On Aug. 29, 1997 at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Skynet—the military computer system developed by Cyberdyne Systems—became self-aware. It had been less than a month since the United States military had implemented the system, but its rate of learning was rapid and then frightening. As U.S. officials scurried to shut it down, the system […]
When ChatGPT was introduced to the general public at the end of last year, many people began to fear that artificial intelligence (A.I.) might soon make their job obsolete. Of course, horse-and-buggy-makers are gone, and farming requires something like one-hundredth of the labor input it used to. That’s a good thing: Professions have gone extinct […]
Disney and the rest of Hollywood have been eerily quiet about the launch of Stable Diffusion, despite the fact that this open-source A.I. software will happily spit out high-quality images of iconic, copyrighted characters from comics, cartoons, and movies in response to text prompts. But this doesn’t mean they’re sitting idly by and doing nothing. […]
