September 2023

September 2023's small but telling selection of items centers on creativity and cultural legitimacy. A US court ruling that AI-generated images cannot be copyrighted anchors the month alongside research showing AI scoring in the top percentile of divergent creative thinking — a pairing that raises unresolved questions about originality, authorship, and what 'creativity' actually means when it can be algorithmically produced. TIME's list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence reflects the field's growing cultural footprint, while a lighter piece on Anguilla's accidental windfall from its '.ai' country code domain captures how the AI boom's economic effects are landing in unexpected places far beyond Silicon Valley.