The Download: how people really use AI, and Flock’s design choices

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. We still don’t know how people are really using AI AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using their products. But they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say, and there’s no independent source to corroborate it. A new research project called the AI Observatory aims to fill in the gap. Its analysis shows many more sensitive behaviors than are captured in reports from major AI companies, which focus more on work than on personal use. The researchers also found significant differences between models. People were more likely to turn to Anthropic for coding, Gemini for social and roleplay uses, and ChatGPT for homework assistance. Here’s what the AI Observatory reveals about how people use AI . —Eileen Guo What Flock’s defenders are missing Flock Safety, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, recently announced changes to its platform. The updates are meant to prevent officers from using it for illegal or illegitimate purposes, including stalking. Amid all this, there have recently been several arguments defending Flock: If these cameras help solve crime, is it as big a deal? On a good day they might help catch a kidnapper, and if not, they’re simply snapping pictures of my car that nobody will bother to look at. But this all skips over a more important question: What kind of crime-fighting system has Flock chosen to build? Its network works the way it does because of decisions about what information to collect, who can search it, how long to keep it, and how widely to share it. Those decisions set the terms of the bargain between security and civil liberties. Find out what a narrower Flock system could look like . —James O’Donnell This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up t