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Everything is a remix: AI and image generation

Large language models explained

Letters live: generative AI

Humans need not apply

Staying human in a machine age

Dan Tepfer’s player piano is his composing partner

AI isn’t merely bad at writing. It does not and cannot write

‘Why did you write it?’

As an English professor, the YouTube video essayist known as ‘josh (with parentheses)’ has, over the past few years, witnessed a faculty-wide panic about students using large language models (LLMs) to plagiarise assignments. The experience inspired him to create this sprawling video essay on the meaning of LLMs – what they can do and, more to the point, what they can’t. To him, this includes the very act of writing itself, which he contends, borrowing the words of Stephen King, requires a ‘meeting of the minds’. The entertaining and insightful piece spans the poetry of Gertrude Stein and contemporary ‘brainrot’ videos, all while he prods at ChatGPT and his friends. Travelling to some surprising places, he generates an unusually perceptive meditation on what might, at first glance, seem like a near-exhausted topic.

Video by josh (with parentheses)

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Why we should worry less about ‘sentient’ AIs and more about what we’re teaching them

videoFuture of technology

Artificial ‘creativity’ is unstoppable. Grappling with its ethics is up to us

videoComputing and artificial intelligence

Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators

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Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave’s letter on the threat of computed creativity

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Who, exactly, authored this AI-generated spin on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo?

The robots are coming… for our jobs! Why the human workforce is at risk

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Meet the jazz pianist who improvises in tandem with a piano that plays itself

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