The art of storytelling is the art of simplification—of giving smooth contours and sharp points to messily loose-ended incidents. That’s why, when artists tell their life stories, the plethora of factual details is secondary to the emotions, the ideas, the insights, and the sublime style that distinguish their art.
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Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage...
What has intelligence? Slime moulds, ants, fifth-graders, shrimp, neurons, ChatGPT, fish shoals, border collies, crowds, birds, you and me?
The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification.
The ocean is a lonely, perilous place. It is especially so when you are aboard a leak-prone wooden vessel laden with a rich cargo of sugar, silks, and opium, like the traders sailing the Quedagh Merchant around India’s southern tip in 1698.
ON FRIDAY WE fit in all of summertime in a day. We pedaled to our favourite pub on the Thames and managed to find a much-coveted seat on the lower dock, right next to the water.
But an ecosystem around text-based generative AI had evolved well before The Atlantic revealed the contents of key datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have been in development since 2017, and OpenAI’s GPT-3, the model that introduced generative AI to the mainstream, hit the world back in 2020.
Imagine a place where you can taste some of the finest wines in the world, enjoy delicious gourmet meals, hike on sea-sprayed oceanfront trails, explore deep ancient caves, surf world class waves, and meet some of the friendliest people anywhere on earth.
What was the World Wide Web like at the start? Long before it became the place we think and work and talk, the air that we (and the bots) now breathe no matter how polluted it’s become?
About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s.
The school year has ended and with it its practice schedules and playoffs, but most sports can be year-round if you want them to be, and now the summer leagues begin, along with the clinics and the development camps.
When it comes to our membership of different social groups, most of us switch between different versions of ourselves multiple times each day.
Most people credit me with the birth of the Brat Pack. That’s flattering, but not really true. What happened was, I destroyed the Brat Pack. The Brat Pack was left for dead on the night I named them in 1985.
Paris, that most presentable of capitals, is being polished before it hosts the Summer Games. Around the Champs-Élysées, where some of the benches date to the 1850s, the seats are getting a new layer of paint before an estimated 15 million visitors arrive to scuff them up again.
There’s no such thing as a miracle cure for weight loss, but the latest obesity drugs seem to come pretty close. People who take Ozempic or other weekly shots belonging to a class known as GLP-1 agonists, after the gut hormone they mimic, can lose a fifth or more of their body weight in a year. Incessant “food noise” fueling the urge to eat suddenly goes silent.