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‘Fredbot’ is one example of a technology known as chatbots of the dead, chatbots designed to speak in the voice of specific deceased people. Other examples are plentiful: in 2016, Eugenia Kuyda built a chatbot from the text messages of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who was killed in a traffic accident. The first Roman Bot, like Fredbot, was selective, but later versions were generative, meaning they generated novel responses that reflected Mazurenko’s voice. In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground’s co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called ‘life story avatars’, that are based on loved ones’ memories. Today, enterprises in the business of ‘reinventing remembrance’ abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December – the list goes on.

These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters and popularity of large language models increase and as personal data expands into the seeming permanence of the cloud. To some, chatbots of the dead are useful tools that can help us grieve, remember, and reflect on those we’ve lost. To others, they are dehumanising technologies that conjure a dystopian world. They raise ethical questions about consent, ownership, memory and historical accuracy: who should be allowed to create, control or profit from these representations? How do we understand chatbots that seem to misrepresent the past? But for us, the deepest concerns relate to how these bots might affect our relationship to the dead. Are they artificial replacements that merely paper over our grief? Or is there something distinctively valuable about chatting with a simulation of the dead?

Although chatbots have been around for a long time, chatbots of the dead are a relatively new innovation made possible by recent advances in programming techniques and the proliferation of personal data. On a basic level, these chatbots are created by combining machine learning with personal writing, such as text messages, emails, letters and journals, which reflect a person’s distinctive diction, syntax, attitudes and quirks. There are various ways this combination can be achieved. One resource-intensive method involves creating a new chatbot by training a language model on someone’s personal writing. A technically simpler method involves instructing a pretrained chatbot, like ChatGPT, to utilise personal data that is inserted into the context window of a conversation. Both methods enable a chatbot to speak in ways that resemble a dead person by ‘selectively’ outputting statements the person actually wrote, ‘generatively’ producing novel statements that bear some resemblance to statements the person actually wrote, or some combination of both.

Chatbots can be used on their own or combined with other forms of AI, such as voice cloning and deepfakes, to create interactive representations of the dead. When provided with the right data, many companies and platforms now have the technical capacity to generate a conversational AI version of your deceased loved one. In the future, these chatbots will likely become more common and sophisticated, involving much more than just text. Like human mediums and Ouija boards, these bots appear to meet one of our deepest desires: to speak with the dead once again.

Many critics view this technological endeavour as an especially abject form of death denial. A common objection to these bots is that emotionally vulnerable users may become so invested in their interactions that they will conflate their chatbot with the deceased person, or lose sight of the fact that the person is gone. As the philosopher Patrick Stokes puts it in Digital Souls (2021), we may ‘become so used to avatars of the dead that we accept and treat them as if they’re the dead themselves.’ This sort of worry suggests, as Weizenbaum feared, that the salutary potential of chatbots is based in delusional thinking.

Another worry relates to chatbots’ lack of inner lives. Critics, like the philosopher Shannon Vallor in The AI Mirror (2024), argue that there is something defective about emotional bonds with entities that cannot reciprocate affection or interest, about love that is kept alive by ‘the economic rationality of exchange’ rather than a more precarious ‘union of loving feeling and action’. And these emotionally one-sided relationships create a risk of over-reliance, social isolation and exploitation. This risk is especially stark given that chatbots of the dead may be produced by companies with a financial incentive to manipulate users and maximise engagement. A chatbot of the dead that is highly monetised (unlock your chatbot’s ‘caring’ traits for a small fee!) or gamified (chat every day to level up!) could be a dangerous tool in the hands of an unscrupulous corporation.'

A discerning user should view chatbots similarly. Depending on how they are designed, chatbots can represent a person in many ways. The assumption that a chatbot delivers – or seeks to deliver – an authoritative replication of a deceased person makes as much sense as the assumption that an actor’s portrayal of a historical figure in a drama represents the sole faithful depiction of that figure. Just as the inspiration for a historical character may come from various sources, our personal data flows from different aspects of our identities. People do not really speak in a single voice: most people are different on social media than they are in text messages, for example. There is no one way to design a chatbot ‘actor’ because there is no best or definitive perspective on a person, no best or definitive fictional world in which to encounter someone’s legacy. There are countless useful, informative, intriguing, funny, strange, beautiful perspectives that a chatbot ‘actor’ might stage, just as there are countless ways a human actor can play a role, a writer compose a memoir, or a portraitist paint a picture.

Doctors in London have become the first in the world to cure blindness in children born with a rare genetic condition using a pioneering gene therapy.

The children had leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a severe form of retinal dystrophy that causes vision loss due to a defect in the AIPL1 gene. Those affected are legally certified as blind from birth.

But after doctors injected healthy copies of the gene into their eyes with keyhole surgery that took just 60 minutes, four children can now see shapes, find toys, recognise their parents' faces, and in some cases, even read and write.

"The outcomes for these children are hugely impressive and show the power of gene therapy to change lives," said Prof Michel Michaelides, a consultant retinal specialist at Moorfields Eye hospital and professor of ophthalmology at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology.

"We have, for the first time, an effective treatment for the most severe form of childhood blindness, and a potential paradigm shift to treatment at the earliest stages of the disease."

HP Inc today abruptly ditched the mandatory 15-minute wait time that it imposed on customers dialling up its telephone-based support team due to "initial feedback."

As The Register exclusively revealed yesterday, HP introduced the minimum time that PC and print users would need to wait before they spoke to a human being. This was to lean on customers to use online alternatives such as social channels or live chat.

This came into force for folks phoning up the call center in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy on February 18. It went down like a lead balloon internally at HP, with some staff on the front line unhappy that they were having to deal with a decision taken by management, who didn't have to directly interact with customers left hanging on the telephone… for at least 15 minutes.

The Go-Go Museum & Café, the world’s only collection dedicated to the celebration, study and preservation of all things go-go, opens Wednesday in its birthplace, Washington, D.C.

For the uninitiated, the genre is a syncopated, drum-driven style of funk. Its distinctive sound is heavy on percussion instruments such as congas and cowbells, as well as brass horns. Go-go is often played live, where its exuberant rhythms soar. “It is a powerful expression of joy,” said Natalie Hopkinson, the museum’s chief curator, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation about go-go. “It is an art form.”

While several bands played roles in early prototypes of the music, Chuck Brown, the “Godfather of Go-Go,” is widely credited with creating the genre in the 1970s. During a club performance with his band, The Soul Searchers, Brown reportedly had the percussion section play continuously between songs. Meanwhile, he engaged the audience in lively call and response. That groove — which goes and goes — became go-go.

A half-century later, go-go is still going. In 2020, it was designated the official music of Washington, D.C. Over the years, artists such as Brown, Rare Essence and Trouble Funk have appeared on NPR’s “Tiny Desk” concert series. Go-Go acts have also appeared at Pharrell Williams’s Something in the Water festival in Virginia, at the Kennedy Center and beyond.

Transphobia and homophobia are common in Nigeria, which has no legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. The Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act of 2014 reinforced existing colonial-era laws that criminalized same-sex activity as “carnal knowledge against the order of nature,” punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment. The 2014 act went further than the original laws by banning marriages and civil unions, the operation of gay organizations and social clubs, public expressions of LGBTQ+ identity and advocacy of LGBTQ+ rights. In northern Nigeria, where Sharia law operates, homosexual activity can be punishable by death by stoning. There is no specific provision in the 2014 law covering trans people, but it is not possible to legally change your gender in the country and gender-affirming health care is hard to access. Trans Nigerians seeking hormone therapy typically obtain drugs through international pharmacies online and take them at home without guidance from medical professionals. Cross-dressing is prohibited under Sharia law in the north and the Nigerian military; in recent years, some lawmakers have attempted to pass a federal ban.

Area Mama’s murder took place amid rapidly spreading misinformation about LGBTQ+ rights in Nigeria, resulting in a surge in transphobia and homophobia. On social media, fans mourned the loss of Area Mama, whose content provided one of the few examples of a publicly out trans person living in the country. “I remember how unapologetic she was about being herself, and how beautifully her energy radiated every time she came on screen,” said Victoria, a Lagos-based queer woman who was in law school in Abuja at the time of Area Mama’s murder. Almost 6,000 people signed a petition calling for the Nigerian Ministry of Justice to take “immediate and decisive action” to thoroughly investigate her murder, categorize it as a hate crime, end violence against LGBTQ+ people and advocate for legislative reforms. At the same time, Nigerians posted hateful messages on Area Mama’s videos, misgendering her and saying that she deserved to die. No one expects the petition to put significant pressure on authorities or the government. Members of Nigeria’s queer community have come to accept that they only have each other — and that to live safely as themselves, they have to do so underground.

Organizations that support the rights of trans and non-binary people are sometimes able to operate more openly because the 2014 act lacks a specific provision against trans people. Creme De La Crème (CDLC), for example, a Nigerian transgender and non-binary rights foundation, has been able to operate despite the hostile environment. The organization works with Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission, a non-governmental group that promotes and protects human rights in the country, to educate state bodies, such as the Nigerian military, on the experiences of trans Nigerians. Even so, Franklin Ejiogu, CDLC’s executive director, said the organization’s offices and safe shelters have been raided repeatedly. CDLC has moved headquarters on multiple occasions and is now looking to buy its own properties to safeguard against threats from landlords and the public that can lead to raids.

Rather than lobby for national policy change, which they know is a losing battle given the government’s staunch anti-LGBTQ+ stance, many organizations prioritize smaller-scale efforts to improve the daily lives of queer folks. They run education initiatives to improve representation and stop the spread of misinformation, including hosting in-person panels, which they publicize as relating to “equality” rather than LGBTQ+ rights specifically. They also publish online material on the queer experience in Nigeria. In one episode of Q Convos, a podcast featuring conversations on queer identity and culture run by The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs), five queer Nigerians discuss the prevalence of kito, a slang term for people who entrap, assault and extort queer people through dating apps, as well as other luring mechanisms.

The city of Alto Hospicio, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is one of the driest places on Earth. And yet its population of 140,000 continues to balloon, putting mounting pressure on nearby aquifers that haven’t been recharged by rain in 10,000 years. But Alto Hospicio, like so many other coastal cities, is rich in an untapped water resource: fog.

New research finds that by deploying fog collectors — fine mesh stretched between two poles — in the mountains around Alto Hospicio, the city could harvest an average of 2.5 liters of water per square meter of netting each day. Large fog collectors cost between $1,000 and $4,500 and measure 40 square meters, so just one placed near Alto Hospicio could grab 36,500 liters of water a year without using any electricity, according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.

By placing the collectors above town — where the altitude is ideal for exploiting the region’s predictable band of fog — water would flow downhill in pipelines by the power of gravity. So that initial investment for collectors would keep paying liquid dividends year after year. “If you’re pumping water from the underground, you will need a lot of energy,” said Virginia Carter Gamberini, a geographer and assistant professor at Chile’s Universidad Mayor and co-lead author of the paper. “From that perspective, it’s a very cheap technology.”

Don’t have a whole lot to say in this intro paragraph. If you enjoy these, do a blog post with your own game and art recommendations. If you don’t have a blog, consider starting a free one on neocities or bear blog. I also have start putting more effort into my recommendation list on Itch.io if you want more recommendations. Consider starting one of those too. I’ve heard they’re way cooler and sexier than Steam Curator pages. I like these ones by Meagan and WildWeasel. And leave nice comments on things you like! Anyway, as Geoff Keighley always says, “Now more than ever, video games.”

A large mural of a teacup decorated with a green flower bursts off the white wall on the ground floor of a tall apartment building in the Kebun Baru area of Singapore. A bowl with a rooster adorns another building nearby. Up the street, another tower features a candy with a white rabbit on the wrapper.

The paintings are more than street art. These 10 murals — each depicting a distinctive Singaporean food-related item — are helping residents with dementia find their way home.

More than 80 percent of Singapore residents over the age of 65 live in public housing blocks like these. But, as the social service agency Dementia Singapore heard from locals in Kebun Baru, the uniform, whitewashed design of the ground floors made it difficult for residents with dementia to get around. Dementia — a family of conditions that impact cognitive function, including Alzheimer’s disease — changes how people are able to navigate even familiar areas, and can impair their ability to read information like numbers.

Along with the hype, the ambitious experiment—building a "car-free" neighborhood in one of the most auto-dependent population centers on the planet—has aroused skepticism. An article by the nonprofit advocacy organization Strong Towns, for instance, contends that Culdesac is a far cry from "the incremental urbanism and thickening our cities need. A dozen or even a thousand Culdesacs can’t solve that problem," because they would lack long-term growth benefits including "the resilience of a system where many hands have built the neighborhood and have a financial stake in it" and would reflect "a zoning and finance stream that favors industrial over incremental production."

But these critics don’t live there. Those with more proximity see the place as a big plus.

Many young people tell me that they fear there is no future. When they ask about the future, they are also asking: what is still imaginable or for what may we still hope? To say there is no future, or that the future moves only in the direction of greater destruction, then we are still imagining something, even if it is a dark picture, one that shows no signs of hope. If we are imagining a fatal conclusion, we are still imagining.

When we say, for instance, that we are imagining the end of the world, or the end of the world as we have known it, we are imagining the end to imagination itself. That is surely something difficult, if not impossible for the imagination to do. For it is one thing to imagine an ongoing destructive process and quite another to feel one’s own power to imagine draw to a halt, potentially destroyed by the destructive processes one is tracking. Tracking fatality is still anticipating, and that assumes a form, whether a picture, a sequence of associations, a cluster of images, a story yet to be narrated about history unfolding, or the new landscapes now lay before us.

If we have an image or story to communicate or we find a form or discover that the image or story is already taking form and that the story took shape in one of the languages we speak. No one is predicting the future at such moments, since it is the unknowable dimension of the future that has us most concerned.

And so, we find that what we imagine is framed and formed in ways that support one kind of interpretation of what will happen over another. The frame and the form are central to an everyday form of conjecturing, one that informs the fear we feel and the imagining we do. All this happens not only inside the mind, but in the modalities and objects through which fearing and imagining take place: specific sensuous modes of presentation, specific media. These are not simply vehicles for preformed thought, but formative powers in themselves.