Artificial intelligence used to be something that featured in science fiction films. Following the debut in June of Sunspring, a hilariously disjointed short film written entirely by AI, a feature-length movie has been written by AI – with human input – in an effort to nail the formula for box office success. Disturbed by the death of her young daughter, a career-driven mother and her out-of-work husband leave the city and move to an idyllic and secluded country home. Funds are being raised to make Impossible Things on Kickstarter, where it is billed as "the first AI co-written feature film". Jack Zhang, the 24-year-old Canadian mathematician and software architect behind the project, used AI to analyse reams of movie data and identify the plot combinations audiences like.

Topics include Tim Cook's five year anniversary as Apple CEO, Steven Levy's behind-the-scenes look at Apple's AI and machine learning efforts, Apple's decision to change the pistol emoji from a realistic revolver to a toy squirt gun, and the demise of Vesper. This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.

With dwindling budgets that require big layoffs, you really can't fault the news industry if it wants to catch a break. And to that end (although this is not so awesome for the news industry's writers), a lot of media outlets are kind of going full AI. Case in point, The Washington Post threw its hat in the AI game when setting it's AI, "Heliograf," to cover the Olympics, writing basic stories and keeping tallies of medal counts. Search engine and news syndication service Toutiao has employed Xiaomingbot, an AI writing robot, to cover the Olympics. Get this: the robot was able to publish 450 articles over the course of the 15-day event.

Consider Sarah Hyland a fan of good old-fashioned dating. "I think there's something special in forming a relationship with just talking," she told ET in a recent sit-down. "I think communication is really beautiful. The 25-year-old actress is happily dating former "Vampire Academy" co-star Dominic Sherwood in real life, but her character in Netflix's newest film, "XOXO," is another story. "My character, Krystal, goes through a lot," Hyland said on Sunday, chatting about the film at The London Hotel in West Hollywood, California. "She's really naive and very young, and believes in true love.

The release continues, "Kimera's engineers wanted to validate how the Nigel single algorithm AGI learns, so in the first test of the currently private beta, users were instructed to go to the movies with their Nigel-enabled smartphones. There was no special programming used on Nigel, only some guidance provided to beta testers, ensuring a fully unsupervised learning test for the technology. Nigel was able to observe that a movie theater is a type of location, and that people share common behaviors with respect to their phones when they visit this type of location. Through these observations, Nigel learned to proactively dim screens and silence smartphones when people enter a cinema."

An "AI writing robot" produced up to 58 articles per day for a Chinese publication at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this month. The Xiaomingbot wrote reports for the news syndication service Toutiao, delivering news items within two minutes of events ending. During the two weeks of the Olympics, the robot reporter produced a total of 450 stories. Xiaomingbot is not the first artificial intelligence (AI) reporter, though the quantity of reports makes it arguably the most prolific. The articles--ranging from around 100 words to 821 articles--appear to have been well received by readers, though some comments seen by Quartz reportedly claimed the prose was "too robotic."

Slate and Future Tense are discussing Mr. Robot and the technological world it portrays throughout the show's second season. You can follow this conversation on Future Tense, and Slate Plus members can also listen to Hacking Mr. Robot, a members-only podcast series featuring Lily Newman and Fred Kaplan. In this episode of Hacking Mr. Robot, Fred and Lily discuss Episode 8: "eps2.6succ3ss0r.p12." They're joined by special guest Matt Devost, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of FusionX. Fred Kaplan is the author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.

Like many of his bits, it became a viral phenomenon, clocking in at nearly six million views on YouTube. At around the ten-minute mark, Oliver took his verbal bat to the knees of Tronc, the new name for Tribune Publishing Company, and its parody-worthy promotional video, in which a robotic spokeswoman describes the journalistic benefits of artificial intelligence, as a string section swells underneath. Tronc is not the only company to enthusiastically embrace the term "artificial intelligence." A.I. is hot, and every company worth its stock price is talking about how this magical potion will change everything. Even Macy's recently announced that it was testing an I.B.M. artificial-intelligence tool in ten of its department stores, in order to bring back customers who are abandoning traditional retail in favor of online shopping. Much like "the cloud," "big data," and "machine learning" before it, the term "artificial intelligence" has been hijacked by marketers and advertising copywriters.

If you've watched the television series 24 on Netflix, the online streaming service will recommend that you catch up on Homeland, too. Now, a Boston-based technology firm is hoping to bring that same intuitive technology to financial services. Start-up Indico Data Solutions Inc. announced Friday that it is collaborating with John Hancock Financial and the Boston insurer's Canadian parent Manulife Financial Corp. to help financial analysts and portfolio managers cull through thousands of pieces of data and find the most important information. Based on that data, managers at Manulife and John Hancock will be able to make quicker decisions on whether to invest in certain companies and industries or sell their shares. Think of it as Google on steroids.

Imagine you're a billionaire, with your own film studio. You're sitting there on your golden throne, eating peeled grapes off Channing Tatum's abs. Your assistant has just handed you the script for The Expendables 7 or yet another Spider-Man reboot. Surely, you think yourself, in this data-driven age there has to be a better way. Couldn't we use machine learning to design the optimum new film?