ChatGPT 10-hour outage sends users into existential spiral
In a turn of events that plummeted productivity and gave many existential dread, ChatGPT was down for more than 10 hours on Tuesday, a move that left users feeling as though they were teleported back to the Dark Ages (or at least to 2018).
The worldwide outage began around 2:45 a.m. ET (9:45 a.m. SAST), according to Down Detector. After a brief dip in complaints, reports spiked again as the sun rose across the U.K., Europe, North America, and Australia. A truly global 'what do I even do without my AI?' moment.
ChatGPT's free and paid tiers were both down, and to those who love image generation, Sora, OpenAI's dreamy image generator, had downtime.
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Daily Maverick
a day ago
- Daily Maverick
New worlds unfolding — how Thekiso Mokhele uses AI to reshape artistic labour
Thekiso Mokhele has found a creative toolbox and is pioneering new territory for art-making. As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies reshape the boundaries of art, Thekiso Mokhele's work pushes into the speculative unknown. This is one of the reasons his art was selected by the WORLDART Gallery for the HEAT Winter Arts Festival, which takes place from 6 to 16 August and is centred on the theme, 'Other Worlding'. Blending his foundation in photography with new digital tools, Mokhele uses AI to imagine futures rooted in African narratives, memory and myth. At a recent art fair, he presented works made with AI. His marginal position was reflected in the display as his work occupied a small corner where he and another artist had works placed. 'This is where it starts,' he said. 'In five or 10 years, I'll look back and remember the exact corner.' For Mokhele, it was not about being first, it was about standing on the edge of what art might become. Mokhele is an artist based in Johannesburg, and his work with AI is fairly recent. He has a background in photography, and his artistic journey began long before the current wave of generative AI tools such as Midjourney or ChatGPT became part of today's creative toolbox. He was already digging through the deep web for tools he could use to help him see what didn't yet exist. He was looking for something that could not be done by a camera. 'I have always had an eye,' he says, describing the visual sensibility as nuances honed through the eye behind the camera. He began experimenting by testing how prompts could be shaped and worked, and this evolved with his curiosity. He came to recognition for a series of AI images, titled The Rumbling. These images were created in response to the methane gas leak explosion in the Johannesburg CBD on 19 July 2023. Inspired by the chaos, Mokhele used the destructive images to start a conversation among people about the state of South Africa's infrastructure. He often returns to this idea of curiosity of play and building. 'I want to create pieces that are going to speak to people… in a way that is deeper than just normal visuals that you'd expect. I want them to tell a story.' His workflow is complex and multilayered. Every image begins with intention, a concept, mood and composition. He constructs a vision using every tool at his disposal: photography, references, detailed prompt engineering and editing. He often uses his own photos as raw material. These are images he has shot, directed and styled, sampling and transforming them through the AI lens. Lighting, texture, framing, tone. They are intuitive but also learned. Years of working with a camera taught him how a photo should look, where the shadows should fall, and how the human body communicates through gestures and poses. These instincts guide the way he writes prompts, refines outputs and chooses what not to use. Because AI art is disruptive, it is controversial. It is threatening the status quo. It blurs the line between machine and maker, between invention and replication. And in doing so, it opens deep, uncomfortable questions: Who owns an image? What counts as authorship? Is creativity still creative if it is shared with a machine? We are not speculating anymore about it. It's here. Mokhele does not claim to have all the answers. He speaks often about how images don't make themselves. 'AI itself is another dimension because it references our world but creates what it interprets as us.' For him, AI is a tool and it is not here to erase artistic labour, but to reshape it. This has made him more aware of what he brings to the process – not less. His background in photography informs how he prompts. Every decision, every edit, every prompt is part of his intention. It is a hybrid process. One that relies on an understanding of code and colour, composition and command lines. Mokhele is still learning what the process is. Mokhele's work fits here because it is speculative. It imagines new worlds and challenges how we define what's real. He is not claiming to lead a movement, but he is claiming his space in it. His art exists in a moment that is still unfolding. 'Futurism is a duality of what we believe we're living in now and what the future will be,' he says. In many ways, his work is already part of an answer. He is not using AI to run away from art but to build on its existing characteristics. This fusion challenges the potential of African artistic production beyond colonial expectations and rigid traditions. To create work that lives in speculative worlds, future landscapes and imagined timelines. Work that is rooted in photography, but also in play, experimentation and risk. DM A longer version of this article will appear in HEAT: Emerging Artists You Should Know 2025. Mokhele is showing at WORLDART Gallery's HEAT Festival exhibition titled Technology as Palette: Imagination to Image. Meet the artist during a curator-led walkabout on 7 August at 5pm at Alliance Francaise. Visit to book and find out more about the festival.
Mail & Guardian
2 days ago
- Mail & Guardian
AI didn't kill writing — we did
(Graphic: John McCann/M&G) Being a grammar snob is so 2012 but I'm probably not alone in this one. Seeing the em dash (—) go mainstream wasn't on the cards for many years. But now, it's everywhere, tucked into every second article, LinkedIn sermon and long-form X post that wants to sound groundbreaking but falls flat. It wasn't always like this. Outside of yellowing novel pages, em dashes, especially those without spaces on either side, were prevalent in prestige American texts. They belonged in literary-leaning publications like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Pitchfork… publications with writers and editors who know how to break rhythm with elegance for a readership that gets it. Now the em dash has gone corporate. The issue is not that it's going mainstream, but how it's being used. Blame the machine It's ChatGPT's fault. And that of all other large language models (LLMs) like Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. For better or worse, LLMs are widely used in writing today. But, while they can assist, most LLM-generated text lacks that personal touch. It reads broad and glossy. Emotionally neutral and safe. You can often tell when a piece of writing has been LLM generated, not just by its tone, but by its punctuation. The em dash appears like a glitch in the code, levitating where a comma, semicolon, colon or even just a space would've worked better. It's like narrative duct tape — functional but overused. And yet, humans are letting it slide. Or worse, they are copying the style without realising why. The popularity of AI in SA ChatGPT is the fifth-most visited website in South Africa, after Google, YouTube, Facebook and, sadly, Hollywoodbets. Globally, it received 4.7 billion visits in April alone, up 51% from just two months earlier. In the AI search space, ChatGPT now commands over 80% of the traffic. People are using it to write everything from school essays to corporate blogs and press releases. Financial challenges, rife in the media space all over the world, are pushing publications to quietly consider the use of AI-generated articles. I've heard the whispers and read the actual texts. One never knows the prompts people are feeding LLMs, but the output speaks volumes. Whole articles, captions and bios that sound templated. You can feel the generic thrum of machine-generated rhythm. Deeper than punctuation To me, as an emerging writer in the 2010s, the em dash was aspirational. My Lenovo didn't have the symbol on the keyboard, but my Mac made it easier, though still a two-key job. In my delusions, I felt the em dash elevated my writing and set it apart because em dashes were never common in South African writing. Echoing the New York Times style I admired, I'd open with anecdotal leads and pepper the body with em dashes, only to have them stripped out by sub-editors and replaced with spaced hyphens, en dashes or colons and commas. But today, it's a different story. This isn't to say an em dash is a sign of LLM-generated text. But in a South African text, it does make you pause. There are times when it's the only punctuation that truly works for cutting across a thought, or surprising the reader, but when you start seeing it everywhere, it becomes suspicious. And points not just to laziness, but no care. LLMs aren't writers. They're tools. With access to nearly the entire internet, they're brilliant at research, summarising, organising thoughts and even giving technical feedback. But relying on LLMs to write for you, no edits, no effort, is the plastic surgery of writing. 'Basically, AI is a very fancy autocomplete,' It generates responses by predicting the most likely next word based on training data, not by truly understanding meaning. Which means, if you are going to use it, edit. Start with the punctuation then move on to the other tells. First, the clause trio, a rhythm AI loves: three short, punchy phrases or words. Those are usually used to punctuate the 'it's not just …, it's a …' structured sentence. Next, the Oxford comma, a largely American habit, now cropping up in every other LinkedIn post and amapiano press release. Then there's the overly measured tone — serious, but generic. Works best for motivational speakers and, eh, life coaches. Even when humans write this way without the use of AI, sadly, the work just reads … suspect. So what now? Write like a human? Writers are starting to worry. There have been cases where AI filters flag human work as machine-written. X users told one writer to ditch the em dashes, colons and semi-colons altogether. It's Editors already have a list of blacklisted phrases. Now, that list includes the punctuation marks and indicators mentioned above — or your work may be dismissed as synthetic. Worse, when Which brings us to a bigger question: what is AI doing to writing? Experts argue that, outside the generic sentence-stitching, relying on LLMs is detrimental to our thinking and reasoning capacity. 'It turns you from an active seeker of information into a passive consumer of information and I don't know if, in the long term, that is a good shift for us to be making,' says Celia Ford, an American science journalist, in Ford admits that, through technological tools, humans have been doing a lot of 'cognitive off-loading'. She mentions calendar reminders, GPS and even the idea of writing stuff down instead of memorising it. But, there's a caveat. 'When we let LLMs write essays or code for us,' she says, 'we are giving up something that feels, at least to me, pretty central to humanness; critical thinking and creativity, and we are risking letting these tools think for us, instead of aiding us in our own thinking.' Always invite AI to the table However, despite the concerns, the fact is AI is not going anywhere. It may be bad for the environment, but so are fossil fuels and many other technologies we can't live without. In an era when publications are understaffed, leading to minimal time spent on editing drafts, I can't imagine working without Grammarly, which is still a form of AI. It doesn't write, it's not generative like LLMs, it assists, it refines what you've already put on the page. But sometimes it can suck the soul out of your writing. That's when the human brain should take over. But, overall, it helps improve the quality of your draft. Refusing to use AI at all, as noble as it might be, is backward and somewhat masochistic, but also on-brand for humans. All new technologies get criticised by purists. Guns were once seen as cowardly in combat. Cars were dismissed as loud and dangerous by horse riders. Even typewriters were accused of ruining handwriting. How about digitally produced music? We've come a long way. Mollick gets it. 'We have never built a generally applicable technology that can boost our intelligence,' he writes. 'Now humans have access to a tool that can emulate how we think and write, acting as a co‑intelligence to improve (or replace) our work.' He's not afraid of collaboration, however, and he embraces the machine and encourages us to do the same: 'Always invite AI to the table.' 'In field after field,' he writes, 'a human working with an AI co‑intelligence outperforms all but the best humans working without an AI.' Tech changes every art form Technology has transformed all major art forms. In electronic music, computers gave us hi-hats that rattle faster than any drummer could ever play, creating a texture musicians weren't familiar with. What is the world without trap music and EDM? In the 16th century, the camera obscura projected scenes onto a canvas, allowing artists to trace subjects, leading to more immersive art. CGI has made entire universes possible. Marvel's billion-dollar empire couldn't exist without it. Mark Zuckerberg recently said most Meta code will be handled by AI going forward. 'It can run tests, it can find issues, it will write higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already,' Zuck said in a podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel. Writing: What will AI bring? Maybe speed. Maybe a new kind of prose. Hopefully not just more em dashes in your feed, but a deeper shift in how we think on the page. That's only possible if the human stays in control. If we surrender the process completely, what's left is not writing, just passive copy and paste. But there are more efficient ways to use LLMs. 'It's not that the LLM is giving me the answers,' said David Perell in his visual essay The Ultimate Guide to Writing with AI, 'it's that the LLM is helping me ask good questions … like shining a spotlight in different corners of my brain and helping me find treasure boxes of insight I would've never found on my own.' Stacy Schiff, biographer of There are lines. Where they are drawn is deeply subjective. But, seeing no line at all should be collectively condemned.
The South African
25-07-2025
- The South African
Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet suffers global outage
SpaceX chief Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service experienced an hours-long global network outage late on Thursday, which executives attributed to a key software issue. The service interruption was announced on X at about 22:00 (SA time) on Thursday by Starlink's official handle. Users in the United States and Europe began reporting problems with the service an hour before the Starlink announcement on Downdetector, a website that tracks issues in internet-based services. 'Service will be restored shortly,' South Africa-born Musk posted on X, apologising for the outage. 'SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn't happen again.' The tech billionaire later reposted a statement from Starlink Vice President of Engineering Michael Nicolls, who said the disruption was due to the 'failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.' Nicolls also said the Starlink network had 'mostly recovered' from the outage, which 'lasted approximately 2.5 hours.' About two hours later, Starlink posted that the issue was resolved and that service was restored. User reports on Downdetector began after 21:00 (SA time), peaking at 21:34 (SA time) and tapering out at 05:00 (SA time). Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk's space rocket venture SpaceX, has deployed more than 6 000 low-orbit satellites to provide high-speed internet to isolated and poorly connected areas. Starlink currently leads the satellite internet race, with European competitor Eutelsat – which is backed by France and the United Kingdom – lagging behind with 600 satellites. Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1 Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news. By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse
