Category: AI

  • Move Fast and Kill Kids

    Trigger Warning: If the title wasn’t enough of a hint, this piece gets into dark territory. In the December 5 episode of the podcast On with Kara Swisher, Swisher interviewed Megan Garcia and Meetali Jain. Garcia is the mother of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy who killed himself in part because of an unhealthy, one-sided quasi-relationship with a chatbot…

  • Can You Only GenAI Your Way to the Middle?

    Should we take seriously a recent study that shows people like AI-generated poetry? And what are the broader implications? A few days ago, La Profesora sent me an intriguing link to a Poetry Turing Test set up by a couple of philosophers at the University of Pittsburgh. The test is a simple Google Form that presents the…

  • Retro Futures: War Games

    Can a 1983 movie thriller about computers and the military tell us anything about drone warfare today?  In 1984, my lifelong friend Juliet and I were watching a then-recent movie, War Games, at my parents’ house. This was in the early years of home video. The first Blockbuster store had yet to open, and Tim Berners-Lee…

  • The Digital Cyrano

    How realistic is the idea that an AI-driven “digital intimacy assistant” could help a shy man woo somebody he finds attractive? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Flyrt about Chris, a shy man, Roxy, the woman he finds attractive, and Cyr, a snarky, AI-powered “digital intimacy assistant”…

  • Flyrt, a Microfiction

    Can an AI-powered digital intimacy assistant help a shy man finally talk with the woman of his dreams? CHRIS couldn’t tear his attention from Roxy. In the office complex cafeteria line, passing in the art-filled lobby, during the occasional shared elevator ride, he found the flash of her overheard wit, the sparkle of her eyes, the…

  • New Cracks in Reality

    Deep fakes, voice cloning, and other technologies are making fraud more convincing and widespread than ever, but there’s another threat to our ability to answer “what is real?”  An ongoing topic here is how answers to the question “what is real?” keep changing as new technologies (Generative AI in particular) make it easier to create…

  • Who Are We?

    When technology enables us to change our personalities to help us achieve our goals, what duty does the first personality have to the second and vice versa? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Mr. Hyde’s Letter about Tim and Timothy—two aspects of the same man—in which Timothy…

  • Mr. Hyde’s Letter, a Microfiction

    What happens when a man takes medication to change his personality, but the new personality has his own opinions? Timothy’s constipated mind pushed to slow, thick wakefulness. Only a wail from his bladder stopped him from plummeting back to sleep. He felt his way to the toilet and sat, too groggy to aim. A long…

  • We Need New AI Analogies

    Tomorrow’s AIs are both more embodied than HAL from 2001 and less robotic than Rosie or Data. A better analogy comes from a surprisingly old story. Typically, in science fiction and popular understanding, AIs and robots (or drones) fall into distinct, although overlapping, categories. Robots are autonomous single entities that move through the physical world…

  • Chatting with Chat

    Access to ChatGPT’s new voice interface turned into a long conversation while I walked in the summer sun. The results were mixed. To paraphrase and tweak a famous quote usually attributed to H.L. Mencken, nobody has ever lost money by overestimating the laziness of the human mind. To put it more generously, we humans have a lot…