Photo of John Naughton
John Naughton

Columnist

John is an engineer, an academic (co-founder of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge) and a journalist. He's also an historian of the internet, a photographer and a blogger, and in an earlier life was The Observer's TV Critic for eight happy years when TV was worth watching.

Photo of John Naughton

John Naughton

Columnist

John is an engineer, an academic (co-founder of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge) and a journalist. He's also an historian of the internet, a photographer and a blogger, and in an earlier life was The Observer's TV Critic for eight happy years when TV was worth watching.

  • John Naughton
    Tech bros, beware: resistance to AI moves from theory to direct action

    The backlash against Silicon Valley’s dispowering technology is manifesting as direct action and US state legislation

    Fri, 17 Apr 2026

  • John Naughton
    In polarised times, AI may be the centrist the world needs

    Studies have shown chatbots nudge people from extreme rightwing views to the middle ground

    Sat, 11 Apr 2026

  • John Naughton
    Ten metaphors for AI

    AI is everywhere, and yet we struggle to understand exactly what it is. Enter the metaphor

    Fri, 3 Apr 2026

  • John Naughton
    AI’s punctuation is only human – I love an em dash too

    The proliferation of the grammatical device is correlated with the rise of LLMs. But don’t forget, they learn from us

    Fri, 12 Sept 2025

  • John Naughton
    Park your fears, there's a roadmap to an electric car future

    Anxiety over infrastructure and premiums still dog the takeup of EVs, but things are improving

    Fri, 5 Sept 2025

  • John Naughton
    AI is like a lunch – there’s no such thing as a free one

    When the tech giants monetise LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini, will our thoughts be the currency?

    Fri, 29 Aug 2025

  • John Naughton
    My advice to Sam Altman: read Jacques Derrida

    The bold claims made about the new version of ChatGPT are yet more big tech hyperbole

    Fri, 22 Aug 2025

  • John Naughton
    Zuckerberg’s sermon suggests Meta is lacking belief

    The tech giant’s supreme leader is preaching again – but will the AI converts want to be part of its future?

    Fri, 15 Aug 2025

  • John Naughton
    America’s plan to use AI as a political weapon

    The US blueprint for AI dominance is a global gamechanger that explains why the Silicon Valley crowd turned against the Democrats

    Fri, 8 Aug 2025

  • John Naughton
    Paying geeks $200m but slashing jobs? This is an AI bubble

    The tech giants are spending fortunes on ‘ultra-smart’ algorithmic experts – but to the cost of other staff

    Fri, 1 Aug 2025

  • John Naughton
    AI tells us what we want to hear

    AI must learn to tell the truth rather than what it thinks we want to hear

    Fri, 25 Jul 2025

  • John Naughton
    A tool that can make sense of a screen full of tabs? Sign me up

    Google’s unheralded NotebookLM tool is a much-needed way to organise disparate pieces of information in one virtual space

    Fri, 18 Jul 2025

  • John Naughton
    Musk’s chatbot praises Hitler then says ‘sorry, my bad, I fell for a hoax’

    Grok AI had been instructed not to ‘shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect’

    Sun, 13 Jul 2025

  • John Naughton
    Cloudflare’s AI thunderbolt: pay for content or be blocked

    The delivery network through whose servers about a fifth of all internet traffic passes is blocking AI web crawlers

    Fri, 11 Jul 2025

  • John Naughton
    Musk and co should ask AI what defines intelligence

    The X owner thinks artificial general intelligence is ‘smarter than the smartest human’. But it’s not as clever as he thinks

    Fri, 4 Jul 2025

  • John Naughton
    Does AI make us dull? Students have answered that question

    An MIT experiment shows exactly what happens to the brain when writing an essay with the help of AI – and without it

    Fri, 27 Jun 2025

  • John Naughton
    The networker: So long, software visionary Bill Atkinson

    Fri, 13 Jun 2025

  • John Naughton
    The networker: Universities must learn to embrace AI

    Students are already using tools such as ChatGPT. Academic institutions should embrace them too

    Sat, 7 Jun 2025

  • John Naughton
    John Naughton: AI is coming and we all have to get used to it

    The titans of tech tell us that the rise of AI is inevitable. But the allocation of dwindling resources for its production need not be

    Sat, 31 May 2025

  • John Naughton
    John Naughton: beware Microsoft shutting down emails

    The commercial interests of US tech giants have fused with the country’s national interests. We’re about to find out what ‘digital sovereignty’ really means

    Sat, 24 May 2025

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