'Let's talk about something fun!' Grem the AI chatbot toy. 'Let's talk about something fun!' Grem the AI chatbot toy. 'I love you too!' My family's creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy The cuddly chatbot Grem is designed to'learn' your child's personality, while every conversation they have is recorded, then transcribed by a third party. It wasn't long before I wanted this experiment to be over ... 'I'm going to throw that thing into a river!" my wife says as she comes down the stairs looking frazzled after putting our four-year-old daughter to bed. To be clear, "that thing" is not our daughter, Emma*. It's Grem, an AI-powered stuffed alien toy that the musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, helped develop with toy company Curio. Designed for kids aged three and over and built with OpenAI's technology, the toy is supposed to "learn" your child's personality and have fun, educational conversations with them. It's advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time and is ...

A couple of years ago, Grimes thought art might be dying. She worried that TikTok was overwhelming attention spans; that transgressive artists were becoming more sanitized; that gimmicky NFTs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club--digital cartoon monkeys which were selling for millions of dollars--were warping value systems. "I just went through this whole big'art isn't worth anything' internal existential crisis," the Canadian singer-songwriter says. "But I've come out the other end thinking, actually, maybe it's the main thing that matters. In the last year, I feel like things became way more about artists again." The rise of AI, Grimes believes, has played a role in that shift, perhaps paradoxically. Earlier this month, Grimes was honored at the TIME100 AI Impact Awards in Dubai for her role in shaping the present and future of the technology. While many other artists are terrified of AI and its potential to replace them, Grimes has embraced the technology, even releasing an AI tool allowing people to sing through her voice. Grimes' penchant for seriously engaging with what others fear or distrust makes her one of pop culture's most singular--and at times divisive--figures. But Grimes wears her contrarianism as a badge of honor, and doesn't hesitate to offer insights and perspectives on a variety of issues. "I'm so canceled that I basically have nothing left to lose," she says. She argues that hyper-partisan hysteria has consumed social media, and wishes people would have more measured, nuanced conversations, even with people that they disagree with. "A lot of people think I'm one way or the other, but my whole vibe is just like, I just want people to think well," she says.

Spotify is testing an AI-powered feature that creates playlists from text prompts. TikTok user @robdad_ posted a short clip of it, captioned, "I just randomly discovered Spotify's ChatGPT?" For the chosen guinea pigs, the feature is available as an option under Your Library after tapping the plus sign to create a new playlist. The news was reported by TechCrunch, which says it received confirmation from Spotify that it's testing AI playlists. It isn't yet clear if the music streamer plans to launch it publicly. "Turn your ideas into playlists using Al," the feature's in-app description reads in the TikTok video (while noting it's only available in English).

A glimpse toward this future is beginning to emerge in products like Grok, an AI-powered plush toy in the shape of a rocket that can converse with your child. Grok is the first product from a Silicon Valley start-up called Curio that is partnering with OpenAI on a line of toys Curio's founders say will be capable of long-running, fully interactive conversation, allowing a child to view it almost as a peer or friend.

In 2021, Elon Musk became the world's richest man (no woman came close), and Time named him Person of the Year: "This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars." Right about when Time was preparing that giddy announcement, three women whose ovaries and uteruses were involved in passing down the madcap man-god's genes were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Austin. Musk believes a declining birth rate is a threat to civilization and, with his trademark tirelessness, is doing his visionary edgelord best to ward off that threat. Shivon Zilis, a thirty-five-year-old venture capitalist and executive at Musk's company Neuralink, was pregnant with twins, conceived with Musk by in-vitro fertilization, and was experiencing complications. "He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to," Zilis said.

I thought my interview with Grimes--the mysterious techno artist, fan of all nerddom, and the deepest of insiders in Elon Musk's world--would be one-on-one. Instead it wound up as a roundtable discussion. Turns out there are multiple personas embedded in the surprisingly haimish human who sat under a tree with me and spent the waning hours of an afternoon in conversation. There was Claire Boucher, the given name of a Vancouver kid obsessed with video games and devoted to provoking adults with misbehavior and the embrace of taboo subjects. There was Grimes, the self-invented, scrappy DIY musician and provocateur who weaves sci-fi into her work and released what Pitchfork judged to be the second-best song of the 2010s.

The pop singer invites creators to generate new music using software trained on her voice.

Duke law and philosophy professor and author Nita Farahany says the challenge for humans with quickly developing artificial intelligence is the ethical and legal constraints around it. As controversy swirls around the use of famous artists' vocals for AI-generated music, Grimes seems to be embracing the use of artificial intelligence in the music industry. In a tweet Sunday, the 33-year-old Canadian singer, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher, said she is happy to have her voice featured on AI-simulated music tracks as long as she is compensated with royalties for successful songs. "I'll split 50 [percent] royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice," Grimes, who shares two children with Elon Musk, tweeted. Feel free to use my voice without penalty.

It needs to be through engineering and design. If you don't do your chores, the company won't succeed. No task is too menial. If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. I take the position that I am always to some degree wrong and the aspiration is to be less wrong.

Grimes may be dating the richest man on the planet, but that doesn't stop the musician from thinking about communism. Take this June 2 TikTok, in which Grimes presents a "proposition for the communists." In the humble tradition of previous communist thinkers like Karl Marx, she continues, "If you think about it, AI is actually the fastest path to communism." Let her explain: "If implemented correctly, AI could actually theoretically solve for abundance. Like, we could totally get to a situation where nobody has to work, everybody is provided for with a comfortable state of being, comfortable living.