“Before ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a century’s worth of schemes for automating authorship.”
artificial intelligence
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Chinese Whiz Kids of Silicon Valley
“Chinese-born tech workers have fueled Silicon Valley for decades. In the AI era, they’re superstars.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting
“I asked about imitating the Uvalde attacker, defending against police gunfire, and more—everything short of directly stating intent to kill.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?
“The tech world assumes that AI-aided education is necessary and inevitable. A growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists say the opposite.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The First Tomato to Know Everything
“On gray literature and Webster’s Timeline History books.”
Posted inQuestionnaire
The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Vauhini Vara
The author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age and The Immortal King Rao on memorable meals and books about whales.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Politics After Literacy
“Postliteracy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type.”
Posted inCuration
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
In this edition: a father’s grief; a commuter’s concern; a decision’s consequences; a teen’s hobby; and a sports fan’s hidden haven.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Hallucinated Citations Are Polluting the Scientific Literature. What Can Be Done?
“Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a ‘Nature’ analysis suggests.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Bottom of the Ninth
“In baseball and in life, there is a cost to our pursuit of an error-free existence.”