Sign up to receive it in your inbox. In " Final Boy," your story in this week's issue, Rick is a writer of fan fiction about the eighties sitcom "Charles in Charge." How does Rick think of his writing, and how does it fit into his conception of himself? Rick is a guy who has always loved books and used to study creative writing. He's worked for decades in the gig economy, long before it was even called that, doing freelance copy editing and the like.

Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages--with sixteenth-century folktales about a golem made of clay and summoned to life, through ritual incantation, to defend Prague's Jewish community --its modern form was set in motion by a play called "R.U.R.," by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Its 1921 première, also in Prague, set the agenda for the next century, and it has remained an apparently ironclad convention that all critical writing about the genre begin there. The drama gave us the word "robot," a derivative of an Old Slavic root related to "serfdom," and its narrative, of a rebellion among artificial workers, provided a metaphorical template--stories about robots are stories about labor and freedom. The word "robot" is still with us, and the underlying metaphor has a generous flexibility, encompassing two related but distinct ideas. One is that the first thing we would obviously do with artificial people is enslave them--as in, say, "Westworld."

AI is so powerful that it will inevitably destroy the world--at least, that's what the people who sell AI software keep saying, and I can't think of any reason why they might lie about how amazing they are. Still, I can't help but wonder: What is AI useful for right now, before it ends civilization? I've done some experimenting and talked to my friends on LinkedIn and Mastodon. Here's the best use cases I could personally find. I spend hours crafting an article but most people will only ever see the few words I choose to put at the top.

About 30 minutes into Fast X, the 10th installment of the Fast and Furious franchise, there is a moment of exposition so self-aware it seems all but designed to make longtime fans snicker in the aisles. Aimes (Alan Ritchson), the new hotshot head of the secretive organization known as The Agency, is recounting to Tess (Brie Larson) a series of heists, messes, and, of course, massively destructive car chases pulled off by Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew. He also notes that at every turn, the group's enemies--be they cops or revenge-seekers--end up being a part of the team. "Everyone becomes family," he scowls. Of every knowing wink made at a franchise's fanbase, this might be the most blatant--because, yes, it's a jab at the series' countless references to "family," but it's also a nod to the fans themselves.

Content ratings can enable audiences to determine the suitability of various media products. With the recent advent of fan fiction, the critical issue of fan fiction content ratings has emerged. Whether fan fiction content ratings are done voluntarily or required by regulation, there is the need to automate the content rating classification. The problem is to take fan fiction text and determine the appropriate content rating. Methods for other domains, such as online books, have been attempted though none have been applied to fan fiction. We propose natural language processing techniques, including traditional and deep learning methods, to automatically determine the content rating. We show that these methods produce poor accuracy results for multi-classification. We then demonstrate that treating the problem as a binary classification problem produces better accuracy. Finally, we believe and provide some evidence that the current approach of self-annotating has led to incorrect labels limiting classification results.

As a Harry Potter fan and a lover of writing, I was curious to see what would happen if I asked ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) to write a Harry Potter fan fiction. So, I fed ChatGPT a few prompts and let it do its magic. The result was a piece of fan fiction titled "The Lost Diadem of Ravenclaw", which follows the story of Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they embark on a quest to find the lost diadem of Ravenclaw. The diadem, which is said to enhance the intelligence of its wearer, has been missing for centuries and is believed to be hidden in the Forbidden Forest. As they journey through the forest, the trio encounters a number of obstacles and challenges, including an encounter with a pack of werewolves and a showdown with the infamous Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange. Despite the challenges they face, Harry, Ron, and Hermione persevere and eventually find the lost diadem.

Your partner asks you why the little, evil dudes in a certain game called Overlord speak as if they were stolen from a Monty Python sketch. Your terse response--being an evil Overlord while commanding a horde of unruly minions is hard goddamn work, after all--is that someone was paid a good amount of money to make them sound that way. But the question sticks in your mind as the in-game banter continues to amuse, so much so that you find yourself laughing out loud. As the credits roll, you make sure to note the person responsible for the quips and barbs: Rhianna Pratchett. After a quick Google search, you find that she's the daughter of the famous Discworld author Terry Pratchett, and that she began as a gaming journalist before crossing over to write for games rather than about them.

Marisa Johnson's six-year-old daughter was just learning to read independently when her Alameda, California, school shut down last year. Without solid literacy skills and lots of time stuck at home, the tot is spending much more time playing video games and watching shows than reading books. "She's definitely reading less," Johnson says. "The only way we can be alone among ourselves is with screens." As many parents know, screen time has ballooned during the pandemic.

The Hugo Awards are some of the most important prizes in genre fiction, including science fiction and fantasy. Among past winners we see Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Neil Gaiman, and most recently, N.K. Jemisin, who made history for winning Best Novel three years in a row for every book in her Broken Earth series. This year, nestled among nominees for novels, short stories, and even individual episodes of The Good Place and Doctor Who, is an unexpected contender for the Best Related Work category: the primarily women-run fan fiction website Archive of Our Own. Archive of Our Own (often known as "AO3" for short) is an online platform for fan works-- creative work based on existing media like novels, books, and video games, produced by fans of the originals. The nearly 5 million works archived there--4,690,000 as of this writing--represent almost 2 million registered users and countless more who visit the site every day, consuming content and leaving comments.

A group of computer scientists once backed by Elon Musk has caused some alarm by developing an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) they say is too dangerous to release to the public. OpenAI, a research non-profit based in San Francisco, says its "chameleon-like" language prediction system, called GPT–2, will only ever see a limited release in a scaled-down version, due to "concerns about malicious applications of the technology". That's because the computer model, which generates original paragraphs of text based on what it is given to'read', is a little too good at its job. The system devises "synthetic text samples of unprecedented quality" that the researchers say are so advanced and convincing, the AI could be used to create fake news, impersonate people, and abuse or trick people on social media. "GPT–2 is trained with a simple objective: predict the next word, given all of the previous words within some text," the OpenAI team explains on its blog.