No-one knows what the future of AI has in store for us, and one journalist has raised concerns about the impact of the technology.

When investigative journalist Karen Hao started looking into Sam Altman’s OpenAI, she had hopes for the technology, but extensive research and unparalleled access to those closest to the AI arms race left her with a different view.

Her work in this space has made her one of the foremost tech journos covering AI. She’s been listed in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.

She's heading to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers Festival with her book EMPIRE OF AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination.

"My criticism of companies that use this kind of rhetoric is that they are essentially just leveraging the lack of a shared definition as a way to just hype up their technologies."

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Olympic paddler Luuka Jones-Yaxley's lined up an unexpected project after her success in Paris.

Shortly after retiring from the high-performance canoe Slalom at the Paris Olympics, Luuka received a call and an offer to appear as Charlize Theron’s stunt double in the Netflix film Apex.

She says the offer felt like an 'April Fools joke' at first, but she was on a plane to the South Island to begin filming before she knew it.

"I just received at text from a friend down in the South Island and he called me and said he's been doing a bunch of water safety on some films and that this film had approached him and they needs a kayak double for Charlize Theron - and it kind of went from there."

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Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Natalie Heller Mills drifts into marriage with a real loser, and in a last desperate attempt to help him make something of himself, gets her father in law to fund them onto a remote ranch in Idaho where she raises a brood of kids, embraces a traditional way of life, and sends it all via Instagram to a rapidly increasing audience. The trouble is, Natalie doesn’t entirely subscribe to the situation she finds herself in - and when one day she wakes up in the year 1855, in exactly the environment she’s been emulating, the things she’s been espousing and pretending to live like suddenly become all too real. This is terrifically well done - full of side-eye and quips to the reader amid a situation from which there is no escape.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. He’s the author who gave us the wonderful Empire of Pain a few years ago. This is about a young man whose fall from the balcony of a high end apartment block beside the Thames was filmed by MI6 cameras across the river. Zac Brettler always wanted more, and passed himself off as the child of a Russian oligarch which ultimately resulted in him getting in with the wrong crowd. Despite the footage, the Metropolitan Police refused to investigate and when Radden Keefe got involved he found a great deal to answer for. This is fascinating, investigative writing of the highest order.

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