
The thrills and perils of raw-dogging reality
Untethered from drugs, apps, and shoes, Christina Catherine Martinez charts a journey of physical and psychological undress to Mexico’s only nude beach

How voice cloning is changing the music industry
Universal Music Group just inked a deal with Endel AI—further cementing a revolution in modern listening habits and intellectual property laws alike

Amidst a rise in cybercrime, researchers trained an AI on the dark web
Having scoured the internet’s seedy underbelly, DarkBERT suggests that, in the future, AI may play an even bigger role in online policing

The seductive promise of finding home on the homepage
For Document’s Spring/Summer 2023 issue, Oliver Brown dissects how physical reality defines social interaction, from escalators to web browsers and the metaverse

Artists and journalists call for the restriction of AI illustration in publishing
In an open letter, Molly Crabapple and Mazria Katz advocate against the use of the technology in journalism, a medium long defined by human storytellers

‘The Godfather of AI’ speaks out about the dangers of the technology he helped create
Geoffrey Hinton has left Google, joining the chorus of industry leaders warning against the race to deploy new AI models

Pornhub blocks access in Utah to protest new age verification laws
The legislation chips away at the right to privacy online—raising questions about the cost of making the internet safe for children

Inside TRANSFIX, the world’s largest touring immersive art experience
Set in a multi-level labyrinth off the Las Vegas strip, the event’s inaugural edition is a choose-your-own-adventure featuring art from over 50 creators

Spotify has a fake artist problem
Users are encountering AI-generated songs by artists that don’t exist—many of which are being aggressively promoted by the platform’s algorithm

Can you copyright a voice?
Faced with the virality of deepfake Drake, Universal Music made a bid to shut down AI-generated songs

Google put 25 AI agents together in a Sims-inspired virtual town, and told them to go about their lives
The ChatGPT-powered characters go to work, flirt, and throw Valentine’s day parties—forecasting new uses for AI in the study of human behavior

The risks and rewards of jailbreaking ChatGPT
When companies put sexual restrictions chatbots, users race to get around them—but there are other side effects to disabling the technology’s guardrails

How do you moderate a chatbot?
In banning renderings of Chinese president Xi Jinping worldwide, Midjourney sparked debate about the policing of AI-generated content—and the line between regulation and censorship

Amidst calls to halt the advancement of generative tech, a chatbot convinced a man to kill himself
This incident comes in the wake of an open letter from AI experts, urging technologists to halt developments beyond GPT-4 ‘for the good of humanity’

Tokens of a Type: How Levi’s AI models continue a history of human-averaging
Artificial Intelligence may be new, but its racial and gender-based biases are not—paradoxically disappearing the individual under the guise of championing diversity

Why is menstrual blood banned in porn? You might want to ask your credit card company
In the era of e-commerce, payment processors have become the internet’s unofficial content moderators—because when banks threaten to revoke service, platforms listen

Why can’t sex workers find a bank?
Following the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, another shutdown went unnoticed: that of SpankPay, one of the few payment platforms catering to the adult industry

The work of art in the age of algorithmic optimization
The intellectual property debate asks who profits from the fruits of creative labor—and what it means to make something beautiful when everyone else can, too

GPT-4 heralds a new era of AI-generated get-rich-quick schemes
Digital entrepreneurs are automating their side hustles—and the ease with which they’re being replaced calls into question their value in the first place

Meet CupidBot, an AI designed to automate straight men’s dating life
A group of alleged ex-Tinder engineers designed a service to improve the experience of heterosexual men in the only place they face systemic disadvantage: on...

Microsoft lays off its ethics team despite doubling down on AI offerings
The team was tasked with predicting the dangers of new technologies, raising questions about the company’s commitment to responsible use

With ‘Cyberfeminism Index,’ Mindy Seu snapshots a mutating movement
Following the release of her book, the designer and researcher speaks on information activism, the art of collecting, and the power in rendering grassroots technologies

What can we do about deepfake porn?
A new face-swap app ran provocative ads featuring celebrity faces, illustrating the dangers of non-consensual deepfakes and the struggle to moderate them

What internet sex drama says about our political climate
From debates over on-screen sex scenes to whether kids should be exposed to drag, recent Twitter discourse illustrates the slippery slope of online censorship

Microsoft “lobotomized” its chaotic chatbot—now, it’s rolling back those restrictions
When it’s not busy having an existential crisis or attempting to break up a marriage, the new Bing raises questions about the ethics of AI

Feeld is the dating app for the next sexual revolution
Document catches up with Ana Kirova, the radical platform’s founder, examining the roots, rules, and labels of the modern sexual landscape

Will transparency be enough to improve TikTok’s famously overzealous censorship policy?
The app is under fire for banning everything from educational content to videos about racial injustice. Now, they’re putting a new “strike” system in place

Deepfake porn isn’t just a consent issue, it’s a labor issue
Sex workers have been fighting for control over their imagery since the rise of the internet—and now everyday people have joined the fray

Charting the past, present, and future of emotionally-intelligent chatbots, from ELIZA to GPT-3
Consumer trust in technology is declining, even as machine learning programs grow more sophisticated. Are AI chatbots the exception?

Good artists borrow, great artists steal, and AI art generators get sued
The company behind popular art tool Stable Diffusion is facing accusations of copyright infringement from all sides, raising questions about the future of AI art

For cyborg Neil Harbisson, technology is the medium, not the message
From shark fins to seismic senses, members of the biohacking community are changing their brains and bodies to foster a deeper connection with nature

Artificial intelligence is gunning to join your court defense
Between two of the most distrusted classes of modern society—lawyers and robots—who do we have less faith in?

The most absurd inventions from the world’s biggest tech show
From virtual reality scents to self-driving strollers, Document compiled a list of the most aggravating, unnecessary, and obscene products in attendance at CES this year

Is VR the new frontier of inclusivity? Actor Jillian Mercado weighs in from the Metaverse
Document spends an afternoon exploring Nuevo Norte, Meta’s attempt at fostering cultural community

Inside FORMAT, the festival bringing cyborgs and sex therapy to the Ozarks
Held in the town that Walmart built, its inaugural edition offered attendees a choose-your-own-adventure-style journey designed to blend art, music, and technology

Amazon is reading palms at Whole Foods
Biometric payment technology is a slippery slope to becoming one with our digital footprints, raising concerns about data privacy and customer surveillance

Just because you can create a digitally rendered pop star, doesn’t mean you should
While AI artists can spare fans from the disappointment of boy band breakups, their popularity raises questions about whether today’s music centers connection or capital

NFT television is the latest attempt to manufacture token utility
The failure of Seth Green’s ‘White Horse Tavern,’ starring a Bored Ape NFT, exemplified the risks of pairing investment with media creation

At Freshii, your ‘virtual cashier’ is actually a person working for $3.75 per hour
Public debate around a Canadian franchise’s experiment raises questions about automation, labor laws, and the ignorance of the Western consumer

The dangers, and benefits, of mobile health apps in a post-Roe world
Period tracking apps are marketed as a tool to empower users with information—but with abortion rights under fire, many worry that the data they collect...

Fairchain imagines an art market that centers the artist
The founders of the blockchain-based platform meet with Renee Cox and gallerist Hannah Traore to discuss collaboration, royalties, and why creatives can’t work for free

Teen hackers are wreaking havoc on the world’s biggest companies
LAPSUS$ collective recently breached Microsoft and Samsung, calling the motivations and power of cyber gangs into question

AssangeDAO imagines the social justice potential of online collectives
The community bought an NFT for $53 million, with the aim to fund the WikiLeaks founder’s legal fees

Academic journal fingerprints PDFs to prevent free use of its materials
When primary sources are paywalled, the public is cornered into taking secondary interpretations at face value

Who does your voice belong to? For musician Holly Herndon, the answer is ‘everyone’
For Document’s Winter 2021/Resort 2022 issue, the musician envisions the future of intellectual property in the era of vocal deepfakes

New Cosmologies: Could reconsidering the Big Bang theory save us?
Tao Lin takes a closer look at science’s creation stories, examining their implications for human culture at large

Can a pizza-making robot remedy restaurant disparities?
Robotics company Picnic seeks to better the situations of owners, workers, and consumers in the restaurant industry

Inside the incelosphere, where the lonely get lonelier
SergeantIncel, founder of incels.co, joins Document to discuss the nuances of the internet's most despised subculture

Jacolby Satterwhite is using the past to create art about the future
In collaboration with Nike Every Stitch Considered, Document highlights innovative creatives who are expanding our cultural landscape through acts of exploration, process and education
