The US immigration service wants to raise visa costs from $460 (£385) to $1,615 (£1,352) alongside other changes that artists and their managers say would make it almost impossible for anyone but the biggest stars to perform in the US. - The Guardian
Polyglot texts (texts using multiple languages) have become increasingly common; they are salvos fired against arrogant monolingualism. Monolingual English speakers would do best to join the multilingual world and welcome these texts. - The Conversation
It’s easy to imagine many productive uses of the metaverse, from educational to virtual meetings to entertainment. And most of these are already underway in some form or another. The consumer opportunities are clear: “Every year, US$54 billion is spent on virtual goods.” - 3 Quarks Daily
A ceaseless and faultless archive of mental images is instantly available; every configuration of clouds he has ever witnessed can be compared to the patterned endpapers of every book he has ever opened. But this prodigious memory proves useless, an obstruction to thought. - New York Review of Books
The Grand Falls, N.L., native and Canadian household name had a storied acting career spanning dozens of films and TV projects over six decades, including Due South, The Red Green Show, Babar and the Adventures of Badou, The Grand Seduction and The Shipping News. - CBC
From the 18th century to the 21st, the stats keep rising — number of words, number of entries, number of volumes — and the rival publications proliferate: Compton’s, Caxton’s, Collier’s, Grolier’s, the Oxford and the Columbia, to name a few. - Washington Post
The editors of three science fiction magazines — Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction — said this week that they had been flooded by submissions of works of fiction generated by A.I. chatbots. - The New York Times
Unlike existing, but newly popular, artificial intelligence (AI) systems which are designed to perform specific tasks such as image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing, artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems will be super-AI systems that will be able to learn anything. - Shelly Palmer
Sports are a harbinger of a future of surveillance that is more intrusive, multitudinous, and expansive. But they aren’t just showing us the future. Sometimes, they’re directly bringing it about. - The Atlantic
And, from the super secret ballots revealed in their entirety here, it sure looks like Todd Field is going to win Best Director for TÁR. - Los Angeles Times
The game won't be ready for years - but by the time it is, players will have watched "content" for it on TikTok, read graphic novels, and more. "What if we try to build this IP slightly in reverse. ... What if we didn’t start with gaming?" - Los Angeles Times
Clarkesworld publisher Neil Clarke says some people submitting AI content are "listening to all these experts on TikTok and YouTube that say, ‘Hey, you can make some money, just pop this into ChatGPT and then submit the text to this list of sites.’" - BuzzFeed
