Ai
Story Stream
Infinity Engines March 13, 2025
Lucid dreaming is an excellent model for understanding the future of video games. Consider a sample dream scenario: you’re running across a concrete, parapet-perimetered, rectangular rooftop of some nondescript multi-story building, the wind whistlin...
Where Has the Left’s Technological Audacity Gone? March 13, 2025
Techno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more.In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled “Effective Acceler...
The Sensitive Young Meme March 12, 2025
One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares o...
The Last Good Place on the Internet March 04, 2025
The internet was probably never a net pleasant or edifying place. For most of its life, the web has been a repository for maladjusted losers and the collective id, a ceaseless stream-of-consciousness delivered by mass humanity at its most gormless an...
High Infidelity March 04, 2025
Sunday’s Oscars ceremony was a productive night for The Brutalist, which scooped up the statuettes for cinematography, score, and best actor. Since the film’s release late last year, the deluge of acclaim for Brady Corbet’s epic, three-and-a-half hou...
Hollywood’s Obsession With AI-enabled ‘Perfection’ March 03, 2025
The notion of authenticity in the movies has moved a step beyond the merely realistic. More and more, expensive and time-consuming fixes to minor issues of screen realism have become the work of statistical data renderings—the visual or aural product...
Roll Over Shakespeare: ChatGPT Is Here February 24, 2025
Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal—a much anticipated theater production starring Robert Downey Jr., with ChatGPT in a supporting role—I mused how playwrights have been dealing with the implications of AI for over...
Comedians Should Not Be Hot February 19, 2025
There’s a troubling trend afoot.No, it’s not that a bunch of unelected coder-crats are rummaging through the file cabinets at the Pentagon. (Long live the DOGE boys!) It’s not that natural disasters are threatening our cities, or that AI is threateni...
Tempted by the False God of Convenience February 19, 2025
When the phonograph was invented, the composer John Phillip Sousa was heartbroken. In a 1906 article on “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” he worried out loud that recording tools would reduce music from a matter of the heart and soul to a mere mechan...
AI and the Future of Literature February 17, 2025
When Sam Kahn asked if I wanted to have a written debate about AI and literature (after my recent piece ‘Literary Culture Can’t Just Dismiss AI’) I immediately agreed. What a good idea! We conducted the discussion over email for the last couple of we...
The Plays About the End of the World February 14, 2025
In the future, sooner than you think, we’re all going to have computer chips implanted in our brains. Or maybe we’ll all have full-service robot assistants, who will be able to make us a cocktail just how we like it and suggest the perfect jazz playl...
The Ghost in the Machine February 10, 2025
About halfway through the second act of Doomers, Matthew Gasda’s new play, inspired by the ousting of Sam Altman from OpenAI, a camo-wearing think-tank blogger (played by Ira Gamerman) asks the corporate board a question: “Have you heard about the ga...
To Win A.I., Go Nuclear February 05, 2025
Last week, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced Stargate, a massive data center to power artificial intelligence. It promises to be one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in American history. With a price tag as high as half a trillion d...
Do You Need A.I.? February 05, 2025
When I think about the artificial intelligence revolution, I keep returning to a simple dichotomy: need vs. want....
DeepSeek Was Inevitable February 03, 2025
DeepSeek was always going to happen. We just didn’t know who would do it. It was either going to be a startup or someone outside the center of leadership and innovation in AI, which is mostly clustered around trillion-dollar companies in the U.S. It ...
Sam Altman’s Stargate Is Science Fiction February 03, 2025
Stargate is a staggering power grab.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has spent the past year seeking an absurd amount of computing power to train the company’s AI models — one report says Japanese officials literally laughed at the amount of electricity he dema...
What Michael Crichton Reveals About Big Tech and A.I. January 31, 2025
In 1968, a young Michael Crichton, still a student at Harvard Medical School, sent a manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, who had just taken over as editor-in-chief at Knopf. The document had a compelling title, “The Andromeda Strain,” and it featured a fa...
15 Observations About Artificial Intelligence January 30, 2025
Many of my friends still seem to think that AI is “all hype.” On social media, viral posts claim that the progress of AI has stalled; that the technology can at best create shoddier copies of work done by humans; and that it’s only useful to people i...
Reflecting on the AI Crisis in Higher Education January 30, 2025
Higher education faces a crisis at the hands of new “Artificial Intelligence” tools. Everyone is on edge, and sides are being chosen....
Why DeepSeek Is a Gift to the American People January 30, 2025
On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, a 184-pound satellite, into Earth’s orbit. The satellite didn’t do much—it just “beeped” over radio waves. But those beeps sounded a wake-up call for the United States....
DeepSeek Is a Wake-Up Call. Is America Listening? January 29, 2025
On Monday, Nvidia’s stock price fell by 17 percent. The firm, whose chips have powered America’s AI revolution, lost nearly $600 billion in market capitalization—the largest single-day sell-off in history. Other tech stocks plummeted too, with more t...
The Looming Climate vs. AI Civil War January 28, 2025
There is an old European proverb: “Where two fight, a third one wins.”Anyone with eyes to see the misaligned interests of our major industrial factions can see that an existential clash is coming between the climate industry and artificial intelligen...
'Doomers' Looks at What AI Means for the Future January 27, 2025
I wrote my play Doomers partly because, the night Sam Altman was fired, I was performing in a play called Zoomers....
The New Iconoclasm January 20, 2025
In the historical struggle over images—iconomachy (Eikonomachía)—there is no doubt that in the Christian West the iconophiles were victorious. That said, Byzantine defenders of holy representation could not possibly have foreseen how, and to what ext...
Inside the Plan to Teach Robots the Laws of War January 03, 2025
“There’s a lot of unemployed philosophers around,” the philosopher told me. “But how many of them want to go work for the military?” I’d reached out to Peter Asaro, who is also a professor of media at the New School and the vice chair of the Internat...
