Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i WIRED

YES, OPEN AI: We’re talking to you and your ilk, as well as your future super-intelligent creations. Don’t like being called overlords? Get used to it. Sure, once you put AI in everyone’s hands, it’s out of your control. But the design and business decisions of a handful of companies are setting the parameters. We’ve seen this movie before. In its 30 years, wired has crowned countless marvels as the next big thing, only to see them falter. By now, though, it’s hard to deny that generative AI could be as big a deal as the internet itself. In most cases, large language models like ChatGPT are still little better than toys, but two shifts already underway could turn them into more useful workhorses. One is toward fine-tuning LLMs on…

THE AIR CRACKLES with an almost Beatlemaniac energy as the star and his entourage tumble into a waiting Mercedes van. They’ve just ducked out of one event and are headed to another, then another, where a frenzied mob awaits. As they careen through the streets of London—the short hop from Holborn to Bloomsbury—it’s as if they’re surfing one of civilization’s before-and-after moments. The history-making force personified inside this car has captured the attention of the world. Everyone wants a piece of it, from the students who’ve waited in line to the prime minister. Inside the luxury van, wolfing down a salad, is the neatly coiffed 38-year-old entrepreneur Sam Altman, cofounder of OpenAI; a PR person; a security specialist; and me. Altman is unhappily sporting a blue suit with a tieless…

“STEP INTO MY OFFICE,” says Joanna Fang. OK, but to the untrained eye it’s a kleptomaniac’s hoard: rolls of Astroturf, mud and moss, wooden planks, violin bows, smashed keyboards, plastic boxes brimming with shoes, a full armory of axes and swords, a sand pit, a bamboo fence, rocks, half a bike, smashed iPhones, a boat’s anchor chain, a grimy car door. “Never trust a clean foley stage,” she says. Fang is a senior foley artist at Sony PlayStation. Her job is to put sound to video games. So of course her stash includes a lot of leather jackets, since “in games, everyone wears leather.” But other common video game tropes—assault rifles and the like—aren’t close at hand in her San Diego studio. Her work is all about improvisation: Fang trained…

EDWARD TIAN DIDN’T think of himself as a writer. As a computer science major at Princeton, he’d taken a couple of journalism classes, where he learned the basics of reporting, and his sunny affect and tinkerer’s curiosity endeared him to his teachers and classmates. But he describes his writing style at the time as “pretty bad”—formulaic and clunky. One of his journalism professors said that Tian was good at “pattern recognition,” which was helpful when producing news copy. So Tian was surprised when, sophomore year, he managed to secure a spot in John McPhee’s exclusive non-fiction writing seminar. Every week, 16 students gathered to hear the legendary New Yorker writer dissect his craft. McPhee assigned exercises that forced them to think rigorously about words: Describe a piece of modern art…

THE MORRISSEY HAD the right melodrama in his limbs, and his voice was strong and pained. I was at Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan to see a Smiths tribute band. I tried to get Morrissey’s acid yodel in my throat, to sing along. I am human and I need to be loved/just like everybody else does. But it didn’t feel right to copy a copy. Most tribute bands don’t practice outright impersonation, so the way this fake-Smiths singer captured everything about Morrissey was messing with my mind. I’d hoped to be able to savor the music’s maudlin glory without the headache of the flesh-and-blood Morrissey, who seems to have aligned himself with white supremacists. The contempt in Morrissey’s lyrics and politics was presumably not native to Seanissey, as the tribute singer…

BACK IN MAY, an image of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on the site formerly known as Twitter. It was soon followed by pictures of explosions near the White House. Experts in mis-and disinformation quickly flagged the images as fakes, likely generated by artificial intelligence—but not before the stock market started to dip. It was only the latest example of fake content’s troubling real-world effects. The generative AI boom has meant that tools for creating bogus images and videos and pumping out huge amounts of convincing text are now freely available. Misinformation experts say we are entering a new age where distinguishing what is real from what isn’t will become increasingly difficult. In July, major AI developers, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, promised the Biden administration they…

THERE WAS A TIME in the not too distant past—say, nine months ago—when the Turing test seemed like a pretty stringent detector of machine intelligence. Chances are you’re familiar with how it works: Human judges hold text conversations with two hidden interlocutors, one human and one computer, and try to determine which is which. If the computer manages to fool at least 30 percent of the judges, it passes the test and is pronounced capable of thought. For 70 years, it was hard to imagine how a computer could pass the test without possessing what AI researchers now call artificial general intelligence, the entire range of human intellectual capacities. Then along came large language models such as GPT and Bard, and the Turing test suddenly began to seem strangely outmoded.…

BEFORE MICHELLE FOURNET moved to Alaska on a whim in her early twenties, she’d never seen a whale. She took a job on a whale watching boat and, each day she was out on the water, gazed at the grand shapes moving under the surface. For her entire life, she realized, the natural world had been out there, and she’d been missing it. “I didn’t even know I was bereft,” she recalls. Later, as a graduate student in marine biology, Fournet wondered what else she was missing. The hump-backs she was getting to know revealed themselves in partial glimpses. What if she could hear what they were saying? She dropped a hydrophone in the water—but the only sound that came through was the mechanical churn of boats. The whales had…

—Rachel Brigden Haskins, via Facebook THE ASSIGNMENT: IN SIX WORDS, WRITE A STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE OF VEGETABLES. Honorable Mentions Harvesting takes courage with tomatoes screaming. —Kenneth Krabat, via email Broccoli too fears death, studies concluded. —Anthony George, via email Ambitious eggplant’s altered eugenics affect everyone. —@silky_z, via X Complete daily nutrition in one pea. —Sara Faust, via email Turns out anthropomorphic veggies prefer Shakespeare. —@ksherm1017, via X Sentient potato bombs potato chip factory. —@VerbalK48710825, via X Carnivorous kale and the human brunch. —RFrank Davis, via Facebook When the vegetables came, we hid. —Paul Lewis, via email Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? Look for the latest story prompt on Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and WIRED.com/six-word, where you can also see how we’ve illustrated past favorites.…