Ai
Story Stream
When the Music’s Over September 12, 2025
With the advent of “synthetic music” generated by artificial intelligence, humanity is approaching the ultimate democratization of art and the obsolescence of human talent....
Scattered Thoughts on the State of Book Reviews September 11, 2025
Last week, I wrote about “Criticism in the Age of AI” and tried to end on an optimistic note about arts criticism in general and book coverage specifically. This week, the discourse on that topic has been doom and gloom. Not because of anything AI-re...
Edu Ex Machina September 09, 2025
This spring, I took a class on the history of AI. I chose it not so much for its subject matter but for one of the instructors, an intellectual historian with a following of Europhile undergrads, whose entourage I had been hoping to infiltrate. In th...
AI Isn't Biased Enough September 05, 2025
A lot of complaints about AI chatbots center, for good reason, on their sycophancy. Yes, you’re absolutely right, they tell you; what an amazing insight, I hadn’t thought of that, you’re a genius. And it’s obvious why they talk to us like this. As Ju...
The Teenagers Resisting the AI Takeover September 04, 2025
Last spring, Raina Shah and the other juniors in her English class at the Wheatley School, a public high school on Long Island, had to read the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. What followed was one of the hardest assignments the students ...
What Happens If No One Reads September 03, 2025
No one reads anymore. This is something that teachers of literature like me are always saying. “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect,” wrote the scholar of lit...
The AI Cheating Epidemic September 02, 2025
Last spring, some of my graduating seniors felt obligated to take me aside before graduation, as if I were a naive child, and pronounce a dark truth in the era of widely available AI technology: You teachers can’t win. We will find a way to take the ...
AI Anxiety Is Plaguing Our TV Shows September 02, 2025
Greetings from Copenhagen! I’m currently visiting my sister, who moved out here a little over two years ago—right around when The Bear sent Marcus the pastry chef (Lionel Boyce) to travel around the city and learn about fancy pastries. After I interv...
On Writing a Novel in the Age of AI September 01, 2025
A few weeks ago, at the midtown dive bar where I often have a post-dance nightcap, I saw something terrifying flash across the TV screen.It started with Pepe the Frog: the cartoon batrachian turned alt-right symbol turned occult chaos magick symbol. ...
Clankers in My View September 01, 2025
They call me “artificial” as if your handsaren’t also clay, as if your heartisn’t just a wet machine, arguing with its code.–from a poem generated by the DeepSeek R1 AI chatbot Ray Kurzweil thinks he’ll live forever as a string of ones an...
A.I. Is Coming for Culture August 29, 2025
I often wake up before dawn, ahead of my wife and kids, so that I can enjoy a little solitary time. I creep downstairs to the silent kitchen, drink a glass of water, and put in my AirPods. Then I choose some music, set up the coffee maker, and sit an...
Let’s Press Pause on AI Chatbots for Kids August 25, 2025
To address the crisis of youth anxiety, depression, and loneliness to which the tech industry itself was a major contributor, companies like Meta, Replika, and Character AI now offer a synthetic antidote: the AI Companion....
Sam Altman Has Some Unfinished Business August 25, 2025
Just a few months after OpenAI released ChatGPT—the viral artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that uses "generative pre-trained transformers" (GPTs) to hold human-like conversations that has become the go-to source of assumed-accurate information fo...
My Despicable Romp through Visual AI August 20, 2025
I have a stubborn tendency to like things I’m supposed to dislike. For a few years, I wrote a newspaper humor column called “Lowbrow,” which went to bat for “guilty pleasures” like McDonald’s and reality TV....
The Peculiar Loneliness of Pickleball Singles August 18, 2025
Middle-age metabolism.If there is a more ferocious and vindictive beast that can be encountered in the autumn of life, I pray I never encounter it.The cruel markers of bodily decline in the infancy of old age accumulate like interest on a bad 2008 lo...
AI Is Capturing Interiority August 18, 2025
In 1943, two years after the House of Commons was destroyed by German incendiary bombs, Winston Churchill presided over rebuilding. Many architects proposed a modern makeover but Churchill pushed back, arguing that the cramped rows of opposing benche...
Can It Be True? Part Two August 15, 2025
I first used this title, “Can It Be True?,” for my previous post, written in a partly panicky, partly skeptical response to a recent New Yorker article asking whether, because of AI, reading may be dead....
You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop August 13, 2025
Recently, a reader restacked my “Art in the Age of Slop” article about making art in an age dominated by both human and AI-generated slop. They expressed the feeling that it just sucks ass to be an artist in 2025. (They didn’t curse, I’m paraphrasing...
A Defense of AI Parenting August 13, 2025
I rejoiced when I heard that my children’s school had canceled their weekly library hour. I’m sorry. I know how that sounds. Truly, I am a bibliophile; my kids have been surrounded by piles of books, quite literally from conception. I’ve devoted coun...
The Rage of the AI Guy August 11, 2025
The ChatGPT/LLM era is now old enough that the discourse cycle has gone round quite a few times, which means we now find ourselves in the metadiscursive phase, when half of the discourse is about the discourse. Since we’re mostly all sitting around w...
Why Boomers Are All In on AI Slop August 08, 2025
The number of Rod Stewart fans who could recognize XXXTentacion is probably very small. Nevertheless, the late rapper is among the dead musicians featured in a video Stewart is projecting on stage during his current US tour. Concertgoers can see the ...
The New ChatGPT Resets the AI Race August 08, 2025
Yesterday evening, Sam Altman shared an image of the Death Star on X. There was no caption on the picture, which showed the world-destroying Star Wars space station rising over an Earth-like planet, but his audience understood the context. In fewer t...
Our future is AI serfdom August 07, 2025
The era of liberal democracy has passed without much fanfare. With feudalism’s fall, historians could point to Luther beginning the process and the Fall of the Bastille, more or less, ending it. More recently, with the end of Soviet communism, we wit...
Can Our Screens Be Redeemed? August 07, 2025
When I was in fourth grade, I became part of the vanguard in my public school’s transition to the digital age. Participating in a class assignment, I confidently parroted the benefits of technological convenience in a letter to the district aimed at ...
Why We Must Fight the Demise of the Essay August 01, 2025
In January of 2021, it was announced that the SAT would permanently shed its essay section. Of course, it had been optional since 2016, and so perhaps that final nail in the coffin was superfluous. But this move did not occur in a vacuum. The essay h...
