to remove the “anti-steering” clause from its agreement with App Store developers. This clause for years had prevented app developers from directing their customers to other ways to pay for in-app purchases or subscriptions from inside their apps, leading to confusing screens or broken features, where customers would have to figure out on their own how to make the necessary purchases from the developer’s website.

Apple updated its App Store Guidelines following the Supreme Court’s decision but with a lot of caveats. It said that developers would still have to pay a 27% cut on purchases, instead of 30%, and developers in Apple’s Small Business Program or auto-renewing subscriptions in their second year would be reduced to 12%, instead of 15%. This three percentage point discount is similar to what Google is offering through its User Choice billing pilot program, which counts Spotify and Bumble among its early adopters. In Google’s case, it reduced the required commissions by 4%. But these small discounts aren’t enough to make alternative payment processing worthwhile for most developers who have to pay at least that much in payment processing fees, many have argued.

Sweeney agrees, noting in his post today, shared on X, that developers aren’t able to offer their digital items “more cheaply on the web after paying a third-party payment processor 3-6% and paying this new 27% Apple Tax.”

In addition, he points out that Apple is strictly controlling how the new links and buttons must appear. In addition to forcing developers to apply for permission, the links can’t be in the app’s ordinary payment flow but must be in a separate section of the app, Sweeney explains. The links also open to a generic web browser session, forcing users to log in again to the developer’s website — an additional point of friction in making a non-App Store purchase. And then customers will have to initiate a search to find the item they wanted to buy, after logging in.

Apple will also “front-run competing payment processors with their own ‘scare screen’ to disadvantage them,” Sweeney says, meaning that Apple will warn users about the issues that may arise when transacting with a developer outside its App Store. For instance, users won’t be able to cancel their subscriptions within Apple’s App Store or request refunds  — they’ll have to do this through the developer’s website.

Sweeney says Epic will contest Apple’s compliance in District Court.

The developer lobbying group, Coalition for App Fairness, which also includes Epic, issued its own statement on Apple’s new App Store rules.

“Apple’s approach to ‘compliance’ with the District Court’s decision will not benefit developers and consumers. The new 27 percent commission on payments it does not process defies the intention of the District Court’s injunction and undermines competition,” said Rick VanMeter, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness. “These changes do nothing to enhance consumer choice, lower prices for in-app purchases or inject competition into Apple’s walled garden. It is precisely this type of abusive, monopolistic behavior that makes it imperative for Congress to pass the Open App Markets Act,” he added.

Update, 1/14/24, 2:05 p.m. ET: 

Spotify also issued the following statement about Apple’s new App Store policies:

Once again, Apple has demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to protect the profits they exact on the backs of developers and consumers under their app store monopoly. Their latest move in the U.S. — imposing a 27% fee for transactions made outside of an app on a developer’s website — is outrageous and flies in the face of the court’s efforts to enable greater competition and user choice. This action follows similar moves by Apple to circumvent compliance in South Korea and The Netherlands. However, the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) will finally put an end to this false posturing, which is essentially a recreation of Apple’s fees. We strongly urge the European Commission to act swiftly and decisively to prevent Apple from implementing similar fees, which are prohibited under the DMA.

Apple allows devs to promote subscriptions on the web with a 27% commission

Supreme Court declines to hear Apple-Epic antitrust case, meaning app makers can now point customers to the web

Epic Games Inc. Fortnite App As Gamers Flock

Epic plans to contest Apple's 'bad-faith' compliance with court ruling over App Store

by with No Comment Tech

Epic Games Inc. Fortnite App As Gamers Flock

Image Credits: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg / Getty Images

Fortnite maker Epic Games is not happy about how Apple intends to comply with a district court’s injunction that permitted app developers to direct users to their own websites and payment platforms — a court order that came into effect following the Supreme Court’s decision to not hear the Apple antitrust case, leaving the current ruling to stand. Though Apple had largely won the case, as the court decided it was not a monopolist, a judge ruled that app makers should be able to steer their customers to the web from links or buttons inside their apps, something that forced Apple to change its App Store rules.

But Apple’s compliance doesn’t give app makers the victory they had hoped, as the tech giant aims to still charge commissions on purchases made outside of apps — a decision Epic aims to challenge in court.

According to statements made by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, shared on X, Apple’s “bad-faith” compliance undermines the judge’s order that would have allowed buttons or external links “in addition to [in-app purchases].”

The Ninth Circuit Court had ruled on one count of out 10 in favor of Epic in its decision, finding that Apple violated California’s Unfair Competition law. The decision meant Apple had to remove the “anti-steering” clause from its agreement with App Store developers. This clause for years had prevented app developers from directing their customers to other ways to pay for in-app purchases or subscriptions from inside their apps, leading to confusing screens or broken features, where customers would have to figure out on their own how to make the necessary purchases from the developer’s website.

Apple updated its App Store Guidelines following the Supreme Court’s decision but with a lot of caveats. It said that developers would still have to pay a 27% cut on purchases, instead of 30%, and developers in Apple’s Small Business Program or auto-renewing subscriptions in their second year would be reduced to 12%, instead of 15%. This three percentage point discount is similar to what Google is offering through its User Choice billing pilot program, which counts Spotify and Bumble among its early adopters. In Google’s case, it reduced the required commissions by 4%. But these small discounts aren’t enough to make alternative payment processing worthwhile for most developers who have to pay at least that much in payment processing fees, many have argued.

Sweeney agrees, noting in his post today, shared on X, that developers aren’t able to offer their digital items “more cheaply on the web after paying a third-party payment processor 3-6% and paying this new 27% Apple Tax.”

In addition, he points out that Apple is strictly controlling how the new links and buttons must appear. In addition to forcing developers to apply for permission, the links can’t be in the app’s ordinary payment flow but must be in a separate section of the app, Sweeney explains. The links also open to a generic web browser session, forcing users to log in again to the developer’s website — an additional point of friction in making a non-App Store purchase. And then customers will have to initiate a search to find the item they wanted to buy, after logging in.

Apple will also “front-run competing payment processors with their own ‘scare screen’ to disadvantage them,” Sweeney says, meaning that Apple will warn users about the issues that may arise when transacting with a developer outside its App Store. For instance, users won’t be able to cancel their subscriptions within Apple’s App Store or request refunds  — they’ll have to do this through the developer’s website.

Sweeney says Epic will contest Apple’s compliance in District Court.

The developer lobbying group, Coalition for App Fairness, which also includes Epic, issued its own statement on Apple’s new App Store rules.

“Apple’s approach to ‘compliance’ with the District Court’s decision will not benefit developers and consumers. The new 27 percent commission on payments it does not process defies the intention of the District Court’s injunction and undermines competition,” said Rick VanMeter, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness. “These changes do nothing to enhance consumer choice, lower prices for in-app purchases or inject competition into Apple’s walled garden. It is precisely this type of abusive, monopolistic behavior that makes it imperative for Congress to pass the Open App Markets Act,” he added.

Update, 1/14/24, 2:05 p.m. ET: 

Spotify also issued the following statement about Apple’s new App Store policies:

Once again, Apple has demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to protect the profits they exact on the backs of developers and consumers under their app store monopoly. Their latest move in the U.S. — imposing a 27% fee for transactions made outside of an app on a developer’s website — is outrageous and flies in the face of the court’s efforts to enable greater competition and user choice. This action follows similar moves by Apple to circumvent compliance in South Korea and The Netherlands. However, the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) will finally put an end to this false posturing, which is essentially a recreation of Apple’s fees. We strongly urge the European Commission to act swiftly and decisively to prevent Apple from implementing similar fees, which are prohibited under the DMA.

Apple allows devs to promote subscriptions on the web with a 27% commission

Supreme Court declines to hear Apple-Epic antitrust case, meaning app makers can now point customers to the web

2022 Toyota Mirai

Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s practically paying people to buy the Mirai

by with No Comment Tech

2022 Toyota Mirai

Image Credits: Toyota

Who wants a nearly free car?

If you hurry, you can get $40,000 off a 2023 Toyota Mirai Limited, a fuel-cell vehicle that retails for $66,000. When you factor in the $15,000 in free hydrogen over six years and the available 0% interest loan, the new car would run you just $11,000. That’s how much it costs Toyota to make the vehicle’s fuel cell stack alone, according to the most recent estimate. You buy the fuel cell, Toyota pays for the rest of the car.

It would be a great deal, if you can find the hydrogen to power it.

Toyota’s discount comes on the heels of Shell’s announcement three weeks ago that it’s closing its hydrogen filling stations in California. Granted, the oil company only had seven to begin with (five of which had been out of order), but that still represents more than 10% of the Golden State’s stations, nearly all of which are clustered around Los Angeles and San Francisco. Of those that remain, about a quarter are offline, according to the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership.

California was, and still is, the only state where a fuel cell vehicle makes logistical sense — if you have a filling station nearby that’s operational. And if you squint. And tilted your head.

Just don’t tell Honda, which recently found the time to convert its best-selling CR-V into an automotive equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster: a plug-in hybrid, fuel-cell vehicle.

The crossover’s 17.7 kWh battery provides 29 miles of electric-only range, and once that’s spent, the front-mounted fuel cell starts sipping hydrogen from a pair of carbon-fiber tanks. One tank sits under the rear seat, the other behind, where it takes up an inordinate amount of trunk space.

For all that complexity and compromise, what do you get? A grand total of 270 miles of range, or about the same as a mid-pack electric crossover. Except the EV isn’t restricted to driving around LA or SF.

Now, hydrogen has great potential as a fuel source for many parts of a carbon-free economy, from industrial heat to steel production and long-distance shipping. That’s why so many hydrogen startups are pitching themselves as zero-carbon solutions for those sectors. Electric Hydrogen, which has raised $600 million, is courting steel, power, methanol and ammonia production. Advanced Ionics, 2023’s Startup Battlefield finalist, is aiming the hydrogen from its electrolyzers at ammonia and chemical producers. Hgen is also stalking steel and ammonia. Sense a trend?

Where hydrogen has not found traction is in propelling passenger cars and trucks. Hydrogen production and distribution is still too spotty for Mirai or CR-V owners to take road trips. Plus, despite the Mirai’s fire-sale price, fuel cells aren’t cheap. And if FCEVs are to cut carbon emissions, then they’ll have to run on green hydrogen, not the fossil-fuel derived gray hydrogen that dominates today. Until that happens, they’re only marginally better for the climate than advanced hybrids.

In the near term, it’s pretty clear that zero-emission, light-duty vehicles will need to rely on batteries. So why are Toyota and Honda (and Hyundai and others) still so bullish on hydrogen?

It’s hard to know what happens inside closed boardrooms, but there are a number of reasons why automakers might be pushing fuel cells. The cynical view is that automakers know that hydrogen infrastructure and fuel-cell vehicles won’t be ready for a decade or more, but by touting the drivetrain’s advantages (namely, fast fueling), they can convince EV-wary consumers (and politicians) to embrace fossil-fuel-powered vehicles in the meantime. To some degree, it’s like they wanted to invest in an image of being climate-conscious and technologically innovative while eschewing electric vehicles — the most common vision of a low-emissions transportation future.

A more charitable view is that the companies can’t fight their institutional inertia. Fuel cells might simply excite the companies’ existing engineers and executives. Like internal combustion engines, they’re complex and largely mechanical, fed by pumps and tubes and relieved by exhaust pipes. Plus, most of the design and manufacturing expertise can be kept in house, unlike batteries, which are almost always made by suppliers.

Lastly, automakers might think that consumers won’t switch until filling times match gas-powered vehicles. While EV charging times continue to drop, they’ll probably never hit the five-minute mark like hydrogen can. Automakers might truly believe that an extra five or 10 minutes might be a deal-breaker for most consumers.

Someday, automakers might be proven correct. If today’s hydrogen startups succeed, and if they’re able to build enough capacity to satiate industrial and shipping demand, then it might make sense to start selling fuel-cell vehicles to the masses. Will that day be 10 years from now? Or maybe 20? Let’s put it this way: it’s not currently on anyone’s roadmap.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Toyota’s discount only applies to the Mirai Limited.

Why is AI so bad at spelling? Because image generators aren't actually reading text

by with No Comment Tech

Firefly photograph of a street sign on a busy road near a billboard that says hello

Image Credits: Adobe Firefly

AIs are easily acing the SAT, defeating chess grandmasters and debugging code like it’s nothing. But put an AI up against some middle schoolers at the spelling bee, and it’ll get knocked out faster than you can say diffusion.

For all the advancements we’ve seen in AI, it still can’t spell. If you ask text-to-image generators like DALL-E to create a menu for a Mexican restaurant, you might spot some appetizing items like “taao,” “burto” and “enchida” amid a sea of other gibberish.

And while ChatGPT might be able to write your papers for you, it’s comically incompetent when you prompt it to come up with a 10-letter word without the letters “A” or “E” (it told me, “balaclava”). Meanwhile, when a friend tried to use Instagram’s AI to generate a sticker that said “new post,” it created a graphic that appeared to say something that we are not allowed to repeat on TechCrunch, a family website.

Image Credits: Microsoft Designer (DALL-E 3)

“Image generators tend to perform much better on artifacts like cars and people’s faces, and less so on smaller things like fingers and handwriting,” said Asmelash Teka Hadgu, co-founder of Lesan and a fellow at the DAIR Institute.

The underlying technology behind image and text generators are different, yet both kinds of models have similar struggles with details like spelling. Image generators generally use diffusion models, which reconstruct an image from noise. When it comes to text generators, large language models (LLMs) might seem like they’re reading and responding to your prompts like a human brain — but they’re actually using complex math to match the prompt’s pattern with one in its latent space, letting it continue the pattern with an answer.

“The diffusion models, the latest kind of algorithms used for image generation, are reconstructing a given input,” Hagdu told TechCrunch. “We can assume writings on an image are a very, very tiny part, so the image generator learns the patterns that cover more of these pixels.”

The algorithms are incentivized to recreate something that looks like what it’s seen in its training data, but it doesn’t natively know the rules that we take for granted — that “hello” is not spelled “heeelllooo,” and that human hands usually have five fingers.

“Even just last year, all these models were really bad at fingers, and that’s exactly the same problem as text,” said Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta. “They’re getting really good at it locally, so if you look at a hand with six or seven fingers on it, you could say, ‘Oh wow, that looks like a finger.’ Similarly, with the generated text, you could say, that looks like an ‘H,’ and that looks like a ‘P,’ but they’re really bad at structuring these whole things together.”

Engineers can ameliorate these issues by augmenting their data sets with training models specifically designed to teach the AI what hands should look like. But experts don’t foresee these spelling issues resolving as quickly.

Image Credits: Adobe Firefly

“You can imagine doing something similar — if we just create a whole bunch of text, they can train a model to try to recognize what is good versus bad, and that might improve things a little bit. But unfortunately, the English language is really complicated,” Guzdial told TechCrunch. And the issue becomes even more complex when you consider how many different languages the AI has to learn to work with.

Some models, like Adobe Firefly, are taught to just not generate text at all. If you input something simple like “menu at a restaurant,” or “billboard with an advertisement,” you’ll get an image of a blank paper on a dinner table, or a white billboard on the highway. But if you put enough detail in your prompt, these guardrails are easy to bypass.

“You can think about it almost like they’re playing Whac-A-Mole, like, ‘Okay a lot of people are complaining about our hands — we’ll add a new thing just addressing hands to the next model,’ and so on and so forth,” Guzdial said. “But text is a lot harder. Because of this, even ChatGPT can’t really spell.”

On Reddit, YouTube and X, a few people have uploaded videos showing how ChatGPT fails at spelling in ASCII art, an early internet art form that uses text characters to create images. In one recent video, which was called a “prompt engineering hero’s journey,” someone painstakingly tries to guide ChatGPT through creating ASCII art that says “Honda.” They succeed in the end, but not without Odyssean trials and tribulations.

oh. my. GOD.
byu/debiEszter inChatGPT

“One hypothesis I have there is that they didn’t have a lot of ASCII art in their training,” said Hagdu. “That’s the simplest explanation.”

But at the core, LLMs just don’t understand what letters are, even if they can write sonnets in seconds.

“LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably is not actually reading text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it’s translated into an encoding,” Guzdial said. “When it sees the word “the,” it has this one encoding of what “the” means, but it does not know about ‘T,’ ‘H,’ ‘E.’”

That’s why when you ask ChatGPT to produce a list of eight-letter words without an “O” or an “S,” it’s incorrect about half of the time. It doesn’t actually know what an “O” or “S” is (although it could probably quote you the Wikipedia history of the letter).

Though these DALL-E images of bad restaurant menus are funny, the AI’s shortcomings are useful when it comes to identifying misinformation. When we’re trying to see if a dubious image is real or AI-generated, we can learn a lot by looking at street signs, t-shirts with text, book pages or anything where a string of random letters might betray an image’s synthetic origins. And before these models got better at making hands, a sixth (or seventh, or eighth) finger could also be a giveaway.

But, Guzdial says, if we look close enough, it’s not just fingers and spelling that AI gets wrong.

“These models are making these small, local issues all of the time — it’s just that we’re particularly well-tuned to recognize some of them,” he said.

Image Credits: Adobe Firefly

To an average person, for example, an AI-generated image of a music store could be easily believable. But someone who knows a bit about music might see the same image and notice that some of the guitars have seven strings, or that the black and white keys on a piano are spaced out incorrectly.

Though these AI models are improving at an alarming rate, these tools are still bound to encounter issues like this, which limits the capacity of the technology.

“This is concrete progress, there’s no doubt about it,” Hagdu said. “But the kind of hype that this technology is getting is just insane.”

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