The Stone and the Shell

Is it funny, or painful, when bots talk about their inner lives?

Does AI provide anything to look forward to, if "super-intelligence" sounds boring?

Like the internet or a magical sidekick, chatbots are reorganizing knowledge to be more interactive and more accessible.

Apple, OpenAI, and Anthropic have three different answers.

While distant reading has taught us a lot about the history of fiction, it hasn’t done much yet to explain why we keep turning pages.

If I'm buying a thinking process, I really need to understand what I see when I look under the hood.

Writing is a way of learning.

Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions.

To understand why neural language models are dangerous (and fascinating), we need to approach them as models of culture.

It resembles the Library of Babel more than HAL.