If you pay attention to the music industry, you've probably heard about spatial audio. The promise is that music will envelop the user from all directions without needing a room full of speakers to achieve the effect. Apple has pushed it a lot in the last few years, in Apple Music, its line of AirPods headphones and the latest HomePod speaker. Amazon's streaming service also offers spatial audio, and its Echo Studio speaker can play back compatible tracks. Sonos has been paying attention, as well – its recent Arc and Beam soundbars support Dolby Atmos for movies, and now the company is releasing its first music speaker designed for spatial audio, the Era 300.

Of the two speakers Sonos announced earlier this month, the Era 100 is much easier to sum up: it's a replacement for the Sonos One, which was first introduced in 2017. Unlike the Era 300, there's no need to ponder the value of spatial audio; the Era 100 is a relatively straightforward mono speaker, just like the One and the Play:1 before it. Don't let that simple description deceive you, though – the $250 Era 100 is a complete redesign, inside and out, and the end result is a worthy upgrade and a very versatile speaker. At first glance, the Era 100 looks quite similar to the One, but upon further examination you'll notice a number of small but meaningful changes. That starts with the vertically-oriented Sonos logo that you'll find on most of their other speakers like the Roam and, naturally, the Era 300.

I've never really admired Sonos' speakers for their actual sound quality. But the main draw of a Sonos speaker is the technology behind the grill. Boasting integrations with Alexa, Apple, Google, and virtually every music streaming service worth mentioning, the multiroom-capable system is the most convenient way to listen to everything, everywhere, all at once. With the new Era 100, Sonos finally wipes the floor with competitors when it comes to sound quality too. With stereo tweeters and a more advanced room tuning feature, this is a single speaker that easily holds its own with everything but more expensive two-speaker systems.

The internet has been enthralled with the rise of AI starting with the introduction of the Artificial Intelligence image generation program DALL-E 2 to the public in November 2022. Programs like ChatGPT have already begun to change how we use the internet, and huge organizations such as Microsoft and the British government have started investing hundreds of millions of dollars into creating new AI technology. AI is going to be around for a while and, like with every other advancement in technology, will inevitably cause some problems. Programs like ChatGPT have the potential to radically change how we interact with our devices, but that potential needs to be realized while understanding the limits of the technology and protecting the rights of workers. Before we unpack what limits may need to be placed on AI, it is important to understand what makes the tech useful. Recently, the introduction of the massively improved GPT-4 has shown that AI has the potential to be a great asset to society.

Artificial intelligence is more prevalent than ever, with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google all offering easily available AI tools. The technology could change the world, but experts also say it's something to be cautious of. Some chatbots are even advanced enough to understand and create natural language, based on the online content they are trained on. Chatbots have taken advanced tests, like the bar exam, and scored well. The models can also write computer code, create art and much more.

An image of Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic church, wearing a large, white puffer jacket has gone viral on social media in the past few days. The 86-year-old pontiff looks stylish, with many people commenting on his fashionable clothes. There is just one problem: the image isn't real. The pictures above were generated by the artificial intelligence Midjourney, which produces images based on text prompts, and were posted on Reddit on 24 March by an artist who goes by the name of u/trippy_art_special. The user's account has since been suspended, but one image (the left-hand one) has since spread across Twitter, where it has fooled many.

Luk Kop didn't seem to have the makings of a musical prodigy. He didn't hum made-up tunes to himself as a youngster or shake his head when someone sang flat. He didn't build instruments out of sticks and gourds or blow trumpet solos as a five-year-old. He had a brief moment of fame as a child actor, in the Disney film "Operation Dumbo Drop," but grew into a sullen and ungainly teen. When the composer and instrumentalist Dave Soldier first met him, in Thailand, in 2000, Luk Kop spent most of his time eating grass and hanging around with the other elephants.

As someone who used to commute through Penn Station, I appreciated William Finnegan's piece about the transit hub and its troubles ("The Way Things Work," March 13th). In 2012, I moved from Brooklyn to suburban New Jersey. I work in urban planning; at the time, I described my new town as a planner's paradise, owing to its walkability and to the fact that my journey to my midtown office seemed to be only about ten minutes longer than it had been when I was taking the subway. Over time, however, the extra ten minutes became an additional half hour, thanks to frequent delays caused by downed wires, signal troubles, and stalled trains. Because of this, when my office called us back to work in person, I decided to find a local job.

Boston: AI is becoming more prevalent in everyday situations but there is still distrust. The challenge is overcoming that barrier. When you scan the headlines on your favourite news app each morning, do you ever stop to think who -- or what -- wrote the story? The assumption is there are human beings doing the work. But it's also possible an algorithm wrote it.

An image generated by DALL-E 2 from information submitted by artist Rebecca Brewer.Rebecca Brewer/Handout The Vancouver artist Rebecca Brewer is a painter; they apply oils to wood panels to create dreamscapes that hover between the abstract and the representational, offering a low viewpoint or hallucinogenic take on tangled images that might evoke the forest floor or the ocean depths but can't be pinned down. Inspired by the 17th-century tradition of sottobosco, still life paintings of undergrowth, Brewer brings attention to the overlooked or hidden, and lets the viewer glimpse images in their figures the way one might see shapes in clouds. To make work for their recent show at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver, they wondered if some artificial intelligence might help conjure up these surreal images. "I started to fool around with the Open AI tool DALL-E, developing ideas for the show," they said in a recent interview, explaining how they fed descriptions of the effects they had wished to achieve in previous paintings into the program. I could get to something quite similar to what I had in mind." Brewer resubmitted versions of the best AI-generated images along with new prompts into the program and eventually incorporated a few examples into their new works, projecting the computer-generated imagery onto panels and then painting them. Sabrina Ratté's exploration of the blurred line between tech and humanity is making her an art world star "I felt I was very creatively involved.