When The Atlantic revealed last month that tens of thousands of books published in the past 20 years had been used without permission to train Meta's AI language model, well-known authors were outraged, calling it a "smoking gun" for mega-corporate misbehavior. Now that the magazine has put out a searchable database of affected books, the outrage is redoubled: "I would never have consented for Meta to train AI on any of my books, let alone five of them," wrote the novelist Lauren Groff. The original Atlantic story gestured at this sense of violation and affront: "The future promised by AI is written with stolen words," it said. Still I was mystified, at first, by the Sturm und Drang response, and by the claim that generative AI is "powered by mass theft." Perhaps I was just jealous of the famous writers who were being singled out as victims--Stephen King, Zadie Smith, Michael Pollan, and others who command huge speaking fees and lucrative secondary-rights deals.

There is no question that Artificial Intelligence is a transformative technology – so much so that we can't even begin to imagine the impact it will have in the next five, ten, or even twenty years. At the same time, AI is already being used in innovative and unexpected ways across a variety of industries. Bees perform an important ecological function, especially for farmers who rely on pollination to germinate crops. As the bee population continues to decline, scientists have looked for ways to mimic the important work that the insects do – and one solution they've found is to create robot bees (robot drones to replace real drones!) that are equipped with cameras, GPS, and Artificial Intelligence. This potent combination of hardware and software allows these robots to determine where crops are located, and pollinate them accordingly.

There is no question that Artificial Intelligence is a transformative technology – so much so that we can't even begin to imagine the impact it will have in the next five, ten, or even twenty years. At the same time, AI is already being used in innovative and unexpected ways across a variety of industries. Bees perform an important ecological function, especially for farmers who rely on pollination to germinate crops. As the bee population continues to decline, scientists have looked for ways to mimic the important work that the insects do – and one solution they've found is to create robot bees (robot drones to replace real drones!) that are equipped with cameras, GPS, and Artificial Intelligence. This potent combination of hardware and software allows these robots to determine where crops are located, and pollinate them accordingly.

Back to the heydays of Youtube, when it was all about amateur videos. Here, with a modern twist: A guy (me) dancing while listening to music produced by the Alexa show. You can chose the music you want, skip songs you don't like, increase volume, and so on: Just ask the Alexa robot. This is an untouched, raw video - no rehearsal of anything.