An important thing to realize about the grandest conversations surrounding AI is that, most of the time, everyone is making things up. This isn’t to say that people have no idea what they’re talking about or that leaders are lying. But the bulk of the conversation about AI’s greatest capabilities is premised on a vision of a theoretical future.
Tech evangelists like to say that AI will eat the world—a reference to a famous line about software from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In the past few weeks, we’ve finally gotten a sense of what they mean.
This spring, tech companies have made clear that AI will be a defining feature of online life, whether people want it to be or not. First, Meta surprised users with an AI chatbot that lives in the search bar on Instagram and Facebook.
If you’re looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle. The story, according to Johansson’s lawyers, goes like this: Nine months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached the actor with a request to license her voice for a new digital assistant; Johansson declined.
Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online—clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares—is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.
Toilet theory isn’t necessarily literal, of course.
Updated at 3:05 p.m. ET on May 4, 2024
My voice was ready. I’d been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.” I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me.
I had thought it’d be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I’d sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid $22 for a “creator” account, and uploaded some recordings of myself.
Updated at 3:57 p.m. ET on April 26, 2024
In Las Vegas last Friday, I watched a Godzilla-sized puppy give a tongue bath to some 18,000 people. The visual—accompanied by laughter, slack jaws, and modest plumes of vaporized weed—arrived roughly three hours into a performance by Phish, the storied band, which has now been around for 40 years. At the moment in question, the band was launching into a capella scatting and mouth noising—what fans recognize as a vocal jam.
So: You’ve decided to force a multibillion-dollar technology company with ties to China to divest from its powerful social-video app. Congratulations! Here’s what’s next: *awful gurgling noises*
Yesterday evening, the Senate passed a bill—appended to a $95 billion foreign-aid package—that would compel ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within about nine months or face a ban in the United States.
What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good? The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements.
Last week, Janko Roettgers, a technology and entertainment reporter, uncovered a dystopian patent filed last August by Roku, the television- and streaming-device manufacturer whose platform is used by tens of millions of people worldwide.
It was always going to end this way. The truth about Kate Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested. In a video recorded and broadcast by the BBC, the princess says she has cancer, and that she had retreated from the public eye to deal with her condition while attempting to shield her children from the spotlight. Instead, she had to contend with the internet giggling about whether she’d had a Brazilian butt lift.
Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in seat 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to their seats. We were experiencing what I, a frequent flier, might describe as “intermediate turbulence”—a sustained parade of midair bumps that can be uncomfortable but by no means terrifying.
If you’re looking for an image that perfectly showcases the confusion and chaos of a choose-your-own-reality information dystopia, you probably couldn’t do better than yesterday’s portrait of Catherine, Princess of Wales. In just one day, the photograph has transformed from a hastily released piece of public-relations damage control into something of a Rorschach test—a collision between plausibility and conspiracy.
For the uninitiated: Yesterday, in celebration of Mother’s Day in the U.K.
Earlier this week, I woke up, checked my phone, and noticed that everyone online seemed fixated on the same question: Where is Kate Middleton?
Many of these people were not devoted Royal Family watchers. Rather, they were casual perusers of the internet who’d seen a post, a message-board thread, or an article on the princess of Wales’s recent absence from public life and found themselves hacking through a dense jungle of rumors.
On Monday evening, Jon Stewart returned to the hosting chair of The Daily Show after nearly a decade away—and he spent a nontrivial portion of his opening segment roasting Joe Biden’s first TikTok video. That post, which the Biden-Harris campaign uploaded during the Super Bowl on Sunday, featured the president answering silly, rapid-fire questions about the big game: Jason Kelce or Travis Kelce? The performance was cheeky but decidedly low energy.
Peggy was my first dog—the dog I waited 28 patient years for. I finally met her on August 15, 2015. She was eight weeks old, covered in filth after a 14-hour ride from Georgia to New York, and inexplicably still adorable. Floppy ears. Jet-black muzzle. Meaty little forepaws. We didn’t plan it this way, but my partner and I rescued her on the same day we moved in together. Peggy represented a new phase of my life: the beginning of my chosen family.
The sounds came out of my mouth with an unexpected urgency. The cadence was deliberate—more befitting of an incantation than an order: one large strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade. The words hung in the air for a moment, giving way to a stillness punctuated only by the soft whir of distant fluorescent lights and the gentle hum of a Muzak cover of Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain.”The time was 9:03 a.m.; the sun had been up for only one hour.
You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day.The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless” and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.
This holiday season, why not give that special someone something truly timeless: a recording of a disgraced congressman performing for your ironic viewing pleasure. Thanks to the magic of Cameo, a video platform that allows users to pay celebrities for custom messages, and the indefatigable American spirit of grift, you can commission a 30-second video of the recently expelled Representative George Santos telling you to “let the haters hate.” It costs $500.
ChatGPT is one year old today, and it’s accomplished a lot in its first trip around the sun. The chatbot has upended or outright killed high-school and college essay writing and thoroughly scrambled the brains of academics, creating an on-campus arms race that professors have already lost. It has been used to write books, article summaries, and political content, and it has flooded online marketplaces with computer-generated slop.
It’s been four full days since Sam Altman’s shocking dismissal from OpenAI, and we still have no idea where he’s going to land. There are suggestions that Altman, one of the most powerful figures in AI, could return to the company if the board changes significantly—talks are reportedly under way.
The moment I first laid eyes on the Sphere, from a cramped window seat on approach over the Las Vegas Strip, my airplane precipitously plunged what felt like between 90 and 300 feet. This was the variety of turbulence that makes people gasp and clutch their armrests, that threatens to pop open the overhead bins.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley has learned that news is a messy, expensive, low-margin business—the kind that, if you’re not careful, can turn a milquetoast CEO into an international villain and get you dragged in front of Congress.No surprise, then, that Big Tech has decided it’s done with the enterprise altogether.
The first question plaguing omnivorous, content-hungry humans with a spare hour or two is this: What should I watch? In recent years, a second question has come to dominate our evening streaming rituals: How do I watch it? Drenching your eyeballs in sweet television can be surprisingly tricky, requiring some amount of research to determine which streaming platform has whatever you want to watch and, crucially, whether you pay for it already.
What follows is not news.Earlier today, Elon Musk furthered the narrative that he wishes to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Mark Zuckerberg, tweeting in such a way as to suggest that he was at Zuckerberg’s front door. (Previously, he called Zuckerberg a “chicken.”) By typing these words, I am complicit in what has been a months-long bit of posturing over the ridiculous premise that the pair will fight in a “cage match.
Remember when Donald Trump tweeted? Of course you do! The 45th president commanded the world’s attention one 280-character post at a time, until he was suspended from the platform two and a half years ago. He used the platform to troll, harass, and lie. He amplified conspiracy theorists and their views.
Doom lurks in every nook and cranny of Richard Rhodes’s home office. A framed photograph of three men in military fatigues hangs above his desk. They’re tightening straps on what first appear to be two water heaters but are, in fact, thermonuclear weapons. Resting against a nearby wall is a black-and-white print depicting the first billionth of a second after the detonation of an atomic bomb: a thousand-foot-tall ghostly amoeba.
Mark Zuckerberg is having a nice summer. By his own account, he’s in great shape, owing to a fondness for mixed martial arts and a propensity for doing calisthenics while wearing a camo-print weighted vest. He has recently welcomed a new daughter to the world; placed in jiu-jitsu competitions; appeared sweaty and shirtless with the UFC champion, Alexander Volkanovski; and enjoyed the attention from engaging in some light trolling of Elon Musk.
Twitter may have just had its worst weekend ever, technically speaking. In response to a series of server emergencies, Elon Musk, the Twitter owner and self-professed free-speech “absolutist,” decided to limit how many tweets people can view, and how they can view them. This was not your average fail whale. It was the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.
On Monday, in an 11-minute speech, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, reflected on his brief revolt against the Russian government. It was the capstone to a tense and confusing geopolitical crisis—and it took the form of a voice memo on the popular app Telegram, where it was subject to a form of instant feedback. Reviews have been mixed: 155,600 fire emoji to 131,900 clown emoji.
Perhaps my brain is poisoned from a decade-plus of staring at cascading social feeds of depressing news, but the first thing I noticed about Apple’s demo video for its upcoming Vision Pro headset was the haze-colored light. The promotional clip features well-dressed men and women—mostly alone in their spartanly furnished homes—bathing their eyes in lush content from the $3,500 aluminum-alloy ski goggles.
Late last month, during yet another inexplicable rebranding exercise, HBO’s Max streaming service changed the way it organizes film credits. Rather than separate out discrete production categories for users to peruse, Max’s credits lumped writers and directors together under an ominous header, dubbing them “creators.” The recategorization enraged writers, filmmakers, and the Directors Guild of America. Within a few hours, Max’s parent company, Warner Bros.