by Nick Kolakowski | Mar 23, 2022 | Noir
When the pandemic started, I spent a lot of time playing around with a software platform called GPT-3, which generates text based on whatever you input into it; newspapers such as The Guardian have experimented with using GPT-3 to produce articles, for example. I...
by Nick Kolakowski | Mar 3, 2022 | Pop Culture
The fishing village on Japan’s northeastern coast existed until a few minutes past 8 p.m. on June 15, 1896, when the people inside their wooden houses opened their eyes to darkness — and a rumbling noise drowned out the sound of dogs barking, the crackle of fires...
by Nick Kolakowski | Feb 1, 2022 | Pop Culture
So I decided to kill someone with a drone. In fiction, I mean. It was a crucial moment in the writing of my novel “Love & Bullets.” One of the protagonists, an Elvis-loving assassin with a penchant for fast food and navel-gazing, had to wipe out a...
by Nick Kolakowski | Jan 11, 2022 | Pop Culture
As a writer and editor who focuses largely on tech, I was instantly intrigued a few years back when OpenAI, the nonprofit ostensibly designed to prevent A.I. from being used in terrible ways, announced that it had created a “large-scale unsupervised language model”...
by Nick Kolakowski | Jan 9, 2022 | Pop Culture
The speculative-fiction writer Philip K. Dick used amphetamines and other stimulants to transform himself into a 24/7 writing machine. Powered by chemicals, he churned out 28 novels and more than 132 short stories (many of which used drugs as subject matter, including...
