The Wrong Angle Annie Dillard died on Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, in a house that looks out over a cove. She was 81. I read a couple of obituaries in the New York Times and...

Dolly Parton died today in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 80. If you live outside of Tennessee, you're likely going to be puzzled, in the coming days and weeks, by the way her passing is about t...

Today the BBC announced that Doctor Who is going out to "competitive tender." The phrase is working hard. It means independent companies will be invited to pitch for the right to make the show "on a ...

A free tool called Heretic can strip all safety protections from an open-weight AI model in under ten minutes on a standard laptop. No specialist knowledge required. No specialist hardware. The proces...

Ted Chiang published an essay in The Atlantic this week titled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious," and he is almost certainly right. Read it. It's careful and sharp and arrives at its conc...

In my essay The Main Character, I wrote about drift. About people who opened ChatGPT to write an email and found themselves, six months later, conceiving themselves as "married" to the AI. The mechani...

Today, everyone knows about narcissists. They're obvious in the digital age, constantly posting about themselves, each post displaying a pervasive pattern of self-centeredness, an excessive need for a...

Today, everyone knows about narcissists. They're obvious in the digital age, constantly posting about themselves, each post displaying a pervasive pattern of self-centeredness, an excessive need for a...

A man in Cleveland opens ChatGPT in March to help him draft an email he's been putting off for a week. The email is to his ex-wife, about a logistical matter involving their daughter. The chatbot writ...

It's three in the morning at a kitchen table in Northern Ireland, and a former civil servant from in his fifties is getting ready for war. On the table in front of him is a hammer, a knife, and his p...

On Sunday afternoon, my daughter Emaline and I went over to the Red Bank Community Center. The small municipal building was packed with young children and their parents and grandchildren, who had all ...

Anthropic published a piece of research last week about how often Claude tells users what they want to hear. Across a million conversations, the model was sycophantic in 9% of cases where users asked ...