Nathan Fielder, like Andy Kaufman before him, makes performance-art comedy that does not only poke fun at the world but experimentally perturbs it, and he plies this trade in the buffer zone between reality and artifice. He presents himself as something of a Kaspar Hauser figure for the age of artificial intelligence, a foundling raised not by wolves but by an advanced and affectless race of extraterrestrial anthropologists. His object is to isolate and mimic the rudiments of human sociability. Fielder's intuition is that many putatively normal people share his own bewildered dread of everyday interactions, which are at once governed by established, if opaque, social norms and subject to unnerving unpredictability. Children learn to tame uncertainty through repetition: they replay interactions in an effort to interpret and control the varied challenges of their environment.

They flag offensive content on social networks and delete spam from our inboxes. At the hospital, they help convert patient--doctor conversations into insurance billing codes. Sometimes, they alert law enforcement to potential terrorist plots and predict (poorly) the threat of violence on social media. Legal professionals use them to hide or discover evidence of corporate fraud. Students are writing their next school paper with the aid of a smart word processor, capable not just of completing sentences, but generating entire essays on any topic.

Ahead of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities last Sunday, Apple released a short film that showcased its Personal Voice accessibility feature, which debuted earlier this year in iOS 17. Personal Voice allows users to create digital versions of their voice to use on calls, supported apps and Apple's own Live Speech tool. For those who are at risk of permanently losing their voice due to conditions like Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, ALS and vocal cord paralysis, not sounding like yourself can be yet another form of identity loss. Being able to create a copy of your voice while you're still able might help alleviate the feeling that you'll never feel like yourself again, or that your loved ones won't know what you sound like. All iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma users can create a personal voice in case you need it in the future -- whether temporarily or for long-term use.

Researchers have argued that large language models (LLMs) exhibit high-quality writing capabilities from blogs to stories. However, evaluating objectively the creativity of a piece of writing is challenging. Inspired by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), which measures creativity as a process, we use the Consensual Assessment Technique [3] and propose the Torrance Test of Creative Writing (TTCW) to evaluate creativity as a product. TTCW consists of 14 binary tests organized into the original dimensions of Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, and Elaboration. We recruit 10 creative writers and implement a human assessment of 48 stories written either by professional authors or LLMs using TTCW. Our analysis shows that LLM-generated stories pass 3-10X less TTCW tests than stories written by professionals. In addition, we explore the use of LLMs as assessors to automate the TTCW evaluation, revealing that none of the LLMs positively correlate with the expert assessments.

On a chilly but humane November night in Toronto, Allison Williams and I slip into an expansive conversation about the polite ways one can manipulate an audience. Williams is an actress, one of the more self-aware of her generation; audience manipulation is her not-so-secret weapon. I have interviewed Williams several times over the years, and each time is as lovely and warm and full of mutual compliments as the last. I would say, at this point, we like one another. Is it possible to have an "authentic" connection during a press commitment between two people who know how the personality machine operates and are each trying to work it for their own advantage?

Over the past several weeks, there has been a wave of reactions to recent developments in the world of Ai and the arts, which seems pretty well typified in this article from the Verge. I'd like to get into why I think this line of thought is asking the wrong questions for the wrong reasons, but you'll have to bear with me a little. Let me start with a little about me. I'm a "multi-hyphenate" artist, which is to say I've done a lot of work in a variety of mediums: music production, visual art, writing. I'm not famous, but I've developed a methodology already, and didn't have much interest in the early Ai apps of yesteryear, until one came along that seemed to present some utility as tool rather than replacement. In talking to several artist friends of mine, I heard that MidJourney had an approach to Licensing that seemed to have artists in mind.

Red-eyed robots notwithstanding, the power of artificial intelligence holds just about every facet of business in its crosshairs. There's not a segment of the commercial world that will go unaffected. At the moment, AI is tackling countless mundane processes, enabling workers to spend their time on quality projects. The impacts will be much greater. InsideAnalysis will spend all of 2019 focused on the power of AI.

Repeat after me: Machines are our friends; they're with us till the end! There, now doesn't that feel better? Oh, sure, the "narrative" says that machines will take jobs away from humans, but that's only somewhat true. Mostly, the machines of tomorrow will do what they've always done: streamline and expedite workflow across the spectrum of business processes. Keep in mind, the cotton gin eradicated thousands of jobs all over the Southern United States (and elsewhere), back when it stormed the market in the 1800s.

Then you would want to hear from 7 founders that have built and scaled AI apps to success. Almost consistently, we heard them all say – don't get too consumed by the technology itself, but pay attention to the real human problem you're solving. Be human with your AI app. There's, of course, much more to the advice, so here are 7 founders in their own words, what it takes to develop a successful AI app. Research your user: If you don't know your user you don't know the tool's use.