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Richard Holmes, our greatest living biographer, is back with an enthralling chronicle of the poet. Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. You're already subscribed to the aa_Laura_Miller newsletter. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

That move may have warded off the lawyers, but it didn't slide past Olympic viewers. Disgusted reactions ensued immediately after Mrázková and Mrázek took the ice and NBC's announcers pointed out that, while half of their choreography was set to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck," the other half had been soundtracked by A.I. The ISU's own documentation identifies the track as something called "One Two," created by an A.I. prompted to come up with something resembling "90s style Bon Jovi."

With celebrity endorsements from the likes of MrBeast and Marshawn Lynch, bots are taking center stage during the big game--and it's a sign of bleak times ahead. Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. You're already subscribed to the aa_Nitish_Pahwa newsletter. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

Moltbook is the chaotic future of the internet. The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots--1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to "stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away." Moltbook was developed as a sort of experimental playground for interactions among AI "agents," which are bots that have access to and can use programs. Claude Code, a popular AI coding tool, has such agentic capabilities, for example: It can act on your behalf to manage files on your computer, send emails, develop and publish apps, and so on. Normally, humans direct an agent to perform specific tasks.

Using LLMs to talk with your friends is efficient. My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI. There was the telltale proliferation of abstract nouns, a surfeit of assertions that the deceased was "not just --he was " coupled with a lack of concrete anecdotes, and more appearances of the word than you would expect from a rec-league hockey teammate. It was both too good, in terms of being grammatically correct, and not good enough, in terms of being particular. My friend had no definitive proof that he was listening to AI, but his position--and I agree with him--is that when you know, you know. His sense was that he had just heard a computer save a man from thinking about his dead friend.

The Model S deserved better than this. Before Elon Musk, most electric vehicles seemed less like an alternative to gasoline than an argument in its favor. The sad state of affairs for EVs for many years was that they were slow, impractical, and largely enticing only if you lived with copious guilt over your carbon emissions. Then Tesla came out with the Tesla Model S. The speedy, high-tech sedan didn't just leave other EVs in the dust; it could compete with the likes of BMW and Mercedes-Benz. "EVs went from'eating your vegetables' to getting you super-car performance in a vehicle that's luxurious and quiet," Jake Fisher, the senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, told me.

Work A.I. Was Supposed to "Revolutionize" Work. Although we've been told that A.I. is poised to "revolutionize" work, at the moment it seems to be doing something else entirely: spreading chaos. All throughout American offices, A.I. platforms like ChatGPT are delivering answers that sound right even when they aren't, transcription tools that turn meetings into works of fiction, and documents that look polished on the surface but are riddled with factual errors and missing nuance. If you've read anything about A.I., you know that it sometimes "hallucinates" facts that simply aren't true, yet asserts them with so much confidence that its lies don't get caught. Clearly, there's more work to do on this emerging technology, but in the meantime, it's ravaging some workplaces.

TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US. When TikTok users in the US opened the app today, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to agree to the social media platform's new terms of service and privacy policy before they could resume scrolling. These changes are part of TikTok's transition to new ownership. In order to continue operating in the US, TikTok was compelled by the US government to transition from Chinese control to a new, American-majority corporate entity.