fiction

Many years before ChatGPT was released, my research group, the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, wondered whether it was possible to have neural networks generate misinformation. To achieve this, we trained…

In 2017, detectives at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department working a cold case got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found Weidhofer, dead and sexually…

In the game known as the streaming wars, Disney+ came out swinging, bringing with it a massive library of movies and TV shows—with new ones being added all the time. Watched everything on Netflix? Disney+ has a seemingly endless selection…

The Netflix series Bodies is a time travel mystery about four detectives in different time periods attempting to solve the same murder. TV writer Andrea Kail was immediately captivated by the show’s intriguing premise. “This came up in a…

The Dungeons & Dragons video game Baldur’s Gate 3 has become a cultural phenomenon, winning countless accolades including Game of the Year. One of the game’s biggest fans is science fiction editor John Joseph Adams, who has played…

While Netflix is busy pumping out more shows than any one person could watch (probably), Amazon Prime Video has remained the place to go for a few of the best shows around. Trouble is, navigating the service’s labyrinthine menus can make…

No one knows whether artificial intelligence will be a boon or curse in the far future. But right now, there’s almost universal discomfort and contempt for one habit of these chatbots and agents: hallucinations, those made-up facts that…

many times a year, as if on a hidden schedule, some tech person, often venture-capital-adjacent, types out a thought on social media like “The only thing liberal arts majors are good for is scrubbing floors while I punch them” and hits…

The Apple TV+ series For All Mankind is an alternate history story in which the Soviet Union beats the United States to the moon, leading to a greatly intensified space race. Screenwriter Rafael Jordan was excited to see another science…

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…