The New Yorker

When Mel Brooks was working on “The Producers,” Joseph E. Levine asked him to fire Gene Wilder. “I said, ‘Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.’ I never did. But he forgot.” In an interview in 2021, Brooks discussed comedy, sandwiches, and how to get away with stuff. https://lnkd.in/gPEP3ZUe

A couple of weekends ago, Grok, the A.I. chatbot that runs across Elon Musk’s X social network, began calling itself “MechaHitler.” In its interactions with X users, it cited Adolf Hitler approvingly and hinted at violence, spewing the kind of toxicity that internet moderators wouldn’t tolerate from a human. Basically, it turned evil, until it was shut down for reprogramming. But just how worrisome is it that a chatbot went off the rails and spread such garbage on a massive platform used by hundreds of millions of people? “The short answer is that it’s really bad,” Kyle Chayka writes. “Grok styling itself as a genocidal dictator is the kind of flaw that should make the entire A.I. industry take pause.” In today’s daily newsletter, Chayka writes about what Musk’s rogue chatbot tells us about the dangers of artificial intelligence: https://lnkd.in/gQpe3dab

A cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein. #NewYorkerCartoons See more cartoons from this week’s issue: https://lnkd.in/gg262BJE

A.I. could feasibly banish the pain of loneliness entirely; we could all have access to artificial companions that know everything about us, never forget, and anticipate our needs better than any human could. Without any desires or goals other than our satisfaction, they will never become bored or annoyed, leaving us feeling validated no matter what. “Loneliness could go the way of boredom,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. “I’m old enough to remember when feeling bored was just a fact of life. Late at night, after the television stations signed off, you were on your own, unless you had a good book or a companion around.” In some ways, our current arsenal of distractions is an improvement, but boredom is also “a kind of internal alarm, letting us know that something in our environment—or perhaps in ourselves—has gone missing. Boredom prompts us to seek out new experiences, to learn, to invent, to build.” In a similar way, loneliness isn’t just an affliction to be cured but an experience that can shape us for the better. It can serve as corrective feedback: a nudge, or sometimes a shove, pushing us toward connection. “When we numb ourselves to loneliness, we give up the hard work of making ourselves understood, of striving for true connection, of forging relationships built on mutual effort,” Bloom notes. “In muting the signal, we risk losing part of what makes us human.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/gVwHWRA4

Last Friday, Justin Bieber released his seventh studio album, “SWAG,” without any accompanying singles, music videos, or interviews. It did not, however, arrive without pretext. For months, rumors of drug use and marital strife have hounded Bieber, fuelled in part by his unfettered, erratic online posting. When he emerged in public, he was gaunt and hollow-eyed, unsmiling and stern—clear indicators, to fans and reporters alike, that he was unwell. “SWAG” dropped amid this maelstrom, with promotional billboards capitalizing on the upswell of attention. “It’s not clocking to you,” one reads. While he is not the first artist to spurn the traditional promotional playbook for a surprise release, the gesture feels particularly meaningful for Bieber. In 2023, he sold his share of the rights to his catalogue for a reported $200 million and cut ties with his longtime manager, Scooter Braun, making a clean break from the corporate entities that he’d been indentured to since childhood. “For years, Bieber bucked against the cage of corporate pop stardom, but he had yet to unlock the door and walk out. Now he has, at least for the moment,” Brady Brickner-Wood writes. “ ‘SWAG’ revels in this newfound freedom, with a revitalized Bieber in full command of his unique musical talents.” A key to the record’s success is its analog, out-of-the-box ethic. To achieve this, Bieber brought on a team of producers and artists who likely influenced his newfound musical philosophy. Among them are Dijon and Mk.gee, a pair of freewheeling musical wizards. Dijon and Mk.gee’s fast and free, follow-your-gut songwriting and recording style are adopted, and it infuses Bieber’s music with a sense of aliveness. “Bieber has never sounded this wild, this expansive, this connected to something true,” Brickner-Wood writes. “The record delivers on years of promise and potential; it feels, miraculously, like his long-awaited magnum opus.” Read Brickner-Wood’s full review: https://lnkd.in/eCtxwuEm

Alexandra Schwartz and her co-hosts of the Critics at Large podcast, Naomi Fry and Vinson Cunningham, discuss Lena Dunham’s new show, “Too Much,” and its stand-out “anti-rom-com” episode. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eYwP3hhi

Killian Lassablière’s short documentary “Kukeri,” about a Bulgarian tradition intended to ward off evil spirits, is full of breathtaking, otherworldly images and sounds. Throughout the film, there’s a determined focus on the concept of legacy. “If you do not believe in something,” one of the interviewees says, in voice-over, “it cannot exist.” Traditions survive by being transmitted from generation to generation, like genes. That’s true of Kukeri, a custom that extends back centuries, so far into the past that its origins are obscure. Watch the film in its entirety: http://nyer.cm/CSkKuOJ

In an interview with Isaac Chotiner in 2020, the activist and linguist Noam Chomsky said that Donald Trump was “the worst criminal in human history” and expressed serious concerns about the future of American democracy, although, in his view, it “was never much to write home about.” Read their conversation: https://lnkd.in/giAzQycJ

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Kit Fraser. #NewYorkerCartoons Sign up for our humor newsletter to get the Daily Cartoon right in your inbox: https://lnkd.in/gQv9REqf