Culture Editor, Lonic
Noor writes about culture and technology, focusing on how synthetic media changes what audiences trust.
Startup Orchid's 'relationship-saving' AI assistant drew sharp criticism this week, part of a wider 2026 reckoning with what AI companion tools quietly outsource.
The claim that short-form video is destroying attention spans has become received wisdom. The research is more mixed, and more interesting, than the headline version suggests.
Major publishers have begun striking licensing agreements with AI companies over back-catalogue and future rights. The sums involved, and how much of them authors actually see, vary far more than the announcements suggest.
The South African school produced remarkable individual outcomes and never resolved the question its critics raised on day one. Both parts of that record deserve a hearing.
A wave of mergers, acquisitions and closures has concentrated development inside a smaller number of very large publishers. The category most exposed is the one that used to sit between indie experimentation and blockbuster spectacle.
Anticipation is enormous and the economics are less forgiving than they were five years ago. What the numbers around this release actually tell us about the genre.
Box office totals have crept back towards pre-pandemic levels, but the recovery is lopsided. A narrower band of films is doing more of the work, and the mid-budget theatrical release has not come back at all.
The chart still shapes careers, but the formula behind it has changed more in ten years than in the previous fifty. Understanding the inputs explains most chart controversies.
Millions of AI-generated tracks now sit alongside human recordings on major platforms. The dispute is no longer whether to allow them, but how to pay for them without hollowing out the pool everyone draws from.
A growing number of museums are repatriating objects that would have been considered untouchable a decade ago. The change owes less to any single legal ruling than to a broader shift in how institutions weigh reputational risk.
When anything can be generated, audiences start paying for proof. Provenance is becoming a cultural value, not just a technical standard.