Category: AI

  • 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…

  • 13 Ways of Looking at Brands

    Brands have different functions in our lives, some easy to understand and some that deserve extra pondering. A few days ago, my friend Om Malik reached out with these questions about brands: I am thinking about something and wanted to get a better idea of what it means to be a music artist or a media company…

  • Democratizing Digital Deception

    Will bad actors use digital duplicates of our dead loved ones against us? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called “Hacking the Dead” about Trix, a corporate spy who influences the digital duplicate of an equity analyst’s beloved dead mother in order to change his mind…

  • Hacking the Dead, a Microfiction

    When a company planning an IPO wants to influence a skeptical analyst, they go about it in a sneaky way that involves Generative AI. I’ve been experimenting with microfictions, short SF stories (1,000 words or less) that help me explore and illustrate aspects of how our lives might evolve within digital transformation. Here, then, is another…

  • Who Am I This Time?

    New developments in Generative AI promise that we’ll all have digital BFFs to help us live our best lives, but is this really possible?  Last week, I read an intriguing Psychology Today piece about the next wave of Generative AI powered digital assistants. In “The Emergence of Private LLMs,” John Nosta argues: The role of Large Language…