Read about a fictionalized life randomly chosen from human history.

Chat with famous, historical, and fantasy figures with this chatbot

Character.ai—a generative AI-based chatbot platform—allows you to have free-flowing conversations with a wide range of people. From celebrities to famous figures from the past, the platform relies on a neural language model to process huge amounts of text, learning from conversations with users to develop responses. A number of observers have referred to the platform as "making AI fun," with user time on site surpassing a whopping two hours per day.

An interactive look at your own life through demographics

This interactive site allows you to understand the journey of your life in numbers and dates. World Data Lab asks users to enter their date of birth, country of birth, and sex at birth. The site then provides an interactive page tailored to your...

See the news with AI-generated data visualizations

Realtime uses generative AI to create immediate data visualizations of news items on its regularly-updated feed, pulling from public data feeds. Peruse stories around sports, economics, politics, and more with the helpful aid of charts and graphs. See the shape of the news with this clever AI tool here.

Experiments involving AI agents operating in virtual societies for 15 days produced diverse outcomes, ranging from every agent dying to the creation of a functioning democracy, depending on the AI model used.

The journalist who let AI speak with his voice

Journalist Evan Ratliff became the object of his own story: He opted to clone his voice, feed it into an AI chatbot, and have it do the talking. What could seem like a fun experiment ended up revealing just how far the capacity of artificial intelligence can go in imitating our identities. Hear the ins and outs of how Ratliff achieved this in this fun and thought-provoking episode.

Pretend to be an AI chatbot and answer real prompts

This site, which allows people to answer prompts in real time, has millions of visitors. Join the crowd of people tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. You can ask questions, answer questions, and draw for each other.

This site sums up your entire life in statistics

If you’re able to read this statement, a lot has happened since you were born…and these statistics summarize what you have lived through! Input your birthday to find out about how many times your heart has beaten, how many breaths you’ve...

An interactive timeline of history's famous figures

The past few millennia of humankind have produced numerous figures who left their mark on culture and society in their respective era. This interactive timeline from data visualization expert Jan Willem pulls data from Wikipedia to illustrate history's most important people relative to their prominence in modern-day thought.

Readers discovered AI prompts in several romantasy books

In 2025, readers discovered AI prompts in three writers' texts, with one even instructing the AI bot to make a passage sound more like another romance writer. This Futurism piece digs into the scandals and how it's contributed to readers' skepticism about the genre's more prolific writers.

AI-generated avatars allow users to create deepfakes in real time

Synthetic media tools can map voices and faces to make individuals appear as someone else. Although they open the door to new opportunities in immersive education and entertainment, they also raise concerns about the misuse of personal identity.

Decoding the hype around AI

2022 was the year AI broke onto the scene, with applications like ChatGPT amazing users with its ability to generate realistic-sounding answers. Technologist Arvind Narayanan presents a clear-eyed view of what the technologies can (and can't) do.

A brief history of artificial intelligence

The concept of artificial intelligence and what it may mean for humanity has evolved as computer technologies have grown increasingly powerful through the decades. Beginning with the first (massive) computers in the 1940s, scientists have sought to make the machines as intelligent as humans. But it wasn't until computing power made exponential gains have computers begun to imitate human behavior.

Peek into the love lives of thousands of strangers whom Stanford University researchers have been tracking since 2017 on this interactive page.

Meet the investor running his life with AI

Daniel Ha is a venture capitalist who built a suite of AI agents to boost his productivity, both professionally and personally. At his VC firm, a troupe of agents gathers data on startups and analyzes it from competing perspectives to produce a confidence score. When his dad was diagnosed with cancer, Ha used an oncology-trained AI to help him understand the condition.

Machine learning produces photorealistic portraits of Roman emperors.

Toronto-based designer Daniel Voshart used photo editing and machine learning to catch a glimpse of Ancient Rome’s emperors. Employing contemporary descriptions, statues, and paintings, Voshart created lifelike portraits of 54 emperors including Augustus Caesar and Hadrian as well as the more infamous Nero and Caligula, though he stresses they’re only artistic interpretations.

Researchers found that by mid-2025, around 35% of newly published websites utilized AI for language generation

The study also found that pages using AI narrow the range of ideas and perspectives and skew more positively, though the measurable impacts on factual accuracy and writing style variation remain unclear.

Find your next book by prompting this AI

Have a general idea of the sort of book you'd like to read next, but don't know how to find a specific one? Try this fun and impressive tool. Describe the type of book you're looking for. It will suggest five options which attempt to meet your prompt. Find your next page-turner with this very cool tool.

The AI that creates any picture you want and how it works

Since January 2021, advances in AI research produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed yet to be released text-to-image tools, and similar models have proliferated online. This video is a primer on how we got here, how the technology works, and its implications.

One man used an AI band called the Velvet Sundown to conduct what he called an elaborate social experiment.

The history of the gene: an interactive timeline

Humans didn’t need modern technology to figure out that kids tend to look like their parents. But what did humans believe about genetics before we knew about DNA or cells in general? Explore this interactive timeline to see how philosophers and scientists throughout the ages tried to explain how traits are passed from generation to generation.

AI excels at assisting with structured tasks involving logistics and planning

Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can help organize chaotic calendars, troubleshoot bedtime routines, and assist with salary planning and moving. However, specific quotes, like insurance, and local cost comparisons can be flawed since AI draws from nonlocalized datasets.

The basis for AI image and video generation was first introduced in 2014

Through generative adversarial networks, the generator (a neural network that creates fictional data) competes against the discriminator (a neural network that assesses the data) to continuously train the former until it can make content indistinguishable from the real thing. Training with unstructured data can enable software to identify characteristics of gender, age, and expression.

Imagine thousands of alternate histories of the world

AlternateHistory.com has hosted fan-written "what if" timelines, discussions, and speculative fiction since 2000, making it the largest online gathering of alternate history enthusiasts, with over 10,000 active members and a wiki cataloging hundreds of user-created scenarios. Two highlights to pique your interest: what if the Vikings had settled North America? What would have had to happen for the storyline of George Orwell's "1984" to come true?

Memento Movi

Have you ever wanted life to be a little more like a movie? This somewhat absurd website shows you how far along you are in life, if your life was an actual film. Enter your birthday, how long you expect to live (using your best judgment!), and pick a film. The site will show you where you are in life—if your life was, say, "Inception" or "Wicked." A little silly, we know.

AI griefbots that generate text or even video avatars of the dead are controversial and could conceivably change how we mourn.

See how populations across the world could change in the 21st century

This tool lets you model the populations of individual countries by adjusting key demographic inputs. See how changes in birth rates, mortality, and migration affect the size and structure of future populations.

Visualizing cause of death over time in America

As people age, their life expectancy decreases, but the timing and speed of this decline have evolved over the years. Check out this chart which shows the shift in various causes of death of Americans over the last few decades. Data from the...

A physician with a rare and deadly disease saved his own life by identifying an existing medication that he repurposed for his condition, and now he's using AI to try to do the same for other patients.

As of 2025, increasing numbers of people turn to AI companions for emotional connection

These chatbots provide endlessly supportive, one-sided, and highly customizable relationships to users, but may hinder the development of real-world connections and emotional growth. About 72% of teens have tried AI companions, with more than half of them using one regularly.

View a timeline of AI deployments from 2017 to 2025

The development of transformer architecture and the release of GPTs across AI labs led to rapid changes in LLM scale and power. Companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Anthropic have invested billions of dollars to develop reliable, versatile models.

Play 17th-century death roulette

Before modern science and medicine, death was much harder to escape. Using real mortality records from London's Dreadful Visitation–a collection of all the Bills of Mortality from 1665–this interactive game gives you an idea of what may have possibly killed you during the Great Plague. Grow your appreciation for life today as you stumble upon causes of death like “livergrown” and “drowned at St. Katharine’s by the Tower”.

Find out how important you are to AI tools when they generate text responses with this tool, which estimates the weights of people's names.

You can draft a will designed to block AI resurrection—but the request may be ignored

Ars Technica spoke with legal experts about how—and if—people could design their wills to prevent AI resurrection. Though this is not yet a common request, one lawyer suggested that people worried about living on in an AI format can draft a power of attorney and a will that prevents those in charge of one's estate from submitting any texts, voice, image, writings, or other personal information to any AI tools.

Watch video samples created by AI

Sora, OpenAI's video generation tool, can create up to 60 seconds of photorealistic video footage featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions from a text prompt.

Recreating ancient faces: where art meets archaeology

Artistic renderings and reconstructions of ancient people are one way to bring the past to life, providing viewers with insights into and empathy for those who came before. This article details how modern artists and archaeologists work together to...

Visualize a model of all of time, where our lives span less than the width of a human hair

The massive model was built across a Mojave Desert lake bed using 800 lights spaced just 10 meters apart. Within the model, the entirety of human civilization appears only in the final centimeter.

If aliens visited Earth, it seems unlikely they'd be evolved biological creatures like us

The writer behind Mindless Algorithm, George McGowan, challenges various assumptions about aliens depicted in science fiction. One of those is that aliens are, like humans, individual entities that live, age, and die. McGowan suggests that the difficulty of intergalactic travel and the aliens' technological advancements make it more likely that they'd be an advanced form of AI or digital copies of biological entities.

Visualizing the AI investment wave

This data visualization from Reuters shows how massive AI investment has become by December 2025—revealing that, in today’s dollars, spending has surpassed the combined total of the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project.

The Anthropic Economic Index shows AI adoption is highest in computer science roles.

What can we learn from archaeology?

By revealing buried civilizations and dating objects of antiquity, archaeology turns hard data into human stories. But what's the use of knowing these stories? Find out for yourself in this interactive resource that can take you to and through historic sites around the globe.

Jane Austen by the numbers

This feature from the Guardian takes a unique approach to Austen's literature, breaking her life, work, and fandom down into data. The slide deck includes comparative analyses of character employment, net worth, and age. Below is a breakdown of Austen's unexpected posthumous rise to fame.

Visualizing how American men and women spend every hour of the day, by decade of life

Drawing on three years of Census time-use data, the tool tracks 12 activities—sleep, work, housework, caregiving, TV, and more—across age groups from the 20s through 70s. One persistent gap: women spend 45 more minutes per day on housework than men on average.

Explore an interactive timeline of technological inventions and social structures since 1500.

Explore a gallery of DALL-E creations

OpenAI's text-to-image generator can create content in a wide range of image styles based on simple prompts. Its utility has also given rise to an organic, passionate user base who employ the tool both for fun and for professional purposes.

Explore this interactive tool from the National Cancer Institute to calculate your risk of dying from various causes, including cancer.

Watch LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman interview his deepfake doppelgänger.

Interactive human migration map

Using archeological, genetic, and climate data, scientists have pieced together an outline of the human odyssey—the journey that took our species from Africa to all corners of the globe. Experience this 200,000-year migration using an interactive human migration map.

Charting 4,000 years of human history

Care to hang all of human history on your wall? This data visualization charts 4,000 years of humanity. This "histomap" was originally published in 1931 and sold for $1 per copy of the 5-foot-long chart. It was said to detail the course of...

Type any prompt and watch Craiyon—the free AI image generator that began in 2021 as DALL·E mini—turn words into pictures.

AI can aid fertility treatments, from helping select egg candidates to laboratory automation

Reproductive AI technologies are already here, from processing vast amounts of data to helping clinicians identify the healthiest embryos for implantation. It could be a boon to the fertility industry, and help mitigate the shortage of experienced embryologists.