All posts tagged: Books

AI Company Known for Teen Suicides Launches New Feature to Turn Books Into Roleplaying Experiences

AI Company Known for Teen Suicides Launches New Feature to Turn Books Into Roleplaying Experiences

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech AI company Character.AI has long garnered a reputation for hosting some extremely dubious content. Though it built its early success off explosive popularity among teen users, it was repeatedly caught hosting wildly inappropriate bots — like ones modeled after real-world mass shooters or designed to encourage eating disorders. Outrage grew when a teen died by suicide after developing an intense emotional connection to a Character.AI chatbot, followed by at least two other suicides and related lawsuits. The situation got so bad that last year, the company banned underage users from interacting with its bots entirely. Now the company has announced “c.ai Books,” a bizarre feature designed to turn books into “choose your own adventure” novels. “Interactive AI storytelling is powerful, but a blank page can be intimidating,” the company wrote in its announcement. “Books gives you a familiar starting point — characters you know, narratives you love, and stakes that are already built in.” The company scraped classic …

How Audrey Hepburn’s Son Became Her Only Official Biographer

How Audrey Hepburn’s Son Became Her Only Official Biographer

Published by Sam Flores

Before agreeing to participate in the definitive account of Audrey Hepburn, once one of the world’s highest-grossing movie stars, her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer told himself that there were already more than a thousand books about the subject. “Aside from biographies, comic books, cookbooks, fictionalized sketches, and illustrated style guides, there are fashion books with compilations of her many magazine covers and the hats she wore,” says the film producer and philanthropist. To the actor, he added, a biography “would have seemed like nonsense, and she would have rejected the idea with a grimace and said it was the last thing the world needed. But the truth is that she never anticipated the insatiable appetite across the world for her personality.” As custodian of her image, name, and identity since Hepburn passed away in 1993, Ferrer says he has witnessed an astounding development: “the crystallization of her memory into icon and legend, not only internationally but from the generation before mine and, from there, to subsequent generations of 20-somethings and teenagers.” Sean Hepburn Ferrer poses …

The Books Briefing: The First Draft of Cultural History

The Books Briefing: The First Draft of Cultural History

Published by Daniella Wilson

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Newspapers publish the rough draft of history, as the saying goes. And what’s the rough draft of the news? I would argue that it’s gossip, as filtered by good reporters. Which means that gossip is the very rough first version of what ends up in the history books. I first thought of this syllogism while reading primary sources for my book of cultural history, and it came to mind recently as I dove into Lena Dunham’s highly entertaining new memoir, Famesick. “God bless a memoir that drops names—the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote this week in an essay about the book. Gilbert also laments that Dunham’s second memoir fails at what her groundbreaking HBO series, Girls, managed to do: “make broader meaning out of her experiences.” It’s true that the book cannot compete with the show’s ability to explain members of a generation to themselves. And yet, …

The best books about being a teenager – according to our experts

The best books about being a teenager – according to our experts

Published by skeptic

Awkwardness and acne are the first things that spring to mind when thinking of adolescence, but they’re not always the full picture. We asked eight of our experts to tell us which book they feel best represents the experience of being a teenager. 1. Natives by Akala In this biographical polemic, Natives, Akala captures the experience of being a teenager as a time when young people begin to recognise the social injustices shaping the worlds they inhabit. John Murray Publishers Ltd Akala reflects on his teenage years as a period of awakening. Experiences at school, encounters with authority, and immersion in music and culture all contributed to the formation of his own identity. For many teenagers, it is during these formative years that individual experiences become connected to wider social structures and for all too many teenagers, the limits placed upon them. Akala conveys the confusion and anger that can arise when adolescents realise that society is not fair, particularly for those from minority backgrounds. His honest discussion of education, policing, and representation highlights how …

Horror Books with Spring Vibes

Horror Books with Spring Vibes

Published by José Betancourt

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. We often think of horror novels as dark, moody, and atmospheric, which is why the autumn and winter months feel like the perfect time for horror. But spring can be just as scary! Plants are growing, flowers are blooming, and animals are frolicking. It might not seem sinister at first glance… but looks can be deceiving. Here are scary horror books you can read this season for all the spring vibes. Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson What’s more spring-appropriate than a farmer’s market? In this sapphic horror story, that’s where Ash and Rosemary meet. Ash is selling beautiful artisanal soaps, cupcakes, candles, jars of honey, and more. Ro has never met a woman more perfect, and she can’t tell if she wants to be with her or wants to be her. Ro’s obsession with Ash makes her believe the other woman can do no wrong. But is Ash as perfect as she seems? And if Ro is willing …

The Dog’s Gaze by Thomas Laqueur review – the art of the canine, from Velázquez to Picasso | Art and design books

The Dog’s Gaze by Thomas Laqueur review – the art of the canine, from Velázquez to Picasso | Art and design books

Published by Sam Flores

Thirty-five thousand years ago, in the Ardèche region of France, Paleolithic artists drew a spectacular bestiary on the walls of the Chauvet cave. Their focus was apex predators, so there were lots of lions, as well as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Dogs were nowhere to be seen, and yet in the soft sediment on the limestone floor of the cave, there are traces of canid pawprints next to human footprints. Two fellow creatures, most likely a boy and a dog, stood together, about 10,000 years after the art was made, looking up at the walls in wonder. Here was a moment of shared contemplation, followed perhaps by a glance to see the other’s reaction. In this luminous book, the American cultural historian Thomas Laqueur explores what he calls “the dog’s gaze”. The dog was the first animal to live companionably with humans, and Laqueur argues that this marks the boundary between nature and culture. It is this threshold status that has, in turn, qualified the dog to play a rich, symbolic part in western art. Just having dogs in a picture – snuffling for picnic crumbs …

Britain’s bitter assisted dying debate is about to come roaring back to life – POLITICO

Britain’s bitter assisted dying debate is about to come roaring back to life – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Da Costa called the plan “extraordinary.” She said: “Last time round, MPs voted to allow the Lords to do their work. This is a very different vote. There will be no ‘off switch’ once it goes to the Lords. MPs will be asked if they’re happy with the bill — with all its deficiencies and all the evidence that has been heard — to become law.” Opponents of the bill argue that the debates in the Lords have exposed holes in the law that the Commons scrutiny did not. One, Labour peer Luciana Berger, pointed out that the bill has sweeping powers and 59 clauses — far longer than any known private members’ bill, including those that allowed abortion and outlawed capital punishment. Supporters of assisted dying react outside Parliament on June 20, 2025 as MPs in the House of Commons voted in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. | Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images “This process has shown that we can’t get a bill that is safe,” said Berger. …

The Online Fiction Boom Reimagining China’s History

The Online Fiction Boom Reimagining China’s History

Published by skeptic

If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious past. In a new book titled Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism, Rongbin Han, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Georgia, examines a popular science fiction genre where people travel back in time to rewrite Chinese history. Han looked at the 2,100 most popular titles on a top web novel review platform and found 238 such stories where the main characters bring technological knowledge, advanced political theories, and economic reform ideas back to ancient China or more recent historical eras. Who says 10th-century China is unequipped for a parliamentary political system? Someone’s gotta try to see how it would have worked. Han says he has personally read over 70 of these alt-history fiction books, plus dozens of other web novels with other themes for comparison. …

Lena Dunham Remembers the Downsides of Working with Adam Driver

Lena Dunham Remembers the Downsides of Working with Adam Driver

Published by Sam Flores

Following the recent success of the Netflix series Too Much, Lena Dunham has released her memoir, Famesick, which she is busy promoting in a series of interviews with international news outlets. In conversation with The Guardian, the actress and director talked about the difficulties she had on set with Adam Driver, who played her character Hannah’s on-and-off boyfriend in Girls. The HBO series, which aired six seasons from 2012 to 2017, was a great springboard for Dunham, the project’s star and showrunner—but it was not without its rough spots. In Famesick, Dunham says Driver would habitually yell on set, once even throwing a chair against the wall next to her and puncturing the wall of his trailer with a fist. “At the time, I didn’t have the skill to … it never entered my mind to say, ‘I am your boss, you can’t speak to me this way,’” she said. “And, at that point in my 20s, I still thought that’s what great male geniuses do: eviscerate you. Which is weird, because I was raised …

New Scientist recommends Jamie Bartlett’s insightful How to Talk to AI

New Scientist recommends Jamie Bartlett’s insightful How to Talk to AI

Published by skeptic

I don’t use AI chatbots, so you might wonder what use I could make of Jamie Bartlett’s book, How to Talk to AI. Well, this plain-speaking guide makes the compelling case that, despite their popularity, we don’t know how to speak to chatbots properly. Few of us have had adequate training on getting the most out of AI – or on how to protect ourselves from it. That’s where it can all go very wrong, sending us down misinformation rabbit holes or fostering emotional dependence. Mastering the art of prompting a chatbot is about more than AI, says Bartlett. It’s about self-awareness: how much do you know about how it works? How might your questions (and the biases they reveal) affect the output you receive? I’m still wary, but after reading the book I feel much better equipped should temptation strike me. What it makes clear is that scepticism is your friend in this AI-powered world, whether you talk to chatbots daily or avoid them at all costs. Bethan Ackerley,Subeditor, London Topics: Source link