This paper presents Negative Shanshui, a real-time interactive AI synthesis approach that reinterprets classical Chinese landscape ink painting, i.e., shanshui, to engage with ecological crises in the Anthropocene. Negative Shanshui optimizes a fine-tuned Stable Diffusion model for real-time inferences and integrates it with gaze-driven inpainting, frame interpolation; it enables dynamic morphing animations in response to the viewer's gaze and presents as an interactive virtual reality (VR) experience. The paper describes the complete technical pipeline, covering the system framework, optimization strategies, gaze-based interaction, and multimodal deployment in an art festival. Further analysis of audience feedback collected during its public exhibition highlights how participants variously engaged with the work through empathy, ambivalence, and critical reflection.

Recent publications explore AI biases in detecting objects and people in the environment. However, there is no research tackling how AI examines nature. This case study presents a pioneering exploration into the AI attitudes (ecocentric, anthropocentric and antipathetic) toward nature. Experiments with a Large Language Model (LLM) and an image captioning algorithm demonstrate the presence of anthropocentric biases in AI. Moreover, to delve deeper into these biases and Human-Nature-AI interaction, we conducted a real-life experiment in which participants underwent an immersive de-anthropocentric experience in a forest and subsequently engaged with ChatGPT to co-create narratives. By creating fictional AI chatbot characters with ecocentric attributes, emotions and views, we successfully amplified ecocentric exchanges. We encountered some difficulties, mainly that participants deviated from narrative co-creation to short dialogues and questions and answers, possibly due to the novelty of interacting with LLMs. To solve this problem, we recommend providing preliminary guidelines on interacting with LLMs and allowing participants to get familiar with the technology. We plan to repeat this experiment in various countries and forests to expand our corpus of ecocentric materials.

In an acerbic 1976 article on AI research, the computer scientist Drew McDermott was the first to contrast the phrases "artificial intelligence" and "natural stupidity". Four decades later, researchers warn of the threat posed by computer "superintelligence", but stupidity is still a far greater peril: both the age-old natural stupidity of humans and the newfangled artificial stupidity displayed by algorithms – such as chatbots supposed to be able to diagnose illness, or facial-recognition software that throws up false matches for ethnic minorities – in which we place far too much trust. An alternative reason to be cheerful about the coming machine takeover is offered here by the eminent scientist and inventor James Lovelock. A chemist by training, who invented instruments for Mars rovers and helped to discover the depletion of the ozone layer, Lovelock is most celebrated in pop culture for his "Gaia hypothesis". First formulated in the 1960s, it proposes that Earth and its biosphere comprise a single, self-regulating system.

In an intriguing thought experiment, landscape architect Bradley Cantrell, historian Laura Martin, and ecologist Erle Ellis have taken this ethos to its logical extreme, and ended up with what they call a "wildness creator"--a hypothetical artificial intelligence that would autonomously protect wild spaces. We'd create it, obviously, but then let it go, so it would develop its own strategies for protecting nature. Maybe it blocks out human-made light or noise. Maybe it redirects the flow of water or destroys litter. Think Skynet crossed with Captain Planet, or the Matrix meets Ranger Rick, or IBM's Watson meets Greenpeace.

Amid all the sound and fury over Brexit, progressives disorientated by 2016 should remember a vital fact - it is only the firing gun on a decade of much wider disruption. As the UK negotiates its new place in the world, a wave of economic, social and technological change will reshape the country, in often radical ways. It is vital progressives better understand the forces driving these changes and the challenges and opportunities they will create. After all, progressives historically have won when they have a strong set of demands allied to a sense they own the future, and have change in their bones. The IPPR's new report, Future Proof: Britain in the 2020s, sets out the five key trends that will drive change in the 2020s and the major challenges they will create.

Isaac Asimov publishes Pebble in the Sky, his first science-fiction novel. And Earth enters a brand new epoch – according to some geologists. Now the idea of the Anthropocene – the period in which human activity profoundly shapes the environment – has taken an important step closer to general acceptance. A working group of scientists has been mulling over the subject for seven years. This week 30 of its 35 members recommended adding the Anthropocene to our standard geological timescale. The ultimate decision rests with the International Commission on Stratigraphy.