Artificial intelligence

You Talkin’ to Me?

by Meghan O’Gieblyn,

From “Sentience and Sensibility,” which was published in the September/October issue of The Baffler. It was all too easy to dismiss the Washington Post story about Blake Lemoine—the Google engineer…

Made, Not Begotten

by Loren C. Eiseley,

This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the great age, make no mistake about it; the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with…

Routine Maintenance

by Meghan O’Gieblyn,

Embracing habit in an automated world

From “The Anti-Extinction Engine,” which appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of The Yale Review. In Good Morning Revolution—a volume of Langston Hughes’s contributions to revolutionary magazines—there is a small…

Motherboard Issues

by Vladimir Alexeev,

From a conversation between Vladimir Alexeev, a data journalist, and GPT-3, a language generator developed by the artificial-intelligence laboratory OpenAI. GPT-3 learned to respond to questions by analyzing online data.…

Search and Destroy

by Joanne McNeil,

By Joanne McNeil, from Lurking: How a Person Became a User, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A user of Google products might be put off by the…

The Silicon Mystique

by Walter Kirn,

If I’m having trouble sleeping and feel like spinning my wheels in the dark, I like to meditate on the simulation hypothesis—the idea that we’re living inside a kind of…

Hanging by a Thread

From descriptions generated by two AIs of ten Rorschach inkblots. The AIs were part of an MIT project released in April, to examine the influence of biased data on machine…

Known Unknowns

by James Bridle,

Here’s a story about how machines learn. Say you are the US Army and you want to be able to locate enemy tanks in a forest. The tanks are painted…

The Minds of Others

by David Bromwich, Garth Greenwell, Hanif Abdurraqib, Kelly Clancy, Laila Lalami, Mychal Denzel Smith, T. M. Luhrmann,

The art of persuasion in the age of Trump

Deep Blues

by Zhiyan Chen,

From a conversation between Chen Zhiyan, a Chinese journalist, and three chatbots: Chicken Little, Little Ice, and Little Knoll. The interview was conducted on WeChat, a social-networking platform. It was…

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