Tag Archives: books

Amazon’s virtual shelves already feature books written by artificial intelligence. One startup believes that even titles written by humans would benefit from some AI, in the form of an accompanying chatbot primed to talk about a book’s contents. YouAI, a startup that offers tools for building AI apps, recently developed …

The Luddites arrived on the streets of San Francisco much as they did in the English factories two centuries ago: under cover of darkness and with iconic weapons in hand. In this case, traffic cones. An enterprising activist had observed (or perhaps gotten an insider tip) that placing an object …

Journalist Taylor Lorenz isn’t the first to declare legacy media a dead industry walking. But few voice it with the conviction that she does—and an even more vigorous claim that they know its successor. The future of media, she says, lies in social media influencers and the “creator economy.” Let’s …

Peter Watts is the author of some of the darkest and most thoroughly researched science fiction novels ever written. One of his early fans was horror author Theresa DeLucci, who read his debut novel Starfish while working at Tor Books in the early 2000s. “I had never really read a …

Imagine, for a moment, that one of the world’s most beloved and successful journalists had, in 1994, embedded himself in OJ Simpson’s world. Imagine that this writer had been reporting an uplifting rags-to-riches biography of the famous football player for months, only to find himself hunched over scribbling notes in …

Soheil Feizi considers himself an optimistic person. But the University of Maryland computer science professor is blunt when he sums up the current state of watermarking AI images. “We don’t have any reliable watermarking at this point,” he says. “We broke all of them.” For one of the two types …

Let me just be honest: Patrick Stewart brings out my daddy issues. That keen gaze, alternately steely and compassionate. That warrior-monk profile, disciplined and ascetic. And, of course, the Shakespearean cadences that wash over your mind and soul like a lullaby. For more than three decades, as Star Trek’s Jean-Luc …

Amazon has an artificial intelligence problem. Namely, that its “everything store” is filled with books authored by bots. Several AI detection startups say they have a straightforward solution to help customers: Tell them when a book is AI-generated. Thus far, though, Amazon isn’t embracing detection tech. It’s unclear exactly how …

Abby Goldsmith’s science fiction novel Majority tells the story of a group of young people from Earth who get abducted by the Torth, a galaxy-spanning civilization ruled by merciless telepaths. “There’s a galactic empire, and these people are all neurally, superluminally connected,” Goldsmith says in Episode 550 of the Geek’s …

Six or seven years ago, I realized I should learn about artificial intelligence. I’m a journalist, but in my spare time I’d been writing a speculative novel set in a world ruled by a corporate, AI-run government. The problem was, I didn’t really understand what a system like that would …