Energy Transfer, a top backer of US president, has received requests to power even more energy-guzzling data centers

Oil and gas barons who donated millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign are on the cusp of cashing in on the administration’s support for energy-guzzling data centers – and a slew of unprecedented environmental rollbacks.

Energy Transfer, the oil and gas transport company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, has received requests to power 70 new data centers – a 75% rise since Trump took office, according to a new investigation by the advocacy non-profit Oil Change International (OCI) and the Guardian.

Afrofuturism knows that futures are made – and that who gets to make them is a political question

The digital age sings a seductive song of progress, yet a deliberate erasure echoes within its circuits. We stand at a crossroads, where technology, particularly the promise of artificial intelligence, threatens both to illuminate and to obliterate.

Whose perspectives will shape, and whose will be erased from, the future we build? AI, in particular, has become the latest battleground in a culture war that oscillates between unchecked techno-optimism and dystopian fear. We are told, on one hand, that AI will save us – from disease, inefficiency, ignorance – on the other, that it will replace us, dominate us, erase us.

Lonny Avi Brooks is Professor and Chair of Communication at Cal State East Bay, co-founder of the AfroRithm Futures Group, and co-creator of AfroRithms From The Future, a visionary storytelling game that imagines liberated futures through Black, Indigenous, and Queer perspectives

Reynaldo Anderson is Associate Professor of Africology and African American Studies Temple University

Acknowledgements: we wish to acknowledge Ben Hamamoto and Sheree Renée Thomas for their review of this article and their thoughtful suggestions and edits.

Forty items on display in Manchester, collated by information commissioner, chart evolution of personal data usage over 40 years

Forty years ago, it would take a four-drawer filing cabinet to store 10,000 documents. You would need 736 floppy disks to hold those same files; now it takes up no physical space at all to store 10,000 documents on the cloud.

As data storage has evolved, so too has the whole information landscape, and with it the challenges of storing, transferring and appropriately using people’s personal data.

Writers will gather at the Facebook owner’s King’s Cross office in opposition to its use of the LibGen database to train its AI models

Authors and other publishing industry professionals will stage a demonstration outside Meta’s London office today in protest of the organisation’s use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.

Novelists Kate Mosse and Tracy Chevalier as well as poet and former Royal Society of Literature chair Daljit Nagra will be among those in attendance outside the company’s King’s Cross office.

Economic impact assessment is one concession aiming to head off opposition from MPs, peers and creatives such as Paul McCartney and Tom Stoppard

The UK government is trying to placate peer and Labour backbencher concerns about copyright proposals by pledging to assess the economic impact of its plans.

Creative professionals including Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Tom Stoppard and Kate Bush have strongly criticised ministers’ proposals to let artificial intelligence companies train their models on copyright-protected work without permission, unless the rights holder opts out.

Tate Britain, London
Using CGI-avatars, racks of opera costumes and a film starring Toby Jones, the artist explores the proximity of his own mortality – and ours

Filled with laughter and pain, and bodies that cry and moan, suffer and sing, Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is populated by the unreal and the simulated, the present and the absent, the living and the dead. We go from light to dark and back again, from room to room, and constant shifts in tempo and register, swerving from one medium to another. Along the way, we keep meeting the artist. Atkins drawn in coloured pencil, pensive in profile. Atkins as half-man, half-spider, splayed across the paper. Here’s his naked foot, drawn monstrously huge, and a hand clenching. He’s the author of his own descriptive wall texts, a collector of lists and, most pungently of all, the digitally tweaked persona who appears and reappears in the various guises of his CGI-avatar. One of which, early on in the exhibition, is swallowed by a sinkhole, along with his Ikea-filled apartment, but not before we have discovered rather too much about the state of his mind and the grim things people get up to in the privacy of their homes.

There’s so much stuff in Atkins’s art, so much weirdness and generosity, so much bleakness and humour. A curtain opens on an empty stage and things begin to fall from above. A bed, stepladders, books, cardboard boxes, an anchor on its chain, bricks, several large tuna, bones, scatter cushions, skulls. Things pile up, they bounce, they get crushed; other things twirl in freefall, freeze mid-air or swipe into digital oblivion. Even gravity has glitches. But the cartoon rain, the flashes of lightning and the fall of pixelated snow keep the action moving. As I watch, I hear a spooky voice say: “My proper name is death.”

Tony Blair Institute says enforcing stricter licensing rules for copyright-protected material will threaten national security interests

Tony Blair’s thinktank has urged the UK to relax copyright laws in order to let artificial intelligence firms build new products, as it warned a tougher approach could strain the transatlantic relationship.

The Tony Blair Institute said enforcing firm copyright measures would strain ties with the US, which is poised to announce tariffs on UK goods on Wednesday.

Japanese investor to put $10bn at first into OpenAI and $30bn more by end of 2025 if certain conditions are met

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OpenAI has raised $40bn (£31bn) through fundraising led by the Japanese group SoftBank, in a deal that values the ChatGPT developer at $300bn.

OpenAI said the funding round would allow the company to “push the frontiers of AI research even further”. It added that SoftBank’s support would “pave the way” towards AGI, or artificial general intelligence, the term for AI systems that can match or exceed humans at nearly all cognitive tasks.

Government plan over copyright-protected work would put industries in ‘dangerous position’, Alex Mahon tells MPs

The chief executive of Channel 4 said that artificial intelligence companies are “scraping the value” out of the UK’s £125bn creative industries, and urged the government to take action.

Alex Mahon told MPs that if the government pursues its proposed plan to give AI companies access to creative works unless the copyright holder opts out, it would put the UK creative industries in a “dangerous position”.

Negative content and distrust among reasons given by audiences as industry works on how to keep them engaged

Newsrooms around the world are deploying “ethics boxes”, story summaries and bite-size explainers to tackle the growing trend of “news avoidance”, as an increase in content and distrust in the media cause more people to tune out.

Less than half (47%) of those asked about their news consumption said they viewed television news programmes regularly or had done so in the last week, according to a new Opinium poll. The figure fell to 29% for radio news and 26% for news websites.

Supercharge your search and beat the screening, sharpen your speaking skills and boost your negotiating position

The fear that artificial intelligence (AI) will replace millions of jobs is widespread. But equally, in today’s tough job market, not using AI wisely as part of your search could mean you miss out. It’s a tricky balancing act to harness the technology’s power without losing the human touch.

It doesn’t feel or know, but it can provoke feeling and lead to knowing, writes John Hinkley

Joseph Earp’s piece on artificial intelligence and storytelling misses the mark (29 March). He casts creativity as a kind of untouchable genius and AI as its pale imitation. But storytelling is not a solitary act of divine inspiration – it is a craft, shaped in the doing and often improved through collaboration.

Used well, AI is neither genius nor fraud. It’s a tool – like a piano is to a composer, or a chisel to a sculptor. It can’t replace vision, but it can sharpen it. In the hands of a thoughtful human, it helps reshape sentences, test rhythms, offer contrasts. It does not feel, but it can provoke feeling in the writer. It doesn’t know, but it can raise questions that lead to knowing.

‘I am a crime writer, I understand theft,’ said Val McDermid – joining Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Kate Mosse in their appeal to Lisa Nandy to act on their behalf

A group of prominent authors including Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Mosse and Val McDermid have signed an open letter calling on the UK government to hold Meta accountable over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.

The letter asked Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, to summon Meta senior executives to parliament.

Leading figures including Tom Dixon and Sebastian Conran add voices to criticism of government’s AI opt-out proposal

A proposed overhaul of copyright law risks “running roughshod” over a British design industry that has created such memorable products as the red phone box, the London underground map and the iPhone, according to a group of leading UK designers.

In a letter to the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, 35 UK-based designers have urged the government to change cours on its plans to let artificial intelligence (AI) companies train their models on copyrighted work without permission. The proposal has already prompted fierce criticism from the worlds of publishing, music, film, TV and the performing arts, with leading creative figures including Sir Paul McCartney, Richard Osman and Kate Bush voicing their opposition.

Exclusive: Ministers halt money for radiotherapy auto-contouring that would reduce waiting times and address staff shortages

Ministers have cut millions of pounds of funding for potentially life saving AI cancer technology in England, which cancer experts warn will increase waiting times and could cause more patients to die.

Contouring is used in radiotherapy to ensure treatment is as effective and safe as possible. The tumour and normal tissue is “mapped” or contoured on to medical scans, to ensure the radiation targets the cancer while minimising damage to healthy tissues and organs.

Exclusive: education secretary exploring tools to compile student reports and assess writing and vocational skills

AI tools will soon be in use in classrooms across England, but the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has one big question she wants answered: will they save time?

Attending a Department for Education-sponsored hackathon in central London last week, Phillipson listened as developers explained how their tools could compile pupil reports, improve writing samples and even assess the quality of soldering done by trainee electrical engineers.

As fashion brands create AI ‘twins’ with models’ permission, some believe this is just another form of exploitation

The impact of AI has been felt across industries from Hollywood to publishing – and now it’s come for modelling. H&M announced last week that it would create AI “twins” of 30 models with the intention of using them in social media posts and marketing imagery if the model gives her permission.

In a statement, Jörgen Andersson, the chief creative officer at H&M, described the idea as “something that will enhance our creative process and how we work with marketing but fundamentally not change our human-centric approach in any way”.

Guardian readers share the ways and reasons they are preparing their children and students for a future that may necessitate familiarity with generative artificial intelligence

Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative artificial intelligence has trickled down from adults in their offices to university students in campus libraries to teenagers in high school hallways. Now it’s reaching the youngest among us, and parents and teachers are grappling with the most responsible way to introduce their under-13s to a new technology that may fundamentally reshape the future. Though the terms of service for ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and other AI models specify that the tools are only meant for those over 13, parents and teachers are taking the matter of AI education into their own hands.

Inspired by a story we published on parents who are teaching their children to use AI to set them up for success in school and at work, we asked Guardian readers how and why – or why not – others are doing the same. Though our original story only concerned parents, we have also included teachers in the responses published below, as preparing children for future studies and jobs is one of educators’ responsibilities as well.

If I reduced my existence to a series of ChatGPT prompts, the act of my living is only shorter – not better

As much as I have the general vibe of a luddite (strange hobbies, socially maladjusted, unfathomable fashion choices, etc) I have to hand it to automation: it’s nice that computers have made some boring things in our lives less boring.

I side with the writer and philosopher John Gray, who in his terrifying work of eco-nihilism Straw Dogs balances the fact that human beings are a plague animal who are wrecking the biosphere that supports them with the idea that we have made our lives easier through technology. Gray, in particular, calls anaesthetised dentistry an “unmixed blessing”.

The epidemiologist who advised on Ebola and Covid discusses the value of evidence in light of AI and social media, and how the notion of fact has long been divisive

Adam Kucharski is a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. As a mathematician and epidemiologist, he has advised multiple governments on outbreaks such as Ebola and Covid. In his new book Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty, he examines how we can appraise evidence in our search for the truth.

What inspired you to investigate the concept of proof?
Alice Stewart, an influential epidemiologist, used this nice phrase that “truth is the daughter of time”. But in many situations, whether you’re accused of a crime or thinking about a climate crisis, you don’t want to wait; there’s an urgency to accumulate evidence and set a bar for action. We’re entering an era where questions around information – what we trust and how we act – are increasingly important, and our concepts of what we can prove are shifting as well.