Tech

Ellen E Jones: AI can already create films. What it can’t create is art

A machine-made movie has premiered at Tribeca and virtual actor Tilly Norwood is about to star in a feature. But if there’s no soul, no emotion, or no attempt at human connection ... who cares? By Ellen E Jones

Culture

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist

Tech

‘We go where the silence is’: Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on Trump, violence and the power of bearing witness

The pioneering independent reporter, now the subject of a documentary, talks to Carole Cadwalladr about surviving a massacre and the current threats to the media

Tech

Adele Walton: The Online Safety Act is supposed to make Britain’s internet a safe space – yet it can’t touch the site linked to my sister’s death

Ofcom says it has used all its powers and can do no more against a pro-suicide forum. For bereaved families like mine, only a public inquiry can explain why

News

Peter Thiel, precogs and ‘non-human corporations’ – welcome to the wild world of AI Argentina

President Milei’s plans to turn my country into an anarcho-capitalist tech paradise makes him just the latest character in the nation’s long history of chancers and dictators, writes Uki Goñi

Tech

We’re being asked to save two buckets of water a day. Meanwhile data centres drink a town’s worth

England is heading for a 5bn-litre daily water shortfall by 2055 – so why is the government fast-tracking one of the most water-hungry industries there is, and letting it keep its consumption private, asks campaigner Adele Walton

Environment

‘If these social media apps were an air fryer, they would have been recalled’: digital campaigner Beeban Kidron on Big Tech

The acclaimed film-maker and peer has made it her business to represent the rights of children and creators against Silicon Valley’s ‘giant compulsion machine’. She talks to Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Q&A

‘It’s like this was made up by a schoolkid’: Reform’s vanishing crypto bill

Nigel Farage launched it in Las Vegas and promised to make it law. Now, as his links to cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne are under scrutiny, Reform’s flagship policy has disappeared. When you understand who would benefit from its proposals – and from other policies Farage has lobbied for since – this is perhaps no surprise. By Ian Tucker

The Harborne Receipts

Scan your eyeballs, think of the children: how Britain sells surveillance as safety

Keir Starmer's under-16 social media ban can only work if everyone proves who they are. It is the natural conclusion of the Online Safety Act – and of a Brexit that was always about control, says digital rights advocate Heather Burns

Tech

At last, the fool’s bargain that the media struck with AI may be over

In a thunderous speech last week, the boss of the New York Times sounded a rallying call to news organisations to rise up against the theft of their work by Big Tech – and not before time, writes Branko Brkic

Tech

‘Her silence was more powerful than words’: how I interviewed a Facebook whistleblower who wasn’t allowed to speak

The Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr was all set to talk to Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the explosive memoir Careless People, at the Hay festival when Meta’s lawyers intervened ... and turned the event into ‘absurdist theatre’

News

‘What’s happening is horrifying’: the rebel film-maker challenging AI’s march into Hollywood

While pro-Silicon Valley documentaries got major distribution deals, Valerie Veatch had to struggle to get her film, about Big Tech’s dark past and future, into the world. She talked to Charlotte O’Sullivan about what some attendees called ‘the scariest movie playing at Sundance’

Tech

Cory Doctorow: Hell is other people – so billionaires are using AI to replace them

The tech elite are pouring billions into dispensing with inconvenient humans. Now governments want the same trick to wish away the migrants their economies desperately need, writes the author and Nerve columnist

Tech

‘They are weapons of war’: Gisèle Pelicot on the tech platforms that facilitate rape

The woman whose courage at trial transformed the debate around abuse talks to Lucia Osborne-Crowley about survival, reclaiming confidence – and shutting down the tools of sexual exploitation

News

‘It’s not progress, and we can stop it’: journalist Karen Hao on big tech, protest and the preventable AI future

The US reporter and bestselling author was one of the first journalists to get inside OpenAI – and was alarmed at what she found. Six years on, she tells Carole Cadwalladr, a coalition of resistance is growing to oppose the new Silicon Valley ascendancy

Tech

‘They can shape the outcomes they claim to forecast’ – could Polymarket influence an election?

A platform backed by Peter Thiel and advised by Donald Trump Jr. is taking anonymous crypto bets on UK elections, missile strikes and the death of world leaders. In Britain no regulator will touch it, writes Ian Tucker in this in-depth guide to so-called "prediction markets"

Tech

New fears over spread of Palantir’s influence after ‘Big Brother’ Met police project extended

The programme, designed to expose officer misconduct, was due to expire last month. The Nerve has established that it was extended to today, May 15, with no indication what happens next. Officers fear they will be under long-term surveillance, while it’s also emerged the project could be rolled out to more staff. Report by Max Colbert and Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Palantir

‘It’s like they were sharing tips on building a barbecue’: how the ‘rape academy’ teaching men to become Dominique Pelicot was exposed

CNN’s Niamh Kennedy was one of a team that made headlines when they uncovered a porn site specialising in abusing drugged women. She talked to Lucia Osborne-Crowley about the impact of her work – and the toll it can take

News

Richard Dawkins’s chatbot isn’t conscious: it’s just all talk

The acclaimed scientist spent time with Anthropic’s ‘Claudia’ and couldn’t believe she wasn’t sentient. But Dawkins' own work has taught us that complexity can exist without a divine spark, writes neuroscientist Anil Seth

Tech

Wellness scammers promise to ‘reset your nervous system’ for money. Don’t believe them

'Vagus nerve stimulation', which scientists still don’t fully understand, has become a trend – pushed by influencers who could cause serious harm, writes the Nerve's Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Tech

Cory Doctorow: Comrade Trump is the unwitting hero of a green revolution

In the first of a new monthly column for the Nerve, the author and cyber-activist argues that by dumping cheap solar panels on Asia and starting a catastrophic war in the Gulf, the president has started a headlong rush for cleantech that no eco-activism could match

Tech

Iran is winning the propaganda war against Trump – brick by brick

Tehran’s viral videos satirising a Lego-style president have harnessed the power of AI – and Maga’s debasing of political discourse – and turned it against the US, writes disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz

Tech

Your pension, Palantir’s war machine

USS, the UK's largest private pension fund, has £45m invested in the AI company that, its CEO boasts, can bring ‘violence and death’ to America's enemies. University union leaders want change, reports Ian Tucker

Palantir

Big Tech tried to get young people addicted. Now the reckoning has begun

Two seismic court decisions in the US have intervened where legislators have failed to defend social media users from exploitation, writes campaigner Zamaan Qureshi

Tech

The UK tech energy grab: how AI data centres are delaying the building of homes

Artificial intelligence infrastructure is being handed priority access to Britain's overwhelmed electricity grid, pushing housing down the list. But as the US shows, there's an alternative: make Big Tech pay for the power it needs. Report by Nicole Kobie

Environment