Culture / Digital Culture

In a subreddit dedicated to Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios’ critically acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons–based role-playing game, a player posed an important question: “I know you probably heard this here more times than I can count but…

We've already discussed how the Israel-Hamas war is the latest conflict where people are poring over social media and news channels looking for updates on what, exactly, is happening. After all, whether it’s news about our neighborhoods or…

“Dating apps promised a quick fix to the messiness of love,” says Carolina Bandinelli, a professor at the University of Warwick whose research focuses on the digital culture of love. “Their promotional narratives spoke about reducing love…

When Texas-based copywriter Dustin Ballard released a cover of Aqua’s 1997 Europop hit “Barbie Girl” this summer using an AI-generated version of Johnny Cash’s voice, he was surprised by its reception. “I actually expected more of a…

A golden age of connectivity is ending. “I deleted my Facebook years ago, spend at least three to six months off Twitter every year, and Bluesky invites are just sitting in my inbox,” a friend tells me when I ask how her relationship to…

The experiment began quite simply: We popped open a few cans of Mountain Dew, put some Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult on the turntable, grabbed our bags of polyhedral dice, and asked ChatGPT, essentially, “Shall we play a game?” Initially,…

Lex and I spent untold hours that summer staring into the green-black screen of an Apple II, venturing from Independence to the Pacific Northwest along the Oregon Trail. It would be years before we learned about Manifest Destiny, about…

I felt like a thawing glacier. Still chilly, I contacted my colleague, Jo-e Sutton, a certified holistic health practioner. She surprised me with her enthusiasm. “Zoom sessions are the greatest blessings that have come from this dark…

“There’s been a lot of speculation recently about the possibility of AI consciousness or self-awareness. But I wonder: Does AI have a subconscious?” —PsychobabbleDear Psychobabble, Sometime in the early 2000s, I came across an…

An LLM cannot write a cohesive, novel-length narrative from start to finish. At present, ChatGPT can produce roughly 600 words at a time, so in order to complete a novel, a human has to feed it prompts and then collage its outputs into a…