A couple of weeks back, the news broke that a school district in Mason City, Iowa, was using ChatGPT to implement Iowa’s ban on books that include descriptions of sex acts. One book flagged was Buzz Bissinger’s classic “Friday Night Lights.” The thing is, that book includes no such descriptions, according to the author himself. Although the district reversed course, it’s an example of how more government officials are using artificial intelligence at work, in some cases leading to restrictions on tools like ChatGPT. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with journalist Todd Feathers, who covered this recently in Wired.

The humble keyboard is the unsung hero of our tech lives. It’s the thing that almost every great modern book or screenplay or even Instagram caption was first written on. And yet, very few people are writing about it. Designer and writer Marcin Wichary sought to change that with his new book “Shift Happens.” In it, he chronicles the sometimes contentious history of the keyboard. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Wichary about his research, beginning with the very first typewriters.

There’s an entire industry built around making money off personal information that’s gathered online. Companies known as data brokers collect it, then sell it to other parties. California tried to tackle this problem a couple of years ago, giving consumers the right to ask that companies delete their information. But actually doing that is tedious. Consumers have to make the request one company at a time. A bill passed by California lawmakers this month aims to change that by allowing one request to apply to all data brokers. SB 362, also known as the Delete Act, would additionally require brokers to register with the state. At this point, the legislation needs Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature to become law. Jessica Rich, a senior policy adviser for consumer protection at the law firm Kelley Drye, laid out the stakes of the issue for Marketplace’s Lily Jamali.

In making the case for the Human Brain Project back in 2009, neuroscientist Henry Markram noted that 2 billion people are affected by some kind of mental disorder. It was time, he said, to explore fundamental questions about how the brain works. The collaboration that resulted involved hundreds of scientists across several nations. This week marks the end of Europe’s ambitious but also at times controversial initiative. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Miryam Naddaf, a reporter for the publication Nature, about what the project’s researchers have accomplished.

According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states, “Amazon is a monopolist.” They say Amazon uses strategies that prevent sellers on its online marketplace from lowering prices on other platforms and compels them to use Amazon’s logistics service to be eligible for Amazon Prime. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Neil Chilson, the former chief technologist at the FTC and currently a research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity, about the FTC’s lawsuit. He said Amazon’s argument will likely hinge on the amount of value they’ve created for consumers and sellers.

We’re going on Week 3 of Google’s high-stakes trial over allegations that it bought its way to dominance in internet search. The Department of Justice and several states allege that the tech giant has maintained a lucrative monopoly through exclusive contracts with browser companies and phone makers like Apple and Samsung. Google has countered that it’s dominant in search because it offers the best product. Covering this trial has been a complicated task. Part of the challenge is that Google and other companies involved have moved to shield documents from public view. That applies to some testimony too. Leah Nylen, an antitrust reporter for Bloomberg who’s been present throughout, told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali about the trade-offs involved in these confidentiality decisions.

It’s impossible to quantify the volume of data generated by citizens around the world. Make no mistake, though — data has become a commodity to the companies that monetize it. At the same time, governments are making laws around how to protect it, who can access it and even where to store it. These choices are guided by how leaders think data can advance their national interests, according to Gillian Diebold at the Center for Data Innovation, who just wrote an analysis on the subject. She spoke with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali about data policies in China, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Singapore and India and how they compare.

When ChatGPT came on the scene in November, it sent schools across the country into a panic. Some districts immediately started setting rules around how students could use artificial intelligence programs in their schoolwork. Others moved to ban them altogether. All this happened while information about the good and the bad of AI’s foray into classrooms was still pretty scarce. Researchers at the Center for Democracy & Technology, based in Washington, D.C., gathered data to counter some of the hype. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali discussed it with Elizabeth Laird, CDT’s director of equity in civic technology and a co-author of a report out this week.

AI chatbots have gotten pretty good at generating text that looks like it was written by a real person. That’s because they’re trained on words and sentences that actual humans wrote, scraped from blogs and news websites. But research now shows when you feed that AI-generated text back into the models to train a new chatbot, after a while, it sort of stops making sense. It’s a phenomenon AI researchers are calling “model collapse.” Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Clive Thompson, author of “Coders” and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and Wired, about what could be a growing problem as more AI-generated stuff lands on the web.

Earthquakes are the trickiest phenomena to detect ahead of their impact. California, for example, has the MyShake app, which aims to notify Californians seconds ahead of a quake. But aside from the public sector funding this type of lifesaving innovation, private companies are also racing to develop the tech for earthquake warning and alert systems. The BBC’s Will Bain reports.