AI
The craft renaissance
As long ago as the 1960s, the poet Edward James was worried that traditional crafts were dying out. Having frittered…
In the grip of apocalypse angst
Dorian Lynskey lays out the many ways in which we have imagined the world ending – through pandemic, nuclear holocaust, climate change, asteroid impact or, most unnervingly, AI
AI just changed the world. Again
Argentine President Javier Milei’s recent speech, to the World Economic Forum in Davos, has caused a stir for several reasons.…
Mother’s always angry: Jungle House, by Julianne Pachino, reviewed
But who – or what – is Mother? And are her exasperated warnings about ever-present danger exaggerated?
The real problem with ChatGPT is that it can never make a joke
When Andy Stanton commands the AI program to tell him a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis, the result, as it unfolds, drives him a bit insane
The balance of power between humans and machines
Robert Skidelsky dismisses the possibility of our annihilation by a superintelligent computer system, since ‘science tells us that we cannot create such a being’. But does it?
The case against re-recording albums
In 2012, Jeff Lynne released Mr Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra. Except it wasn’t. It was…
Gone girl
Anthropology is a drama about artificial intelligence that starts as an ultra-gloomy soap opera. A suicidal lesbian, Merril, speaks on…
Are we human?
A little-known fact about the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, the first sampling synthesiser, introduced in 1979, is that it incorporated…
Deus ex machina
The rise of the godbots
AI is the death of porn
I have a friend, let’s call her Ellie, who has a diverting side hustle: she sells erotic images of herself…
Are we ignoring AI’s ‘lived experience’?
Number Five, as the old film’s catchphrase went, is alive. A whistleblower at Google called Blake Lemoine has gone public…
Be a self-sacrificing ant
One day the writer and artist James Bridle rented a hatchback, taped a smartphone to the steering wheel and installed…
Cringe benefits
The tagline of This is Dating, a new podcast from across the pond, is ‘Come for the cringe, stay for…
The AI future is rosy
In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women…
Ai-Da Vinci
Stuart Jeffries discusses beauty, Yoko Ono and the world’s disappointments with the first robot artist
Bright and beautiful
Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels were loosely autobiographical renderings of the author’s harrowing, rarefied, drug-sozzled existence. Despite their subject…
A robot with feelings
The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel — let’s call it Ishville — is instantly recognisable. Our narrator, Klara, is…
The terrifying development of AI warfare
The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France contains some of the earliest known Palaeolithic cave paintings, including those of lions, bears, and…
Concrete poetry
Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that…
Car-boot sale of the unconscious
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
How far should we go?
Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like…
TikTok is the world’s fastest-growing – and goofiest – digital platform, but should we fear it?
In November last year, an internet video made by a 17-year-old American went viral. The video was less than a…
Ancient and modern: Antigone and algorithms
Hardly a day goes by without someone making excitable predictions about human progress and how, thanks to AI, we are…
