Couple of interesting posts in the Guardian (and other media) this month:
- Digital resurrection: fascination and fear over the rise of the deathbot - https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/10/artificial-intellligence-avatar-death-grief-digital-resurrection-fascination-deathbot
Deathbot seems an even more perjorative term than griefbot! What interests me though is what the bot means for the person making it more than what it means for those left behind. I'm writing something long form on this but looking the for the best way to publish it in due course.
- It’s missing something’: AGI, superintelligence and a race for the future -https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/09/its-missing-something-agi-superintelligence-and-a-race-for-the-future
In which it's reported that "Google’s AI unit on Tuesday outlined its next step to AGI by announcing an unreleased model that trains AIs to interact with a convincing simulation of the real world". Whilst it's not clear if this is real embodiment as we've described in Virtual Humans it's certainly a recognition of the greater issue that an AGI needs to exist in a "place" in order to gain all the awareness that AGI may need.
- Can an AI chatbot of Dr Karl change climate sceptics’ minds? He’s willing to give it a try - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/11/digital-dr-karl-kruszelnickic-ai-chatbot
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is dealing with 100s of questions about climate change so is making a Digital Dr Karl. It is trained on 40,000 PDFs.
