Good afternoon, Louis here.
Welcome back to Cyborg, your weekly AI briefing. There are over 35 of us now, lovely stuff. If you’re enjoying the updates, the best thing you could do is forward this email to one person who’s curious about AI but doesn’t want the jargon.
Let’s go. It’s been a busy week, and I’ve got an AI project I’d really like to show you.
This week in AI
Keeping you up to date with the latest AI stories in a minute or less
Claude’s powerful Fable 5 model is back. Released on June 9, suspended on June 12 after a US government directive citing “national security concerns,” then re-released globally on July 1. The catch? It now has even more safeguards, and might refuse to do what you ask—even if it’s 100% harmless. Claude’s even stronger Mythos 5 is also back, though only for select US organisations.
OpenAI is previewing GPT-5.6 Sol, its latest model. Access is limited for now, and OpenAI hasn’t confirmed when it’ll be widely available. That said, their reports are promising: it’ll be about half as expensive as Fable 5, and performed much better on one benchmark test (although that statistic may be cherry-picked, and doesn’t tell the whole story). OpenAI is also considering giving the Trump administration a 5% stake in their company, which would be an interesting first.
Claude science is out, an “AI workbench for scientists". They say that if you’re an academic, it'll help you at every stage of research, from getting through the relevant literature to finalising your publication. Hardly as exciting as the latest models, but having AI move into the lab might help us make new scientific discoveries, and faster.
If you try one thing
The best AI tool or project I’ve been trying this week
How do you compare AI models? Easy. Give the same task, and see what they come up with. Write the same email, design the same landing page, and so on.
Well, Matt Wolfe had a better idea: make them draw American actor Gary Busey. He calls the result BuseyBench, the “deeply unnecessary AI benchmark for Gary Busey portrait generation.”
I’m all for it, and it’s as entertaining as it is revealing. But before you complain that some of the portraits look nothing like him, keep in mind that these are only SVG images: a file format build from code and mathematical shapes, usually reserved for logos or basic illustrations.
You can just how far AI has come since March 2023, or pit the latest models against each other. Hours of fun, the best combination of silly and educational.
What if
A provocative question about AI’s place in our future
… AI were the next Shakespeare?
Not as a tool for humans, I mean—the dictionary or typewriter of the twenty-first century: to suggest a word or a metaphor, or perfect a tricky sentence—but as the sole writer.
Think about it. Who would be able to compete with a system that has read everything, improves constantly, and can draw fascinating connections between works no human would ever spot?
There’s an obvious objection: isn’t that plagiarism?
Maybe. But I’d argue that writers have always borrowed and reworked what came before them. Shakespeare did it too, have a read:
“The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.”
And now compare it with the source he was drawing from:
“She disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of herself: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf’s side, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people.”
Shakespeare didn’t invent the story from nothing, let alone the scene. He transformed it, though; he added his own spin to an existing passage with a distinctive and musical style of poetry. We consider him a genius for it.
If an AI were to do something similar, would we call it creativity?
The deeper objection is that AI has never felt anything: never grieved the death of a lover or relative, never even tasted an apple! So how could it hope to express what it means to be human, which is surely at the heart of all our literature?
But, being cynical, would we always be able to tell? Around four million books are published each year, and I doubt even now that each and every word of those hundreds of trillions was typed out by a human.
So if the next great novel were written with help from AI, would you care? Would it be worthy of the Booker Prize, say?
Let me know by hitting reply. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Finally
Something light to end on
Philosophers may be back in business. Google DeepMind now has an in-house philosopher thinking about what advanced AI systems actually are, and the moral questions that they raise.
Philosophy hasn’t always been known as the most lucrative career path, but when AI eradicates the usual big-money jobs and still struggles to explain what a ‘mind’ is, perhaps the Socrates of today will get the last laugh.
Until next time,
Louis