More than 2,000 cultural figures challenge Whitehall’s eagerness ‘to ­wrap our lives’ work in attractive paper for automated competitors’

Original British art and creative skill is in peril thanks to the rise of AI and the government’s plans to loosen ­copyright rules, some of the UK’s leading cultural figures have said.

More than 2,000 people, including leading creative names such as Mark Haddon, Axel Scheffler, Benji Davies and Michael Rosen, have signed a ­letter published in the Observer today calling on the government to keep the legal safeguards that offer artists and writers the prospect of a ­sustainable income.

The tech firms’ efforts to change copyright laws and gain free access to intellectual property is patently wrong

There are decades when nothing happens (as Lenin is – wrongly – supposed to have said) and weeks when decades happen. We’ve just lived through a few weeks like that. We’ve known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation. They were a worrying nuisance, to be sure, but not central to the polity.

And then, suddenly, those corporations were inextricably bound into government, and their narrow sectional interests became the national interest of the US. Which means that any foreign government with ideas about regulating, say, hate speech on X, may have to deal with the intemperate wrath of Donald Trump or the more coherent abuse of JD Vance.

The star has urged for a shift away from plans where artists must opt out of a system allowing AI free use of any online work

Sir Elton John has called on the government to rethink proposals involving the relaxation of copyright rules in the hope of protecting creative talent from AI.

The singer and songwriter is among a growing list of public figures to express concerns about plans that would allow tech firms to use online material, including creative work, for AI without permission.

We would like to hear how you have found them useful and if you have any concerns

The AI chatbot market has grown exponentially in recent years, with more than 1.4 billion people worldwide estimated to be using them.

While tools such as ChatGPT and customer service assistants are most prevalent, millions of people are turning to personified AI chatbots, such as Replika and My AI (Snapchat), which look to imitate human interactions. Some are using these personified chatbots for platonic or romantic companionship, while others are using them for support with managing their wellbeing and mental health.

Compact phone has flagship chip and buckets of AI, but hasn’t changed much from predecessors

The smallest and cheapest of Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 line might be the one to buy, offering top performance and the very latest AI features for less and proving that smaller-sized Androids can still be great.

Unlike previous generations of Samsung’s smaller models sold in the UK and Europe, the regular S25 has the same top-flight chip as the enormous and pricey Ultra model, offering a lot of performance while costing £799 (€919/$800/A$1,399).

Chip is powered by world’s first topoconductor, which can create new state of matter that is not solid, liquid or gas

Quantum computers could be built within years rather than decades, according to Microsoft, which has unveiled a breakthrough that it said could pave the way for faster development.

The tech firm has developed a chip which, it says, echoes the invention of the semiconductors that made today’s smartphones, computers and electronics possible by miniaturisation and increased processing power.

Architect of copyright law says EU is ‘supporting big tech instead of protecting European creative ideas’

An architect of EU copyright law has said legislation is needed to protect writers, musicians and creatives left exposed by an “irresponsible” legal gap in the bloc’s Artificial Intelligence Act.

The intervention came as 15 cultural organisations wrote to the European Commission this week warning that draft rules to implement the AI Act were “taking several steps backwards” on copyright, while one writer spoke of a “devastating” loophole.

Billionaire CEO claims bot is ‘maximally truth-seeking’ as he looks to rival DeepSeek, OpenAI and Google Gemini

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot that integrates with X, formerly Twitter.

Grok-3 debut comes at a critical moment in the AI arms race as Musk looks to compete with the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google. Musk’s bot has seen less widespread adoption than DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot, which wowed the world weeks ago and caused panic in stock markets, as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Hampstead theatre, London
The actors, especially Kaya Scodelario, work hard with Beau Willimon’s plot, but are hampered by a leaden, tension-light production

House of Cards writer Beau Willimon’s new play East Is South deals with the ethics and advancement of AI. But despite the transformative subject matter, Ellen McDougall’s production has as much propulsion as a car in reverse.

Skins actor Kaya Scodelario plays Lena, a former Mennonite and gifted coder, who is wrestling with the expanding consciousness of Logos, the software her company has developed. We meet her as she is preparing to be questioned by the workplace bigwigs who watch her from the upper level of Alex Eales’s two-tiered sciene-inspired set as if she is a caged animal. Lena and her lover, Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are being investigated after a security breach. For a fleeting second, the tension in McDougall’s direction is sky-high.

Ambitious UK project aims to forecast climate catastrophes using fleets of drones, cosmic ray detection, patterns of plankton blooms and more

An ambitious attempt to develop an early warning system for climate tipping points will combine fleets of drones, cosmic ray detection and the patterns of plankton blooms with artificial intelligence and the most detailed computer models to date.

The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), which backs high-risk, high-reward projects, has awarded £81m to 27 teams. The quest is to find signals that forewarn of the greatest climate catastrophes the climate crisis could trigger. Tipping points occur when global temperature is pushed beyond a threshold, leading to unstoppable changes in the climate system.

Alexis Lanternier, chief executive of the French streaming service, says it can compete with bigger rivals by rewarding the real musicians its subscribers want to support

It is reassuring to find that even the boss of a music streaming company can have his listening app commandeered by his children.

Nestled among Alexis Lanternier’s top picks on Deezer is the Aladdin soundtrack, fighting for competition with Creedence Clearwater Revival and rapper Jul, the most listened-to artist in France.

Why the Paris summit on artificial intelligence failed and how Silicon Valley is toeing the Trump administration’s line

Hello, and welcome back to TechScape. Today – the grand failure of the Paris AI summit, the fungibility of facts online, and how to ditch diversity if you’re a tech giant.

The US president has scrapped paper straws because they allegedly ‘explode’ – a bit like the PM’s reputation if he keeps refusing to confront him on the big issues

It’s difficult to know whether to set any store by Donald Trump’s bleak and yet also often banal pronouncements, which read as if handfuls of offensive concepts have been tossed into the air by a monkey, read out in whatever order they landed and then made policy. Until it’s clear they can’t work. At which point, the monkey must toss again.

But this month, Trump, whose morning ablutions increasingly appear to consist of dousing himself in sachets of the kind of cheap hot chocolate powder I steal from three-star hotels, like a flightless bird stuck in the machine that glazes Magnum lollies, declared he wanted to build his hotels on the mass graves of Gaza. Hasn’t Trump seen The Shining? It won’t end well. Pity those whose children have the misfortune to die next to a monetisable stretch of shoreline. And hope humanity’s next wave of mass killings happens somewhere uneven and way inland that hopefully wouldn’t even make a decent golf course.

Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

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Silicon Valley wants to spend a fortune on the fantasy of human-level intelligence. But there are more practical and valuable things to achieve

There’s a moment in the 1967 film The Graduate that has become renowned. At a party thrown by his parents to celebrate his graduation, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) is approached by Mr McGuire, an elderly bore who wants to say “just one word” to him: “plastics”. “Exactly how do you mean?”, asks the hapless Ben. “There’s a great future in plastics,” says McGuire. “Think about it.”

Listening last week to the spending plans of the techlords who run Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta leads one to wonder if something analogous might have happened to them on their graduation nights. Except that in their cases, the magic word would have been “AI”.

Plan represents move away from SoftBank-owned group licensing its chip blueprints to firms such as Apple and Nvidia

The British semiconductor designer Arm is reportedly planning to launch its own chip this year, after landing Meta as one of its first customers.

The move represents a major overhaul of the SoftBank-owned group’s business model of licensing its chip blueprints to the likes of Apple and Nvidia.

We’d like to hear from people about how much their job has been impacted by AI

Just how much artificial intelligence will “enhance” our jobs or displace them and create different roles remains to be seen, but what impact has the technology already had on our work?

We’d like your help to find out about the different ways that AI has affected your job. Has the technology been positive or negative in your experience? Or perhaps a bit of both? How much do you think might it impact your work in the future?

Experts are split between concerns about future threats and present dangers. Both camps issued dire warnings

I was a technophile in my early teenage days, sometimes wishing that I had been born in 2090, rather than 1990, so that I could see all the incredible technology of the future. Lately, though, I’ve become far more sceptical about whether the technology that we interact with most is really serving us – or whether we are serving it.

So when I got an invitation to attend a conference on developing safe and ethical AI in the lead-up to the Paris AI summit, I was fully prepared to hear Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist and 2021 Nobel peace prize laureate, talk about how big tech has, with impunity, allowed its networks to be flooded with disinformation, hate and manipulation in ways that have had very real, negative, impact on elections.

Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist

AI Action Summit ends with US vice-president criticising European regulation and warning against cooperation with China

Political and business leaders descended on Paris this week for the third annual artificial intelligence summit with the technology causing tensions across the globe.

Emmanuel Macron, who opened the summit with a montage of deepfakes of himself, acknowledged AI’s potential to “disrupt”. A day later, the schism threatened by the rapidly developing technology was apparent.

AI chatbots have a tendency to exaggerate, but their verbose nature feels well-suited to the highly associative task of dream analysis

Some say that talking about your dreams is boring, but personally I think otherworldly nocturnal escapades provide far richer fodder for small talk than the footy season or this unseasonal weather. Sadly, not everyone agrees. That’s why, when I hear about an AI dream interpretation app, I’m seduced by the potential for a captive, preternaturally intelligent assistant to help me decipher the more baffling corners of my psyche.

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT have a well-known tendency to riff and exaggerate with alarming confidence, but their verbose nature feels well-suited to the free form and highly associative task of dream analysis. Admittedly, trading little understood fragments of our slumbering minds to a tech startup in return for spiritual guidance sounds like the foreboding premise of a terrifying sci-fi horror movie. But the app’s fine print promises that dreams are stored “safely and privately”. Who am I to let an intuitive aversion to welcoming the machine into the last private vestiges of my consciousness get in the way of a good story?

Billionaire’s lawyers say offer will be withdrawn if firm he helped found a decade ago ‘preserves the charity’s mission’

Elon Musk says he will abandon his $97.4bn offer to buy the non-profit behind OpenAI if the ChatGPT maker drops its plan to convert into a for-profit company.

“If OpenAI, Inc’s Board is prepared to preserve the charity’s mission and stipulate to take the ‘for sale’ sign off its assets by halting its conversion, Musk will withdraw the bid,” lawyers for the billionaire said in a filing to a California court on Wednesday. “Otherwise, the charity must be compensated by what an arms-length buyer will pay for its assets.”