Do you ever find yourself scrolling endlessly through TikTok, or Instagram Reels, and get swept up in the current of the media machine? You flick to the comments to contribute to the discourse and instead find your own thoughts staring right back at you — the same reaction, the same emojis and jokes. You may… Continue reading The algorithm ate my taste — on losing and reclaiming our aesthetic autonomy
Artificial intelligence is all the rage at the moment (plus there’s plenty of rage against it too). AI has blown up in popularity in the past couple of years thanks to large language models or LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude along with generative-AI tools such as Sora and Runway. Many naysayers assert AI is used… Continue reading Will AI Transform Human Thought?
“Artificial intelligence (AI) will be unleashed across the UK to deliver a decade of national renewal”, the UK government has announced. Data centres — the energy-hungry, water-guzzling facilities powering AI — have sprung up at an unprecedented pace across the country. The UK now ranks third globally for data centres, behind only the US and… Continue reading Britain’s data centre frenzy amid the climate emergency
Michael Burry of The Big Short fame has made a $845 million bet against the American AI industry. The question is, why? Well, for a number of years, analysts have alleged that the AI industry is vastly overvalued and exists in a financial bubble, and this month has seen an ongoing and deeper confirmation of… Continue reading AI bubble hits apex as Michael Burry shorts the industry — the new financial union of three tech giants
In the age of digital assistants, chatbots, and generative AI, we’ve all had the occasional encounter with a machine that seems almost human—until it inevitably messes up your grocery list or misinterprets your sarcasm. But here’s a question you might not have considered: should we treat these non-sentient entities with the same manners we use… Continue reading Should you say please and thank you to AI?
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation delivers an urgent call for action. Haidt argues that the evidence is in. Teenagers’ widespread use of smartphones is causing a mental health crisis. Individual, collective and legislative action is required to limit their smartphone access. Haidt begins his book with an allegory. Imagine someone… Continue reading Have smartphones created an ‘anxious generation’? Jonathan Haidt sounds the alarm
Electric vehicles (EVs) are often seen as the panacea to cutting emissions — and air pollution — from transport. Is this view correct? Yes — but only once uptake accelerates. Despite the recent boom in EV purchases, they are still a tiny minority of the cars on the road. We would get more immediate benefit… Continue reading Electric vehicles will start to cut emissions and improve air quality in our cities — but only once they’re common
Fake photography is nothing new. In the 1910s, British author Arthur Conan Doyle was famously deceived by two school-aged sisters who had produced photographs of elegant fairies cavorting in their garden. Today it is hard to believe these photos could have fooled anybody, but it was not until the 1980s an expert named Geoffrey Crawley… Continue reading AI image generation is advancing at astronomical speeds — can we still tell if a picture is fake?
With the proliferation of female robots such as Sophia and the popularity of female virtual assistants such as Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon) and Cortana (Microsoft), artificial intelligence (AI) seems to have a gender issue. This gender imbalance in AI is a pervasive trend that has drawn sharp criticism in the media—even UNESCO warned against the… Continue reading Why is AI mostly female?
People tend to rejoice in the disclosure of a secret. Or, at the very least, media outlets have come to realize that news of “mysteries solved” and “hidden treasures revealed” generate traffic and clicks. So I’m never surprised when I see AI-assisted revelations about famous masters’ works of art go viral. Over the past year… Continue reading How AI is hijacking art history
