For the past few months, Morten Blichfeldt Andersen has spent many hours scouring OpenAI's GPT Store. Since it launched in January, the marketplace for bespoke bots has filled up with a deep bench of useful and sometimes quirky AI tools. Cartoon generators spin up New Yorker–style illustrations and vivid anime stills. Programming and writing assistants offer shortcuts for crafting code and prose. There's also a color analysis bot, a spider identifier, and a dating coach called RizzGPT.

The ritualized procreation in the novel--effectively, state-sanctioned rape--is extrapolated from the Bible. " 'Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her,' " Atwood recited. "Obviously, they stuck the two together and out came the baby, and it was given to Rachel.

'Ex Machina' is nominated for Best Writing – Original Screenplay during the 88th Oscars Nominations Announcement at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The rise of social media and the ubiquity of cell phones has caused some people to bemoan the state of actual human interaction in the 21st century. But anthropologist Rebecca Gibson argues in a new paper in the journal Sexuality & Culture that our obsession with interaction with the digital has a long history -- and an interesting future. Working through the lens of sci-fi, Gibson tracks the evolution of, in particular, the kind of stories that involve human and android romance and sex, delving into them anthropologically to show how these stories illuminate the human condition. First, Gibson explores Phillip K. Dick's character of Rachel in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, suggesting that early conceptions of androids focused on whether they themselves knew they were not human, and she situates this within a framework of Freudian psychoanalysis.

During my commute the other day, I ended up on a dark subway car. The train still had power--the air conditioning was on, the announcements were coming through--but all the lights were dead. I live near an above-ground stop, so at first there was morning sunshine coming in through the windows. But when the train went underground, we were plunged into complete darkness. I found myself suddenly in a sea of floating, ghostly faces, illuminated by the glow of smartphones.