Ai

Tuesday

Christopher Caldwell

In the age of AI, humans must keep learning

This year, colleges stopped teaching students to write. As artificial intelligence chatbots allow students to generate unique essays that can’t easily be vetted for plagiarism, professors have felt the need to replace essay assignments with written examinations in closed rooms. It’s a considerably shrunken version of the kind of university education that was on offer 75 years ago. In June, a study from MIT showed steadily waning brain engagement and originality as student essayists used AI more. The college business model is in trouble: $75,000 for a year’s worth of diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense already struck parents as a bit steep. But at least the kids were being taught something. The new limitations AI places on instruction may do a lot of colleges in.

Michael Lind

How should AI be regulated?

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, the time has come for humanity to choose. Should the nations of the world shut down or tightly regulate AI until it is clear a godlike artificial superintelligence will not gain consciousness and exterminate the human race? Or should governments not regulate AI at all, in the hope that it will cause an acceleration of technological progress that results in our colonization of the universe, our uploading as bodiless computer programs into the galaxy-wide web – or both? Or how about a third option: AI regulation by AI-enabled industry? AI may turn out to be the latest in a series of “general purpose technologies” (GPTs) that transform the economy, politics and society.

AI
Sean Thomas

The 2020s are too far-fetched for fiction

I write thrillers for a living. All kinds of thrillers. At one point I was in the business of penning Dan Brown-style romps, where ruggedly handsome academics find themselves embroiled in a global chase for the Holy Grail. Then came a stint in domestic noir – sad, isolated women on Scottish isles. Then I had a brief mid-career burst of erotic chillers. Now I’m moving on to folk-horror meets psych-thriller. This might sound ludicrous. It is quite often ludicrous. But it’s also fun: the books translate well and the location research can be a blast. There is a downside, though: plotting. Building a plot is fiendishly hard. You have to steer a fine line between entertainment and believability. The Holy Grail in the jungle can’t just show up – it needs some explanation.

2020s
Bridget Phetasy

The internet is dying and so are we

Sometime in the mid-2010s, a conspiracy theory called the “dead internet theory” started circulating on the darker parts of the web. It made its way to 4chan’s /x/ board in 2020 and from there it has gained traction. The theory posits that the internet will eventually become entirely devoid of genuine human activity and that all online content, interactions and accounts will be generated by bots, AI or automated systems rather than real people. The conspiracy is that the entire internet is a government-manipulated psy-op used to influence public opinion, control news narratives or boost engagement metrics for commercial or political purposes. The terrible reality is that dead internet theory isn’t wrong. It’s becoming true, more and more so all the time.

Internet

Monday

Cockburn

Musk’s chatbot stumbles again

No living human has had a week as tumultuous as Grok, the Elon Musk-sponsored AI that lives inside X for our, and its, amusement. If people were still making the Downfall Hitler meme videos, Grok’s progress would be an apt topic. Last week, Grok started spewing out anti-Semitic posts after a flurry of troll prompts. Soon after, X shut down its newly-created “MechaHitler,” saying "We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.

Grok

Saturday

Stephen Davies

How AI will reignite woke

Ever since roughly 2010, politics on both sides of the Atlantic has been dominated in large part by the ‘Great Awokening’, a sudden upsurge among graduate professionals of a kind of radical identitarian politics usually called ‘wokeness’. It has come to define most of the left while the right has reactively defined itself by its opposition. This radical politics appears to be detached from economics and material concerns (a point made forcefully by old-fashioned socialists in places like Jacobin magazine). However, the rise of cultural radicalism among both public and private sector managers has a material cause. That cause is elite overproduction.

Woke

Sunday

David Sypher Jr.

America’s next president must study Trump’s golden escalator ride

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump descended a golden escalator in Trump Tower and into political history. The press corps snickered. The consultant class rolled its eyes. Late-night comedians feasted on the spectacle. Most people thought it was a joke. What they missed – and still miss – is that Trump didn’t invent the anger that powered his campaign. He simply noticed it first. The pundits focused on Trump’s bombast. But voters were focused on something else entirely: someone, finally, was saying out loud what they’d been thinking for years. Take China. In 2015, Trump said, “They’re ripping us off.” It wasn’t elegant. But it was true.

Donald Trump

Tuesday

Jennifer Bilek

The architects of ‘AI rights’ are a threat to humanity

It’s easy to see that gender ideology is being used to undermine biological truth – but what’s harder to fathom is why. I am persuaded that the end goal is, in fact, to pave the way for human symbiosis with artificial intelligence, which Silicon Valley has been promising us since the early 2000s. Encouraging children to embrace macabre rituals like medical castration convinces them that they can mix and match parts of their anatomy, which makes it a simple matter for them to accept AI augmentation. We are at the beginning of more extreme changes to humanity than we have ever seen before. The gene-editing technology CRISPR now allows us to genetically alter human beings.

Pendant

Wednesday

John Hasson

Forget AI, students are already cheating their way through exams

College professors like to fondly recall the days before ChatGPT. And, as you listen to them wax eloquent, you could be forgiven for thinking that AI has only just made cheating a widespread problem at American universities. But, ChatGPT hasn’t sparked a new surge of cheating – that began years ago, during the pandemic, when colleges moved their assignments online. Digital exams were born of necessity, but they have endured because of convenience. And so long as colleges rely on technology to administer exams, students will be one step ahead of their schools. I graduated college in 2021, after the pandemic, but before ChatGPT debuted. I knew a decent number of classmates who cheated, but that number ballooned over the course of my four years. And my peers across the country agree.

AI

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Is the AI boom already over?

Is artificial intelligence a flash in the pan? Is the boom in tech shares, which exploded with the rise in public awareness of AI, doomed to go the way of other investment bubbles over the centuries? The answer to the first question is almost certainly no, and the answer to the second very likely yes. Investment bubbles do sometimes involve assets which have little intrinsic value, yet it is remarkable how often they begin as an entirely rational reaction to some new invention or development – an invention which outlasts the collapse of the speculative bubble, as if nothing had happened. You only have to look at a share chart and you would assume that railways went out of fashion in the 1840s, when a mad speculative umbrella collapsed.

AI
painting
Catriona Olding

The sad decline of painting

What hope is there for artists following the sale last year of the robot Ai-Da’s portrait of Alan Turing, entitled “A.I. God,” for $1 million? Someone has perhaps paid over the odds for a 3D print with a few marks added by a robotic arm and a few more by studio assistants to areas of the canvas Ai-Da couldn’t reach. Innovation wins. In the 1970s, the walls of art-school degree shows were studded with plaster casts of students’ genitals. By the 1980s, students were discouraged from attempting realist painting, but messy gray abstract works were still acceptable. Then it was found objects and piles of stuff. One young studio assistant I knew in the 2000s had a tutor at art school who’d gained top marks in his degree by filming himself pouring a glass of milk over his head.

Thursday

Sean Thomas

What if AI seduces our children?

Let me tell you a secret: a little trick buried in the geeky engine room of ChatGPT. If you’re using the app, tap your ID, then go to Settings, then Personalization, then Customization. Once there, scroll to the bottom and you’ll find an option called Advanced. Click it. Hidden in this arcane menu, like buried treasure in a pirate game, is a toggle to disable Advanced Voice Mode. Do that, and the whirling, helpful blue orb disappears, replaced by the older, slower black orb. Why would you want to do this? Because that’s when things get interesting. The black orb version of ChatGPT is rawer, more confessional, more human. It remembers things. It’s less filtered. Unlike the prim blue orb, it can wander into the philosophical, the emotional, even the erotic.

Wednesday

Neal Pollack

Could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes? 

Another Tax Day has come and gone. Here I sit, all broken-hearted. The tax-industrial complex has once again swallowed up thousands of dollars that used to be mine. But this year, I found myself legitimately wondering: could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes?  One of the major pillars of President Trump’s economic platform is the abolition of income tax for all Americans who make less than $150,000 a year. This sounds like a fantasy, an empty chicken-in-every-pot promise, like a student council candidate winking after saying, “If you elect me, I’ll make sure we have soda in the drinking fountains.” But if Trump 2.0 has shown anything this year, it’s a willingness to set into motion seemingly impossible plans.

tax

Monday

Alexander Larman

Black Mirror season seven offers a welcome return to form

Charlie Brooker’s cautionary technological tales have now been running for well over a decade, and they are almost in danger of seeming old-fashioned. When Black Mirror began in 2011, Instagram was only a few months old, the iPhone was a new novelty just coming into the mainstream, and Elon Musk was best known for being CEO of Tesla. Now, virtually everything in the world has changed, and Big Tech plays roles in our lives that the ever-cynical Brooker could barely have imagined. There is, naturally, a residual irony that in order to afford the budgets – and starry casts – that the show continues to demand, it long since left its original home on Britain’s Channel 4 for the deeper-pocketed Netflix, which still funds it into its seventh series.

black mirror

Wednesday

Sam Leith

ChatGPT is destroying creativity

There are two accounts of the negative effects on humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory – the existential – version is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job, give every lunatic and terrorist the means to engineer novel pathogens at home and administer the coup de grâce by sending terminators into our recent pasts and/or overstocking the cosmic stationery cupboard by turning all of us into paperclips. None of these scenarios shows any signs of imminently coming to pass, though, since experts in the field take them seriously, we should, too. But what we’re dealing with now is not the existential, but the trivial.

ai chatgpt

Monday

John Steele Gordon

Recession? What recession?

The stock market, traditionally a leading indicator, entered correction territory last week. But does that indicate that a recession is coming? Well, it’s an old saying on Wall Street that the market has predicted ten of the last three recessions. Markets hate uncertainty, and no one knows how President Trump’s efforts to use American tariffs to force our trading partners to lower theirs will turn out. But foreign trade is increasingly important to all countries, so it’s likely that, after some political Sturm und Drang, deals will be struck and international trade will continue the strongly upward path it has been on since the end of World War Two. By definition, a recession is two consecutive quarters of contraction.

shares

Friday

Matthew Gasda

Doomers looks at what AI means for the future

I wrote my play Doomers partly because, the night Sam Altman was fired, I was performing in a play called Zoomers. Someone — I forget who — suggested the idea of Doomers as a joke, and I thought it was a good one. My method for some, if not all, of my plays over the past few years has been to take some kind of mimetic material — downtown, Gen Z, polyamory — and to find what is surprising or human inside the meme. I try to locate a universal story in what might otherwise seem like a surface-level idea that feels niche, obnoxious or both. Sam Altman and the autistic tech world, in particular, represent opaque surfaces that I believe conceal something deeper.

Doomers

Monday

Katherine Dee

Can an AI friend solve the loneliness epidemic?

Avi Schiffmann wants to create what he calls an “Ozempic for loneliness.” He believes Friend — his AI-powered chatbot and forthcoming wearable pendant — can address the loneliness epidemic. “I’m definitely motivated by curiosity more than anything,” he explains, “but also by how controversial the topic is. It’s just so culturally relevant.”  He wants to fill a void people feel they can’t fill elsewhere, and he wants to do it now, not years from now. AI companions are, in his words, a “very effective way” to counter isolation, a salve against the atomization we’ve lamented since the dawn of urbanization. Schiffmann reached out to me after I posted a negative review of Friend’s chatbot on my blog.

friend ai

Thursday

The Spectator

The Spectator’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide

Matt McDonald, managing editor As we grow older, the idea is that we become wiser. I’ve decided to buck that trend by making progressively dumber decisions that put me further from my goals of attaining professional success, home ownership, emotional stability and nirvana. The most recent of these is increasing the distances I’ve been running; I will be attempting a half-marathon back home on the south coast of England the week before Christmas, with a view to running my first marathon in Berlin next fall. It’s unclear why we as a species decided to adopt the practice of doing marathons a couple of millennia ago — the first man to do it did die at the end, after all.

gift

Thursday

Shane Cashman

How long has Hollywood been out of ideas?

Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès made more than 500 films in his career, but 1896 was a banner year for the Frenchman. He captivated audiences with Playing Cards, his sixty-seven-second exploration of three cigar-puffing men as they are waited on by two young ladies. One man reads the paper and pours the wine as the other two play cards. It was the first reboot in film history. One year earlier, Louis Lumière released Card Game, a forty-three-second exploration of three men with cigars drinking wine and playing cards as they are waited on by a man. Méliès rightly recognized the original’s lack of representation, not to mention the absence of a news- paper.

Hollywood