Brian Merchant was the Los Angeles Times’ technology columnist. He’s the author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” and the forthcoming “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.” Merchant is the co-founder of Terraform, Vice Media’s speculative fiction website, and the co-editor of the anthology “Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn.” Previously, he was a senior editor at Motherboard, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, the Atlantic, Fast Company, and Slate, among others.
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Column: The George Carlin auto-generated comedy special is everything that’s wrong with AI right now
To a meaningful degree, the entire AI industry right now is one opaquely sourced fake George Carlin comedy special: a crass stunt whose only purpose is to serve as an advertisement for itself.
ChatGPT and other generative AI applications rely on copyrighted material to do what they do. But rather than compensate creators, the companies are turning to one of Silicon Valley’s most reliable playbooks.
Ring doorbell cameras, self-checkout kiosks, “smart” everything: These are the technologies readers said they’d most like to eliminate, if they could.
From meditations on AI to investigations of cryptocurrency, this year brought a bumper crop of great books about tech. These are required reading for those who would understand this moment.
Questions that have swirled this year — Will my boss try to replace my job with AI? Can my work really be automated away? — are about to become a whole lot more urgent and existential.
The holiday season is here, and with it ubiquitous guides to smart gadgets and tech toys. But what about the products we’re better off without? Our experts weigh in.
The tragedy of AI is not that it stands to replace good journalists, but that it takes every gross, callous move made by management to degrade the production of content — and promises to accelerate it.
The hottest startup in Silicon Valley is in flames. So is the fiction that anything other than the profit motive is going to govern how AI gets developed and deployed.
Joy Buolamwini, author of “Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines,” joins the L.A. Times Book Club on Nov. 14.
Given the myriad practical and ethical questions that continue to surround the technology, Israel should be pressed on how it’s deploying AI in its fight against Hamas.