Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available pool of quality public data online at the same time that some data owners are blocking access to AI companies. - The Wall Street Journal
Science fiction prides itself on being visionary, but like any literary genre, it just ends up examining whatever issues the author is working through in the present. We just do it more allegorically. - Nautilus
Why are we so afraid to use words freely, to offend with impunity? Whence arose this fetish for the ‘purity’ of the text? I trace the origins of this obsession with textual purity to the triumph of linguistic philosophy in the early 20th century. - Psyche
The heart of the problem is that chatbots are designed to identify the quickest path to an answer, which rarely involves reading everything. It is simply never a wild guess to predict that the heroine of a 19th-century romance will get the guy. - Nautilus
"Chilean politicians have been plundering for years. So I thought: why not explore theft almost as if it were an artistic intervention, and see what happens next? My life at the time was quite punk. I was in a rock band and interested in radical artistic ideas.” - The Guardian (UK)
There are the bleedover emotions. There’s the tendency at a party to hide in a corner with an e-reader app open, looking like readers are scrolling Insta. And then … there’s the budget. - Book Riot
Linda Holmes is not just any critic, but host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and an alum of the revered sarcastic review site Television Without Pity. Holmes is also a novelist. How does she deal with reviews of her work, and, more broadly, how does a critic deal with criticism? - Slate
To have such solicitous faculty on hand to advocate for students’ interests is, depending on how you look at it, either wonderfully supportive or repulsively infantilizing. - Hedgehog Review
Evidently, the time is ripe for a survey of the branch of cultural production concerned with the end of the world. And yet, tales have been told about it for as long as we’ve been doing story. - Literary Review
The idea that we have rights is an unquestioned certainty, but rights are also often a source of considerable conflict in the modern world. Which rights do we actually possess? Do animals have rights? - 3 Quarks Daily
Protopias, on the other hand, are achievable. They present a realistic, better tomorrow. But even the protopian visions of more recent iterations of Star Trek, she notes, do not necessarily grapple with our most immediate crises. - NPR
In the contemporary world, the self is no longer a subject but a project. The self is something to be optimised, to be maximised, to be made efficient, cultivated for its capacity for productive output. The worry is that all life activities become viewed as lines on a résumé. - Psyche
Time was the problem, I assumed: There was enough of it; I just wasn’t using it right. Or maybe the problem was my attention span. I couldn’t focus. - Esquire
Hinst for fake-info spotting every day of the year: “Stop when you see something that's 'too good to be true, or too crazy to be believable, or too-anger inducing.’” - NPR
In pursuit of info, the first season of the actor’s podcast “featured guests like Carol Burnett (90), Isabel Allende (81) and Darlene Love (82). The second ... includes Julie Andrews (88), Patti Smith (77) and Ina Garten (76).” That’s many years of accumulated ideas, and, sometimes, wisdom. - The New York Times
