My name on the platform is ri611. Or h924092b12ee797f, depending on who’s paying me. I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot’s tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I’ll…

“It isn’t absurd,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1947, “to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity.” The proposition is looking less absurd by the day: AI may eventually turn on us; industrialization has turned the planet against us;…

A lot of healthy diets are considered to be just as good for your brain as they are for your body. But one in particular, which is usually recommended for lowering blood pressure, may be particularly good when it comes to protecting your cognitive function, a recent study suggests. An international…

Books Soccer stadiums can be dominated by violence, tribalism, chauvinism, and near-religious fervor‚ animated by the memory of old hostilities and the power of ritual. February 23, 2026 The founders of the global soccer tournament imagined that they might bring the people of the world together.…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China by Ya-Wen Lei Princeton University Press, 398 pp., $120.00;…

In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to…

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it…

The Financial Page Silicon Valley envisions artificial intelligence ushering in an era of economic plenty. But what if the benefits are largely confined to corporations and investors that own the technology itself? January 12, 2026 Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., onstage at a tech conference in…

As you get older, your body will invariably begin to shed muscle. This age-related decline in muscle mass starts at about age 30 and accelerates after you turn 60. It can cause a loss of strength, endurance and mobility. Severe muscle loss in older adults, known as sarcopenia, can lead to sickness,…

“Developing superintelligence is now in sight,” says Mark Zuckerberg, heralding the “creation and discovery of new things that aren’t imaginable today.” Powerful AI “may come as soon as 2026 [and will be] smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields,” says Dario Amodei, offering the…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen Witt Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 389 pp.,…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: Strangers and Pilgrims: Tales by Walter de la Mare with an introduction by Mark Valentine Carlton-in-Coverdale: Tartarus, 2 volumes, 592…

Earlier this week, I stopped for breakfast in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a largely Hispanic neighborhood where street vendors sell tamales and rice pudding out of orange Gatorade coolers. I speak some Spanish, but I wanted to test out Apple’s new “Live Translation” feature, which has been advertised as…

A few years back, my dad was diagnosed with a tumour on his tongue – which meant we had some choices to weigh up. My family has an interesting dynamic when it comes to medical decisions. While my older sister is a trained doctor in Western allopathic medicine, my parents are big believers in…

Annals of Inquiry Scientists consider whether we’ve been visited by aliens or their technology. September 7, 2025 Illustration by Lina Müller When I was growing up, I watched a lot of sci-fi movies about aliens that come to Earth. The extraterrestrials in popular culture, however, always looked so…

Just off the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway, the hotel’s rooftop bar is open late. The bartender passes out shots and turns Ozzy up. It’s 11:37 pm on a hot July night in Cape Canaveral, Florida, when our heads all swivel in the same direction. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off, its orange plume…

Infinite Scroll Artificial-intelligence startups, like the makers of the “smart” web browser Dia, are being acquired for vast sums. But it’s not yet clear which products can transcend the hype. September 24, 2025 Illustration by Ariel Davis You’re reading Infinite Scroll, Kyle Chayka’s weekly column…

AI is not an agent – AI is a tool AI is not an agent – AI is a tool Published on6 Aug 2025 Written by Anoush Margaryan Professor Anoush Margaryan, Visiting Research Fellow at the OII considers how we should frame AI: competitor, collaborator, or tool? AI is not an agent – AI is a tool In a recent…

Sign up for Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in…

Open Questions GPT-5, a new release from OpenAI, is the latest product to suggest that progress on large language models has stalled. August 12, 2025 Illustration by Shira Inbar For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. Much of the euphoria and dread…

Sam Altman promised "PhD-level intelligence." Users got a model that thinks Oregon is called "Onegon" and Joe Biden is still president. OpenAI's GPT-5, billed as the company's most advanced AI yet, has sparked widespread disappointment and ridicule since its Thursday launch, with users reporting…

It’s nearing the 91st minute, and Italian striker Sofia Cantore is moving with the ball through Norway’s defensive third with purpose. She zigs and she zags, before a narrow opening appears. In the distance, Italy’s captain Cristiana Girelli is waving Cantore down, as she’s running towards goal.…

Language is meaningless without context. The sentence “I’m going to war” is ominous when said by the president of the United States but reassuring when coming from a bedbug exterminator. The problem with AI chatbots is that they often strip away historical and cultural context, leading users to be…

Most people’s browser tabs are filled with unread news articles. Mine are filled with AI agents and ghost clicks. I have four instances of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent—the generative AI tool released last week, which can run searches and perform tasks on the web—already open with each running in its own…

Since its launch in November 2022, hundreds of millions of people have used ChatGPT to write wedding toasts, college essays, apology texts, bad jokes and even worse poetry. Billy Ray — Oscar-nominated screenwriter and unapologetic human being — is not one of them. Ray, whose writing credits include…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna Harper, 274 pp., $32.00 The…

back to thedrum.com By Editor D&AD | article This content is produced by a publishing partner of Open Mic. Open Mic is the self-publishing platform for the marketing industry, allowing members to publish news, opinion and insights on thedrum.com. Find out more June 30, 2025 | 5 min read Drawing…

The story unfolds so rapidly that it can all seem, at a glance, preordained. After transferring to Columbia last fall, as Chungin “Roy” Lee tells it, he used AI to cheat his way through school, used AI to cheat his way through internship interviews at Amazon and Meta—he received offers from both—and…

Companies that rushed to replace human labor with AI are now shelling out to get human workers to fix the technology's screwups. As the BBC reports, there's now something of a cottage industry for writers and coders who specialize in fixing AI's mistakes — and those who are good at it are using the…

The subtitles for one of Crunchyroll’s newest anime series make it pretty clear that the company is going all in on ChatGPT. This week as viewers logged on to Crunchyroll to check out Studio Gokumi’s Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, many were surprised to see that the series’ subtitles were…

In a world increasingly shaped by cultural complexities, contested histories, and fragmented narratives, the act of translation emerges as a vital, dynamic process. It is not simply a matter of converting language from one form to another but an ongoing negotiation between meanings, perspectives,…

A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant…

Who has the highest IQ in history? One answer would be: a 10-year-old girl from Missouri. In 1956, according to lore, she took a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and recorded a mental age of 22 years and 10 months, equivalent to an IQ north of 220. (The minimum score needed to get into Mensa is…

Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers of innovation radically…

One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses, of course, who would rather foster intrinsic motivation than pay…

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen. I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had…

Listen to this story BRYAN JOHNSON wants to live for ever. The American businessman pops a hundred pills a day, never eats after 11am, and obsessively monitors dozens of his body’s “biomarkers”. The goal, as he will tell anyone who asks, is not merely to live a few years longer. It is to vanquish…

Generative-AI companies have been selling a narrative of unprecedented, endless progress. Just last week, OpenAI introduced GPT-4.5 as its “largest and best model for chat yet.” Earlier in February, Google called its latest version of Gemini “the world’s best AI model.” And in January, the Chinese…

Under Review In the cultural wasteland of the Reagan era, they showed that a band could break through to mass appeal without being cheesy, or nostalgic, or playing hair metal. November 13, 2024 Photograph by Richard E. Aaron / Redferns / Getty Three-quarters of the way through Richard Linklater’s…