Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety
Interacting online today means being besieged by system-generated recommendations, but do we want what the machines tell us we want?
From ACM Opinion
How Fortnite Captured Teens' Hearts and Minds
It was getting late in Tomato Town. The storm was closing in, and meteors pelted the ground.
From ACM Opinion
'2001: A Space Odyssey': What It Means, and How It Was Made
Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick's confounding sci-fi masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey," had its premières across the country.
From ACM Opinion
How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made
We inhabit a small planet orbiting a medium-sized star about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way galaxy—around where Track 2 on an LP record...
From ACM Opinion
Better Business Through Sci-Fi
About five years ago, Ari Popper enrolled in a course on science-fiction writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, hoping to distract himself from the...
From ACM Opinion
Before the Internet
Before the Internet, you would just sit in an armchair with a book open on your lap, staring into space or staring at a decorative broom on the wall—kind of shifting...
From ACM Opinion
Reality Bites: Learning the Future of V.r. at Sundance
Standing in a pink desert landscape, I looked down and realized I'd become a robot, with skinny metal legs and pincers for hands.
From ACM Opinion
All Alone in No Man's Sky
If reality is a game—a vast, snow-globe-y sort of experiment that plays out according to the hard rules of physics and the loose rules of story—then it is, in contemporary...
From ACM Opinion
Pokémon Go Will Make You Crave Augmented Reality
It started as an April Fool's joke.
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality
If Kitchen, a five-minute virtual-reality demo created by the Japanese studio Capcom, were a short film, few viewers would be moved to panic by its misery of horror...
From ACM Opinion
How the Internet Has Changed Bullying
This summer, American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association, released a special issue on the topic of bullying and victimization...
From ACM Opinion
In Search of the Keys to the Virtual City
I'm not the first man to believe that he might fix London.
From ACM Opinion
Why Larry Page Is Stepping Away
In the ten years that I’ve been watching him, Larry Page has always wanted to play by his own rules.
From ACM Opinion
Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality
Today, the Federal Communications Commission, by a vote of three to two, enacted its strongest-ever rules on net neutrality, preserving an open Internet by prohibiting...
From ACM Opinion
Netflix's Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
On the opening night of this year's Sundance Film Festival, two films, as usual, had their premières, gaining maximum exposure to reporters and critics.
From ACM Opinion
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are...
From ACM Opinion
Will Moocs Be Flukes?
On July 23rd, 1969, Geoffrey Crowther addressed the inaugural meeting of the Open University, a British institution that had just been created to provide an alternative...
From ACM Opinion
Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity.
From ACM Opinion
Being a Better Online Reader
Soon after Maryanne Wolf published "Proust and the Squid," a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first...
From ACM Opinion
One-Hit Wonders
For more than a year now, tens of millions of Americans have found time each day to devote themselves to an essential task: swiping at their phones and tablets...12