There’s a special kind of irony that hits you in the gut when a joke about artificial intelligence stealing your job turns out to be the exact thing that gets stolen. That’s the strange, dizzying place we’ve landed. AI is coming for your jokes — and apparently it’s armed with double Ds. In the past couple of weeks, two working stand-up comedians have posted side-by-side videos showing hyper-realistic, heavily sexualized AI-generated female “comedians” performing their material word for word. In some cases, the fake performers even mimicked the same venue background, the same outfit, the same random aside to an…

Paragraph 1 The earth has a way of reminding us, every so often, that it is alive in a way we can never fully control. On Friday, that reminder came to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, a remote and stunningly beautiful region known for its volcanoes, its wild rivers, and its dramatic Pacific coastline. The ground there was jolted by a powerful earthquake, initially measured at magnitude 7.0 by the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre, then revised slightly downward to 6.9. For the people living in that part of the world, it must have been a terrifying few minutes, a sudden lurch that turns…