fiction

Turning to a friend or coworker can make tricky problems easier to tackle. Now it looks like having AI chatbots team up with each other can make them more effective.I’ve been playing this week with AutoGen, an open source software framework…

Experts know that generative AI is poised to drastically change the information landscape, and problems that have long plagued tech platforms—like mis- and disinformation, scams, and hateful content—are likely to be amplified, despite the…

The title card that opens 1979’s original Mad Max places the action in a very near future, looming just “a few years from now.” George Miller’s cult action-thriller captured the edginess of a world teetering on the brink. The film depicts a…

I liked the idea that my foremost duty as an OnlyFans chatter should be to comfort the afflicted rather than wheedle the sexually frustrated into buying pricey “nudes and lewds” content. But I balked when the founder suggested that I start…

On May 29, 2007, journals and communities began disappearing from LiveJournal. The missing journals and groups went unclickable, mute, struck through with a single-line font effect. To a banhammer, every query looks like a nail: depictions…

In 1994, everything was cool. Music, movies, TV—the cultural output felt alive. People were also very cool, or they were achieving cool by trying not to be. Anyway, 30 years ago I was not cool and didn’t have much to do on Friday nights.…

I’m a guy “in real life,” but I’ve always played female characters in video games. More and more people say this means I’m either secretly gay/trans or a total creep. Am I allowed to just prefer it? —Gender PlayerDear Player,It sounds like…

The allegations of forgery are founded on a series of reports compiled by an expert in forensic document analysis nominated by COPA, who analyzed the various materials on which Wright’s claim depends. The reports identified hundreds of…

Alyssa Videlock was 11 years old when she started searching for people like her on the internet. What she found, back in the early 2000s, was not at all what she’d hoped for. “Being trans online was not really a thing,” she says. “There was…

1899, a science fiction series from Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, creators of the hit TV show Dark, premiered on Netflix in November 2022. TV producer Ruairi Carroll enjoyed the show’s mysterious characters and storyline. “Whatever way…