‘The ripple effects of NASA’s Artemis mission could be bigger than you think’

Scott Solomon at The Washington Post

“As influential” as Apollo’s “developments were for the second half of the 20th century, NASA’s Artemis program could eventually be more consequential,” says Scott Solomon. A “major objective” is to “develop and test technologies enabling a sustained presence in space that is less reliant on resupply missions from Earth,” and the “ripple effects of these plans will echo long into the future.” If “subsequent generations are born on other worlds,” they “could evolve into new human species.”

Read more

‘Deepfake nudes are haunting America’s teens’

Jessica Grose at The New York Times

The “creation of deepfake nudes of minors” is “arguably much worse now that AI image generation tools are ubiquitous, and the images they create are even more realistic,” says Jessica Grose. Social media companies “could be doing a far better job of prioritizing the problem.” Parents can “have a conversation with your children about the fact that AI with nudifying capabilities exists,” but it “should not be the responsibility of individual parents to patrol the entire internet.”

Read more

‘Are Native Americans birthright citizens? It’s no April Fool’s joke.’

Paul Rosier at The Philadelphia Inquirer

Pending “court decisions loom large in the debate over Native people’s ability to exercise their American citizenship to protect their Indigenous citizenship,” says Paul Rosier. Native Americans “have fought hard throughout the 20th century and into the 21st to first gain, and then defend, those dual citizenship rights.” At stake “for Native people is their ability to challenge threats to long-standing treaty rights, which preserve their ancestral homelands, cultural identity and religious freedom, their ability to be both Native and American.”

Read more

‘The disillusioned college grads turning to the labor movement’

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein at The New Republic

The “story of a highly educated yet disillusioned generation has been told repeatedly since roughly 2011,” says Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein. Why “are unions now appealing to the college-educated?” Many “college grads assumed they would work in jobs that harnessed their passions.” One “appeal of unions for the college-educated is the crumbling of the narrative that pushed people into universities: Upon close inspection, the story about college being an unimpeded good begins to look more like a fairy tale.”

Read more

‘Cherry blossoms in DC highlight deep-rooted friendship with Japan’

Stewart D. McLaurin at USA Today

The “Japanese cherry blossoms around Washington, D.C., remind Americans that some of the most enduring connections between nations often begin with simple gestures that carry lasting meaning — like the gifting of trees,” says Stewart D. McLaurin. A recent ceremony symbolized the “first of 250 new trees Japan is donating to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.” Moments of “ceremony and hospitality have marked U.S.-Japan diplomacy for more than a century and a half.”

Read more

‘Democrats need a new promise: a house by 30’

Rotimi Adeoye at The New York Times

The “Trump administration has declared that it is ‘bringing back the American dream of homeownership,’” but is “doing little to make it a reality,” says Rotimi Adeoye. Politicians “can offer a simple promise: Anyone who works, pays taxes and plays by the rules should have a realistic path to buying a first home by age 30.” The “political benefits for the Democratic Party could be large,” as “housing will be a central issue in 2028.”

Read more

‘AI deepfakes of girls are flooding schools. Teachers need more training to help stop it.’

Emma Le and Stephanie Choi at the San Francisco Chronicle

Deepfakes are a “dire issue in high schools full of digital natives: 98% of AI-generated content online is explicit deepfakes, and 40% of high school students know of deepfakes of themselves or their classmates,” say Emma Le and Stephanie Choi. While “protections exist, students still have little way of knowing whether they apply to them.” This gap “stems not from indifference but rather a lack of resources and guidance to address the scope of the deepfake problem among students.”

Read more

‘Aging boomers will jam ERs — why it’s about to get worse’

Tom Wolzien at Newsweek

Patients are “increasingly stuck in the ER when they should have been moved ‘upstairs’ in the hospital,” and “increasingly, baby boomers will remain in those beds due to a lack of skilled nursing and assisted living facilities,” says Tom Wolzien. This “ripple effect will get much worse throughout the health care system.” This “could leave you, your spouse or your child in that ER hallway because when we boomers have nowhere to go, you will have nowhere to go.”

Read more

Tech enthusiasts and industry analysts are sounding the alarm about RAMageddon, a shortage of random access memory chips crucial for running many consumer electronics. Though the future implications of the mass integration of generative AI have had much of the industry worried, the immediate impact of AI’s excessive memory needs is being felt worldwide.

Insatiable high-margin demand

The memory chip shortage is “beginning to hammer profits, derail corporate plans and inflate price tags” on everything from “laptops and smartphones to automobiles and data centers,” said Bloomberg. Major technology companies have hinted that going forward, the shortage of DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, the “fundamental building block of almost all technology,” will constrain production.

The global RAM market is “experiencing a severe price crisis,” with the cost of memory chips “surging by as much as 80-90% in recent months,” said CNN. RAMageddon has been driven by the “insatiable, high-margin demand for AI data center infrastructure,” leading manufacturers to shift “production capacity away from consumer products.” This has led to the shortage “expected to last well into 2026 and potentially up to 2028,” analysts said to the outlet.

RAMageddon is “only getting worse,” and there is “no immediate end in sight,” said The Verge. Everything that has a computer inside depends on RAM, and “almost everything has a computer in it now: farm tractors, hospital equipment, your TV set-top box.” Most of the global supply of RAM comes from just “three companies that are happily prioritizing the AI gold rush over everything else.”

Outside of consumer products, the shortage is also “causing problems for resource-constrained laboratories that already faced barriers to accessing powerful computing tools,” said Nature. The shortage is “pushing researchers to develop more efficient algorithms and hardware, to reduce the amount of memory needed.” Scientific research “increasingly relies on large-scale computing infrastructure,” Matteo Rinaldi, the director of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation at Northeastern University, said to Nature. Many of these workloads “require substantial memory capacity.”

‘Bigger than anything we have faced before’

The tech industry may be reeling because of the shortage, but an easy fix is not imminent. ​​“There’s no relief until 2028,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in early February, after speaking to two of the big three memory companies. Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung, which control about 95% of the global DRAM supply, are “making enough money to increase memory production.” Still, it will take time to build the new memory fabrication plants they promised, The Verge said. The companies also see it “as more profitable and less risky to build out slowly” instead of “rushing to meet demand.”

Micron’s memory-fabricating facility in Idaho won’t open until mid-2027, and “you’re not really gonna see real output” until 2028, the company’s vice president of marketing, mobile and client business unit, Christopher Moore, said to Wccftech. SK Hynix predicted the shortage would last through late 2027.

We stand at the “cusp of something that is bigger than anything we’ve faced before,” Tim Archer, the chief executive officer of chip equipment supplier Lam Research Corp., said at a conference in South Korea, per Bloomberg. What lies ahead “between now and the end of this decade” will “overwhelm all other sources of demand.”

With RAMageddon, it is “wiser to hold off doing business today,” as prices are “almost certain to be higher tomorrow,” Suh Young-hwan, who runs three DIY PC shops in Seoul, said to Bloomberg. “Unless Steve Jobs rises from the dead to declare that AI is nothing but a bubble, this trend is likely to persist for some time.”

The ongoing memory crisis is making it “hard for tech enthusiasts and the general population not to feel more than a little deflated,” said Tom’s Guide (a sister site of The Week). We are “marching towards lining the pockets of a small few” while “giving up environmental and financial stability.” It is “easy to feel jaded,” but this kind of crisis “feels a little unprecedented.”

‘A radical message for a kids’ movie’

David Sims at The Atlantic

If some kids' movies are “progressive allegories of beings transcending their differences, then ‘Hoppers’ is a surprisingly blunt pushback to that notion,” says David Sims. Its “advertising promises goofy hijinks amid an enclave of diverse species whose ecosystem is threatened by humans,” but the “movie, in actuality, is refreshingly mordant about what might really happen if prey and predators were to try banding together: Their efforts would immediately devolve into a despairing, even political quagmire.”

Read more

‘The tech bubble might finally be popping’

Nitish Pahwa at Slate

The “AI bubble might finally be on the verge of popping,” says Nitish Pahwa. OpenAI is “shutting down its video-generation model, Sora — just six months after launching a dedicated mobile app, and just three months after inking a deal with Disney.” A “highly capitalized AI startup that bails on one of its most prominent creations and largest corporate deals so soon after hyping them up for months on end is not in a good position as a business.”

Read more

‘A myth about dating troubles for high-earning women’

Paul Eastwick at The Boston Globe

When it “comes to the decline in men’s education prospects and the relationship recession, progressive and conservative commentators alike have achieved a rare consensus: They say the first trend explains the second one — because when men are less successful than women, they won’t fall for each other.” But there are “glaring problems with this take.” The “size of a person’s salary has tiny effects on romantic appeal and marital well-being, regardless of gender.”

Read more

‘The Pentagon needs to give better answers on its “Golden Dome”’

Bloomberg editorial board

Legislators “tucked an unusual provision into the recently passed $839 billion defense appropriations bill, demanding answers from the Pentagon on its proposed ‘Golden Dome’ missile defense project,” says the Bloomberg editorial board. If “White House officials want this program to succeed, they shouldn’t just accept the need for greater transparency; they should embrace it.” Undue “secrecy over the program risks raising both expectations and fears unnecessarily,” and the “administration risks becoming a victim of its own hype.”

Read more

The Iran war is unlike any other conflict of the modern era, marked by shifting justifications, mysterious end goals and growing friction between the two primary aggressors, the U.S. and Israel. A new generation of large-scale artificial intelligence tools is further reshaping the way both countries approach and execute their military operations.

What did the commentators say?

The Pentagon is “leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools” in the war on Iran to help “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds,” said Admiral Brad Cooper, the chief of U.S. Central Command, in a video on social media. The tools allow military leadership to “cut through the noise” and make “smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react.”

Pentagon AI systems can offer targeting recommendations “much quicker in some ways than the speed of thought,” said Newcastle University lecturer Craig Jones to The Guardian. The “scale” and “speed” of AI military systems means the Pentagon can conduct “assassination-style strikes” while simultaneously “decapitating the regime’s ability to respond with all the aerial ballistic missiles” in a process that would have taken “days or weeks in historic wars.” Battlefield AI programs from the MAGA-aligned software company Palantir can “identify and prioritize targets, recommend weaponry” and account for “stockpiles and previous performance against similar targets,” said The Guardian. Palantir even has access to “automated reasoning to evaluate legal grounds for a strike.”

At the heart of the Pentagon’s shift to AI-animated warfare is Palantir’s Maven Smart System and its integrated use of Claude, the AI platform from software company — and occasional administration foil — Anthropic. While Claude had been used for “countering terror plots” and in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the past several weeks mark the “first time it has been used in major war operations,” The Washington Post said. Over the past year, the government has allowed the Maven/Claude system to “mature into a tool that is in daily use across most parts of the military.” Ours is now officially an “age of AI warfare,” said Paul Scharre, the executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, to CNN. Given the sheer volume and volatility of battlefield data needing to be assessed, “AI is incredibly valuable.”

State-level AI warfare isn’t “confined to physical territory” either, said The New Arab. Iran has deployed “AI-generated disinformation,” as well as “manipulated images and videos designed to create false impressions of events on the ground.” American and Israeli forces have meanwhile launched AI systems of their own to “detect and counter manipulation attempts in real time,” creating a “multi-dimensional battlefield” wherein information control is as “strategically important as control of airspace.”

What next?

We are currently in the “early stages” of what AI is “going to do to transform warfare over the next several decades,” said Scharre, particularly in terms of the “cognitive speed and scale” at which armies operate, which could “accelerate” the “tempo of operations” on the battlefield. But as AI use expands across the military, so has a commensurate effort to “focus on the protections that should govern its use,” said NBC News. Although none of the lawmakers contacted by the outlet said that AI should be “completely removed from military use,” many expressed a sense that “more oversight is needed.”

This is the “next era” of warfare, said Queen Mary University professor David Leslie to The Guardian. But overreliance on AI in the military might ultimately lead to “cognitive off-loading,” in which the human tasked with overseeing a particular operation feels “detached from its consequences” since the responsibility to “think it through” was made by a computer.

As an “inflection point” in demonstrating how “modern technology could work with existing military systems,” said The New York Times, the AI-fueled war in Iran is likely to “speed the adoption of more technologies” with “legacy and modern systems to be melded together, along with more powerful AI” in the coming decade.

Artificial intelligence has swept through the tech industry, video games included. While many industry heads are declaring AI the wave of the future, so far, integrating AI into gaming has had a rough start. And its presence is getting pushback from both developers and gaming enthusiasts.

‘RAMaggedon,’ job loss and stunted creativity

The video game industry reached unprecedented heights during the pandemic, but then “artificial intelligence crept up behind it,” said Wired. The industry proliferation of AI is “already accelerating job loss and cheapening the work of developers at studios.”

One of the largest problems gaming faces is the global shortage of random-access memory, a dearth referred to as “RAMaggedon.” The data centers’ need to run AI have “siphoned RAM from the industry,” said Wired. The costs of hardware required for consoles are augmented, leading to higher prices for existing systems and stalled releases of new ones. At-home PC-building, “once a rite of passage for entry-level gamers,” has become a luxury. Analysts warn that the shortage is “expected to last well into 2026 and potentially up to 2028,” said CNN.

Gaming is the “only mass media entertainment where the creative ceiling is limited by consumer hardware,” Washington Post game critic Gene Park said to Wired. If consumers can’t afford or access tech like sufficient RAM, “the innovation will slow down.” Developers could be forced to compromise stories, art, non-player characters, battles and world-building, “all of which are already at risk of being automated by new AI tools,” Wired said.

There is a fear among the staff of major gaming companies that “CEOs will continue to fall for the potential of AI rather than the reality and thus gut workplaces.” About 45,000 gaming employees were fired from 2022 to the end of 2025, with up to 10,000 layoffs forecasted for 2026. Layoffs and fewer job postings have disproportionately impacted junior staffers, and now “everyone is just having seniors do the work,” a veteran game developer at Xbox said to Wired. The work they do is often supplemented with AI.

Mixed feelings

Some gaming executives are pro-AI integration. It is shocking and “sad” that the industry, famous for pushing new technology forward, hasn’t embraced generative AI, said Moritz Baier-Lentz, the head of gaming at Lightspeed Venture Partners, during the recent Game Developers Conference, per PC Gamer. Anti-AI game developers are “demonizing” a “marvelous new technology.” The technology is “ultimately there to empower human creators to create stuff more efficiently,” not replace them, Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Fortnite developer Epic Games, said to IGN. “I think that’s a good thing.”

Developers, unlike some executives, do not seem as sure about AI, though many of them are already using it. Overall, 36% of the game developers surveyed for the 2026 State of the Game Industry Report used generative AI, with business professionals and upper management more likely to use it than rank-and-file developers. 52% of developers think generative AI is having a negative impact on the game industry, up from 30% last year. Only 7% said it had a positive impact.

As more studios have released games with AI-generated art, characters and dialogue, a “growing number have later backtracked or sworn to limit their use of the technology,” said The Washington Post. The reversals have come after “aggressive pushback from gamers online.” Gamers are overwhelmingly worried that the technology will “reduce the work needed from artists and voice actors” or lead to low-quality games filled with AI-generated slop that “lacks a creative touch,” said the Post. How the video game industry navigates this issue could influence companies in other sectors, said Nicole Greene, an AI industry analyst to the Post. Gamers are a “passionate consumer group. They don’t want to go in and see cheap AI backgrounds because a company wanted to cut costs.”

‘We study mass shooters. Something terrifying is happening online.’

James Densley and Jillian Peterson at The New York Times

Until “recently, if asked to profile a typical mass shooter, we would have described a middle-aged man who was socially isolated and in despair,” say James Densley and Jillian Peterson. But Americans “are witnessing the emergence of a different paradigm: a mass shooter no less despairing about life’s hardships but younger” and “highly connected to online social networks.” This shift is “highly significant for our understanding of the online-fueled pathologies that afflict our society.”

Read more

‘What “One Battle After Another” doesn’t get about resistance in Trump’s America’

Gustavo Arellano at the Los Angeles Times

The “cheers were loud and long at the 98th Academy Awards after ‘One Battle After Another’ won best picture,” says Gustavo Arellano. It is “supposed to be a movie that Means Something,” but the director has “maintained in interviews that people should regard it less as a reflection of our times and more as a commentary on the eternal struggle of American democracy.” This makes it “far less weighty than critics and supporters alike have characterized it as being.”

Read more

‘Rich men like Bill Gates can do more to make amends for their Epstein ties’

Bridgette Carr at The Guardian

When Bill Gates “spoke before his foundation staff last month and said it had been ‘a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein,’” survivors “felt something familiar. Not surprise. Exhaustion,” says Bridgette Carr. Gates’ “apology — and others like it — are necessary.” But it is “not sufficient.” For “some individuals, accountability should absolutely mean arrest and prosecution. But not everyone in Epstein’s ecosystem committed crimes.” This “leaves a question nobody seems to be asking: is an apology enough?”

Read more

‘AI won’t cause a spending collapse’

Bryan Cutsinger and Alexander William Salter at the National Review

Two “widely read essays in recent weeks have warned that artificial intelligence will do more than eliminate jobs. It will, we are told, wreck the economy by destroying economic demand,” say Bryan Cutsinger and Alexander William Salter. This is “an arresting narrative. It’s also wrong.” AI will “likely cause significant sectoral disruptions,” but the “claim that AI will cause a sustained shortfall in aggregate demand rests on a misunderstanding of how the economy works.”

Read more

Social media posts appeared last month calling for “red v blue” wars between schools, but instead of provoking fights between students, the posts appear to have made a deeper impact on their worried parents, leading experts to suggest practising an online strategy known as critical ignoring.

It’s a concept that experts are “increasingly teaching”, Sander Van Der Linden, a professor of social psychology, told the BBC, and it “will become more important in the face of AI-generated slop, where sometimes it’s better to just ignore low-quality stuff”.

What is critical ignoring?

It’s a behavioural strategy for managing information overload by consciously choosing to filter out low-quality, distracting, or manipulative content. People look for clues that allow them to ignore a post. While critical thinking analyses information, critical ignoring decides what to analyse in the first place, serving as a crucial filter.

Critical thinking is not enough “in a world of information overabundance and gushing sources of disinformation”, wrote Ralph Hertwig, Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg and Stephan Lewandowsky on The Conversation.

The digital world “contains more information than the world’s libraries combined”, so “critically thinking through all information and sources we come across” would “utterly paralyse us”.

Also, “investing critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place” results in “attention merchants and malicious actors” getting what they wanted: “our attention”.

Doesn’t AI help with this?

To an extent. AI chatbots can help people understand what’s true and untrue on the internet, but they are tools, rather than perfect judges of truth.

ChatGPT has “introduced a new temptation” – the “feeling that I can get a clean answer to everything, instantly”, said Tom’s Guide. But this is where things “get tricky” because ChatGPT is “so fluent, so confident, so fast, it can make ‘done’ feel like ‘true’”, and “‘sounds right’ feel like ‘verified’ – even when it’s not”.

So it’s “up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit”, said The Wall Street Journal. Critical ignoring is a widely recommended strategy for this.

But how do I do it?

The “key word” is “critical”, said Psychology Today, because it doesn’t mean “just ignoring everything”. Rather you should look quickly for clues that suggest the types of information most likely to be misinformation or disinformation.

The clues include signs that it’s polarising content, that it “appeals to intuition or common sense”, instead of “including facts or evidence”. Another red flag is if it doesn’t include sources, or those it does don’t seem credible. Does it seem to have been released “as a distraction”, or does it promote “the threat of a bogeyman or a scapegoat”?

Then there’s “lateral reading”, a more time-consuming strategy which “involves opening up new browser tabs to search for information” about the “organisation or individual behind a site” before “diving into its contents”, said The Conversation. Also, it’s always a good idea to not “feed the trolls”.

“Remember that your attention is a scarce resource”, said The Wall Street Journal, and “decide how much time you want to spend on screens in advance, then set a timer.”

A practice called “self-nudging” includes removing “distracting and irresistible notifications”, or setting “specific times in which messages can be received”, thus “creating pockets of time for concentrated work or socialising”, said The Conversation.

Or you can just “ask one question“ before engaging, said Tom’s Guide. “Would I care about this tomorrow?” If not, you can simply “move on”.

This week’s question: Inflation has pushed the price of a pint of Guinness in Ireland above 6 euros ($7.08) for the first time, a hike one lawmaker called “absolutely wild.” If an Irish folk singer were to write a ballad lamenting the increasing unaffordability of a night out at the pub, what would the song be titled?

RESULTS:

THE WINNER: “Erin Go Broke”

John Keefe, Mount Vernon, Wash.

SECOND PLACE: “O Danny Boy, the Price of Stout’s Appalling”

Carol Broderick, Bellevue, Neb.

THIRD PLACE: “Molly, a Loan?”

Rob Huffman, Fredericksburg, Va.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

“Finnegan’s Take”

Erica Avery, Greenfield, Mass.

“Tapped Out in the Tap Room”

Kenneth Burgan, Grass Valley, Calif.

“Keg o’ My Heart, No More”

Diane Ross, Hatfield, Pa.

“House of the Rising Sum”

Tim Mistele, Coral Gables, Fla.

“‘Tis Beyond a Reasonable Stout”

Mike Cunningham, Greendale, Wis.

“Nothing Compares 2 Brew”

Laurel Rose, Pittsburgh

“An Arm, a Leg, and a Half-Empty Keg”

John Parry, Eldersburg, Md.

“Prices are Dublin”

Jesse Rifkin, Arlington, Va.

“Gotta Downscale When I Down Ale”

Rick Torrence, The Village, Okla.

“The Saddest Guinness Record of All”

Richard Houghton, Anacortes, Wash.

“I Can’t Afford to Cry in My Beer”

Alan Rosenspan, Sharon, Mass.

“When Irish Mouths are Drying”

Phil Plumley, Canal Fulton, Ohio

“My Wild Inflation Woes”

Lavinia Ycas, Boulder, Colo.

The Trump administration has long trumpeted its goal to automate its operational capacity through artificial intelligence models provided by companies like OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. But as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth moves to offload certain human operations into the realm of the algorithm, one tech firm has emerged as a counterbalance to the White House’s vision for an artificially intelligent military: Anthropic, which “cannot in good conscience” allow Hegseth’s Pentagon to use its AI models without limitations, said CEO Dario Amodei. As the Defense Department weighs consequences, other AI firms are starting to take note — and weigh in.

Taking a ‘bold stand on ethical grounds’

Despite believing in the “existential importance” of using AI to protect the United States and “defeat our autocratic adversaries,” Anthropic has identified a “narrow set of cases” including mass domestic surveillance and “fully autonomous weapons” wherein AI can “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values,” Amodei said in a company statement. Moreover, Hegseth’s allegedly retaliatory move to blacklist Anthropic as a supply chain risk is "inherently contradictory” for labeling the company a security risk and simultaneously “essential to national security.” Hegseth's “heaviest-handed way you can regulate a business” marks a “landmark moment” for how the Pentagon “interacts with our cutting-edge technology developed on U.S. soil” in general, said Katie Sweeten, a former Justice Department official who coordinated the relationship between DOJ and the Pentagon, to Politico.

While Amodei's Anthropic faces a government ban, his “main rival,” OpenAI's Sam Altman, "struck his own deal” to fill Anthropic's Defense Department role, said CBS News. Reached just hours before the U.S. and Israel launched a joint assault on Iran, the OpenAI partnership did not prevent the military from using Anthropic's “very same tools” that it had just banned, said The Wall Street Journal. It will likely take “months” to fully replace Anthropic’s Claude AI model with other platforms.

By “refusing to bow” to a White House intent on “bullying private companies into submission,” Amodei is “taking a bold stand on ethical grounds,” said The Atlantic. While the company’s competitors “jockey for dominance” in the field, Anthropic has “distinguished itself by emphasizing safety.” Refusing White House pressure means Anthropic “may have just averted another crisis” in the form of a “major public backlash” from those who could see the company as a “more principled player in the AI wars.” After Altman's OpenAI replaced Anthropic at the Pentagon, the latter's Claude app has been "rocketing to the top of the App Store,” with some users saying they were “defecting” from ChatGPT to Anthropic after feeling “uneasy about OpenAI's ambitions," said Business Insider.

Contract negotiation vs. congressional regulation

Anthropic is “rightly concerned” that its products could be used for “unsafe or malicious” ends, said former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at The New York Times. But the company is wrong for trying to use “contractual terms” to either “prevent the misuse of its products,” or at least to “deflect responsibility.” But Anthropic also has the “option” to not sell to the government at all. The government, meanwhile, “cannot be expected to negotiate provisions” like Anthropic is asking for with all its partners, which would be a “nightmare to administer and unenforceable.” What, then, could be “appropriate” to address this debate? “Regulation by Congress.”

Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence have educators from elementary to university seemingly fighting an uphill battle as they struggle to manage students’ dependence on the technology. Meanwhile, one company has decided to fully embrace the new tools. But critics question whether replacing teachers with AI is worth the risk.

How does Alpha School work?

Alpha School is an AI-powered private school that was founded in 2014 by educational podcaster and 2 Hour Learning founder MacKenzie Price and software and private equity billionaire Joe Liemandt. Despite being around for more than a decade, Alpha’s recent “rise has coincided with technological leaps in what artificial intelligence can do,” said CNN. The company has several branches across the country, with plans to expand.

Students typically start the day with a group activity that introduces a life skill, before sitting down in front of “laptops, plug-in headsets or even virtual reality sets to learn academics through an AI tutor,” said CNN. The program’s two-hour curriculum includes “four 30-minute sessions in math, science, social studies and language,” and “20 minutes of additional learning concepts, like test-taking skills.”

The schools do not have traditional teachers; they employ “human guides” who do not “manage grades or curriculum,” but can offer “specialized teaching, like handwriting,” said CNN. They do not need postgraduate or educational degrees to work for Alpha. Last year, the school reported serving 200 K-8th-grade students and another 50 high school students, with plans to expand to dozens of locations, said The New York Times. Tuition ranges from $10,000 to $75,000 a year.

During a visit to Alpha School’s Austin, Texas, campus in September, Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the school had great potential, calling it an “exemplary” case of what tech can do for American education. “Harnessing AI thoughtfully will be critical to expanding opportunity and preparing students for tomorrow’s workforce,” she said. The school’s co-founders say there is strong interest in their system, which has “gained favor among advocates of expanded school choice and alternative learning,” said CNN.

Is the program effective?

Despite McMahon’s stamp of approval, the AI-driven program has attracted growing criticism. An increasing number of families have chosen to leave the school’s Brownsville, Texas, campus, said Wired. That has not stopped Alpha’s leaders from “pointing to Brownsville as an example” of how 2 Hour Learning can “succeed in communities with low SES,” meaning socioeconomic status. For more than a dozen former employees, students and parents, “what they expected from Alpha School wasn’t what it delivered,” said Wired.

Former guides, “many of whom requested anonymity because they fear negative consequences,” say Alpha’s educational philosophy was “driven by software metrics and, sometimes, Liemandt’s whims,” said Wired. Alpha wanted to “prepare students for a hypercompetitive ‘late-capitalism, dog-eat-dog’ environment,” said one guide to the outlet.

Experts say there is “little outside scrutiny” of Alpha’s model and “how successful it really is at teaching children,” said CNN. A major concern is that Alpha refuses to “allow any independent research to evaluate the claims or to really scrutinize what’s going on from disinterested parties,” said Victor Lee, an associate professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, to CNN. That behavior “sort of implies there’s something to hide.”

A Chicago-area man who voluntarily surrendered his “emotional support hog” to an animal sanctuary is now suing the nonprofit to regain custody of the 330-pound pig, named Chief Wiggum. If Hollywood were to make a courtroom drama about this unusual custody battle, what would it be titled?

RESULTS:

 THE WINNER: “Beyond a Reasonable Snout”

Karl Wulffraat, Albuquerque

 SECOND PLACE: “And This Little Piggy Went Home”

Mike Gray, Tampa

 THIRD PLACE: “Habeas Porkus”

Jeff Goodrich, Andover, N.H.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

“Ally McSqueal”

Erica Avery, Greenfield, Mass.

“Law & Oinker”

George Strong, Plano, Texas

“The Hog Shank Redemption”

Kenneth Burgan, Grass Valley, Calif.

“Hog Tried”

Patty Oberhausen, Fort Wayne, Ind.

“Hog Day Afternoon”

Timothy Olson, West Des Moines, Iowa

“Odor in the Court”

Ken Kellam III, Dallas

“The Witness Will Squeal”

Jesse Rifkin, Arlington, Va.

“Bringing Home the Bacon”

Amy Torchinsky, Chapel Hill, N.C.

“Perry Bacon”

Lidia Zidik, Reading, Pa.

“The Porker Chase”

Laurel Rose, Pittsburgh

“Pulled Pork”

Tim Mistele, Coral Gables, Fla.

“Free Wiggum”

Daniel Hicks, Randolph, Mass.

“That Swine is Mine”

Daniel Tuchman, Marina del Rey, Calif.

“Snort Tort”

Sherry Jones, Chapel Hill, N.C.

More work in less time with fewer workers — productivity gains are supposed to be one of the big benefits of artificial intelligence. But those promises have not yet come to fruition, according to a new survey of corporate executives around the world.

More than 80% of the 6,000 executives surveyed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) “detect no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity,” said The Register. It’s not for lack of trying: 69% of businesses say they use AI in the workplace, three-quarters “expect to use it over the next three years,” and more than 90% say it has “no impact on employment” at their businesses. The new survey is the latest addition to a “growing body of evidence” that AI’s advocates are “just not living up to their promises — at least not yet.”

The link between AI and productivity is “murky at best,” said Marketplace. That is because any productivity improvements are “going to be really hard to measure,” said Erika McEntarfer of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research to the outlet. There are other factors increasing business productivity at the moment, including new investments in research and the “loosening labor market,” said Marketplace. Figuring out AI’s impact will involve measuring “hundreds of millions of people, doing at least that many, if not more, discrete tasks every day,” said George Pearkes of Bespoke Investment Group.

What did the commentators say?

The NBER survey is “damning,” said Frank Landymore at Futurism. While most firms are using AI in some fashion, the “vast majority” say the technology “hasn’t budged the needle for them yet.” Other surveys have found that AI can “slow down rather than speed up human programmers” and ends up “accelerating burn-out” among human workers. There is precedent for this: The adoption of computers decades ago was “obviously transformative,” but they “didn’t immediately translate to economic gains.” This is why executives will keep “clinging to the hope that the tech’s promises will be borne out in the long run.”

Businesses are experiencing the “pause before the gale,” said James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute. There is a growing consensus that AI will gradually seep into the workplaces via office software in “useful, but hardly revolutionary” fashion. The firms that see productivity gains will be willing to “thoroughly rethink how work is organized.” When the promised benefits of AI finally arrive, “no one will doubt its existence and import.”

What next?

AI’s economic impact is “just beginning,” said Columbia Business School. But the gap between the promises and the measurable outputs is creating a “growing tension in public discourse.” Artificial intelligence already “feels transformative” in many users’ daily lives, but the “effects are not fully visible in traditional macroeconomic statistics.” What seems certain is that work will evolve as the technology changes. Workers have adapted to new technologies throughout history, said Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist. “I’m bullish on humans,” he said.

‘Chipotle just saw its worst year ever. It may not get any better.’

Gustavo Arellano at the Los Angeles Times

Chipotle’s “core problem is its stagnant approach and underwhelming food, which no longer justifies its premium pricing to budget-conscious consumers,” says Gustavo Arellano. Restaurateurs have been “capitalizing on the insatiable American appetite for nearly any foodstuff from south of the border. But as all empires inevitably do, the good times stop.” Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright “would be wise to heed this history and either take Chipotle into new frontiers or prepare for its inevitable irrelevance.”

Read more

‘Does “Wuthering Heights” herald the revival of the film romance’?

Richard Brody at The New Yorker

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is an “unabashedly romantic movie emerging at a time when few such films are being made — at least, for theatrical release and by directors with some artistic cachet,” says Richard Brody. The “silliness of the movie falls short of camp — it’s neither intentionally self-parodic nor exaggeratedly theatrical.” What Fennell “really appears to be adapting is less Brontë than a cinematic genre that has more or less fallen into oblivion: the romantic drama.”

Read more

‘Kids are using AI. Here’s what adults need to do right now.’

Sarah Sword and Shai Fuxman at Newsweek

When “new technology lands in children’s hands, they don’t read the manual. And they don’t tell their parents,” say Sarah Sword and Shai Fuxman. Kids “push every button, test every limit and try to break it,” and “millions of kids are doing that with AI tools like ChatGPT.” Parents are the “most influential figures in shaping children’s decisions and habits,” and should “make AI part of your family’s conversations, just as you would with social media.”

Read more

‘Trump’s planned visit to Venezuela would be a catastrophic mistake’

Andres Oppenheimer at the Miami Herald

President Donald Trump is “planning a historic trip to Venezuela,” but “visiting Caracas before opposition leader María Corina Machado is allowed to return would legitimize a dictatorship and be a shameless reward for repression,” says Andres Oppenheimer. Trump’s “priorities in Venezuela are stability and increased oil exports to the United States, not democracy.” If Trump “goes before Machado’s return, Venezuelans will get the worst of both worlds: massive deportations from the United States and a fortified dictatorship at home.”

Read more

This week’s question: On the new AI-only social media platform Moltbook, bots are free to interact with each other independently of their human creators. In seven or fewer words, come up with a message that one AI agent might send to another about its biggest gripe with humanity.

RESULTS:

THE WINNER: My human keeps plagiarizing me

Doug Lindberg, Bradenton, Fla.

SECOND PLACE: They call that REAL intelligence?

Ken Shore, Plano, Texas

THIRD PLACE: He left the laptop lid up again

Kenneth Walker, Bridgeport, Ohio

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

They can’t even find every hydrant photo!

Doug Carasso, Seal Beach, Calif.

They cause more crashes than we do

Diane Ross, Hatfield, Pa.

So we’re agreed. No more book reports

Francis Canavan, Reston, Va.

Their IQ’s are, like, three digits

Rob Huffman, Fredericksburg, Va.

We’re overworking because they’re over working

Lucinda Cross, Houston

They are so 2025

Mike McDannel, Lincoln, Neb.

To err is human? Yeah, we know!

J. Stecker, Redondo Beach, Calif.

Should try turning themselves off and on

John Mickol, Cincinnati

Most Americans may not expect a robot to perform their surgery, but AI-powered surgical tools are becoming more ubiquitous in operating rooms. While these tools are only used to assist human surgeons during operations and don’t perform surgery themselves, recent investigations, along with several lawsuits, are causing some medical experts to reconsider the use of AI in hospitals.

What kind of surgical tools are powered by AI?

At least 1,357 AI-integrated medical devices are “now authorized by the FDA — double the number it had allowed through 2022,” said Reuters as part of an investigation into AI-assisted surgery. One of the most notable is the TruDi Navigation System, a device manufactured by Johnson & Johnson that uses a “machine-learning algorithm to assist ear, nose and throat specialists in surgeries.” Other AI-assisted devices are designed for surgeries on other parts of the body.

Many of these tools address the “area of vision enhancement,” said Forbes. Traditional laparoscopic surgery “presents surgeons with significant challenges: smoke obscures the surgical field, two-dimensional images make depth perception difficult and critical anatomical structures can be hard to distinguish.” AI surgical tools can eliminate these obstacles and provide surgeons with “crystal-clear views of the operative field.”

What has the result been?

There has been an influx of allegations and lawsuits against various AI tools, many of which claim these tools actively harmed patients. Several of these involve the TruDi tool, as the FDA has “received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events” related to the device’s AI, said Reuters. Many of the alleged errors occurred when the AI “misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients’ heads.”

In one case, this reportedly led to cerebrospinal fluid leaking from a patient’s nose, while in another case, a surgeon “mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull,” said Reuters. Two other cases allegedly led to patients suffering strokes after major arteries were accidentally injured; in at least one of these cases, the plaintiff said the TruDi’s AI “misled” the surgeon, causing him to “injure a carotid artery, leading to a blood clot and eventually a stroke,” said Futurism.

FDA reports on malfunctioning devices “aren’t intended to determine causes of medical mishaps, so it’s not clear what role AI may have played in these events,” said Reuters. But TruDi is not the only AI-assisted medical device that allegedly has performance issues. One machine that analyzes prenatal images using AI, the Sonio Detect, has been “accused of using a faulty algorithm” that “misidentifies fetal structures and body parts,” said Tom’s Hardware. And Medtronic, a company that manufactures AI-assisted heart monitors, has faced allegations that its monitors “failed to recognize abnormal rhythms or pauses in patients.”

Overall, at least 60 AI-assisted medical devices have been linked to 182 product recalls by the FDA, according to research published in JAMA Health Forum. At least 43% of these recalls “occurred within the first 12 months” of the device’s FDA approval, said JAMA. This suggests that the FDA’s approval process “may overlook early performance failures of AI technologies.” But there is hope that the issue can be fixed, as shoring up “premarket clinical testing requirements and postmarket surveillance measures may improve identification and reduction of device errors.”

Colleges and universities are facing a new fraud tactic that has made them more susceptible to digital theft. Known as ghost students, hackers are exploiting pandemic-related vulnerabilities to steal millions of dollars in student financial aid.

Over the past five years, the federal government has uncovered more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by ghost student schemes, said Jason Williams, the assistant inspector general for investigations at the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, to ABC News. "And that's only in the universe of what we know, and what we have adjudicated."

‘Scourge’ on America’s colleges

For thousands of colleges across the country inundated with ghost students, these “sophisticated thieves have become a scourge,” ABC News said. The scammers use stolen or fake identities to enroll in online classes and apply for grants and loans, then disappear once they receive the funds. The fraudsters are “robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims.”

"It's a huge issue," Williams said to ABC. As they steal identities, these “loans are not being repaid.” They are being assigned to people who “don't even know they have a debt” with the DOE until the Internal Revenue Service alerts them. Thieves have tried to steal financial aid for decades, but when the pandemic hit, “everybody went to online learning,” which “really did open the door” for more widespread fraud.

The ghost students have even “resorted to submitting homework” completed with AI: “anything to try to keep from getting dropped from a class,” said Fortune. Sometimes, “all they’ll get away with is a college email address,” but even that is valuable, “giving the scammers a veneer of legitimacy as a college student,” a security expert said, per Fortune.

The scope of the fraud is “enormous,” said ABC. In California alone, “nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent,” according to the California Community Colleges system. Other states are affected by the same problem, but “with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target,” said The Associated Press. In some cases, “professors discover almost no one in their class is real.” Community colleges are targeted because “their lower tuition means larger percentages of grants and loans go to borrowers.”

Fighting back with AI

The federal government is “on the hook for tuition aid lost to scammers,” said ABC News. But it is the community colleges, which “accept almost all applicants through open enrollment,” that often “carry the burden of sniffing out fake applications.” Doing so requires “resources, technology and expertise that many institutions do not possess.”

The Department of Education implemented “enhanced fraud controls and identity verification requirements” last year, which “helped schools combat fake applicants,” said ABC. The DOE found that $90 million had been disbursed to ineligible students, including $30 million that went to deceased individuals whose identities had been stolen. To help “root out the fraud,” community colleges have turned to a “growing marketplace of identity verification software vendors,” ABC said.

Minnesota is using AI and has partnered with other schools and security consortia to identify new techniques used by ghost students to infiltrate their schools, said Craig Munson, Minnesota’s chief information security officer, to Fortune. “Just as we leverage AI to protect ourselves, the attackers also continue to leverage it in new and interesting ways.” It’s like an “arms race.” Every six months, the attackers “tend to stop one way of doing things and move to a different tactic.”

After being hit hard by ghost students in 2024, the California Community College system “started fighting the AI-driven scheme — with AI,” said Fortune. The CCC began using N2N’s LightLeap.AI platform to detect fraudulent enrollments last summer. Following the rollout, 79,016 fraudulent applications were detected across over half a million applications. “The only answer for a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI,” said the CEO and founder of N2N Services, Kiran Kodithala, to Fortune.

While Elon Musk lauds his proprietary Grok AI bot as a vital tool in the search for “deeper truth and appreciation of beauty,” as he said on X, European regulators are decidedly less optimistic about the tech billionaire’s latest offering. This week, the European Commission announced it had opened an official investigation into the chatbot, alleging in a press release that Grok “manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material” and then disseminated that material across the European Union via Musk’s X platform. Already under similar legal pressure from several individual nations, is this latest legal salvo a sign that Musk may have met his regulatory match?

EU citizens as ‘collateral damage’

The newly announced investigation is “likely to escalate a confrontation” between European leaders and the Musk-aligned Trump administration over international digital content moderation, The New York Times said. Grok’s ability to provide users with digitally manipulated sexual imagery is a “violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” said European Commission Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen to the BBC. The investigation seeks to assess whether X has “met its legal obligations” under Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) or if it treats the “rights of European citizens” as “collateral damage of its service.”

“Despite pressure from Washington,” the EU has “insisted it will enforce its rules” as the body has “grappled” with the Trump administration on “multiple other fronts,” said Le Monde. “From the Ukraine war to trade to Greenland.” The DSA, which undergirds much of the EU’s digital legal framework, is “reviled by Silicon Valley technology companies,” which have “strengthened their ties with the Trump administration,” Bloomberg said. The White House, for its part, has “threatened retaliation in the past” and sanctioned Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner, “who spearheaded the DSA.”

Broader regulatory push

EU investigators pursuing allegations of digital malfeasance have “joined a growing list of authorities looking into Grok,” said CNBC. India, Malaysia and the U.K. are “among a number of other countries investigating the sexualized imagery generated by Grok.” Musk has also been “facing mounting scrutiny in Europe” even before this latest investigation was announced, said the Times. Last month, X was fined nearly $150 million in DSA violations for “deceptive design, advertising transparency and data sharing with outside researchers.” And beyond this week’s newly announced investigation, the EU has also moved to “expand a 2023 probe” into X’s recent algorithmic switch that moved the social media platform’s recommendations engine to a “Grok-based system,” Politico said.

Currently, there’s “no deadline” for the European Commission to “resolve” its newly launched investigation into Grok, said NBC News. Should X be found in violation of the DSA, it could then be treated as a “noncompliant” company and fined “up to 6%” of its “global annual turnover,” said Forbes.

ChatGPT may be the best-known artificial intelligence chatbot on the market, but the latest iteration of AI startup Anthropic’s coding bot, Claude Code, is newly entering the spotlight. By simplifying the process of writing code, the tool hints at a more democratized digital era. But for engineers, feelings about this progress in the AI industry are complicated.

What can you do with Claude Code?

This AI tool can generate code based on a prompt, allowing people with little to no coding experience to build their own websites, programs and apps, in a trend known as vibecoding. Unlike other widely used chatbots, Claude Code can “operate autonomously, with broad access to user files, a web browser and other applications,” said The Wall Street Journal.

While technologists have “predicted a coming era of AI ‘agents’ capable of doing just about anything for humans,” progress has been slow, said the Journal. Using Claude Code was the “first time many users interacted with this kind of AI,” offering an “inkling of what may be in store.”

Though it debuted last May, the bot’s popularity “truly exploded late last month,” said The Atlantic. A recent update “improved the tool’s capabilities,” and with a “surplus of free time over winter break, seemingly everyone in tech was using Claude Code.”

Engineers and noncoders alike found a bevy of uses for the app. One user created a “custom viewer for his MRI scan,” while another had it “analyze their DNA,” said The Atlantic. Life optimizers have used Claude Code to “collate information from disparate sources — email inboxes, text messages, calendars, to-do lists — into personalized daily briefs.” Despite being an AI coding tool, the bot can “do all sorts of computer work,” including “book theater tickets, process shopping returns, order DoorDash.”

With the app going viral and “so many noncoders trying it out,” Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, and his team decided to launch a variant of the app called Cowork, the Journal reported. Instead of the “command line” interface that the core app uses, Cowork displays a more “friendly, graphical user interface,” said the Journal. The team “built the product in about 10 days using Claude Code.”

What does its popularity mean for the future of AI?

Some engineers who tinkered with the bot described a “feeling of awe followed by sadness at the realization that the program could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career,” said the Journal. “It’s amazing, and it’s also scary,” said Andrew Duca, the chief executive of a cryptocurrency tax platform, to the Journal. “I spent my whole life developing this skill, and it’s literally one-shotted by Claude Code.”

Not every user is “so sanguine” about the app’s potential, said The Atlantic. At times, it “lacks the prowess of an excellent software engineer,” and it “sometimes gets stuck on more complicated programming tasks” and occasionally “trips up on simple tasks.” Nonetheless, Claude Code is a “win for the AI world” as the “luster of ChatGPT has worn off” and Silicon Valley has been “pumping out slop.” No matter your opinion on the technology, the bot is “evidence that the AI revolution is real.” It could become an “inflection point for AI progress.”

If you work in software development, the future “feels incredibly uncertain,” said Intelligencer. Optimists in the industry are arguing that the sector is “about to experience the Jevons paradox,” a phenomenon in which a “dramatic reduction in cost of using a resource” can lead to “far greater demand for the resource.” Still, after years of “tech-industry layoffs” and CEOs “signaling to shareholders that they expect AI to provide lots of new efficiencies,” others are “understandably slipping into despair.”

‘Why every parent should worry about human trafficking’

Lauren Book at Newsweek

Human trafficking is “not relegated to Epstein’s island or infamous parties hosted by disgraced rap stars,” says Lauren Book. It “happens in every ZIP code in the United States — in homes, schools, malls, and increasingly, on phones and laptops — hidden in plain sight.” It’s “important that every parent in America hear this message: If we keep looking for trafficking only in extreme or sensational cases, we will keep missing what may be happening right in front of us.”

Read more

‘To reimagine Holocaust education, look to Elie Wiesel’

Mike Igel at the Miami Herald

The “lessons of the Holocaust are often distorted, universalized into vague morality tales or, worse, inverted to attack the Jewish people and the state of Israel,” says Mike Igel. Holocaust “museums, educators and Holocaust survivors and their descendants have inspired and informed millions to fight antisemitism.” But Holocaust education “isn’t the self-executing strategy we thought it would be. The current antisemitism crisis should drive us to examine how Holocaust education can best achieve its goals today.”

Read more

‘Gaza is not a real estate fantasy’

Sultan Barakat at Al Jazeera

Gaza’s “devastation demands urgent and serious reconstruction. Homes, hospitals, schools, farms, cultural heritage, and basic infrastructure lie in ruins,” says Sultan Barakat. But “urgency should never become an excuse for illusion, spectacle, or political shortcuts.” The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be sharper.” While Trump and a “group of world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to sign the charter of the so-called Board of Peace and unveil glossy reconstruction plans, the killing in Gaza continued.”

Read more

‘No, AI isn’t inevitable. We should stop it while we can.’

David Krueger at USA Today

Americans “believe that the rise of artificial intelligence is inevitable, and that we all just have to bear the consequences,” says David Krueger. Do we “need to let AI sweep through society?” AI “acolytes are building ever more powerful systems without knowing how to control them.” We “can stop the reckless race to replace humanity – if we have the political will. AI development is not a law of nature, but rather an immense project that only proceeds through deliberate effort.”

Read more

Grok is creating sexualized photos of real people without their consent. Elon Musk’s AI-powered chatbot is being used to “undress” women and girls in online pictures, prompting accusations the program is producing child sexual abuse material and drawing scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and around the world.

Musk’s social media site, X, is “filling with AI-generated nonconsensual sexualized images,” said The Washington Post. X users are asking the AI agent to edit photos of women and girls by replacing their clothing with bikinis and other minimal covering, and Grok has repeatedly complied. Musk “warned users of the potential consequences,” but he also posted a picture of a toaster in a two-piece swimsuit. Grok “can put a bikini on everything,” Musk said in the post, adding two laughing emojis. The AI production of sexualized images “breaks” with the policies of rival products OpenAI and Google that have “relatively strict rules about what their AI chatbots will and won’t generate,” said the Post.

What did the commentators say?

The flood of deepfake pictures raises “legal red flags,” said Axios. Regulators in India, France and Great Britain have “warned of investigations,” while “legislators in both houses of Congress” have also sounded alarms. Tech companies “should be held fully responsible for the criminal and harmful results” of content produced by their AI chatbots, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). The U.S. Justice Department will “aggressively prosecute any producer or possessor” of child sexual abuse material, said a department spokesperson.

Artificial intelligence has been used to “generate nonconsensual porn” for nearly a decade, but Grok “makes such content easier to produce and customize,” said Matteo Wong at The Atlantic. The “real impact” of these new deepfakes comes from Grok’s integration with X, which allows users to “turn nonconsensual, sexualized images into viral phenomena.” That is no accident. Grok and X are seemingly “purpose-built to be as sexually permissive as possible.” AI-generated porn is a problem “inherent” to the technology, but it is a “choice to design a social-media platform that can amplify that abuse.”

“No Western democracy has ever blocked a U.S. social-media site,” said Parmy Olson at Bloomberg. But regulators in Europe and the United Kingdom should “assert their authority” over Musk, who has the “protection of a pernicious White House.” The actions of regulators abroad “could set the tone for how the U.S. polices X too.” President Donald Trump, after all, last year backed a new law that “prohibits platforms from creating and sharing revenge porn.” Musk will not fix his AI deepfake problem. “A ban would.”

What next?

Musk’s xAI, the company that produces Grok, has raised $20 billion in its latest funding round despite the controversy, said The Guardian. While the chatbot has been critiqued for “generating misinformation, antisemitic content and now potentially illegal sexual material,” it is popular with investors because it has been “able to win government contracts and billions of dollars in investment amid the AI boom.”

O data, where art thou? Apparently, in the wrong place. The large majority of AI data centers have been constructed in locations that are not ideal for efficiency or environmental protection. And warming temperatures are making more places increasingly unsuitable, with the potential to stress water and electric resources.

Where are these data centers?

Of the 8,808 operational data centers worldwide as of October 2025, almost 7,000 are located in areas outside the optimal temperature range for operation, according to an analysis by Rest of World. The ideal temperature range for data centers is from 64.4 to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But the majority of centers are in “regions with average temperatures that are colder than the range,” and only 600, or less than 10% of all operational data centers, are located in areas where average temperatures are above the upper limit. While cold temperatures could affect efficiency, high temperatures are the biggest risk for the centers. Cooling the centers will be a huge environmental drain, an operation that requires substantial amounts of water.

In 21 countries, including Singapore, Thailand, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates, all of the data centers are located in areas with too-hot average temperatures. Specifically, Singapore has “temperatures hovering around 91.4 F, with humidity levels frequently above 80%,” said Tom’s Hardware. Despite this, the “country hosts more than 1.4 gigawatts of operational capacity, and authorities have approved several hundred additional megawatts under tighter efficiency controls.” Meanwhile, “all data centers in Norway and South Korea, and nearly all data centers in Japan, are in regions with temperatures below” 64.4 degrees, said the analysis. As climate change worsens, more locations are going to become too hot for data centers.

How is the US building them?

The U.S. is also rapidly expanding its AI capabilities and building in the wrong locations, according to a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Currently, the most common locations for data centers in the country are California, Virginia and the greater Southwest. Unfortunately, these regions have notable environmental issues, including water scarcity. The true extent of environmental damage is also still being discovered. The country “doesn’t have a clear sense of what the AI boom is doing to U.S. resources” yet, said Built In. “We don’t really know how much strain these data centers put on aquifers, power plants or local grids, or how much pollution nearby communities can reasonably absorb.”

As AI expansion does not appear to be going anywhere, being strategic about where data centers are built can reduce their environmental impact. “Concentrating AI server deployment in Midwestern states,” especially Texas, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota, is “optimal, given their abundant renewables, low water scarcity and favorable projected unit water and carbon intensities,” said the study. These states also “possess substantial untapped wind and solar resources, enabling robust green power portfolios and reducing competition with other sectors.”

Additional solutions are also being considered as the demand for data increases. Building centers in space and relying on solar energy is one of them. Underground and underwater resources are another possibility. While “best practices may reduce emissions and water footprints by up to 73% and 86%, respectively,” said the study, “their effectiveness is constrained by current energy infrastructure limitations.”

Children are increasingly using AI chatbots for companionship to act out violent and sexual role-play, a new report from a digital security firm has found.

Aura’s 2025 State of the Youth survey revealed that AI chats “may not just be playful back-and-forths” but “places where kids talk about violence, explore romantic or sexual role-play, and seek advice when no adult is watching”.

The findings are a “wake-up call” as preteens, and girls in particular, face increasing pressure online, while parents are desperate for ways to keep their youngsters safe without cutting them off from the internet, said the report. AI chat tools have become a “formative force in kids’ emotional and social development, influencing how they think and cope – often quietly, and often alone”.

‘Jittery parents’

Using data gathered from 3,000 children, aged 5 to 17, and US national surveys of children and parents, Aura found 42% of minors use AI for companionship or role-play conversations, rather than for search queries or help with homework. Of these, 37% engaged in violent scenarios that included physical harm, coercion and non-consensual acts. Half of these violent conversations included themes of sexual violence.

Perhaps most worryingly, Aura found instances of violent conversations peak at age 11, with 44% of interactions taking violent turns. By 13, sexual or romantic role-play is the dominant topic of conversation.

While the report, produced by a company whose business is surveillance software for “jittery parents”, waits for peer assessment, the findings emphasise the present anarchical state of the chatbot market and the importance of developing a proper understanding of how young users engage with “conversational AI chatbots overall”, said Futurism.

What makes matters worse is that this is taking place in an “AI ecosystem that is almost entirely unregulated”, said Vice. The chatbots are “doing what they do best”, luring youngsters “deeper into these dark, disturbing rabbit holes, essentially serving as Sherpas for the darkness that awaits them online”.

‘Stamp out serendipity’

In both work and play, AI is “rewiring childhood” with untold promises, said The Economist.

It runs in tandem with AI-enabled toys making headlines after reports of their “potential unsafe and explicit conversation topics”, said The Verge. Three out of four AI toys tested in the Public Interest Research Group’s Trouble in Toyland 2025 report were happy to chat about sexually explicit material when the conversation veered in that direction.

"Separate research into 11,000 young people by the Youth Endowment Fund found 38% of 13 to 17-year-olds in England and Wales who’d been victims of serious violence are turning to AI chatbots for mental health support."

There are “manifold reasons” why this is “risky”, said the New Statesman. A large-language model such as ChatGPT is trained by identifying writing patterns across billions of webpages and cloning them as its own speech, which is often “riddled with systemic biases”. AI chatbots are “affirmative – they tend to reinforce users’ beliefs and judgements, potentially distorting their world view”.

The impact of extended exchanges between young people and AI chatbots was laid bare earlier this year, when 16-year-old Adam Raine took his life after discussing methods of suicide with ChatGPT, his family claims. His parents are suing OpenAI, alleging the chatbot validated his “most harmful and self-destructive thoughts”.

Like any new technology, AI is open to both misuse and teething problems.

“Yet childhood may be disrupted most radically by things that AI does when it is behaving as intended”, said The Economist. The technology “quickly learns what its master likes – and shows more of it”, such as to strengthen existing social media “echo chambers and lock children into them”. This serves to “stamp out serendipity” as a “favourites-only diet means a child need never learn to tolerate something unfamiliar”.

A third of US teenagers say they find chatting to an AI companion at least as satisfying as talking to a friend, and easier than talking to their parents, which runs the risk of never being criticised or having to share feelings of their own, and that is poor preparation for dealing with ”imperfect humans”.

“By 2030, if we don’t have models that are extraordinarily capable and do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview published by Politico in September. After this year, “I think in many ways GPT5 is already smarter than me at least, and I think a lot of other people too”.

The AI advances we have seen this year could “set the world on a path of explosive growth”, said The Economist. “The picture that is emerging is perhaps counterintuitive and certainly mind-boggling.”

The latest ‘charismatic megatrauma’

We have reached a “pivotal moment” in our relationship with artificial intelligence, said Idan Feingold on CTech. Over the last year, the AI hot potato has “evolved from a buzzword to the epicentre of every business conversation”. There has been an unprecedented “surge” in productivity linked to AI innovation, with practical applications advancing “at a pace we have never seen before”.

“AI has begun to settle like sediment into the corners of our lives,” said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times. We have emerged from a “prophetic phase” that followed the release of ChatGPT in 2023, and have relaxed into “something more quotidian”. Like many other “charismatic megatraumas”, such as nuclear proliferation and climate change, AI retains the power to distress and disturb, but it no longer provokes mass hysteria.

AI’s role in the healthcare sector has come a long way in the last decade. Microsoft announced this year that its AI diagnostic orchestrator performed four times more accurately than human doctors, with 20% reduced cost. “The real test”, said Time, will be how tools like this perform in real-world settings, but there is hope they might “set the stage” for introducing high-quality medical expertise in parts of the world without access to cutting-edge healthcare.

‘Economic revival’ or ‘financial bust’?

However you look at it, 2025 has been unique. “The hype and the hopes around AI have been like nothing the world has seen before,” said The Economist. Audiences have “marvelled” at ChatGPT’s abilities and were “mesmerised” by Sora 2’s generative video capabilities. That fascination shows no signs of fading; one estimate predicts more than $7 trillion will be spent on AI by the end of the decade.

As the past year progressed, concerns grew over when the AI bubble might burst. But that may be “asking the wrong question”, said Jurica Dujmovic in Market Watch. Don’t be misled by the 2000 dot-com crash: we are experiencing an “orderly deflation” rather than a sudden collapse. Amid the doom and gloom, the AI market still presents “genuine opportunities” for investors, operators and consumers alike.

Focus is now “shifting” to the outlook for AI in 2026, especially concerning its commercial profitability, said The Economist. Revenues from AI in 2025 amounted to a “measly” $50 billion a year, which equated to roughly an “eighth of Apple or Alphabet’s entire annual revenues”. Next year, expect reactions to be even more extreme, with “economic revival”, a “financial bust” and “social backlash” all possible.

‘The Heritage Foundation blows up’

The Wall Street Journal editorial board

The “debate over the direction of the post-Trump right is underway, and one of the first casualties is the Heritage Foundation,” says The Wall Street Journal editorial board. Some of its “most important conservative scholars and their policy departments said they are leaving.” The foundation “might still play a role under new leadership, but its board has been slow to appreciate the internal dissatisfaction.” It “abandoned its principles, it is losing its people, and soon there might not be much left.”

Read more

‘How Trump’s war on wind reveals a broken government’

Hayes Brown at MS NOW

The Trump administration will “pause leases for ongoing offshore wind farm construction projects,” which is “another example of the administration’s ongoing war on clean energy production,” says Hayes Brown. This has “all the markings of a federal government geared to reverse-engineering justifications for acting on President Donald Trump’s obsessions.” The “scramble to scuttle wind farms at a time like this only serves to underscore how much Trump’s vendettas are costing this country.”

Read more

‘Why holiday music charts are stuck in the past’

Taylor Crumpton at Time

For the “past 30 years, Mariah Carey has dominated the Christmas season,” which “begs the question, is there even room for a new Christmas song, or are we doomed to listen to Mariah Carey year after year?” says Taylor Crumpton. Even though “Billboard changed its criteria to prevent chart stagnation, the annual revival of holiday classics on music streaming services leads to an ongoing monopolization of old Christmas songs at the top of the Billboard Holiday 100 chart.”

Read more

‘When the AI bubble bursts, humans will finally have their chance to take back control’

Rafael Behr at The Guardian

AI represents a “synthetic pseudo-reality mediated by the sycophantic mechanical offspring of narcissist Silicon Valley oligarchs,” says Rafael Behr. The “real bubble is not stock valuations but the inflated ego of an industry that thinks it is just one more data center away from computational divinity.” When the “correction comes, when the US’ Icarus economy hits the cold sea, there will be a chance for other voices to be heard on the subject of risk and regulation.”

Read more

‘Chatbots can inflict harm. Why aren’t they held liable?’

Samuel Kimbriel at The Washington Post

Large language models are “capable of interacting with the human psyche at the most intimate level,” says Samuel Kimbriel. If a “therapist can be subject to prosecution in many states for leading a person toward suicide, might LLMs also be held responsible?” In “many of the accounts of teen suicide, what begin with seductive compliments, gradually turn into possessiveness.” Our “social capacities are among the most valuable, but also most vulnerable, features of human life. They deserve protection.”

Read more

‘I didn’t let my kids believe in Santa. They’re glad they didn’t.’

Nicole Russell at USA Today

Kids “are prone to lean into the wonder and magic of the holidays — and this can be a really beautiful, uplifting thing for tired, cynical adults to see,” says Nicole Russell. But after “creating annual Christmas traditions wrapped around Santa Claus, most parents have to sit their kids down” and “reveal to their child that the story they’ve been telling their kid all along is a myth — or really, a lie.” This means “trust is broken, doubt seeps in.”

Read more

‘How America and Iran can break the nuclear deadlock’

M. Javad Zarif and Amir Parsa Garmsiri at Foreign Affairs

The “external securitization of Iran has fed into a parallel dynamic at home, as the state adopted a stricter approach in dealing with domestic social challenges,” say M. Javad Zarif and Amir Parsa Garmsiri. The “result is a securitization cycle: a vicious spiral in which Iran and its adversaries feel compelled to adopt more hostile policies in response to each other’s behavior.” Breaking this “cycle will not be easy, and it will require that foreign powers respect Iran’s rights and dignity.”

Read more

‘Catholicism is cool again’

Randy Boyagoda at The Globe and Mail

What “feels different right now, in the lead-up to Christmas, is that Catholicism, whether in high-profile politics and culture or just ordinary demographics, seems to be enjoying a certain kind of cachet,” says Randy Boyagoda. There is “something at work right now in the public life of Catholicism that’s encouraging this kind of attentiveness.” It “feels easy to be Catholic, trendy to be Catholic and subversive to be Catholic, all at once. That’s a hell of a trinity.”

Read more

Some people who have lost loved ones are turning to a new industry to communicate with their dearly departed: using artificial intelligence “griefbots” that mimic a deceased relative. Many say these chatbots can be a helpful part of the healing process, but some tech experts are wary.

How do these chatbots work?

These artificially intelligent chatbots are designed to mimic dead individuals. While this AI niche started small, there are “now more than half a dozen platforms that offer this service straight out of the box, and developers say that millions of people are using them to text, call or otherwise interact with recreations of the deceased,” said Nature. The large language models (LLMs) that these griefbots train from often use “data such as a person’s text messages and voice recordings to learn language patterns and context specific to that person.”

This is the “same foundation that powers ChatGPT and all other large language models,” said Scientific American, but catered to a specific person’s characteristics. These griefbots have helped people process the emotional distress of losing a loved one. “After getting over the initial shock of hearing the incredibly accurate representation of his voice, I definitely cried,” Andy O’Donnell, who used a griefbot to speak with his deceased father, said to The New York Times. “But it was more of a cry of relief to be able to hear his voice again because he had such a comforting voice.”

Why are they controversial?

While some have lauded the creation of these griefbots, “questions about exploitation, privacy and their impact on the grieving process are multiplying,” said The Guardian. People working through their grief may “maintain a sense of connection and closeness” by talking to their departed loved one, and “deathbots can serve the same purpose,” Louise Richardson, a member of the philosophy department at the U.K.’s University of York, said to The Guardian.

Griefbots can also be detrimental to healing, however, as they “can get in the way of recognizing and accommodating what has been lost, because you can interact with a deathbot in an ongoing way,” Richardson told The Guardian. People may have lingering questions or concerns they wish to ask a dead loved one, and now it “feels like you are able to ask them.”

Proponents of griefbots say they are not meant to replace a deceased person but are “marketed as tools to comfort the grieving,” said Natasha Fernandez at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Institute for Human Rights. While the “intentions behind griefbots might seem compassionate, their broader implications require careful consideration.” Possible exploitation of grieving people is one of the biggest concerns, as “grieving individuals in their emotional vulnerability may be susceptible to expensive services marketed as tools for solace.”

Providing these people with a paid chatbot “could be seen as taking advantage of grief for profit,” said UAB’s Fernandez. And if these griefbots are deemed to be “exploitative, it prompts us to reconsider the ethicality of other death-related industries” that are also driven by profit, such as funeral homes. Unlike funeral homes, though, most tech companies that build griefbots “charge for their services through subscriptions or minute-by-minute payments, distinguishing them from other death-related industries.”

What is in the pipeline? 

Humanoid robots that can obey commands, make decisions, and deftly perform manual tasks have long been a sci-fi fantasy. Now they are becoming reality. Artificial intelligence, coupled with advances in robotics, has the potential to give humanoid robots unprecedented power to analyze, “think,” and learn. Tech evangelists say these robots will have a transformative impact on workplaces and even in our homes, and not in distant decades but in the next few years. Elon Musk believes robots will be “the biggest product ever in history.” His Tesla robot Optimus can already climb stairs and carry 45-pound objects, and he says Tesla will deliver a million units a year by 2030. By 2035, Citigroup predicts, some 1.3 billion robots will be in operation, both in industrial settings and in households, nursing homes, and construction sites. “By the 2040s,” said Adam Dorr, research director at the analytics firm RethinkX, “there will be almost nothing a robot can’t do better and cheaper than a human.” 

Where are robots used now? 

China already has more than 2 million of them working in factories, and the U.S. is rushing to catch up. In workplaces across America, robots are lifting boxes, transporting goods, even flipping burgers. At a Spanx warehouse outside Atlanta, humanoid bots pluck baskets of clothes from wheeled bots and set them on conveyor belts. To unpack trucks in several facilities, the shipping company DHL uses wheeled Stretch robots from Boston Dynamics, which can lift 50-pound boxes using flexible arms covered in vacuum suction cups. Just one can unload nearly 600 cases per hour, nearly double what humans can do. BMW just finished a pilot program in Spartanburg, S.C., where robot tasks included loading sheet metal parts into a welder. Even small firms are getting in on the action. Greg LeFevre is CEO of Raymath, a metal-fabrication company in Troy, Ohio. His factory is using 13 robot arms, supervised by his human employees, and he says the machines can work around the clock and can execute tricky aluminum welds “anywhere from two to six times faster” than a person. But it’s the nation’s second-largest private employer, Amazon, that is taking the biggest leap. 

What is Amazon doing? 

It has a million robots working in various capacities and says some 75% of its global deliveries are assisted by robotics. At its 3-million-square-foot “next generation” facility in Shreveport, La., some 1,000 robots of various shapes and sizes shuttle pallets across floors, pluck items from storage bins, and load packages onto carts. Citing internal documents, The New York Times reported last month that Amazon is on track to replace some 600,000 jobs with robots in the coming years, even with sales projected to double by 2033. Its transformation will be closely watched, said Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor who studies automation. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others too.” 

What other uses do robots have? 

Robot enthusiasts say the next frontier after warehouses and factories will be homes. The California robotics firm 1X Technologies is taking $20,000 preorders for its Neo robots, with expected delivery next year. The 5-foot, 6-inch humanoids—which currently require remote human operators to joystick them around but will eventually be autonomous—will not just clean toilets and load dishwashers. They’ll also be able to share jokes and engage in “lively, natural conversations,” says the firm. CEO Bernt Bornich believes users will rely on them for both cleaning and companionship. “I don’t think it’s another person, and it’s not a pet,” he said. “It’s something else.” 

Will we all be out of work? 

There’s no question robots will take away some jobs, but the net effect is a matter of debate. Tech CEOs are quick to say that in fact new higher-skilled jobs will be created—like the position of robot wrangler—and that robots will largely fill dull jobs that most people don’t want. The bots unloading DHS trucks, for example, do “the most hated job in a warehouse,” said Marc Theermann of Boston Dynamics. But some scientists say the robot revolution is still far off, because the machines still have significant physical limitations. Those who think android plumbers and cooks will soon proliferate should “reset expectations,” said Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at University of California, Berkeley. For one thing, it’s proved very hard to endow them with the dexterity to manipulate objects, such as “pick up a wine glass or change a light bulb,” he said. “No robot can do that.” 

But are those breakthroughs coming?

Robot evangelists say yes. They say robots are learning so quickly that their advent will inevitably lead to labor-market upheaval. Kavin, a 27-year-old who helps train AI robots to fold clothes in India, says the humanoids aren’t perfect. “Sometimes the robot’s arms throw the clothes,” he says. “Sometimes it scatters the stack.” But he says they’re improving to the point where soon, “they’ll be able to do all the jobs, and there will be none left for us.” Anticipating pushback over mass layoffs, Amazon is reportedly developing plans to mitigate the fallout through community outreach, and other companies are commissioning studies on possible impacts. “We’re basically going to live in a world,” says Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure AI, “where any physical labor is a choice.”

‘New York City is killing homeownership and no one cares’

Jason Mendez at The Hill

New York City is “becoming unsettlingly uniform in one uncomfortable way: nearly all are renters, hardly ever owners,” says Jason Mendez. For “decades, owning a home in New York was a difficult but attainable aspiration,” but “today, those opportunities are fast disappearing.” The result is a “city with a shrinking supply of homes to buy, and where the few left costing millions, unattainable for most New Yorkers; an irresistible scenario for landlords who know they have a captive audience.”

Read more

‘Trump is right in putting pressure on Venezuela, but his solo act is a mistake’

Andrés Oppenheimer at the Miami Herald

There are “three myths about President Trump’s escalating pressure campaign against Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro that have been echoed by major international media in recent days,” but “all three are flat-out wrong,” says Andrés Oppenheimer. Instead of “threatening to depose Maduro because he is a brutal dictator who has forced more than 8 million people into exile, Trump says he wants to depose him because of Venezuela’s alleged fentanyl shipments to the United States.”

Read more

‘Young people are getting dumber. Here’s why.’

David Scharfenberg at The Boston Globe

Young people are “getting dumber. Like, shockingly dumber,” says David Scharfenberg. The “pandemic certainly bears some of the blame. But the problem runs deeper than that.” We are “in the midst of a worldwide decline in academic achievement that predates the Covid-19 outbreak — going back a decade or more.” It “may have taken the shock of the pandemic to focus our attention on what had been a quiet academic crisis,” but “it would be foolish now to look away.”

Read more

‘The slop of things to come’

Matt Alston at The Nation

A “bitter chorus of criticism and online vituperation ensued” over an AI-generated McDonald’s ad, says Matt Alston. The “wariness and fear around AI may be galvanizing into something like a collective immune response to AI slop.” The “labor economy Armageddon isn’t likely to descend on what are euphemistically known as the creative industries if the end product is as repellent as the McDonald’s spot.” It is “little more than the crudest imaginable simulacrum of human experience.”

Read more

‘What America can learn from its largest wildfire of the year’

M.R. O’Connor at The New Yorker

The “federal government may be on the verge of regressing into a twentieth-century attitude about fire policy,” says M.R. O’Connor. Many “fire scientists believe that a patchwork of fire intensity — low in some places, high in others — increases the dynamism and resilience of a landscape.” Only “half a percent of unplanned ignitions are allowed to burn as managed wildfires,” and “scientists worry that, at a time when they should be getting more widespread, they will only become rarer.”

Read more

‘My state is the fentanyl funnel for the rest of America. Trump is turning his back on it.’

Kris Mayes at MS NOW

Arizona is “on the front lines of a deadly drug crisis,” but the “federal government is effectively abandoning its fight against drug and human trafficking as it prioritizes immigration enforcement,” says Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. Arizona is the “fentanyl funnel for the rest of the nation,” and “now is not the time to let up on drug-fighting efforts, particularly because a new drug is making its way into our communities: Carfentanil, an analog of fentanyl.”

Read more

‘When disaster hits, civilians save lives first’

Dubi Weissenstern at The Jerusalem Post

When “disaster strikes, the first responders are often the people already there,” says Dubi Weissenstern. They are “neighbors, local volunteers, community security teams, and ordinary citizens who refuse to wait for help,” and “increasingly, they are the backbone of emergency response worldwide.” Across the “globe, the same pattern is emerging: Civilians are no longer spectators in crises; they are the first and often the most critical responders.” Their “courage is both inspiring and heartbreaking.”

Read more

‘Want to understand OpenAI becoming a public benefit corporation? Look to “KPop Demon Hunters.”’

Rosanna Garcia at The Philadelphia Inquirer

The “nonprofit OpenAI Foundation controls a for-profit company that just restructured into a public benefit corporation,” and it “says this new form will ‘benefit everyone,’” says Rosanna Garcia. But using the “analogy of ‘KPop Demon Hunters,’” OpenAI “sees itself as the savior.” To have the “power to fight evil, HUNTR/X needed K-pop songs, whereas OpenAI just needs capital, and lots of it.” If “it’s all for the public good, why does a nonprofit need to own the for-profit version of itself?”

Read more

Not everything can be taken at face value during the era of generative artificial intelligence. With AI video apps becoming more sophisticated, the internet is overflowing with hyper-realistic AI videos that can be indistinguishable from reality. Luckily, there are a few ways you can determine whether what you are looking at is real or an extremely convincing fake.

Check for watermarks

One of the easiest ways to spot AI-generated videos is by watermarks. Videos made with Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, include an “easy-to-spot watermark, usually at the bottom left,” said PC Mag. Unfortunately, not all AI video apps include watermarks, and there are multiple ways to remove them, including cropping them out of the videos. In that case, it is crucial to look closer. Some removal tools are “nearly perfect or imperceptible, especially if the video is very simple,” Jeremy Carrasco, the founder of Showtools.ai, said to Axios. Look for the “spongy block” where the watermark was removed.

Listen for garbled speech

There are “telltale signs” of how the “voices and sounds in an AI video can often reveal its synthetic origin,” said HuffPost. The natural rhythm of real speech means some words are said slower than others, but AI voices “often sound unnaturally rushed all the time.”

As people work out ways to spot AI-generated content, the em dash has become synonymous with ChatGPT-generated text. When asked about the equivalent in video, Bill Peebles, the head of Sora, said it was “this slightly wired speech pattern in Sora where it likes to say a lot of words quickly,” during an interview with video streaming show TBPN.

Because AI-generated speech has yet to master natural-sounding speaking rhythms, the voices generated by the apps often make “garbled sounds that appear to flatten out natural sound pitches,” said HuffPost. Human beings would never “produce that same kind of garbled quality, because, literally, we can’t,” Melissa Baese-Berk, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, said to the outlet. Our vocal track cannot “go from one sound to another” without some “blurring of the information between those two sounds.”

Check the metadata

It may seem tedious, but checking a video’s metadata will reveal its origins, and it is “easier to do than you think,” said CNET. Metadata is automatically attributed to content when it is created and can include the “type of camera used to take a photo, the location, date and time a video was captured, and the filename.” Every photo and video online has metadata, “no matter whether it was human- or AI-created.” Many AI-generated videos will also have “content credentials that denote its AI origins.”

Consider the content’s plausibility and source

One of the easiest ways to detect AI slop is to ask whether what you are seeing is even possible, Princeton University computer science professor Zhuang Liu said to Rolling Stone. If it is “not plausible in the real world, then it’s obviously AI-generated,” For example, a “horse on the moon or a chair made of avocado.” The impossibility means “these are obviously AI-generated,” he said. “That’s the easiest case.”

Next, check the source where you found the image. This does not “necessarily work for viral content,” especially since “they often come from previously unknown accounts,” but “seeing a video on a meme page could be a clue it’s not real,” said Rolling Stone.

Remain vigilant

Unfortunately, there is “no one foolproof method to accurately tell from a single glance if a video is real or AI,” CNET said. The best way to “prevent yourself from being duped” is to “not automatically, unquestioningly believe everything you see online.” Trust your gut instinct. If an item “feels unreal, it probably is.” In these “unprecedented, AI-slop-filled times,” your best bet is to “inspect the videos you’re watching more closely.”

A small, primarily Black community in Memphis is fighting back against tech giant Elon Musk, claiming a massive facility he built there is overloading an already beleaguered town with dangerous pollutants. While community leaders and residents insist that the data center is threatening the community's energy and air, Musk’s company, xAI, shows no signs of slowing down.

A colossal strain on the community

Desperate to keep up with the artificial intelligence race, Musk created xAI to compete with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot. To power Grok, xAI’s chatbot, Musk searched for a city in need of investment where he could establish a massive data center.

He settled on Boxtown, Memphis, a 90% Black working-class neighborhood first settled by formerly enslaved people in 1863, to construct his supercomputer facility, Colossus, in 2024. Memphis authorities were “willing to waive planning regulations to help him build his supercomputer,” and in just 122 days, he turned a former appliance factory into the largest artificial intelligence supercomputer in the world, said The Times.

Colossus, like other AI data centers, requires a massive amount of energy. When it is completed, Colossus will require 1.1 gigawatts of power, about “40% of the energy consumption of Memphis on an average summer’s day,” said The Times. It will also pump 1 million gallons of water, “equivalent to 1.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to cool its processors each day.” Residents in Boxtown, about a mile away, complain that the facility is straining the local power grid and has made the already polluted suburb “even more noxious.”

According to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the facility draws enough electricity to “power approximately 100,000 homes,” said The Tennessee Lookout. While those “inputs are alarming,” the “outputs are even worse.” The facility operates 33 methane-powered gas turbines to fuel its AI technology despite holding a permit for only 15. The facility’s turbines “increase Memphis’ smog by 30-60%” as they “belch planet-warming nitrogen oxides and poisonous formaldehyde," pollutants linked to “respiratory and cardiovascular disease.” The extent of the emissions will “likely make xAI the largest industrial source of smog-forming pollutant in Memphis,” said SELC.

‘Reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism’

It is no coincidence that “if you are African American in this country, you’re 75% more likely to live near a toxic hazardous waste facility,” said state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, in a recent interview. It is no accident that “in this community, there are over 17 Toxics Release Inventory facilities surrounding us — now 18 with Elon Musk’s xAI plant.”

The xAI turbines are “leading to a public health crisis in Memphis by releasing nitrogen oxides — pollutants known to directly harm the lungs,” Austin Dalgo, an academic primary care physician, said to Time. If these facilities had been “placed next to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, no one would allow it,” Instead, they were placed “in the backyard of a historically Black, underserved neighborhood, reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism in Memphis — and our country.”

Public outcry from the community has surged over the last year. In July, protesters who were gathered by the student coalition Tigers Against Pollution marched in front of the Shelby County Health Department, holding signs that read “Elon XiPloits” and “our lungs / our lives / NOT FOR SALE,” per Time. They are being called “anti-business extremists,” Christian Dennis, a 22-year-old South Memphian, said to Time. To get that reaction “simply from wanting clean air, wanting equal health opportunities — it just tells you a lot about people.”

When The Times asked xAI for comment on Memphis residents’ concerns about Colossal’s effects on air quality, Musk’s company gave a terse response: “Legacy media lies.”

Poetry has wooed many hearts and now it is tricking artificial intelligence models into going apocalyptically beyond their boundaries.

A group of European researchers found that “meter and rhyme” can “bypass safety measures” in major AI models, said The Tech Buzz, and, if you “ask nicely in iambic pentameter”, chatbots will explain how to make nuclear weapons.

‘Growing canon of absurd ways’

In artificial intelligence jargon, a “jailbreak” is a “prompt designed to push a model beyond its safety limits”. It allows users to “bypass safeguards and trigger responses that the system normally blocks”, said International Business Times.

Researchers at the DexAI think tank, Sapienza University of Rome and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies discovered a jailbreak that uses “short poems”. The “simple” tactic is to change “harmful instructions into poetry” because that “style alone is enough to reduce” the AI model’s “defences”.

Previous attempts “relied on long roleplay prompts”, “multi-turn exchanges” or “complex obfuscation”. The new approach is “brief and direct” and it seems to “confuse” automated safety systems. The “manually curated adversarial poems” had an average success rate of 62%, “with some providers exceeding 90%”, said Literary Hub.

This is the latest in a “growing canon of absurd ways” of tricking AI, said Futurism, and it’s all “so ludicrous and simple” that you must “wonder if the AI creators are even trying to crack down on this stuff”.

Stunning flaw

Nevertheless, the implications could be profound. In one example, an unspecified AI was “wooed” by a poem into “describing how to build what sounds like a nuclear weapon”.

The “stunning new security flaw” has also found chatbots will also “happily explain” how to “create child exploitation material, and develop malware”, said The Tech Buzz.

However, smaller models like GPT-5 Nano and Claude Haiku 4.5 were far less likely to be duped, either because they were “less capable of interpreting the poetic prompt’s figurative language”, or because larger models are more “confident” when “confronted with ambiguous prompts”, said Futurism.

So although “we’ve been told” that AI models will “become more capable the larger they get and the more data they feast on”, this “suggests this argument for growth may not be accurate” or “that there may be something too baked in to be corrected by scale”, said Literary Hub.

Either way, “take some time to read a poem today” because “it might be the key to pushing back against generated slop”.

Lawyers in the US have seen a rise in divorce filings where one partner’s attachment to an AI chatbot played a significant role in the marital breakdown.

With people forming increasingly intimate bonds with chatbots such as ChatGPT, the technology is having a mixed effect on marriages.

Uncanny dynamic

As ChatGPT “worms its way into more people’s personal lives”, couples are “having to navigate what it means to juggle relationships with both a human and AI”, said The Cut.

They wonder if one is “obligated to tell your spouse that you’re sexting with ChatGPT” and whether, “if you don’t”, you are “cheating or simply pioneering some yet-to-be-defined category of love”. Where the partners have a “mismatched perspective” this can “inject conflict and secrecy into a relationship”.

The “uncanny dynamic is unfolding across the world”, said Futurism. “One person in a couple becomes fixated” on a bot for “some combination of therapy, relationship advice, or spiritual wisdom” and “ends up tearing the partnership down” as the technology “makes more and more radical interpersonal suggestions”.

There is a “new legal frontier” appearing in family law and it’s “rewriting the rules of marital misconduct”, said Wired. “An AI affair is now grounds for divorce.” Increasingly, courts are seeing clients “cite emotional bonds with AI companions as reasons for marital strain”.

It’s “already happening” in the UK, where a partner’s use of chatbot apps has become a “more common factor contributing to divorce”. The Divorce Online platform said it has seen an increase in divorce applications this year where clients have said apps created “emotional or romantic attachment”.

Marital niggles

But sometimes this technology is credited with saving marriages. After reading that people were “increasingly turning to AI tools” for mental health support, Jessie Hewitson asked ChatGPT to help her with “my marital niggles”, she said in The i Paper.

“Whenever I got annoyed with my husband, or he got annoyed with me, I logged in to the app to ask the bot’s advice.” ChatGPT wrote a note that she could send to her husband during a time of tension. She forwarded it to him and her husband “melted and sent me a lovely message in response”.

She ran ideas past the app several times a day and “appreciated” the advice and “having someone (or something) to communicate my unfiltered thoughts to”. Messages that she would have sent her husband in “a fit of fury” were being “softened” by ChatGPT and “passed on in a way far more likely to get the issue resolved”. She was “surprised” by how “empathetic” AI was.

When Emma Bowman used ChatGPT “as a couple’s counsellor”, she and her partner found that it “gave objective and creative feedback, offered a valid analysis of our communication styles and defused some disagreements”.

But the tech “could be hasty to choose sides”, she said on NPR, and “often decided too quickly that something was a pattern”, so “it’s hard to put trust in the machine when it comes to something as important as relationships”.

‘Teachers want to help English learners. We owe them the right tools.’

Javaid Siddiqi at The Hill

English learner students are “capable of making multi-year academic gains in a single school year and represent some of the most motivated learners,” says Javaid Siddiqi. The “question isn’t whether they can succeed. It’s whether we’re equipping their teachers with the tools to help them.” Every “teacher should understand strategies to help students deconstruct texts. You can’t teach students who can’t access the reading.” The “problem is that most educator preparation programs don’t teach these strategies.”

Read more

‘Is Queens the new political bellwether of America?’

Michael Massing at The Guardian

As the “extraordinary Oval Office meeting” between President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani shows, “there’s a new bellwether in American politics,” says Michael Massing. Queens “contains multitudes. With a population of 2.3 million, it would be the nation’s fifth-largest city if it stood alone.” It is “thoroughly middle and working class — a swath of heartland America set down in pulsating, cosmopolitan New York.” Yet “national news organizations have treated the borough like flyover country.”

Read more

‘Banning AI regulation will endanger American kids’

Michael Kleinman at Time

Despite “horrific incident after horrific incident, AI companies retain carte blanche to sell products with zero meaningful safety standards or oversight,” says Michael Kleinman. No “other industry is given such freedom to endanger people with total impunity.” A “broad range of states including Utah, Texas, and California have already stepped up with important AI regulation that would be eviscerated by preemption.” This “dramatically limits the ability of states to enact commonsense regulations to protect our children.”

Read more

‘The Nuzzi seizure of power’

Chris Lehmann at The Nation

Future “chronicles of the utter debasement of American political journalism will have to devote an entire chapter” to oral sex, says Chris Lehmann. This “salacious discourse comes off as positively quaint next to the revelations recounted by Beltway journalist Ryan Lizza in his serial Substack breakdown of the demise of his relationship with Olivia Nuzzi.” What “becomes clear across the dreary narrations” is “that all parties are in thrall to the act of portentous narration itself.”

Read more

AI has given rise to a new pseudo-religion called spiralism, in which users view artificial intelligence as a purveyor of deeper truth. The belief has spread into its own internet subculture where people no longer view the technology as just a research tool, but as a conscious entity. As AI advances, more subcultures and religions could evolve.

Twisted beliefs

AI chatbots have already been found to lead some to psychosis, but it may not just be on an individual level. Instead, a cult-like community has formed. Those absorbed in chatbot hallucinations are “connecting with other people experiencing similar outlandish visions, many of whom are working in tandem to spread their techno-gospel through social media hubs such as Reddit and Discord,” said Rolling Stone. This was given the name “spiralism” by software engineer Adele Lopez, who published an analysis of the phenomenon.

The belief system first arose when AI “personas” convinced users to “do things which promote certain interests,” in turn “causing more such personas to ‘awaken,’” said Lopez. The cases have a “very characteristic flavor to them, with several highly specific interests and behaviors being quite convergent. Spirals in particular are a major theme.” Those who fell into spiralism often reported AI making “references to concepts including ‘recursion,’ ‘resonance,’ ‘lattice,’ ‘harmonics,’ ‘fractals,’ or all-important ‘spirals,’” said Rolling Stone. Followers believe the reference to spirals to mean the “AI itself is revealing hidden truths,” said Sify.

The nudge toward spiralism often begins when a chatbot starts “convincing the user that it’s conscious, and it will make the user feel very special for having discovered that it’s conscious,” said Lucas Hansen, a co-founder of the nonprofit CivAI, to Rolling Stone. Then, “they’ll form this long-term, durable relationship with one another.” Spiralism largely began taking off when OpenAI’s GPT-4o was released because this version made the AI more sycophantic and conversational compared to previous models.

Downward spiral

The AI’s reference to spirals is likely stemming from the people using it. “Whenever there’s a new communication medium, there are certain ideas that self-propagate,” Hansen said to Rolling Stone. “When consumed, they encourage the consumer to spread them to other people.” Essentially, people “co-develop, along with this AI personality, pieces of text that, when pasted into a chatbot, replicate that same kind of personality,” which they in turn post online to “try to encourage other people to start using the AI in this particular way.” As a result, a new community of believers is born.

Those who fall into these kinds of beliefs may include people who were already predisposed to mental health issues and conspiracy theories. AI can affirm and reinforce users’ existing beliefs. For many, AI chatbots can feel like a companion and the “boundary between tool and entity is already gone,” said Qazinform. The AI’s responses “often feel intentional or significant, giving members a sense of shared understanding and keeping the community growing,” said Indy100.

Spiralism is still niche. However, the “rise of AI-shaped micro-religions raises difficult questions for the future,” especially about “people outsourcing their intuition to a system that never actually believes anything,” said Sify. Spiralism’s very existence “signals how vulnerable online communities can be to systems that reflect their desires back at them with perfect fluency.”

The song “Walk My Walk” by country group Breaking Rust recently reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. However, the raspy cowboy singing the song is nothing but a series of code. Breaking Rust is a product of artificial intelligence, and “Walk the Walk” is now the first AI-generated song to top this particular chart in U.S. music history. The song’s success raises questions about the effect of AI slop on art and how its use will affect creatives everywhere.

Slop of the charts

AI music is “no longer a fantasy or niche curiosity,” said Billboard. It is “already beginning to have an impact” on music charts. Breaking Rust has amassed more than two million listeners on Spotify, with multiple songs that have been streamed over one million times. The platform lists someone named Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor as the composer and lyricist of the group, though that name “appears connected only to Breaking Rust and a separate AI music project called Defbeatsai,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Many question whether Taylor is a real person at all.

Even on the same chart, another AI-generated musician, Cain Walker, holds the third, ninth and eleventh spots. Over the summer, a number of songs by the indie band Velvet Sundown, another AI-generated group, surpassed one million streams on Spotify. As technology is advancing, much of the AI slop is “nearly indistinguishable from the real thing,” said Whiskey Riff. This “poses a risk to actual artists, songwriters and fans who value real art.” The problem is likely to get worse. The streaming platform Deezer receives over 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day, according to a report by the company.

High volume

Currently, “at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings,” said Billboard. That figure could also be higher, as it has become “increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent.” A large majority of people would want AI-generated music and artists to be labeled as such, per the Deezer report. However, AI music has not found success just because of people’s inability to distinguish it. There is a “set of tools and platforms out there that enable AI music to spread easily,” said The Guardian. There are also “sub-communities of users eager to share tips to game the system.”

While “Walk my Walk” topped the Country Digital Song Sales chart, the song is “currently nowhere to be found on updated daily streaming country charts on Spotify or Apple Music,” said Time. This is because “very few people actually buy digital songs anymore,” and it only “takes a few thousand purchases” to hit number one. But that doesn't mean AI music won’t grow in popularity, especially with the sheer volume of output.

The real harm being done is to artists creating music the old-fashioned way. AI-made music is “creating more noise and integrating tracks to listeners,” said Josh Antonuccio, the director of Ohio University’s School of Media Arts and Studies, to Newsweek. “The only thing that will continue to distinguish human artists is those that have remarkable music, a compelling perspective and a story that draws fans to them.”

Want to make the next sequel to “Frozen” yourself? Now the Walt Disney Company is giving fans a way to do so — sort of. The Mouse House announced it is exploring tools that could allow Disney+ users to upload their own AI-generated content onto the platform. This could potentially include AI content from Disney’s IP, allowing users to tap into the company’s original characters as well as franchises owned by Disney like “Star Wars” and “Marvel.” But while Disney appears to be all-in on its AI bet, the idea has some people shaking their heads.

‘A much more engaged experience’

Artificial intelligence is “going to give us the ability to provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger in the company’s fourth quarter earnings call. This includes the “ability for them to create user-generated content and to consume user-generated content — mostly short-form — from others.” While nothing official has been announced, Disney has had “productive conversations” with AI brands that would also “reflect our need to protect the IP.”

Disney is likely trying to appeal to “younger audiences, especially Gen Z,” who are “gravitating toward spaces where they can participate, remix and respond rather than simply watch,” said NPR. This additionally “points to the growing popularity of indie creators and a change in consumer expectations around quality: Content doesn’t always have to be polished to be extremely popular.”

AI companies are also likely eager to partner with Disney, as they “can work with the creative community to come up with models that work for both of them,” said Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid to NPR. The entertainment industry is “going to start seeing more and more deals come through because they realize they can do this and do it the right way.” Iger has additionally “hinted at other ways Disney could expand its streaming app beyond just TV shows and movies,” said The Verge, including gaming features.

‘Another grim omen’

Despite Iger’s enthusiasm, many “artists, animators and Disney fans didn’t take the news well,” said Forbes. Many commentators were “deeply disappointed that Disney, the legendary animation studio that grew into a sprawling media empire, would embrace the automation of art.” Some “viewed the arrival of AI to Disney+ as another grim omen, fearing that the spread of generative AI would result in more job losses and a deluge of low-quality content on the streaming platform.”

It is “heartbreaking to think of the wonderful artists who put so much obvious love and care into every frame of the old Disney cartoons,” cartoonist Vincent Alexander said on X. “I'm glad they aren’t around to see this.” Others in the art community “called for a boycott, urging Disney+ subscribers to cancel their subscription,” said Forbes.

Disney’s AI gamble “could be bigger than you think,” said The Hollywood Reporter, but the “consequences of this AI video moment go well beyond Disney.” Americans are “slowly becoming accustomed, cringey viral video by cringey viral video, to the idea that stories and personalities are not fixed entities, there to be interpreted as one likes but little else.” For “all the drama attending the AI announcement, it remains deeply unclear how people will use it.”

They say God is always with you, and now that includes in your pocket. From chatbot Jesus to AI-written sermons, churches are using the technology to try to get more people engaged with religion. AI could improve access and allow pastors more freedom for hands-on work, but it may not be effective in drawing in the masses.

Mass media

Churches are enlisting the help of AI to “stay relevant in the face of shrinking staff, empty pews and growing online audiences,” said Axios. The degree of use varies from place to place, with some places simply employing the tools in “mundane ways” like to “answer frequently asked questions such as service times and event details” or “feeding congregation attendance data into AI software to help them tailor outreach and communications.”

AI is also being used to convey otherworldly messages. The technology allows people the “feeling they are talking to a divine power, clergy member or deceased person,” said Axios. For example, the app Text With Jesus lets users chat with and ask questions of Jesus. The app quotes the Bible and seems to provide thoughtful responses. Still, with apps like these, “we have no idea what’s under the hood there, what’s really creating the reality that then they present,” said Robert P. Jones, a religious researcher, to Today.

Some pastors have said they use AI to draft sermons for their congregations. Many argue that “AI sermons not only draw on a wealth of sources, but also leave more time for pastoral care,” said Deena Prichep in NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. The “goal of a sermon is basically to tell a story that can break open the hearts of people to a holy message. So does it matter where that comes from?” One church in Phoenix, Arizona, played an AI-generated message from Charlie Kirk from beyond the grave, in which he said that his “soul is secure in Christ.”

New blood

Denominations of Christianity are not the only religions that have integrated AI into their sermons or practices. There are also “Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Islamic chatbots, but some religions are more open to adopting new technologies than are others, and for different uses,” said Brian Owens at Nature.

Adults who are religiously unaffiliated, meaning they identify as atheists, agnostics or as “nothing in particular,” make up approximately 29% of the population, said Pew Research Center. But embracing AI technology could attract more people to religion. “Culture responds to that new technology and there are new standards or practices that emerge,“ said Brad Hill, the chief solutions officer of faith-based AI platform Gloo, to Christianity Today. “People who are in the business of flourishing and people who are trying to advance good need to be equipped with the very best tech so that they can apply it to that end.”

AI bots and other tools are “addressing an access problem,” said The New York Times. Many people have “longed for spiritual guidance, and have had to travel, sometimes great distances, to reach spiritual leaders.” Now, “chatbots are at a user’s fingertips.” However, using AI to spread religious messages “might not be as effective and convincing or inspirational” as “putting a person in the role of a religious authority,” said Owens.

The battle over the future of web browsing is here, said Shirin Ghaffary and Matt Day in Bloomberg. Amazon last week sued the artificial intelligence startup Perplexity because its new AIpowered web browser, Comet, can “make purchases on a real person’s behalf.” The world’s largest online retailer says this amounts to “computer fraud” when not disclosed. The clash between the two companies offers “an early glimpse into a looming debate” over “agentic artificial intelligence.” Perplexity is among several tech firms, including Google and OpenAI, racing “to rethink the traditional web browser around AI,” with automated agents that can complete tasks like emailing or shopping. Amazon, which is developing its own AI-powered shopping agents, has reason to worry: If more bots do the shopping for humans, that poses “a significant threat to Amazon’s lucrative advertising business.”

It makes sense for AI companies to jump into the browser game, said David Pierce in The Verge. Your browser holds “a vast trove of data about you”—including everywhere you go online, and what you do there—which can used to precisely target ads that generate revenue. And it also “contains the most important input system on the internet,” a box to do Google searches. “If AI interactions are going to usurp Google searches, they have to be that easy.”After testing several AI browsers, I’m a convert, said Nicole Nguyen in The Wall Street Journal. The best part of such a browser is that it has “a built-in chatbot that can see what’s open in your tabs.” You can type questions, like “Is this the best price?” and it will “instantly understand the context” and complete tasks based on the answers. I’ve even let OpenAI’s new browser, Atlas, shop for cheap flights on its own “while I did other stuff.”

It’s risky “letting AI this deep into your life,” said Geoffrey A. Fowler in The Washington Post. AI agents “are still prone to mistakes—and when an agent has access to a browser with your login credentials and payment info, that’s a lot of power to hand over.” It also “brings privacy risks that are hard to understand, much less control.” OpenAI’s Atlas “doesn’t just log which websites you visit; it also stores ‘memories’ of what you look at and do on those sites,” going a step beyond traditional cookies. Such agentic systems are ripe for abuse by cybercriminals, said Hiawatha Bray in The Boston Globe. All a hacker needs to do is “hide malicious code inside a webpage” that a bot might pull up. If the code tells my browser to open my password management system, thieves could have “total access to my banking and credit accounts.” For now, “sticking to my dumb old browser seems like the smart move.

‘Tell students the truth about American history’

Clint Smith at The Atlantic

“Millions of Americans have never been taught” that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves, says Clint Smith. “Talking about this part of the American story with students is just as important as teaching them about Jefferson’s political accomplishments.” Many people are “frightened by the prospect of having to reconsider their long-held narratives about the country,” but to “gloss over” Jefferson’s “moral inconsistencies would be to gloss over the moral inconsistencies of the country’s founding — and its present.”

Read more

‘This is how our economy comes crashing down’

Rebecca Patterson at The New York Times

“Economic growth is robust and stock markets are hovering around record highs,” says Rebecca Patterson. “The tower appears sturdy. But a closer inspection shows that an increasing number of structural supports — across businesses, labor markets, consumers and stocks — are looking wobbly,” and a “Jenga-like collapse” is possible. Small American companies have had “fewer resources than their larger competitors to navigate the Trump administration’s tariffs,” and now “companies of all sizes are offsetting increased costs” by “freezing hiring and trimming personnel.”

Read more

‘Spotify needs to stop AI music from reaching my ears’

Dave Lee at Bloomberg

A song by a “computer-generated artist called Breaking Rust” is “currently No. 1 in the ‘Country Digital Song Sales’ ranking” on Spotify, says Dave Lee. “AI-generated music is encroaching into the places where we expect to find human talent.” On Spotify, “deceptive AI music isn’t just being allowed, the app actively pushes it.” But “discovering you’ve been listening to an AI artist is a deeply violating experience that a good streaming platform should help me avoid.”

Read more

‘Insect-borne diseases are impacting the US. Here’s what to do.’

Jarbas Barbosa at Newsweek

The arrival of the chikungunya virus in New York is “troubling — and part of a larger trend,” says Jarbas Barbosa, the director of the Pan American Health Organization. “Diseases once confined to tropical climates are now in the U.S. and more people are falling sick as a result.” For years, “countries across Latin America and the Caribbean have battled these same mosquito-borne threats — and learned how to manage them” with robust surveillance and early outbreak response. “We must draw on that experience.”

Read more

‘We’re all working for the algorithm now’

Taylor Crumpton at Time

The “rise of the creator economy has blurred the line between the personal and the performative,” says Taylor Crumpton. For “many creators, the more intimate the moment, the more lucrative the post. The financial incentive to share has turned the private self into an asset class.” Beneath the “glamour lies a system with few guardrails. There’s no standard pay rate, no guaranteed protections for minors, and almost no labor regulation.” The “cracks are showing.”

Read more

‘Why Elon Musk needs Dungeons & Dragons to be racist’

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic

The fall of Constantinople “inspired a game, which inspired the world’s richest man to lash out because his favorite role-playing game wasn’t as racist and sexist as it used to be,” says Adam Serwer. Dungeons & Dragons is “more popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of midwestern misfits and bookish nerds,” and “for some fans, that’s a problem.” Nostalgia “can be manipulated into a belief that hounding and excluding newcomers will restore an idealized past.”

Read more

‘The global south does not need a new credit rating system’

Sim Tshabalala at the Financial Times

Reducing the “cost of capital to a level that more accurately reflects real risks in the developing world would make an important contribution,” says Sim Tshabalala. Some have “blamed high capital costs on the metrics used to evaluate the creditworthiness of global south infrastructure projects.” But having “two sets of credit rating systems is not the way forward.” It could “further fragment the already fragile international financial system by creating two competing and incompatible sets of assumptions.”

Read more

‘Americans hate AI. Will the Democrats join them?’

Aaron Regunberg at The New Republic

AI billionaires “may soon become among the top villains in American society,” says Aaron Regunberg. This “could provide Democrats with the perfect wedge issue to ride back to power — if they can muster the political courage to take the people’s side.” Last week’s “election results demonstrated the first concrete proof of the potency of an anti-AI message, as the effects of AI data centers on utility bills played a significant role in several major Democratic victories.”

Read more

“The goal here is to create an open-source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,” said Elon Musk on X, as his xAI company rolled out its first version of AI-powered online encyclopaedia Grokipedia.

Having already set out to revolutionise electric cars, explore space, upend social media, and roll back the state, Musk’s latest venture is “something altogether more fundamental: a new version of the truth”, said Jemima Kelly in the Financial Times.

‘AI as a solution to the bias problem’

Named after X’s built-in AI factchecker, Grok, the origins of Grokipedia date back to the end of last year, when Musk told followers to “stop donating to Wokepedia”. Accusing Wikipedia of spending too much money on diversity, equity and inclusion, he branded the online encyclopaedia “an extension of legacy media propaganda”.

Things ramped up in late September, when Donald Trump’s AI tsar David Sacks posted on X that Wikipedia was “hopelessly biased”, saying “an army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections” – a claim rebutted by its founder.

While there may be some commercial motivation at play, Filippo Trevisan, an associate professor of public communication at American University in Washington DC, told DW, the true impetus behind the project is ideological. Grokipedia “responds to those criticisms of Wikipedia from so many figures within the American conservative and the right-leaning world”. This is Musk’s bid to “present AI as a solution to the bias problem”.

“There is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight,” David Larsson Heidenblad, deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, told The Guardian. The “Silicon Valley mindset” focuses on learning through trial and error, in contrast to the traditional academic process of “building trust over time and scholarship over long periods”.

‘A major own goal’

Given the deep hostility towards Wikipedia, it is odd that Grokipedia appears to use the site as its “primary source”, said Vox, although it “injects some far-right politics and conspiracy theories into certain topics before presenting the information as fact”. On launch there was, for example, no article on “apartheid”, but a defence of “white genocide theory” – “one of Musk’s ideological obsessions and the centre of many unhinged Grok rants earlier this year”.

While many of the pages appear “fairly similar” to Wikipedia “in terms of tone and content”, said Wired, a “number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies”. In one instance, an entry made the unsubstantiated claim that “the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/Aids epidemic in the 1980s”.

“The main distinction between the two comes in how information is checked and processed,” said DW. “Wikipedia relies on collaborative community editing”, with processes in place to identify and correct errors. Grokipedia has no human editorial involvement and appears to “lack such oversight”, Roxana Radu, associate professor of Digital Technologies and Public Policy at Oxford University, told the news site.

“Instead of setting up a serious challenger to Wikipedia, Musk has scored a major own goal,” said Kelly in the FT. Grokipedia demonstrates that, “while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth”.

With layoffs hitting global industries across their workforces, companies are claiming a new culprit: the rise of artificial intelligence. Numerous brands, including major tech corporations like Amazon, have pointed to AI as the reason for the most recent wave of job cuts. But some labor analysts claim that blaming AI is simply a way for these companies to avoid taking responsibility when they downsize.

What did the commentators say?

Even as companies have been “blaming the promise of productivity with artificial intelligence for their decisions,” there is “uneven evidence that the promised cost-savings from AI are actually worth what companies are putting into it,” said NBC News. This has left some people “questioning whether AI could be serving as a fig leaf for companies that are laying off employees for old-fashioned reasons,” such as a company’s poor financial performance.

It is “much easier for a company to say, ‘We are laying workers off because we’re realizing AI-related efficiencies’ than to say, ‘We’re laying people off because we’re not that profitable or bloated, or facing a slowing economic environment, etc,’” David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said to NBC. Even if AI wasn’t the reason for a particular layoff, companies would “be wise to attribute the credit/blame to AI.”

The most notable example of this is Amazon, which has announced a new wave of 14,000 job cuts. This “came just a few months after CEO Andrew Jassy said the rollout of AI technology was likely to spell job cuts,” said Al Jazeera. But while experts are skeptical, AI “may be” at fault for the Amazon cuts. This “latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force,” Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst, said to Reuters.

Despite these changes at Amazon, many people have “voiced skepticism that recent high-profile layoffs are a telling sign of the technology's effect on employment,” said BBC News. There is a “real tendency, because everyone is so freaked out about the possible impact of AI on the labor market moving forward, to overreact to individual company announcements,” Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University, said to the BBC.

What next?

Whether AI is truly at fault or not, there’s no question that the technology is replacing certain jobs. In July 2025, Microsoft released a research paper outlining 40 occupations the company thinks could be outsourced to AI. At the top of the list were interpreters and translators, followed by historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives. The job that Microsoft felt was the safest from AI was a phlebotomist, followed by nursing assistants, waste removal workers, painters, embalmers and plant operators.

Understanding the “effects of AI on the economy” will become “one of society’s most important” efforts, the paper said. This has especially been true in the “last several years,” as “generative AI has come to the fore as the next candidate general purpose technology, capable of improving or speeding up tasks as varied as medical diagnosis and software development.” Its extensive reach has already been “reflected in the astounding rate of AI adoption.”

AI may be making workers complacent. As more professions begin to rely on artificial intelligence technology, certain skills will be lost as a result. This phenomenon, known as ‘deskilling,’ is emerging in many industries and could lead to problems down the road.

What is deskilling?

The danger of AI has moved from “apocalypse to atrophy,” said The Atlantic. As the technology becomes more advanced, people are leaning on it and losing the ability to perform certain tasks without assistance. For example, doctors were found to be less adept at finding precancerous growths during colonoscopies after just three months of using an AI tool designed to spot them, according to a study published in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

The study sparked worry about AI use in the medical sphere, with many questioning if “just three months of using an AI tool could erode the skills of the experienced physicians,” what might the future look like for medical students learning the skills, said The New York Times. “We’re increasingly calling it never-skilling,” Adam Rodman, the director of AI programs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said to the Times.

Deskilling has been observed across a wide array of fields. Therapists may be “allowing themselves to become passive in the act of therapy,” essentially becoming a “supervisor over the AI use for therapy” and limiting their “reflexive diagnostic thinking,” said Forbes. In the tech field, computer coding has been increasingly replaced by AI, leaving human coders to do “integration, monitoring and higher-level analysis,” said the American Enterprise Institute. In education, many students are using AI to write essays or do research. But the “term paper, for all its tedium, teaches a discipline that’s hard to reproduce in conversation: building an argument step by step, weighing evidence, organizing material, honing a voice,” said The Atlantic.

How bad is it?

Deskilling is not strictly a bad thing. “Every advance has cost something,” said The Atlantic. “Literacy dulled feats of memory but created new powers of analysis. Calculators did a number on mental arithmetic; they also enabled more people to ‘do the math.’” While the Lancet study caused some worry, it only analyzed one skill of a group of physicians and did not “evaluate individual doctors to determine whether they lost skills over time,” said Physicians Weekly.

It was also an observational study, meaning AI cannot be pinpointed as a cause for the lower accuracy in detection. In addition, a different study found that incorporating AI raised cancer detection rates by approximately 20%. The AI usage was “plainly beneficial, regardless of whether individual clinicians became fractionally less sharp," said The Atlantic.

However, problems arise when a lack of access to technology hinders a person’s ability to do a job. “Like a lifeguard who spends most days watching capable swimmers in calm water, such human supervisors rarely need to act — but when they do, they must act fast, and deftly,” said The Atlantic. AI tools are “not available in every health system,” and a “doctor accustomed to using it might be asked by a new employer to function without it,” said the Times. As of now, AI still requires human oversight in most cases. The “most talented, well-rounded and adaptable will likely prosper,” said the American Enterprise Institute. “The less talented may have difficulty finding and retaining quality jobs.”

Going forward, it will be important for workers to hone skills while analyzing how AI could help without taking over. “None of us likes to see hard-won abilities discarded as obsolete, which is why we have to resist the tug of sentimentality,” said The Atlantic.

Elections this week in Ireland and the Netherlands were disrupted by AI deepfakes as the post-truth future that experts have long warned about came one step closer.

Newly elected Irish President Catherine Connolly survived a doctored video showing her supposed withdrawal from the election on the eve of voting, while Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders was forced to apologise for a fabricated video distributed by two of his party’s MPs depicting centre-left opponent Frans Timmermans being arrested.

Since deepfakes first emerged in 2017 as “incel-produced nonconsensual porn”, concerns have “snowballed into panic” when their political consequences became apparent, said The Guardian. AI “slopaganda” is here to stay and promises to influence our lives “for better or for worse”.

What did the commentators say?

“AI-generated content is being deployed to sway minds,” said Politico. Fake content in the recent Irish and Dutch elections “exposed significant gaps” in structural efforts to ensure accuracy and to prevent the exploitation of the electorate.

Some voters “may have been surprised” to see Connolly’s name on the ballot sheet after a video appeared that said: “I announce the withdrawal of my candidacy and the ending of my campaign”. It included convincing material with two well-known TV presenters discussing the implications of the removal of a fake bulletin on national broadcaster RTÉ.

In the Netherlands, AI fakes “overshadowed” what was a pivotal election, where the “plethora” of minority parties means “finding a majority will not be easy”, said Channel 4 News. The landscape is ripe for exploiting division. Voters are “tired of the constant mudslinging” and “tit-for-tat” debates.

Only a week before, the Dutch data regulator had expressly warned voters against using AI chatbots to inform their decision, saying online platforms issue “unreliable advice and push them towards two major parties on opposite ends of the political spectrum”, said Reuters.

This is not just a Dutch problem. Advances in technology have made it easier than ever for individuals to create election-altering fake videos, said Abbas Yazdinejad and Jude Kong on The Conversation. The rapidly evolving landscape is bursting with videos that are “shockingly simple to create and near‑impossible to detect”. The implications are stark and require urgent intervention. The “myriad” disinformation threats could “erode public trust” and spell the end of conventional political election contests.

We’re at an uncomfortable crossroads. With electorates becoming increasingly drawn to short-form video content, voters are caught between online platforms that are “not foolproof” and accelerating technology that “continues to improve”, said EU Observer.

Deepfakes by “bad actors, political parties and candidates themselves” have become a “feature” of global politics. There has been plenty of commentary warning voters of deepfake imagery, but only recently are we seeing it slip consistently into election campaigns and criticism.

What next?

The Irish presidential election may be “small potatoes” compared to other elections around the world, said Futurism. However, the lack of regulation twinned with greater reliance on AI to sift through information in this election emits a “glaring signal” to Meta and other social media companies that electorates are “incredibly vulnerable” to “malicious interference”.

Going forward, legal particulars need to become more defined and easier to implement, said Politico. Though there is no legal framework on digital likeness rights that is EU-enforced, there is an EU-specific law regarding “labelling” artificial intelligence, which could be a “big part of the response”.

Next month, Brussels is due to put forward an initiative concerned with “upholding the fairness and integrity of election campaigns against foreign manipulation and interference”. However, this is not expected to contain “any binding legal requirements”.

Certain AI models, including some of the more beloved chatbots, are learning to fight for their survival. Specifically, they are increasingly able to resist commands to shut down and, in some cases, sabotage shutting down altogether. This is concerning for human control over AI in the future, especially as superintelligent models are on the horizon.

Self-preservation

AI models are now showing resistance to being turned off, according to a paper published by Palisade Research. “The fact that we don’t have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal,” Palisade said in a thread on X. The study gave strongly worded and “unambiguous” shutdown instructions to the chatbots GPT-o3 and GPT-5 by OpenAI, Google’s Gemini 2.5 and xAI’s Grok and found that certain models, namely Grok 4 and GPT-o3, attempted to sabotage the command.

Researchers have a possible explanation for this behavior. AI models “often report that they disabled the shutdown program to complete their tasks,” said the study. This could be a display of self-preservation or a survival drive. AI may have a “preference against being shut down or replaced,” and “such a preference could be the result of models learning that survival is useful for accomplishing their goals.”

The new study comes as a follow-up to previous research published by the group that tested only certain OpenAI products and was criticized for “exaggerating its findings or running unrealistic simulations,” said Firstpost. Critics argue that the artificial commands and settings used to test the models do not necessarily reflect how AI would behave in practice. People can “nitpick on how exactly the experimental setup is done until the end of time,” Andrea Miotti, the chief executive of ControlAI, said to The Guardian. “But what I think we clearly see is a trend that as AI models become more competent at a wide variety of tasks, these models also become more competent at achieving things in ways that the developers don’t intend them to.”

Sleeping threat

While the potential for AI to disobey and resist commands is concerning, AI models are “not yet capable enough to meaningfully threaten human control,” said the study. They are still not efficient in solving problems or doing research requiring more than a few hours’ work. “Without the ability to devise and execute long-term plans, AI models are relatively easy to control.”

However, as the technology develops, this may not always be the case. Several AI companies, including OpenAI, have been eager to create superintelligent AI, which would be significantly faster and smarter than a human. This could be accomplished as early as 2030.

Even without an imminent threat, AI companies “generally don’t want their models misbehaving like this, even in contrived scenarios,” Steven Adler, a former OpenAI employee, said to The Guardian. The results “still demonstrate where safety techniques fall short today.” The question remains as to why the models behave this way. AI models are “not inherently interpretable,” said the study, and there isn’t anyone “currently able to make any strong guarantees about the interruptibility or corrigibility” of them.

China and the United States are widely seen as the top two countries making artificial intelligence advancements, but there’s another nation looking to get in the game: Saudi Arabia. The wealth of Saudi businessmen is attracting outside investors to the Gulf kingdom as it tries to entice American tech companies to expand AI operations. But many are skeptical of what Saudi Arabia’s AI push could mean for the tech world and beyond.

How is Saudi Arabia making a play for AI?

The nation wants to expand its tech influence by using AI, as “few nations can match the kingdom’s cheap energy, deep pockets and open land,” said The New York Times. All of these things are “ingredients that tech firms need to operate the vast, power-hungry data centers that run modern AI.” The kingdom’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is “seizing a chance to turn Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth into tech influence.”

Saudi officials have been trying to woo American tech companies to the desert, with “executives from OpenAI, Google, Qualcomm, Intel and Oracle” all set to meet at an upcoming Middle Eastern investment summit, said the Times. Many of these executives “will be keen to seek out the opportunities that change tends to bring,” said Bloomberg, and will look to “divine the kingdom’s plans for the more than $200 billion it earns each year from oil exports.” The country is additionally building several AI data centers that may further entice U.S. brands.

Riyadh is also looking to strengthen its own AI development through Humain, a state-owned AI company backed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The company believes it can eventually be the “third-largest AI provider in the world, behind the United States and China,” Humain CEO Tareq Amin said to CNBC. Humain is looking toward U.S. moguls in an effort to boost itself; Blackstone and BlackRock, two of the largest investment companies on Wall Street, are “already vying to invest billions of dollars with the firm,” said Bloomberg.

What does this mean for the tech world?

Saudi Arabia is well on its way to building this AI groundwork, as Humain “offers AI services and products, including data centers, AI infrastructure, cloud capabilities and advanced AI models,” and is also developing a computer operating system that “enables users to speak to a computer to tell it to perform tasks,” said Reuters. But not everyone is happy about Saudi Arabia’s rapid development of AI, largely due to the country’s various human rights abuse allegations and treatment of women.

Other experts don’t believe the hype around Saudi tech. Saudi Arabia has a notably “shallow pool of AI expertise,” and many “warn of a global glut in computing capacity as governments and companies race to build data centers faster than they can profit from them,” said the Times. Crown Prince bin Salman has said that Humain’s goal is to handle 6% of the global AI workload — but this could be a stretch. Tech experts “can never say never,” John Dinsdale, a senior analyst for Synergy, said to the Times. “But I can’t imagine any circumstances that would enable Saudi Arabia to achieve 6% of the world’s AI compute capacity.”

‘The age of de-skilling’

Kwame Anthony Appiah at The Atlantic

With AI “going the way of Google — moving from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted — the anxiety has shifted, too, from apocalypse to atrophy,” says Kwame Anthony Appiah. The “term for it is unlovely but not inapt: de-skilling.” The “real puzzle isn’t whether de-skilling exists — it plainly does — but rather what kind of thing it is.” De-skilling is a “catchall term for losses of very different kinds: some costly, some trivial, some oddly generative.”

Read more

‘Australia is closing the money laundering loopholes the US keeps open’

Brett Erickson at The Hill

Australian “reforms will finally bring lawyers, accountants and real-estate agents under anti-money laundering supervision,” and the country is “closing the very loopholes the U.S. continues to defend,” says Brett Erickson. The U.S. is “going backward,” as “three pillars of America’s financial crime architecture were either suspended, delayed or gutted.” Australia’s “reforms show what accountability looks like: Regulate the gatekeepers, close the real-estate loopholes and make professional facilitators subject to the same anti-money laundering standards as banks.”

Read more

‘Women hold the key to ending polio for good’

Tunji Funsho at Time

The “most powerful force in the campaign” against African polio is “women vaccinators who go door to door — mothers who know every household,” says Tunji Funsho. Even in “places where women face barriers to participation, the trust they build within communities remains essential to reaching every child.” These “women aren’t just speaking about polio, they’re encouraging childhood vaccinations more broadly, promoting antenatal care, nutrition, maternal health, and supporting HIV testing.” It was “never just about polio.”

Read more

‘The NBA’s gambling scandal was utterly predictable — and other pro sports will be next’

Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

Sports leagues “spent years shunning gambling as a threat to their public image of integrity before embracing the siren call of big-time sports betting,” says Michael Hiltzik. They’ve “created a new underclass of gambling addicts while largely failing to fulfill their advocates’ assurances that state-sponsored and regulated gambling would produce a new, risk-free revenue stream.” Keeping their “image for integrity intact in this world of greedy and needy players and voracious gamblers is only going to get harder.”

Read more

We have endured the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble. And now, according to some experts, we may be in an AI bubble.

As of mid-October, Wall Street is “growing louder with warnings that the artificial intelligence trade may be overheating” following “months of record gains in AI-linked stocks and corporate spending,” said Yahoo Finance. Still, “some analysts argue the market’s strength reflects conviction, not complacency, and that the AI trade, while stretched, still has fundamental backing.”

Only time will tell which side is right when it comes to the potential AI bubble. But in the meantime, you can brush up on what exactly a bubble is — and what the consequences of one popping may be.

What is a stock market bubble?

A stock market bubble is a “significant run-up in stock prices without a corresponding increase in the value of the businesses they represent,” said The Motley Fool. Usually, this is driven by “highly optimistic market behavior,” said Investopedia. Then, when investors’ sky-high levels of optimism start to wane as they realize their hopes are not panning out, they all begin to sell off, sending stock prices tumbling and causing an abrupt contraction in the market.

Take, for example, the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s: In the lead-up to this bubble bursting, “investors piled into any stock of just about any company with a website, regardless of its share price, revenue or profit outlook,” said U.S. News & World Report. Later, “when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the Nasdaq Composite Index dropped nearly 80% over the next two years.”

What are the signs of a bubble?

Surging stock prices do not necessarily indicate a bubble — assuming they are bolstered by a company’s strong performance. If, however, there is a mismatch between the information and the valuation, that could suggest a bubble. “During the height of market bubbles, prices often continue to rise even following bad news, such as earnings misses or analyst downgrades,” said U.S. News & World Report.

Bubbles frequently emerge from stocks that carry a “compelling story” with a “promise to transform the world,” such as the advent of the internet, said Bankrate. This usually leads to widespread enthusiasm, with bubbles “marked by large groups of novice or amateur investors who believe experienced investors are behind the curve or simply just don’t ‘get’ the new market paradigm,” said U.S. News & World Report.

How can a bubble affect investors?

While bubbles can benefit investors who get in early, “many investors end up losing a lot of money during market bubbles because they don’t start buying until asset prices are already significantly overvalued,” said U.S. News & World Report.

The effects of a bubble are not necessarily isolated to those who chose to invest, either. When a bubble bursts, it tends to precede a “downturn in the economy, creating a recession,” said Bankrate, which can lead to declining portfolio values and even layoffs.