Now the problem is how to let in the good bots (like the avatar you send to the Gap to buy you a new pair of pants) and keep out the bad bots (like the thief trying to scrape the data of every Gap customer). The rest of us have to be our own bot detectors. - The New Yorker
"Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period in our own society of which it may someday be possible to say that “nothing happened.” - The Point
“Perhaps you didn’t leave The Odyssey wondering what kind of chief executive Odysseus would be. That’s OK — Forbes has you covered.” - The New York Times
And making money hand over fist, er, phalange over … anyway, the exhibit “is drawing huge crowds by hitching its star to the Poke-verse, using fossil Pokemon to teach about hunting and collecting fossils in the real world.” - NPR
“The experience is just very average — or maybe bad. … It's just me saying, like, ‘I don't know, maybe make a sandwich for yourself’ or whatever.” - San Francisco Chronicle
Monetizing the full gamut of reality, platforms have opened Pandora’s box. Basic tenets of liberal society—democratic integrity and respect for human life—are being corroded. Regulators need to step in. - The Walrus
Despite valiant efforts by activists and reformers, it’s been the dystopians’ world—or at least the realists’—for some time now: an age of techno-feudalism, digital colonialism, the new Jim Code. - Boston Review
In my assessment, Gen Z’s dark and nonsensical humor does not show a lack of moral values, but it’s instead the product of its desire to engage in more authentic conversations about what they believe. - The Conversation
The label of “neo-Luddism” or “digital Luddite” is also being reclaimed by people concerned about labour conditions, society and democracy in an era of AI expansion twinned with personal profit. - The Conversation
Edinburgh has wrestled with for years: what is tourism actually for? If the answer is simply “more visitors, more spending”, the city will keep winning by numbers while residents feel they are losing by experience. - The Conversation
The difficulties of using AI in Africa are also linguistic. By the summer of 2025, only 42 languages in Africa were supported by an LLM, out of more than 2,000 found in the continent; 98 per cent of African languages have no meaningful AI support at all. - Aeon
Boredom isn’t merely the result of a boring external environment, as a schoolchild might think, or inadequate mental resources, as my mother suggested. It is either a mysterious nexus of dysfunction or a healthy adaptive function (it’s complicated) that afflicts both individuals and societies at large. - Portico Quarterly
“Efforts were initially focused around putting in simple black-and-white guardrails, such as forbidding a model from talking about bombs entirely. But these proved clumsy and easy to circumvent. Now, companies are pursuing methods that lean heavily on a philosophical understanding of right and wrong.” - The AI Humanist
According to its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages—which counts business establishments by industry down to the county level going back to 1990—the U.S. has lost a fifth of its movie theaters and nearly a third of its bowling alleys since 2001. - Fortune
