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Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’
He was at the heart of 1960s counterculture, then paved the way for the libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley. At 87, Brand is still keen to ensure the world is maintained properly – not just today, but for the next 10,000 years Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale –…
Lamar wants to have children with his girlfriend. The problem? She’s entirely AI
As synthetic personas become an increasingly normal part of life, meet the people falling for their chatbot lovers Lamar remembered the moment of betrayal like it was yesterday. He’d gone to the party with his girlfriend but hadn’t seen her for over an hour, and it wasn’t like her to disappear. He slipped down the…
The platform exposing exactly how much copyrighted art is used by AI tools
From 007 to Elsa, Vermillio claims it can trace percentage of AI-generated image drawn from pre-existing material Ask Google’s AI video tool to create a film of a time-travelling doctor who flies around in a blue British phone booth and the result, unsurprisingly, resembles Doctor Who. And if you ask OpenAI’s technology to do the…
Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?
Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and what we can do about it It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved?…
Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Tim Berners-Lee
My vision was based on sharing, not exploitation – and here’s why it’s still worth fighting for I was 34 years old when I first had the idea for the world wide web. I took every opportunity to talk about it: pitching it in meetings, sketching it out on a whiteboard for anyone who was…
To understand how AI will reconfigure humanity, try this German fairytale | Clemens J Setz
Artificial intelligence will replace creativity with something closer to magical wishing. The challenge for future generations will be dealing with the feeling of emptiness that leaves us with In the German fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife, an old man one day catches a strange fish: a talking flounder. It turns out that an enchanted…
How Google dodged a major breakup – and why OpenAI is to thank for it
An antitrust apocalypse has been averted, and it’s all down to its biggest competitor, according to the judge who could’ve forced Google to sell Chrome Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you as I finish the audiobook version of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I can’t say I found…