I recently released a pre-print on what I call the AI Criminal Mastermind, an AI agent that plans, facilitates and coordinates a crime by on-boarding human ‘taskers’. In heist films, a criminal mastermind is a character who plans a criminal…
I’ve been thinking a lot about authorial voice and style lately, the thing that makes each person’s writing unique. Growing up, I was a voracious reader, in part because my parents had a rule that we could only stay up…
When my granddad died many years ago, I spent a long time thinking about the world he grew up in. A place where nature was abundant, where humans hadn’t caused so much damage yet, where insects flourished and where physical…
Nostalgic comments about the early internet often praise its random, chaotic aesthetic [...]
The future has never seemed closer, yet we’re still struggling to find our place in it. It’s no surprise, then, that many of us are turning back to the cyberpunk genre. Its’ a world of hackers, rebels, and misfits, in…
Australia has proposed banning social media for children under the age of 16, with penalties for tech companies that don’t comply. Backlash against this idea has centered on the problem of enforcing age verification, which would affect all users, not…
The first image to pop up on Google when you search for “Beethoven” is now an AI-generated image. This can be replicated for other famous composers, including Chopin. In some cases, there are real photographs of these composers being buried…
The UK’s new Labour government has pledged to build 1.5 million homes during its first term in office. To achieve this, it promises planning reform and the reintroduction of local housing targets. Yet little attention has been given to the…
We are entering an era of upheaval that some are calling the fourth industrial revolution.[1] The rise of artificial intelligence, and in particular generative art, threatens to upend our social and cultural landscape, leading to a renewed conflict between mechanical…
(Below is a pre-print shared for educational purposes. The full article is available here, with credit to my co-author Jan Blockx: ) My latest academic work looks at recommender systems, the recommendations that shape our digital lives on YouTube, Amazon,…