Artificial intelligence

Cars ruined cities. Anyone can see that cities built before the invention of the automobile are incomparably more beautiful and serene than anything built after them. The contrast between Los Angeles and Prague is unmistakable. But people like things that move fast and make life easier, which means we’re stuck with the modern city hellscape whether we like it or not. And today, the same is true for AI. The contrast between the internet five years ago and today is unmistakable: content-slop, workslop, AI-generated comments, fake opinions and phony judgments, trite phrases, apocalyptic hysteria, the biggest intellectual-property heist in human history – all because of the invention of Large Language

Homo sapiens, as a species, is programmed to anticipate death, disaster and apocalypse. The monster in the mere, the ague that comes from the east, the flood that wipes out all living creatures outside the Ark. The reason children – and adults in horror movies – are scared of the dark is because darkness is where predators strike. We have a sensible evolutionary fear of things that go bump in the night. For thousands of years it was possible to argue this primal fear of apocalypse was overwrought. No matter what humans did, or did not do, we were incapable of destroying ourselves and anything that might destroy us in

For years, retailers have been behaving like needy friends. My phone would ping. “Hi there!” an email would read, “We’ve missed you.” Who could this be? I would wonder happily, before realizing that the warm and loving message was from someone in the marketing department of the emporium from which I’d once bought a couple of pairs of expensive shoes. Emma usually, or Olivia. With the advent of artificial intelligence, though, personalized, over-the-top PR is getting much, much worse. At least in the past you’d needed an actual Emma to send these emails, some girl who’d gone into marketing, typing enthusiastic nonsense all day. There was at least a human

With both the djinn and AI, we encounter answers that sound true, feel true, but lead us miles off the path

‘My best guess is that someone born today has a better chance of dying by AI than of graduating high school’

‘It won’t be long,’ says Yonatan Dor, ‘before screen actors are a thing of the past’