Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Some things are sadly inevitable: death, taxes, another Coldplay album. One such inevitability, long since proved beyond any reasonable doubt, is that if you try to suppress an embarrassing story, you will only draw more attention to it. This phenomenon is called the Streisand Effect, after an incident in 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued to have an aerial photograph taken off the internet.

In this study, we employ a classification approach to show that different categories of literary "quality" display unique linguistic profiles, leveraging a corpus that encompasses titles from the Norton Anthology, Penguin Classics series, and the Open Syllabus project, contrasted against contemporary bestsellers, Nobel prize winners and recipients of prestigious literary awards. Our analysis reveals that canonical and so called high-brow texts exhibit distinct textual features when compared to other quality categories such as bestsellers and popular titles as well as to control groups, likely responding to distinct (but not mutually exclusive) models of quality. We apply a classic machine learning approach, namely Random Forest, to distinguish quality novels from "control groups", achieving up to 77\% F1 scores in differentiating between the categories. We find that quality category tend to be easier to distinguish from control groups than from other quality categories, suggesting than literary quality features might be distinguishable but shared through quality proxies.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow's distinctive cover, with its image of Hokusai's woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa and retro rainbow lettering, seems to be everywhere at the moment: in the centre of bookshop window displays, poking out of handbags, lying on beach towels, all over Instagram. Gabrielle Zevin's story of love and friendship between two game designers has become a word-of-mouth hit since it came out last year, gaining famous fans including Bill Gates, Zadie Smith and actor Simu Liu, who called it "a masterpiece". The paperback edition, published at the end of June, climbed to the top of the UK bestsellers chart in July, knocking David Walliams and Adam Stower's The World's Worst Monsters from the No 1 spot, and overtaking It Starts with Us, the most recent romance novel by the queen of BookTok, Colleen Hoover. It has remained at the top of the chart for three weeks so far. "Few books in recent memory have been so universally beloved by booksellers and customers," says Bea Carvalho, head of books and campaigns at Waterstones.

A novelist responds to Jeff Hewitt's "The Big Four v. ORWELL." For the first time in history, a machine is capable of crafting flash fiction stories, poems, parody Bible verses, and spoof My Little Pony episode summaries, to everyone's delight (or horror). Narrative art, once thought the sole province of humans, has been invaded by large language models. Hollywood writers have told me they're terrified that studios will fire them all and fill writers' rooms with robots in a few years. Before we've even had a chance to absorb the fact that the Turing test (used to determine if an artificial intelligence can pass as human) has been demolished, it seems we writers are being handed pink slips.

Every Nintendo fan remembers the game that converted them. Perhaps it was running and jumping around as Mario in an abstract, toylike playspace, thrilling at the lightness and precision of his movement. It could have been becoming hypnotised by falling Tetris blocks on the Game Boy's tiny monochrome screen, or choosing a first Pokémon, marvelling at how the little collection of fat pixels representing your chosen critter instantly assumed an imagined personality. Millions of people had their first Nintendo moment during 2020's lockdowns, moving to a virtual deserted island full of quirky neighbours in Animal Crossing. For more than 40 years, this Japanese giant of entertainment has been making video games that have shaped the tastes of the people who played them as children; there is surely no game developer working today who is untouched by its influence.

But these scenarios depend upon an unanswered question: are machines intelligent to begin with? Computers are essentially logic machines that process digital information. But in a recent paper entitled "The Emperor of Strong AI Has No Clothes," physicist Robert K. Logan in Toronto and Adriana Braga in Rio de Janeiro argue that the dream of a super intelligence has limits that its adherents choose to ignore. The things the Singularity will never get right amount to a long list, to quote the two researchers: "… curiosity, imagination, intuition, emotions, passion, desires, pleasure, aesthetics, joy, purpose, objectives, goals, telos, values, morality, experience, wisdom, judgment, and even humor." A clever programmer can figure out how to get a computer to answer human questions like "How is your mother feeling?", "What does chocolate taste like?", and "Don't you just love fresh snow?"

Summary: 99% of our application of NLP has to do with chatbots or translation. This is a very interesting story about expanding the bounds of NLP and feature creation to predict bestselling novels. The authors created over 20,000 NLP features, about 2,700 of which proved to be predictive with a 90% accuracy rate in predicting NYT bestsellers. It's a pretty rare individual who hasn't had a personal experience with NLP (Natural Language Processing). About 99% of those experiences are in the form of chatbots or translators, either text or speech in, and text or speech out. This has proved to be one of the hottest and most economically valuable applications of deep learning but it's not the whole story.

A shorter version of this article was originally published by Scientific American. With articles like these, the press will have you believe that machine learning can reliably predict whether you're gay, whether you'll develop psychosis, whether you'll have a heart attack, and whether you're a criminal – as well as other ambitious predictions such as when you'll die and whether your unpublished book will be a bestseller. Machine learning can't confidently tell such things about each individual. In most cases, these things are simply too difficult to predict with certainty. Researchers report high "accuracy," but then later reveal – buried within the details of a technical paper – that they were actually misusing the word "accuracy" to mean another measure of performance related to accuracy but in actuality not nearly as impressive.

For your friends and family, the right book will endure even when the latest gadgets go out of style. As for you -- well, the fact that books are easy to wrap doesn't hurt. Check out our guide to the best gifts for people with with an attention span longer than a tweet. Best for: Parents who have no idea why their Gen Z kids talk the way they do. For every criticism you hear from a grammar Nazi online, there's a Gretchen McCulloch theory to counter it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. A recent article noted that'robots' -- shorthand for AI in the tabloids -- will be able to write a fiction bestseller within 50 years. I suppose that would be shocking to me as a novelist if most fiction bestsellers were not already being written by'robots'. Or so one feels, keeping publishing and other vogues in mind: a bit of this, a bit of that, a dash of something else, and voila, you have a bestseller! In that sense, perhaps the rise of AI will make us reconsider what we mean by human intelligence.