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Patti Harrison Had Dreams of a Tech Utopia. Silicon Valley Smashed Them

WIRED

Patti Harrison Had Dreams of a Tech Utopia. The comedian sat down with WIRED to talk about social media, AI, and getting laughs for impersonating Boston Dynamics' robot dogs. Patti Harrison, like every great comic, knows how to use her face. If you've seen her stealing scenes in TV shows like Tim Robinson's or Hulu's, you know that she often starts out a bit demure, or pouty, before walking audiences into the deep end. It's that quality in Harrison's work that WIRED borrowed for our own rather unhinged cover concept. Harrison plays five (well, actually six) of the current masters of the universe--Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos (with Lauren Sánchez Bezos by his side). Combining her farcical sensibilities with our commentary on the man-heavy leader ship of Silicon Valley worked perfectly--and she was happy to lampoon the people behind the platforms she used to enjoy. We caught up with Harrison in London, where she had just finished a sold-out run of her show,, and a week of performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. KATIE DRUMMOND: When we were putting together our WIRED Women cover, we knew we had to put the best possible woman on it. You immediately came to mind, and I can't stress enough how much you nailed the assignment. I want to argue with a bunch of it. I was coming in today like, oh, I guess I didn't really check to see what the interview was about.


'I created my mom and talk to her': AI ghosts and deathslop are changing the way we mourn

The Guardian

'Is AI keeping us from getting the social support that we need?' asks Dr Dan Wolfson. 'I created my mom and talk to her': AI ghosts and deathslop are changing the way we mourn'Is AI keeping us from getting the social support that we need?' asks Dr Dan Wolfson. The rise of AI-generated tributes and bots for'talking' to the dead has experts concerned more people will grieve in isolation T ributes rolled in after the death of Dolly Parton last month. Jack White performed Jolene at a London gig. Kesha sang Old Flames (Can't Hold a Candle to You), a single her mother wrote for the country music titan. Even Pitbull stopped his Madison Square Garden show to memorialize Parton and all the other "powerful women" in the crowd.


Meta Is Charging a Subscription for Smart Glasses Features. Welcome to the New Era of Consumer Tech

WIRED

Meta Is Charging a Subscription for Smart Glasses Features. Now you'll need to subscribe for "expanded access" to the most advanced features. So you paid a few hundred bucks for a neat little gadget and think you're good to go. But it turns out you'll need to subscribe to a monthly plan to unlock its advanced features. That where AI-powered consumer electronics are increasingly heading, and Meta is the latest to prove it with its smart glasses .



Memory Speaks in "Marjorie Prime" and "Anna Christie"

The New Yorker

June Squibb sparkles opposite Cynthia Nixon in a futuristic drama, and Michelle Williams loses her way in Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winner. Appropriately enough, Jordan Harrison's déjà-vu-inducing "Marjorie Prime" has been here before. The Off Broadway theatre Playwrights Horizons produced the poignant sci-fi play about hyperrealistic re-creations of the dead--so-called Primes, which are used as a supportive technology for the bereaved--in Anne Kauffman's spirited, delicately comic production, back in 2015. Lois Smith, then eighty-five years old, played Marjorie, a woman struggling with dementia. It's the early twenty-sixties, and so Marjorie is attended by a holographic Prime of her husband, Walter, who tells her stories from her own life.


Sensorium Arc: AI Agent System for Oceanic Data Exploration and Interactive Eco-Art

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Sensorium Arc (AI reflects on climate) is a real-time multimodal interactive AI agent system that personifies the ocean as a poetic speaker and guides users through immersive explorations of complex marine data. Built on a modular multi-agent system and retrieval-augmented large language model (LLM) framework, Sensorium enables natural spoken conversations with AI agents that embodies the ocean's perspective, generating responses that blend scientific insight with ecological poetics. Through keyword detection and semantic parsing, the system dynamically triggers data visualizations and audiovisual playback based on time, location, and thematic cues drawn from the dialogue. Developed in collaboration with the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure and inspired by the eco-aesthetic philosophy of Newton Harrison, Sensorium Arc reimagines ocean data not as an abstract dataset but as a living narrative. The project demonstrates the potential of conversational AI agents to mediate affective, intuitive access to high-dimensional environmental data and proposes a new paradigm for human-machine-ecosystem.


David Byrne's Career of Earnest Alienation

The New Yorker

At seventy-three, the former front man of Talking Heads is still asking questions about what it means to be alive. "When you step onstage, it's a very artificial situation," Byrne said. "To pretend it's not--that isn't being authentic." If you spend enough time wandering around downtown Manhattan, the odds are that you'll eventually encounter the musician David Byrne riding a bicycle. One day this past June, pedalling alongside Byrne from his apartment in Chelsea to the Governors Island ferry, I watched at least a dozen New Yorkers clock his profile, whipping around to squint, softly pinching the arm of their companion and whispering, "Was that . . . By then, Byrne was gone, a tuft of white hair whizzing toward the horizon. Spotting Byrne on two wheels has become a New York City rite of passage, like sussing out the best halal cart in midtown, or dropping something important onto the subway tracks. During the few months that Byrne and I spent together, I never saw him traverse the ...


Google's Conversational Photo Editor Is the Rare AI Feature People Will Actually Use

WIRED

Google's Conversational Photo Editor Is the Rare AI Feature People Will Actually Use Google's tool greatly simplifies photo editing; just tell your phone what changes you want in the photo, and it'll execute them. It also hints at the coming leap in how we interact with computers. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. The smartphone has become the playground for new AI and generative AI features.


Cancel Culture Comes for Artists Who Posted About Charlie Kirk's Death

WIRED

Cancel Culture Comes for Artists Who Posted About Charlie Kirk's Death A episode was taken off air, a DC comic series was canceled, and several artists were fired in the aftermath of the shooting. Almost immediately after she posted about the shooting of Charlie Kirk, author and transwoman Gretchen Felker-Martin started having second thoughts. Felker-Martin, who wrote the latest iteration of DC Comics' series, said "thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch" on Bluesky in response to the killing of Kirk, a right-wing influencer and Trump ally who was staunchly anti-trans rights. "Hope the bullet's okay after touching Kirk," she added. Kirk died after being shot at a stop on his American Comeback Tour organized by the conservative youth organization he founded, Turning Point USA.


Jennie Garth claims ex-husband Peter Facinelli's dating app age range matched their daughter's

FOX News

Jennie Garth told Fox News Digital that once her youngest child graduates from high school, she will be moving out of California. Jennie Garth is bringing up ex-Peter Facinelli's dating past, specifically about his time on the exclusive celebrity dating app, Raya. During a podcast interview, Garth, 53, claimed that the actor's age range was close to their eldest daughter, Luca, who is now 27. "My ex-husband Peter, I was told, was on Raya, and his age, whatever range, that he was looking for was also the age range of his oldest daughter," Garth shared on the "I Do, Part 2" podcast with Jana Kramer and guest J.P. Rosenbaum. "So, she came across him on her thing."