I expect that this is probably the year I’ll need to consider how my profession will change if students start relying on AI writing software. Like many people in my social media feed, this summer I’ve been playing a bit with AI image software, and thinking about how all the photographers and artists whose work…
The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious artificial intelligence website allow him to speak with her once more? […] There was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and…
A student newspaper article about interactive fiction (quoting Emily Short and me) Blaming Roget’s Thesaurus Finding the URL of a framed HTML document My visit to the John Lennon Artificial Intelligence Project HarperCollins re-issuing the works of C.S. Lewis Dave Winer on “The Web is a Writing Environment“
I was honored to play Alquist in Artistic Prosperity’s virtual production of RUR over the summer. I’m glad to see Čapek’s play is getting some attention in the Guardian. Not many plays introduce a new word to the language. One that did was Karel Čapek’s RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots that had its premiere in Prague…
Microsoft is laying off dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. The layoffs are part of a bigger push by Microsoft to rely on artificial intelligence to pick news and content that’s presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft’s Edge browser, and in the company’s various Microsoft News apps. Many of the affected workers are part of Microsoft’s SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division, and are contracted as human editors to help pick stories. Robots will now pick news stories for MSN and Microsoft News.
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. Data’s autonomy is at stake in a taut, character-driven courtroom drama that resists pandering — no distracting fist-fights or space battles. This episode not only succeeds as a stand-alone meditation on the human condition, it meshes narratively with events from past shows and offers affordances for future story arcs…
Sounds like a typical grad school seminar.
This will be my self-reward when I finish all my obligations for the term. For the uninitiated, here’s the rundown. In Broken Age, players control two characters: Vella, a young girl who’s about to be sacrificed to an ancient monster called Mog Chothra, and Shay, a teenage boy who was raised in a spaceship by…
In the mid-1950s mathematician John McCarthy issued a call for research on “Automata Studies,” but the phrase was so bland that few people understood what he meant. So he came up with a more provocative description of the idea he was promoting. He called it artificial intelligence. via John McCarthy, the father of artificial intelligence,…
Honestly, this does not sound good. In the short term, it will only be possible to alter the “flavor text” and not the substance. Since the producers ultimately control both the game world and the TV world, and can therefore nerf a gameworld city that e TV plot needs destroyed, or buff a game world…
(A transcription of the text and scans of photos from a 1972 magazine article about the legendary space combat computer game. Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone.) October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console…
It’s not really a grading tool, but it might be worth introducing into the writing process. I’m running a paper workshop tomorrow… I might give it a shot. PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help…
Journalism is changing. Watchdog journalism — the perusal of thousands of pages of official records in search of anomalies and other signs of abuse and corruption — is much harder to do than reporting on celebrity shenanigans or fashion trends. John Mecklin writes: On a disaggregated Web, it seems, people and advertisers simply will not…
Great 1972 Rolling Stone article about a foundational computer game. Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in…
Efforts are afoot to not only make IF more accessible, but to make it more modern and attractive in appearance. Along with all of the other innovations of Inform 7, for instance, a facility has now been added by which the author can easily include a “book cover” of sorts for her work, which is…
I take the view that computer languages, robot ethics, method acting, and biomechanics are the main ingredients that fused, in the 1950s, to become the cultural meme we call Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. None of those ingredients was wholly new at that time: biomechanics and the Method – first known as the Stanislavski…
The implications of scalable theory have been far-reaching and pervasive. In fact, few end-users would disagree with the deployment of expert systems, which embodies the private principles of artificial intelligence. We explore new introspective configurations, which we call KindlerDop.–Shatner, Elmo, Jerz and Nye —An Improvement of XML (SciGen) Read the backstory behind this random CS paper…
just finished a draft of an encyclopedia entry about “artificial intelligence.” It’s for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and so, of course, it deals with how AI relates to narrative. Following Jill’s example, I have posted this draft in case anyone has comments on who I might have slighted, how I might have misrepresented…
John Lennon Artificial Intelligence Project: Hey, this is John speaking…Who’re you? [Enter your first name below] > Dennis Nice to meet you Dennis > What do you think of computers? If you could have any kind of pet what would it be? > A walrus? Go on. > I am the eggman! What does it…