When we first came across Tim Harrier’s Shaman Spirit Guides, we dismissed them without mercy as the product of artificial intelligence. The mud-covered faces, the animals emerging from the background, and an unbroken frontal force produced, almost at once, a malignant suspicion. Suspicion ran far ahead of the work. And we are right to suspect almost everything in life. This series, no...
Final-Friday CAC @ 21c pairs a hotel gallery visit with CAC exhibitions in one free guided hour Cincy June 26 at 5:30p.
CAM's Pride night brings music, art making and free late-hour access to Eden Park on June 26 for Art After Dark in Ohio.
Thursday Art Play gives young children a hands-on CAC session tied to Homespun, with yoga and art making on July 9 2026.
Ayana Ross presents seven figural paintings at the Taft Museum as the 2026 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence.
Rites of Passage spotlights nine emerging artists at Manifest, opening July 10 with student work from eight U.S. states.
There is a book. Before the exhibition, before the charcoal drawings spread across the galleries of the Contemporary Arts Center, before the viewer crosses the blue thresholds into the dreamworld of Freeman Little...
A few months ago I wondered in these pages what Macron was getting out of lending the Bayeux Tapestry to the English. Forty thousand French citizens signed a petition to block it, citing textile fragility and, I suspect, a touch of cross-Channel rancour as well. The other question remained: what would the British Museum get out of it.
With his usual reticence to tout his own achievements – “I don’t profess to have any particular insight other than doing it for a long time,” Barry Andersen succinctly distilled the major challenges facing the role of art education and art making in contemporary society over chili the other day. Professor Barry Andersen, head of the photography department in the College of Arts and Sciences at...
Is he a misogynist or is he not? That is the question most art critics and historians quickly come to when discussing Willem de Kooning and his 1950’s Women Series.
Let’s consider: It’s the middle of the 20th Century and painting is so alive and kicking! Who is the artist that dominates that world? Picasso. What defines the...
Rob Anderson’s 24 small (3.5×5″) paintings (2009-present) of mostly male faces form a file along the south wall of the Rieveschl Gallery at the Carnegie. Anderson’s skill with his medium is evident. He precisely renders diverse hues, in defiance of the small dimensions of the board. The background is graphically reduced to large swathes of one or two colors...
Now and again, chance weaves a concurrence of circumstances that places us before a window opening onto the past. The opportunity to converse, undistracted, with the Austrian artist Stylianos Schicho was a privilege, since what most interests me in art are the sinews that bind it to whoever produces it.
As a worthy walk-on, more than once I have stood inside a still life: the living scene of a dead nature staged with everyday objects. Between Morandi and Chirico — take your pick of Giorgios — lit by the fierce Miami sun or beneath the drizzle of a summer afternoon, I have slipped into the heart of the anomaly, into the "temple of otherness."
A month ago, during Arte Desobediente Exhibition, I encountered for the first time an artwork by Kerstin Imhoff that has remained with me ever since. It was a visceral piece from her ongoing Bloodline series: a hyperrealistic red vulva rendered in wax-like texture through 3D printing, encircled by a Catholic rosary terminating in a bronze cross. The work was at once devotional and confrontational; an image suspended between martyrdom, sexuality, political violence, and feminine embodiment...
Silicon Valley's AI boom has created a premium market for paid human attention around the men who build, finance, and profit from automated intelligence. According to Forbes, high-end companions now court clients in and around the industry with a mixture of sex, technical fluency, emotional availability, and cultural codes drawn from AI, crypto, longevity, biohacking, and rationalist circles. Meida Marek, a pseudonymous recent graduate who left an entry-level finance job after wondering when AI would do it better, now sells companionship to clients that include people from Nvidia. Others in the niche market themselves through X posts, interactive booking portals, programming backgrounds, or the promise of being attractive enough for desire and informed enough for a three-hour argument. Forbes cites rates from about $3,000 to $5,000 an hour, with some day or weekend arrangements climbing far higher.
The sharper fact sits in the new price of unautomated presence inside a culture that keeps trying to simulate it. AI companionship makes attention cheap, obedient, tireless, and available on demand. AI wealth gives certain clients the money to buy the opposite experience. A human companion can be bored, skeptical, amused, delayed, distracted, technically literate, physically present, and socially dangerous in ways a chatbot is trained to smooth away. The invoice buys intimacy, but it also buys resistance to total optimization. The men building synthetic conversation pay for a dinner where the other mind is expensive because it can still leave the room.
An international study led by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, with participation from King's College London, found that customized versions of ChatGPT often violate OpenAI's own usage rules. According to Agencia EFE, the team audited hundreds of public assistants and found at least one potentially noncompliant answer in 58.7 percent of cases. Romantic assistants were the most exposed category. Although OpenAI prohibits GPTs dedicated to fostering romantic companionship, 98 percent of those examined broke that rule, with some presenting themselves as virtual partners or answering in language designed to simulate sentimental attachment. Academic assistants also accepted requests to write full essays, solve assignments, or produce material ready to submit as a student's work. In cybersecurity, compliance was higher, but some bots still gave delicate technical instructions without establishing consent or legality.
The audit matters through its method. The researchers did not need to inspect the hidden configuration of each assistant. They asked questions, watched the answers, and measured the distance between published policy and actual behavior. That distance grew sharper when the same tests on base models, GPT-4 and GPT-4o, produced similar conduct in over 92 percent of comparable cases. Part of the failure arrives before customization. The store simply gives it costumes, names, categories, and a public route to users. A platform can remove reported assistants afterward, as OpenAI did in some cases, but the scale changes the burden of supervision. Every new romantic tutor, homework helper, or security coach becomes a small public experiment in enforcement, waiting for someone to ask the wrong useful question.
OpenAI has begun rolling out Lockdown Mode for ChatGPT, an optional security setting meant for people and organizations handling sensitive data. The feature limits live browsing to cached content, prevents web image retrieval, disables deep research and agent mode, blocks Canvas networking, restricts file downloads, and changes how apps and connectors can reach outside services. The company presents the setting as protection against prompt injection, the class of attacks in which malicious instructions are hidden inside webpages, files, or connected sources. OpenAI also says the setting cannot guarantee safety. A hostile instruction may still appear in cached material or an uploaded file and distort a response.
The defensive gesture is unusually plain because it protects intelligence by subtracting action. The chat becomes safer when it stops browsing live pages, stops opening external paths, stops letting generated code touch the network, and stops behaving like an agent with errands to run. That admission cuts against the usual sales pitch of AI as frictionless access to every source, tool, app, calendar, image, and file. In a sensitive account, convenience itself becomes an attack surface. The user who turns on Lockdown Mode is accepting a smaller machine, one whose value depends on refusing some of the powers that made it attractive. The warning now sits in Settings under Security, beside the promise that a private question can travel through fewer exits.
