Forget the more recent TV show, which ended up so frustratingly opaque as to render it pointless. The most fun version of Westworld is Michael Crichton's original movie. A robot cowboy comes to life and goes nuts in a theme park. What more could anyone need? Eleven years on, it's still hard to believe this film exists.

Fox News correspondent Matt Finn has the latest on the impact of AI technology that some say could outpace humans on'Special Report.' Stanford researchers have leveraged generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create a simulated town comprising various characters, each with unique identities, memories and behaviors. The simulation, discussed at length in the new research paper "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior," has been compared to an advanced version of the life simulation videogame "The Sims," as well as the HBO sci-fi series "Westworld." The latter tells the story of a theme park where robots are preloaded with storylines and personalities for wealthy human guests to interact with. Each day the robots are reset to their core tasks, but until then, they act like real humans, remembering their experiences, what people said to them and how they relate to the world around them.

A photographer uploaded his fantastical photos to the AI image generator Midjourney and asked it to recreate them with astonishing results. Artificially intelligent (AI) image generators synthesize pictures from text prompts, but photographers can upload their own photos as a guide. After uploading his original pictures to Midjourney he then types in a text prompt that roughly describes his photo. "I've been playing with AI for almost a year now and I'm starting to get the hang of it even though the technology is moving at the speed of light," he tells PetaPixel. "I was curious and decided to try to use AI to replicate my own pictures" Karppinen is a professional commercial photographer but for his own projects shoots all types of "storytelling" images.

If The Peripheral is to be believed, we're all pretty much doomed. Based on the William Gibson novel of the same name, the new Amazon series finds Flynne, a young computer-savvy woman played by Chloë Grace Moretz, unwittingly bouncing between the bleak near-future and the even bleaker distant future. She's been enlisted by her cyber GI brother to test some new mystery tech, and the pair quickly realize they've become embroiled in a thriller for the ages. The series is rife with outlandish inventions, brutal fights, and faceless cyborgs, plus local no-goods, hints of romance, and even some good old-fashioned drone warfare. The Peripheral also features behemoth sculptural air cleaners hovering over a staggeringly empty future version of London, just in case you weren't freaked out enough already.

A novice police officer assigned to watch over a refugee group tries to figure out whether the refugees have been framed for terrorism--and where the real killers are lurking. Technically, this is an accurate description of the plot of David Musgrave's debut novel, Lambda. Sounds like a pretty straightforward potboiler, right? But from its first page, Lambda is up to something weirder and more unwieldy, ditching a linear narrative and setting the story in an alternate-universe Britain where you can get in trouble with the cops for damaging a talking toothbrush. In Lambda's bizarro-world 2019, advances have been made in artificial intelligence to the point that "sentient objects" have been granted rights, including said toothbrush, aka the ToothFriendIV.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. When it premiered six years ago, Westworld epitomized prestige sci-fi at its peak. An expensive HBO series with an old-school Michael Crichton pedigree, it featured a stellar cast and a mind-trippy premise: What if all the sentient robots, or "hosts," at a Western theme park decided they'd had enough of being kicked and dragged around? Subsequent seasons revealed the influence of artificial intelligence and reached far beyond the borders of the Westworld attraction, a global mess of money, corruption, and consciousness-tampering that was nightmare fuel for viewers watching at home while scrolling through Twitter. It was a hit--even if a modest one.

Sense8 was an eight-hour Netflix Original series created by Lana and Andy Wachowski, and J. Michael Straczynski. The science fiction series starred eight characters worldwide, connected by a bond that can be felt through every sense. Sense8 follows the inhabitants of Chicago, who are all connected by more than just two or three senses; they are experiencing everything that their counterparts are seeing, sensing, hearing, and feeling. The series is a love story between two characters, and as they become more connected to their sense counterparts, they begin to feel their partners' pain. They also carry the responsibility of protecting their loved ones that are constantly in danger and fighting for freedom from some sort of outside threat.

So goes the classic line from HBO's dystopian television series Westworld. The show depicts the growing consciousness, and later uprising, of android "hosts" from a western-themed amusement park. The phrase is the series' proverbial safeword, the recurring host admission that they are not, to the great relief of all Westworld guests, sentient beings. Westworld is the latest addition in the Hollywood tradition of sinister robots that gain intelligence, gain consciousness and go rogue. Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Matrix, Transcendence, Ex Machina... the list is long and, for many, a clear demonstration of why the full implications of artificial intelligence (AI) might not be worth the convenience it brings.

Grappling with the ramifications of Artificial Intelligence is one of the first things science fiction ever did as a genre. Yet most sci-fi books, movies, and games explore those ideas from the perspective of a person, whether we're taking down SHODAN in System Shock or chatting with Cortana in Halo. That's something the developers of Per Aspera, Tlön Industries, wanted to change. From their offices in Buenos Aires the team of about 12 people have spent the last few years trying to figure out what it would be like to inhabit the mind of a newly awakened—a newborn—Artificial Consciousness.The result is Per Aspera, a strategic city-builder that has players working to terraform Mars as the artificial consciousness AMI. You're a genderless superintelligence capable of incredible things, but you're also effectively a child with no conception of society or social interaction.

In the intro to the HBO sci-fi series Westworld, a 3D printer churns out humanoid robots, delicately assembling the incredible complexities of the human form so that those robots can go on to--spoiler alert--do naughty things. It takes a lot of biomechanical coordination, after all, to murder a whole lot of flesh-and-blood people. Speaking of: Researchers just made a scientific leap toward making 3D-printed flesh and blood a reality. Writing recently in the journal ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, a team described how they repurposed a low-cost 3D printer into one capable of turning an MRI scan of a human heart into a deformable full-size analog you can actually hold in your hand. Squeeze it, and it'll give like the real thing.