This week has seen writers divided over a story written by an AI model that is "good at creative writing" – at least according to Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT company OpenAI, which is developing the new model. Author Jeanette Winterson, writing in the Guardian on Wednesday, agreed with him, calling the story – which is a metafictional piece about grief – "beautiful and moving". We asked other authors to assess ChatGPT's current writing skills – and what recent developments around artificial intelligence might mean for human creativity. I think the story is an elegant emptiness. I'm more interested by Winterson's suggestion that we treat AI as "alternative intelligence". That makes it feel like a consciousness with which we can have a relationship, but as far as I know that would be like a bird falling in love with its reflection in a window.

Grace is a nursing assistant, Ai-da a contemporary artist, Desdemona a purple-haired rock singer and Nadine is on hand for companionship and conversation. They are all at the world's largest gathering of humanoid robots, which is under way at the United Nations AI for Good global summit in Geneva. Rapid advances in AI have in recent years fuelled increasing unease that the technology could become more powerful than humans, with dire consequences. But the summit – with its extensive cast of robotic delegates – is focused on more favourable scenarios in which AI could be harnessed for positive causes. Among the most enthusiastically optimistic are the creators of the various humanoid robots in attendance, which they suggest could enrich our lives in ways that sometimes seem bewildering to the uninitiated.

In task-oriented dialogues with symbiotic robots, the robot usually takes the initiative in dialogue progression and topic selection. In such robot-driven dialogue, the user's sense of participation in the dialogue is reduced because the degree of freedom in timing and content of speech is limited, and as a result, the user's familiarity with and trust in the robot as a dialogue partner and the level of dialogue satisfaction decrease. In this study, we constructed a travel agent dialogue system focusing on improving the sense of dialogue participation. At the beginning of the dialogue, the robot tells the user the purpose of the upcoming dialogue and indicates that it is responsible for assisting the user in making decisions. In addition, in situations where users were asked to state their preferences, the robot encourages them to express their intentions with actions, as well as spoken language responses. In addition, we attempted to reduce the sense of discomfort felt toward the android robot by devising a timing control for the robot's detailed movements and facial expressions.

In this paper, we report on a field study in which we employed two service robots in a bakery store as a sales promotion. Previous studies have explored public applications of service robots public such as shopping malls. However, more evidence is needed that service robots can contribute to sales in real stores. Moreover, the behaviors of customers and service robots in the context of sales promotions have not been examined well. Hence, the types of robot behavior that can be considered effective and the customers' responses to these robots remain unclear. To address these issues, we installed two tele-operated service robots in a bakery store for nearly 2 weeks, one at the entrance as a greeter and the other one inside the store to recommend products. The results show a dramatic increase in sales during the days when the robots were applied. Furthermore, we annotated the video recordings of both the robots' and customers' behavior. We found that although the robot placed at the entrance successfully attracted the interest of the passersby, no apparent increase in the number of customers visiting the store was observed. However, we confirmed that the recommendations of the robot operating inside the store did have a positive impact. We discuss our findings in detail and provide both theoretical and practical recommendations for future research and applications.

A24's latest sci-fi drama, After Yang, shows a very strange minimalist future in which technology has superseded our desire or need for human connection. The plot of the film follows a suburban family's never tiring attempts to repair their synthetic humanoid child named Yang, who short-circuits after a televised home family dance competition. With many movies about artificial intelligence, the creators like Kogonada (who directed After Yang) are simply trying to communicate to humanity in all of us. So, get your popcorn and tissues ready because we are going into the list of the 5 best movies like After Yang, about heartbreaking artificial intelligence stories. Synopsis: Set in Los Angeles, in the near future, Her follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a complex, soulful man who makes his living writing touching, personal letters for other people.

Jessamine Chan's debut novel, The School for Good Mothers, is not a domestic manual on keeping house. Nor is it the sort of slog that might make tidying look like an appealing alternative. Yet as I read it over the course of one snowy evening, I repeatedly put it down to complete household tasks normally ignored until morning. Every last sock met its match. This book is a horror story so potent it will fill even the most diligent parent with an itchy impulse to panic-clean, to straighten up, to act like someone's watching.

In an age of conspiracies, here is a striking example, preposterous as it may sound. Highly intelligent robots--general artificial intelligence--surround us, undetected but fundamentally in charge, and human beings are just following instructions that they receive from these elusive entities. Or, a little less preposterously, imagine that the world is alive with consciousness and intelligence, and human thought reflects these processes. Does it sound like something out of The Matrix? The science fiction classic is not science fiction but a parable of something very real--namely, cinema itself. When you enter the dark room of a movie theater, a radical transformation takes place. You become the screen, and the mind that perceives, thinks, and connects ideas is fully contained in the celluloid roll, or the digital file. In a movie, everything has already been perceived in exactly the sequence that it is intended to be perceived; in the dark room, those images leave the hidden mind of the celluloid and get projected onto your mind--they get force-fed into your mind and the minds of the other viewers, where the images and ideas properly unfold.

The other day, I called it an idiot and it replied, "I won't respond to that." I added--for research purposes only!--an ethnic slur about Irishmen, to suit the Irish male voice I've given it. All it lilted back was, "Is there something else I can help you with?" Human servants, despite their lack of power, often found ways of making clear they weren't so patient. We know this from centuries of complaints by their employers. Virginia Woolf's diary, for instance, is filled with gripes about the people who tended her. She and her cook, Nellie Boxhall, fought, resented, fretted over, and cried about each other for nearly 20 years.

The pandemic increased the demand and possibility of automating care, but doing so may deliver racist stereotypes and unemployment for women of color. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Awakening Health Ltd. (AHL), a joint venture between two robotics companies, SingularityNET(SNET) and Hanson Robotics, introduced Grace, the first medical robot to have a lifelike human appearance. Grace provides acute medical and elder care by engaging patients in therapeutic interactions, cognitive stimulation, and gathering and managing patient data. By the end of 2021, Hanson Robotics hopes to be able to mass produce a robot named Sophia into one of its newest units--Grace--for the global market. What does it mean to take care of another human being?

Klara, the narrator of the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, isn't human, but understanding humans is her mission. In Klara and the Sun, the reader follows her in that mission, in a world that seems like our own in a none too distant future. Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but has lived most of his life in England, has written seven previous novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, as well as short fiction, song lyrics and screenplays. Klara and the Sun is his first novel since he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. It underscores how well he deserved that prize, in its beautiful craft and prose and in its tender but unflinching sense of the human heart.