Welcome back to The Daily's Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what's keeping them entertained. Today's special guest is Honor Jones, a senior editor who has written about divorce, motherhood, and John le Carre. She has also published short stories in this magazine, including 'Skin a Rabbit,' which was excerpted from her novel, Sleep. Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Because this is Mother's Day weekend I'm answering this one first. One of my kids discovered the Netflix movie Nimona, and I don't think enough people know how great this movie is. It's got a spunky heroine, two knights in love, and smart things to say about how authoritarians exploit fear. And for my 6-year-old: fight scenes with a rhinoceros. An author I will read anything by: There are many, but one is Lauren Groff. While on a hike with two Atlantic colleagues this spring, I made them listen to me recount in detail the entire plot of 'Between the Shadow and the Soul''one of the stories in Groff's new collection, Brawler. I feel bad because now they can never come to the story fresh, and because I went on for a really long time and they were trapped on a nature trail and couldn't escape. So I'll be briefer here: Groff commands the passage of time brilliantly, your understanding of the characters' relationship changes right up until the very end, and the story is so sad. Groff has also written one of my favorite openings in all of recent literature, for her novel Matrix: 'She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.' I mean....

How much of the scientific literature is generated by AI' The first studies of the size of the AI footprint in scientific journals, preprint repositories and peer-review reports give a spread of answers ' and indicate a rapidly evolving situation that it is difficult to get a handle on. The fear of many in the research community is that poor-quality or entirely fabricated research produced by large language models (LLMs) could overwhelm the ability of current quality-control systems to detect it, thereby polluting the scientific canon. 'We live in an escalating arms race' between people using AI unscrupulously and those who are trying to constrain or detect it, says Richard She, a stem-cell biologist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Concerns about the extent of AI-generated content in the scientific literature mirror broader online trends. At the end of March, AI-generated articles were estimated to outnumber those written by humans, according to an analysis of 55,000 newly published webpages shared with Nature by the private firm Graphite in San Francisco, California....

Earlier this year, computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac received a notification from Google Scholar that one of his publications had been cited in a paper published in the International Dental Journal1. That was unexpected, because his research on spotting fabricated papers doesn't typically intersect with dentistry. 'I was very surprised to see that I couldn't recognize my own reference,' says Cabanac, who is based at the University of Toulouse in France. The title in the citation resembled that of a preprint2 he had posted in 2021 and never published formally, but the journal was listed as Nature and the DOI ' the unique identifier assigned by publishers and preprint repositories ' did not lead to the original preprint. 'I got very concerned,' adds Cabanac, who immediately suspected that the citation had been hallucinated by artificial intelligence. This is just one example of a rapidly growing problem. Surveys and related studies have shown that researchers are increasingly using large language models (LLMs) to help to conduct literature searches, write manuscripts and format bibliographies. And sometimes, these models generate non-existent academic references....

A decade ago, when I became a stay-at-home dad, I was too busy sanitizing baby bottles and washing reusable diapers to read a short story, let alone an entire novel. Now I have a pair of night-owl elementary schoolers, and although bedtime can still be draining, I at least have the energy to enjoy a few chapters once they're asleep. So when I learned last year about two well-reviewed novels featuring stay-at-home-dad protagonists'Something Rotten, by Andrew Lipstein, and The River Is Waiting, by Wally Lamb'I was curious to pick them up. Within the first few pages, however, I was disappointed to find that these characters were essentially a collection of the same old incompetent-dad tropes: unemployable, emasculated, blundering, or, in the case of Lamb's book, tragically negligent. I never used to be a reader who needed to see himself in a novel. But as a dad who takes pride in bringing fun and, if I may say so, some skill to the role, I've grown tired of cultural stereotypes that reduce stay-at-home fathers to undignified buffoons. So I decided to go hunting, to see where else these dads show up in literature, in the hope of finding a character whose experience might reflect my own....