The Worst Thing About AI Is That People Can't Shut Up About It A plea from WIRED's top boss: Say less. I tried to get out of this assignment so many times, in so many different ways. Not every package needs an editor's letter, I told them. I was very busy recording a new podcast, getting ready to speak at a tech conference, eating and sleeping, parenting, doodling, revising my to-do list, retying my shoelaces. I was doing my best, I tried to convey to my editor.

Erotic imagery and curiosity often arise in intimate relationships, especially when there's safety, play, and mutual recognition. It doesn't mean you've done anything "wrong." On the contrary, it shows that your imagination is alive and searching for ways to bridge the gap between closeness and distance, fantasy and reality. You offer me something charged, even a bit embarrassing, and you're watching--will I crumble?

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He's one of the loudest voices of the AI haters--even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention. In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like "Sam Altman is full of shit and "Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul." Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO is a "chunderfuck." And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic," Zitron was saying over burgers on a fine Manhattan afternoon in September. "I work with founders all the time. I'm a founder myself, I guess--I don't like the title. But when you are a person that has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these chunderfucks burning 5, 10 billion dollars in a year--and everyone's celebrating them? We were talking about whether any of Zitron's ranting about the AI industry had cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. There was the one client who felt Zitron was being a little mean toward Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the biggest chunderfuck of all, as far as Zitron is concerned. Founding a company is hard, the client said. "I said, 'I appreciate the comment, but, like, this isn't about you,'" Zitron told me. "His company is burning billions of dollars.

And when that didn't work, I did have sex with AI Pedro Pascal. I recently heard that a former friend was now heavily into an S/M relationship with Pedro Pascal. This was moderately surprising, as she's a lesbian and he's an AI chatbot, but what is fluidity for if not to explore previously untapped facets of ourselves? Let's not get all rigid about identities. I decided I wanted in on this.

In recent times, there have been two techno-religious awakenings. To be human is to yearn for a Sky Daddy. Something that explains the unexplainable, someone to blame. No wonder, then, that in the ZIRP-fueled 2010s, when a new gospel of creation was being spread, some people started to see technology as a kind of religion. Startup founders and CEOs became messianic figures.

They didn't want to put their children in the middle--so they put a machine there instead. Sol Kennedy used to ask his assistant to read the messages his ex-wife sent him. After the couple separated in 2020, Kennedy says, he found their communications "tough." An email, or a stream of them, would arrive--stuff about their two kids mixed with unrelated emotional wallops--and his day would be ruined trying to reply. Kennedy, a serial tech founder and investor in Silicon Valley, was in therapy at the time.

On an airstrip somewhere in Texas, a swarm of killer jets approaches--controlled by, of all things, a large language model. At a secret US military base located about 50 miles from the Mexican border--exact location: classified--the defense contractor Anduril is testing a remarkable new use for a large language model. I attended one of the first demonstrations last year. From a sun-bleached landing strip, I watched as four jet aircraft, codenamed Mustang, appeared on the horizon to the west and soared over a desolate landscape of boulders and brush. The prototypes, miniaturized for the demo, fell into formation, their engines buzzing as they grew near.

Some of the world's most interesting thinkers about thinking think they might've cracked machine sentience. And I think they might be onto something. As a journalist who covers AI, I hear from countless people who seem utterly convinced that ChatGPT, Claude, or some other chatbot has achieved "sentience." The Turing test was aced a while back, yes, but unlike rote intelligence, these things are not so easily pinned down. Large language models will claim to think for themselves, even describe inner torments or profess undying loves, but such statements don't imply interiority.

I sound Korean--because I am Korean. Can AI make me sound American? It all began, as these things often do, with an Instagram ad . "No one tells you this if you're an immigrant, but accent discrimination is a real thing," said a woman in the video. Her own accent is faintly Eastern European--so subtle it took me a few playbacks to notice.

Increased defense spending is a boon for Germany's ailing industrial sector. Numerous companies, even those with no previous military experience, are now hoping to get in on the act. Visiting the works of Ilsenburger Grobblech GmbH is like taking a trip back in time. Way back in the 16th century, copper used to be produced at this site in the northern Harz Mountains, not far from eastern Germany' tallest peak, the Brocken. Today, slabs of steel up to 35 centimeters thick are piled up in front of the factory halls, delivered from the blast furnaces and converters of parent company Salzgitter, less than an hour's drive away. What is happening behind the factory walls, though, is part of a new hype that has gripped Germany's crisis-ridden industrial sector. A hype which many are hoping will be enough to revive it.