Listen to this recording of Sir Alec Guinness reading Shakespeare’s most famous lines of poetry, ‘to be or not to be’. Impressed? What about Jay-Z’s Hamlet. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s? If you were caught out don’t worry. Deep fakes, both audio and video, are now worryingly accurate. Even when the intention is good (recreating a stage performance that was never recorded), the opportunities for commercial fraud and mass deception are huge. In fact, Jay-Z has just filed copywrit

AI still can’t compose music very well. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful for musicians. How easy is it to write a good pop song? Pretty damn hard when you think about it. Imagine all the elements that go into your favourite hits: melody, rhythm, orchestration, instrumentation, structure (verse and chorus) and more. No wonder computers struggle, even those using the latest advances in machine learning and neural networks. There have been many attempts to train an algorithm t

Although dated by today’s standards, Wargames still has plenty of lessons to teach us about the limits of AI. A hit in 1983, the movie tapped into several trends that were fashionable at the time: video games, nuclear war and, yes, artificial intelligence. It tells the story of a teenage gamer and computer geek who uses an early modem to hack into the Pentagon’s network. Thinking that he’s playing a new video game, he fools the Pentagon’s AI system into a nuclear launch count