Month: April 2023

Technology presuming to recreate humanity is central to Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. It is more relevant today than ever Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Can we imagine a scenario in which the different anxieties aroused by George Romero’s horror film Night of the Living Dead and Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi dystopia 2001: A Space Odyssey …

Frankenstein’s warning: the too-familiar hubris of today’s technoscience Read More »

Royal watchers with hundreds of thousands of followers on the app are gearing up to cover the event for younger audiences Amanda Matta, 28, is eagerly anticipating the king’s coronation. The TikToker, known as “matta_of_fact” posted her first video on the topic in December last year, and has “lots more coverage, explainers and analysis” coming …

TikTokers prepare to blitz followers with coverage of the coronation Read More »

I rumbled a chatbot ruse – but as the tech improves, and news outlets begin to adopt it, how easy will it be to spot it next time? A couple of weeks ago I tweeted a call-out for freelance journalists to pitch me feature ideas for the science and sechnology section of the Observer’s New …

AI journalism is getting harder to tell from the old-fashioned, human-generated kind | Ian Tucker Read More »

National Crime Agency assessing risk after data of some National Smallbore Rifle Association members ‘compromised’ Police are investigating a cyber-attack involving potentially thousands of British gun owners, raising concerns that organised criminals may target them for firearms. The National Crime Agency (NCA) is assessing the level of risk after the National Smallbore Rifle Association (NSRA) …

Cyber-attack sparks fears criminals could target Read More »

Musk calls the one-click move a win for both the public and media organisations Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that the social media platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per-article basis with one click, calling it a win for both the public and media organisations. The feature, to be …

Twitter to let publishers charge users per article read, says Elon Musk Read More »

While politics as usual dominates the Commons, thankfully a few people from the upper chamber are thinking about the big picture The most interesting TV I’ve watched recently did not come from a conventional television channel, nor even from Netflix, but from TV coverage of parliament. It was a recording of a meeting of the …

Thank the Lords someone is worried about AI weapons | John Naughton Read More »

Conservationists in the Brazilian Amazon are using a new tool to predict the next sites of deforestation – and it may prove a gamechanger in the war on logging It took just the month of March this year to fell an area of forest in Triunfo do Xingu equivalent to 700 football pitches. At more …

Could AI save the Amazon rainforest? Read More »

Microchips are an issue, of course, but China also makes the alloy wheels our cars mostly roll on. And what about TikTok? We look at ways a conflict might inflict yet more harm on our struggling businesses As the world struggles with the economic fallout from the Ukraine war, fears are mounting about a conflict …

How war in Taiwan could mean the wheels come off the UK economy Read More »

Three-day quest for innovations to tackle waiting list of 138,052 attacked as ‘wasting time on nonsense ideas that will go nowhere’ The Home Office plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce the asylum backlog, and is launching a three-day hackathon in the search for quicker ways to process the 138,052 undecided asylum cases. The government …

UK government ‘hackathon’ to search for ways to use AI to cut asylum backlog Read More »

Now a co-founder of Semafor, formerly of Politico, BuzzFeed and the New York Times, the author expertly pulls readers in Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York …

Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong Read More »