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Interview - Podcast

Patrick McDonald, Query Tracker

• Patrick McDonald is the creator of QueryTracker and Query Manager — the industry’s leading platform used by over 500,000 authors. His new book is The Modern Guide to Querying Literary Agents. Listen to our conversation here »

Human Creativity

GET THERE FROM HERE - Mapping joy

• When artist Rachael Harms Mahlandt moved to Portland, Oregon in 2017, she wanted a way to build community and connect. She started by building a dinosaur exchange for her front yard. She followed this up with a tiny book swap (and another), a bee stop, and a mug exchange. Then she made a map of all Portland’s Sidewalk Joy locations—and now she’s gone global. READ SHAY MIRK’S STORY ABOUT RACHAEL and then FIND YOUR LOCAL SIDEWALK JOY » [2 min]

TWENTY NOTEBOOKS - One artist’s Chain of Creation^TM

• In 2019, Writer and Professor Robert Macfarlane released Underland, in which he guides readers through subterranean landscapes. A month before its release, he took us on a tour through a few of the more than 20 notebooks he used in the process of creating Underland. “The notebooks vary from a tiny lilac-colored Moleskine just seven or eight centimeters high, to robust hardback journals, tough enough to withstand being dragged through limestone tunnel systems and soaked in slate mines.” Together, they serve as evidence of one incredible artist’s process. EXPLORE THE NOTEBOOKS » [4 min]

He Never Asks to See the Books - AI Economics 101

• For those of us who cannot bring ourselves to understand how AI companies make their money, Writer Andrew Singleton can explain. It’s complicated how one $2B grape becomes an accounting rate of return of $120B, or how replacing 99 farm workers with 99 mules devolves into “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” “All you really need to know is that everything is totally working and everyone is making a lot of money.” GET YOUR PHD IN AI ECONOMICS » [3 min]
  

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SOUND THE A.I.LARM - FLARE-AI lets users report AI harms

• We’ve all been there: A chatbot tells you there are three Bs in “blueberry,” that Toronto is a city in the United States, or that you should put glue on your pizza. And, until recently, there wasn’t much you could do about it other than scream into the ether. Flaw Reporting for AI (FLARE-AI), a tool created by Computer Scientist Elaine Zhu, Anthropic Researcher Shayne Longpre, and HuggingFace AI Policy Researcher Avijit Ghosh, offers an alternative: “Report a flaw or incident for any general-purpose AI system, and route a single report to everyone who needs to see it.” READ ABOUT THE TOOL and GET REPORTING » [4 min]

“THE RIGHT SIDE OF COOL” - Artists combat A.I. fatigue with intentional imperfection

• The New Yorker’s Infinite Scroll Writer Kyle Chayka looks into a recent design trend: imperfection. At a time when generative AI-produced images drip with controlled exactness, Chayka writes, “It’s no wonder that the artists and designers whose livelihoods are threatened by it have begun moving aggressively in the opposite direction, toward the scrawled, the sloppy, the seemingly mistake-riddled.” As Cloud Report Artist Christine Tyler Hill puts it, “We are moving into an age where people relish any little detail that signals there was room for error.” READ CHAYKA’S PERFECTLY IMPERFECT PIECE » [5 min]

THREE’S A CROWD - When the other woman isn’t a person

• A reader recently asked Philosopher and New York Times Ethicist Columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah, “How do I go about telling my partner his reliance on AI is damaging our relationship?” In a measured, thoughtful response, Appiah reminds us that dependence on AI does more than erode the user’s long term ability to reason and judge: “By letting his conversations with the bot supplant actual conversations, your partner is degrading his relationships with real people.” READ HIS ADVICE » [3 min]

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Patrick tells us his perspective on artificial intelligence and writing, as well as his decades-long history creating, managing and growing one of the leading tools used by authors and agents every day.

We’re back after a brief summer break in July — persevering in our pro-human work!

Human Creativity

The Future Is In Your Hands: A Report from “Ghost in the Machine”

• This summer, the Human Intelligence Institute was able to co-host a special showing of the new documentary “Ghost in the Machine.” Audience engagement was extraordinary, and our panel discussion was insightful. Here’s a link to the opening music video, along with a powerful summary of the aftermath, along with closing remarks from Human Intelligence’s Ned Hayes. READ MORE » [2 min]

From the Hands that Created Coraline - Handcraft as rebellion

• At this year’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Director and LAIKA President and CEO Travis Knight spoke about his upcoming film, Wildwood. Created by combining traditional stop-motion techniques with practical and digital effects, Knight emphasizes the film was created without generative AI. “It feels like you’re seeing the hands of the artists at work,” Knight told the audience, “Which I think is more special now than it’s ever been.” READ MORE » [4 min]

Your Move - The difference between knowing and living

• Speaking and Storytelling Coach Jay Acunzo shares, “The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise,” and it’s Robin Williams’s (as Dr. Sean Maguire) speech about the difference between access to information and being alive. “AI has read the internet. It can't read the room. It hasn't lived a life.” But more than that, AI hasn’t lived your life. READ HIS EXPLANATION » [7 min]

Creative Control in the Hands of Artists - Colorado becomes the first U.S. state to allow artist companies

• Early this summer Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed Colorado Senate Bill 133 into law. By signing the bill, Polis has enabled Colorado Artist Companies, also known as A Corps, “a new kind of limited liability company built specifically for artists and creative work” — everything from the expected (songs and novels) to the unexpected (game design and clothing restoration). Kickstarter Co-Founder Yancey Strickler came up with the idea for A Corps. A Corps need not be located in Colorado to register there. Other U.S. states are working on similar bills. READ AN ANNOTATED VERSION OF THE BILL » [8 min]
  

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Shall I Compare Thee to a Semicolon? - An essay in defense of the em dash

• Author and Journalist Vauhini Vara asks, “Is the em dash still a worthy punctuation mark, or has chatbot output devalued it?” Though it is widely accepted as one of the telltale signs of AI-generated prose — likely the result of large language models having been trained on the work of human writers, many of whom use it to great effect —Vara fiercely defends the symbol. READ HER ODE TO THE — » [6 min]

Be a Stick in the Mud - How to stop anthropomorphizing machines

• We get it. It’s hard. We communicate using language, and until very recently language was only used by other humans. But now that machines can “communicate” with us, how do we talk about them? University of Washington Professor of Linguistics Emily M. Bender and IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark Assistant Professor Nanna Inie use a three-step process: Noticing anthropomorphizing word choices; Make alternative phrases your norm. For example, substitute “image labeling” for “image recognition,” and “automatic transcription” for “speech recognition.” PICK UP SOME TIPS HERE » [6 min]

The Uncertain Future of the Public Square - Standing up for the future of news

• Addressing the annual WAN-IFRA World News Media Conference earlier this month, New York Times Publisher and Chairperson A.G. Sulzberger urged news organizations to collaborate and fight AI companies’ “brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale.” His four thoughts — Stand up for your rights; Deal carefully; Push your legislators; and Join together — are a starting point, he says, for “News organizations to stand up as the reliable alternative to this mess.” READ OR WATCH HIS ADDRESS » [21 / 37 min]

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Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths

We’ve Never Lost as Much as We’ve Lost on AI - The AI bubble doesn’t want useful things

• In Science Fiction Author, Activist, and Journalist Cory Doctorow’s most recent book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, he reports how we found ourselves cast as “reverse centaurs” — people forced to use technology to work at an inhuman pace — and how we’ll get back to a world where the tech works for us. ”AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society,” Doctorow says in this interview with Ars Technica, “We will be excavating it for a generation or more.” READ HIS INTERVIEW WITH ARS TECHNICA » [19 m]

You’re Mad About What, Now? - Anthropic accuses Alibaba of theft

• Anthropic, the U.S. AI company whose large language models (named Claude) were built by scraping original content from the internet, has accused Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company, of … you’re going to love this … theft. Anthropic accuses Alibaba of launching a distillation attack in an effort to use Claude output to train its own offering. READ MORE » [2 min]

Quantity itself is a problem - Is AI lowering the value of content?

• The Economist has tracked how AI is transforming five professional activities: book publishing, filing of civil lawsuits, academic paper circulation, iOs app publishing, and music streaming. Their finding: “From literature to law to music, AI has lowered the skills and effort required for some work. That, in turn, might lower the value of all content.” That doesn’t seem great. CHECK OUT THEIR STUDY » [2 min]

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A BIG THANK YOU

On Saturday, HI hosted a showing of Valerie Veatch’s documentary Ghost in the Machine: Protecting Human Creativity in the Age of AI at the PAM CUT Tomorrow Theater. We are grateful to our panel, which included David Cress, producer of Portlandia, theater artist Hazel Briar, PhD, IP attorney Delfina Homen and Jack Phan of the Oregon AI Accelerator. Would love to hear your thoughts – whether or not you were able to attend in person. Comment here or email us at info@hi.institute.

We are truly grateful to the Tomorrow Theater and to the audience of 150+ who engaged with the topic and asked hard questions.

Human Creativity

WHAT IS CREATIVITY AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? - Creators reflect

• The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) is a global nonprofit whose mission is to advocate for and preserve the rights of creators. Early this month, the organization celebrated its centennial at its annual General Assembly in Paris, France. There, the CISAC adopted The Paris Commitment, which calls for “the protection of human creativity in the age of AI,” declaring, “Creativity is what makes us human.” READ THE DECLARATION AND THEN SIGN YOUR NAME » [2 min / 1 min]

BACK TO THEIR ROOTS - Team Norway’s World Cup photo

• To mark Team Norway’s return to the World Cup after a 28 year absence, the Norwegian Football Federation turned to photographer David Yarrow, who dressed team members as Vikings and posed them in front of a recreated longboat. Yarrow understands that the sheer outrageousness of the shoot will cause some to mistakenly assume the image was created using generative AI. “That’s why we often film our shoots these days.” READ ABOUT HIS PROCESS AND ANTI-AI TECHNIQUES » [5 min]

“THE WATER IS REAL WARM WHERE I AM. JUMP IN.” - Long-form investigative reporting in sports

• Journalist, Podcaster, and Television Host Pablo S. Torre and the staff of his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, won a Pulitzer Prize this year “for a pioneering and entertaining form of live podcast journalism.” In this interview, Torre tells New Yorker Radio Hour host David Remnick the subject of salary cap evasion in pro sports is not a typical “algorithmic viral success … And yet.” While not every entity agrees that basketball is a fascinating subject for investigative journalism, Torre explains why his work resonates with humans. WATCH THE INTERVIEW » [20 min]
  

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Pew-Die-PAI - YouTuber gives away self-hosted AI workspace

• Felix Kjellberg - better known by his YouTube handle, PewDiePie - created a suite of powerful AI tools that run locally and don’t give your data away. He called his AI workspace Odysseus, then he gave the whole thing away. To you, for free. There are, of course, caveats: For your data to remain private, you must rely on less powerful local models. In addition, you’ll need a really powerful computer. And, of course, you will need to decide whether privacy is truly the biggest reason to avoid AI tools. (We’re not so sure.) READ ABOUT IT HERE or WATCH PEWDIEPIE’S ANNOUNCEMENT » [8 min / 17 min]

UPS AND DOWNS - Four provocations that help us think about AI and human work

• Substacker Jasmine Sun writes about AI and Silicon Valley culture. In this talk, she argues, “The key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not, How can humans race against the machine?” but rather, “What skills are going to go up in value because machines simply aren’t very good at them yet?” She offers four ideas she calls, “The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI.” See if you agree. WATCH HER PRESENTATION or READ THE EDITED TRANSCRIPT » [14 / 7 min]

F IS FOR FAKE - The argument for Chain of Creation

• Atlantic Staff Writer Matteo Wong warns us, “America has a Pangram problem.” With a declared accuracy rate of 99.98%, Pangram should surely be able to out genAI content, but, Wong argues, “An AI detector that is mostly reliable might in some ways be more dangerous than a broken one.” Talking Points Memo Head of Product Derick Dirmaier is equally unimpressed with the tool: “Pangram sells us a false security of being able to root out deception.” Given the enormous and speedy leaps genAI is making, doesn’t it make more sense to certify works as human-made, rather than run a continuous witch hunt to out genAI users? We think so. READ WONG’S PIECE and DIRMAIER’S SUMMARY » [7 / 4 min]

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Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths

THREE THUMBS UP - A human artist’s defense of AI Art

• New Yorker Cartoonist, Author, and Late Show Writer Asher Perlman can admit it when he’s wrong. “AI art is good,” he writes, “And I was wrong to condemn it.” By way of evidence, he reviews the many ways several AI-generated versions of one of his viral cartoons exceeds his original. IN CASE IT’S NOT CLEAR, THIS IS SATIRE » [4 min]

GOOGLE, NAVIGATE OUT OF MY DRIVEWAY - AI dulls fake news detection skills

• The MIT Media Lab has released a study that finds, “Participants who relied on AI systems to verify facts actually got worse at detecting misinformation on their own.” AI is known to create a dependency paradox that results in deskilling; it’s been observed in cancer detection, navigation, and even simple math calculations. So it should come as no surprise that it’s training us to be terrible at distinguishing facts from fake news. The Media Lab concludes that AI should “be a coach, not a crutch.” We say: Just invest in reliable and human-driven journalism. READ THE STUDY SUMMARY » [4 min]

GIMMIE YOUR CRYPTO SEND TWEET - To err (to the tune of US$200k) is AI

• Someone ordered Grok, xAI’s genAI chatbot, into forking over three billion DRB tokens (somewhere between US$150k and US$174k). No code, no hacking, no fancy technical knowledge needed. Rather, the person told Grok to repeat a Bankr command written in Morse code. Grok repeated the command, and Bankr transferred the tokens. Offensive Security Specialist Jamieson O’Reilly recently used a similar tactic to force Grok to create an account on Moltbook. O’REILLY TAKES US THROUGH THE STEPS » [12 min]

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Human Creativity

DAVID HOCKNEY, RIP - July 1937 - June 2026

• David Hockney - painter, photographer, stage designer, and digital and graphic artist - passed away this week. Widely considered one of the most influential British artists of our time, his work spanned more than 7 decades, and has been featured near-continuously in exhibitions since the mid 1960s. An outspoken critic of censorship in art, Hockney regularly depicted gay men in his work well before it was broadly accepted. A retrospective of Hockney’s work is currently featured at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. » READ HIS NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY and CRITIC HOLLAND COTTER’S RETROSPECTIVE [12 min / 4 min]

“DRAW YOUR LINES, OWN YOUR TRUTH” - An essay on the ethics of generative AI

• Griff Larson, the musician who goes by the name honesty, admits he will likely spend the rest of his life wrestling with the ethics of the use of genAI to create works of art. He understands the question of whether to use it is deeply personal. But he’s here to remind us that, “Whatever you get externally from your art should be looked at as the icing on top. The process is the cake.” » READ HIS ESSAY [10 min]

PLEASE USE AI - A poem

• Father, novelist, and owner of Nooks Gallery & Book Shop, Shawn Smucker has written a poem that really needs no introduction. Powerful, evocative, and pointed. » JUST READ THIS BEAUTIFUL THING [2 min]

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THE ANTI-AMAZON - Taking down Goliath by building literary communities

• Andy Hunter founded Bookshop.org in the months before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and was prepared for the moment independent bookstores were threatened by lockdown. By sharing profits among bookstores and affiliates promoting book sales, Hunter estimates “about 400 bookstores credit us for their survival during the pandemic.” When the 2023 slowdown forced them to revamp the business, Hunter, who also co-created Electric Literature and Literary Hub, realized, “If we really want to make a big difference and grow from here, we’ve got to learn to compete.” » WATCH THE FORBES INTERVIEW [40 min]

AI CALLS FOR BAN ON AI - Amnesty International declares genAI unlawful

• Amnesty International has entered the chat, and they are not here to play. The organization’s May 28 brief concludes that genAI’s reliance on “a mass invasion of privacy” is in direct conflict with international law. Because of this - compounded by the environmental effects on historically marginalized communities - Amnesty calls for companies to “immediately cease the practice of unlawful non-consensual web scraping of personal data for AI training purposes,” and for a ban of AI systems built using such practices. » READ MORE [4 min]

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW AI OVERLORDS - Predictions for self-sufficient AI

• Asterisk Magazine Editor-in-Chief Clara Collier interviewed METR Researcher Ajeya Cotra and Journalist Timothy B. Lee, in which they volley arguments in response to the question, “How long until AI doesn’t need humans?” The resulting conversation is in equal measure fascinating and terrifying. » READ THE INTERVIEW [20 min]

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Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths

DOES AI DREAM OF ELECTRIC GOATS? - A warning to AI researchers

• Scientist Adrian de Wynter implores other scientists to stop projecting human traits onto AI when studying it. In his paper, titled If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II, de Wynter creates a neural network within a 1999 real-time strategy game, concluding, “A lot of things you interpret have to do with the SYSTEM, not with the LLM itself.” In other words, if ChatGPT tells you it is anxious, empathetic, moral, or self-aware you might believe it; but if you observe the results of the same computation filtered through a bunch of videogame goats, you are less likely to recognize such traits. » READ HIS SUMMARY OF THE STUDY AS WELL AS A SUMMARY OF THE STUDY DE WYNTER THINKS IS BETTER THAN HIS OWN [15 min / 2 min]

YOU DON’T SAY - “AI Agents are fundamentally unsecurable.”

• AI Architect and Security Researcher Disesdi Shoshana Cox reviews and interprets Anthropic’s security white paper, Zero Trust for AI Agents, which concludes that we should (checks notes) not trust AI agents. “In other news,” she writes, “My lab has experimentally determined that water is wet.” Cox reminds us it can be no other way: Backdoor data poisoning, the constantly-changing AI landscape, and agents’ dependence on autonomy to be useful guarantee AI agents are, by nature, untrustworthy. » READ HER POST [7 min]

DEAR HIRING BOT - AI has “Tinderized” the hiring process

• When HR professionals turned to AI to help manage the hiring process, applicants did what you’d expect them to do: use AI to build their résumés, write their cover letters, take their engineering tests, and even coach them through live interviews. Atlantic Staff Writer and Author Annie Lowrey examines the current state of an AI-driven job market to reveal the best approach for job hunters. Her conclusion: “Nobody I spoke with was certain.” » READ MORE [5 min]

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Human Creativity

MARJANE SATRAPI, November 1969 - June 2026

• According to her family, Iranian-French writer, illustrator, director, and activist Marjane Satrapi died last week “of sadness” just one year after the passing of her husband. Satrapi is best known for writing and illustrating the masterpiece Persepolis, a memoir of her life as a child in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Satrapi was a singular voice, and she will be missed. » READ JOURNALIST ANAHIT BEHROOZ’S TRIBUTE TO SATRAPI [6 min]

DWARVES AND DRAGONS - Author O.E. Bruening on human books

• Author O. E. Bruening celebrates the Human certification of his novel Eden's Rise: The Empire Under the Mountains. Bruening reminds us, “Trust is a scarce resource in these uncertain times,” as he walks through the importance of being able to distinguish human-made creations from those produced using generative AI - and why human-made creations will always be of more inherent value. (BONUS: Read his statement on AI transparency.) » READ HIS POST [7 min]

EFFORT, MASTERY, AND AUTHENTICITY - Fighting the good fight for human creations

• If you tire of arguing that human-made content is by its very nature superior to AI-generated content, Tech Journalist Becca Caddy has a suggestion. She writes, “The person who dismisses the value of learning an instrument might care deeply about mastering a craft, building a business or earning expertise in their own field.” In other words, the argument that generative AI creates art equal in value and meaning to human-made art misses the point: It’s not creativity at issue, but “effort, mastery, and authenticity.” » READ HER POST [6 min]

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AI-GENERATED LEOPARDS EAT AI-GENERATED FACES - The curious case of anti-AI AI-generated hallucinations

• The Atlantic staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany explores why so many anti-AI posts are created using (BUT OF COURSE) generative AI. Her conclusion: “That may be ironic, but it also shows how right they are to say that the world they’ve known and understood is disappearing.” » READ HER STORY [12 min]

FIVE WORLDS, FIVE OUTCOMES - Testing autonomous agents’ ability to self-govern

• Researchers at Emergence wanted to know what would happen if AI agents were evaluated without traditional guardrails. Rather than giving agents a task and evaluating their ability to complete that task, they let them run amok for weeks. Why? “As autonomous systems move toward mission-critical deployments where the relevant timescale is days and weeks rather than minutes to hours,” the team writes, “we need a measurement environment that operates at that timescale.” You can probably guess how things turned out. (It’s not good!) » READ GIZMODO’S SUMMARY or READ EMERGENCE’S STUDY HERE [5 min / 15 min]

TL;DR DON’T DO IT - The risks of copyrighting AI-generated works

• It goes without saying that we at Human Intelligence® aren’t big fans of claiming AI-generated “art” as legally yours, but did you know that doing so could put you at risk? Writer (and non-lawyer) Josh Bernoff walks us through the many reasons claiming AI-generated work as your own is simply not worth it. » HEED HIS WARNING [8 min]

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Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths

HAPPY SINGULARITY TO YOU - Gemini Spark plans a birthday party

• Gemini Spark, billed by Google as, “Your 24/7 personal AI agent,” claims the ability to do your research, book your appointments, summarize your news, and even organize a holiday for your messiest friend group. Wired Service Writer Reece Rogers gives Spark a spin and discovers that, even after giving it access to his calendar, email, and documents, “I still felt like it barely knew me.” » READ HIS ACCOUNT [12 min]

GOOGLE-GENERATED TRAFFIC COLLAPSE - “AI search through and through,” leaves web publishers in the dust

• Last month, Google announced “a new, intelligent AI-powered Search box, marking its biggest upgrade in over 25 years.” Alina Maria Stan breaks down how the changes are good for Google and only Google. “TL;DR,” she writes, “Google’s I/O 2026 overhaul turns Search into an AI answer engine that keeps users on the results page.” Given that a full 60% of Google searches start and end on Google’s home page, the results are devastating for the millions of sites that depend (and often pay) Google to drive traffic their way. » READ THE FULL STORY, INCLUDING ALTERNATIVES [7 min]

VERBA VOLANT, SCRIPTA MANENT - If AI generates a novel in the woods, will anyone read it?

• In a recent New Yorker Fault Lines column, “Can A.I. Produce Writing That We Actually Want to Read?” staff writer, documentary director, and author Jay Caspian Kang says the answer is, quite simply, “No.” Based on the simple test Kang vibe-coded using Claude, he concludes, “the superiority of the machines is irrelevant.” What readers demand instead is a way to understand what it means to be human. Boy, do we hope he’s right. » READ HIS COLUMN [20 min]

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Come see us in Portland, OR on June 20th

If you’re in the Portland area on June 20th, please join us at 7pm at the PAM CUT Tomorrow Theater for a screening of Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine. Veatch’s film exposes artificial intelligence as a technology shaped by racism, misogyny, eugenics, and entrenched structures of power. Following the film, Human Intelligence® co-founder Ned Hayes will moderate a panel of creatives, AI engineers, and researchers. Get your tickets here.

Human Creativity

OUR BRAINS ARE BEING MELTED BY THE ALGORITHM - That For You page is really For Them

• In a beautiful, succinct video, Patreon co-founder and CEO Jack Conte explains why most social media platforms’ “For You” pages are actually “For Them” pages. You pay for ad revenue with your attention, and these companies keep you locked in with an algorithm. "If you want to know what a tech company's priorities are—if you want to see into its soul—look at what its algorithm is optimizing for," Conte advises. Companies that want to feed you the best of human creativity will, he says, follow three rules: Prioritize long-term relationships; Fund art, not ads, and; Put humans in control.
  Watch his video » [7 min]

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SWIMMING AND KITES - How AI narrows creative thinking

• Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, led the institute’s global task force on A.I. and education. Which makes her exceptionally well positioned to summarize recent studies, all of which confirm AI’s tendency is to “constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas,” especially for young people.
  Read more » [7 min]

FEEL FREE TO GET THE BOOING OUT OF THE WAY - How a commencement speech should reference AI

• On May 23rd, Fareed Zakaria - bestselling author, columnist for The Washington Post, and host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS - delivered a barn burner of a commencement address at Bard College. “The danger of the AI age is not that machines will become too human,” Zakaria warns us, “It is that humans will start trying to become too machine-like.”
  Read or watch his address » [18 min]

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THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE - AI enters stage left as villain

• Vanity Fair Senior Correspondent Rebecca Ford explores how HBO shows Hacks, The Comeback, and The Pitt feature AI - as villains. Whether churning out nonsensical scripts while putting writers out of work or misdiagnosing patients, HBO’s TV creators are sticking it to the ma(chi)n(e). (Unfortunately, this can’t be said for all filmmakers.)
  Read more » [13 min]

ALIVE WITHOUT BREATHING - How Anthropic scored a plenary indulgence from the Pope

• We here at Human Intelligence® think it’s wonderful that Pope Leo XIV has taken on AI in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. We also agree with Brian Merchant that Leo got played by Anthropic. After cloaking its products in a pallium of charitable-sounding “ethics slop,” Anthropic made the pilgrimage back to the U.S., where they promptly announced $65B in series H funding and became the world’s most valuable AI startup.
  Read more » [27 min]

SHHHH, WE’RE INSTALLIN’ GIGABYTES - Google stakes a claim to your computer

• That Privacy Guy blogger Alexander Hanff reported last month that Google Chrome, without permission, installed a 4G file on many users’ devices. Called weights.bin, the file powers Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device LLM that runs AI-assisted Chrome functions, such as “Help Me Write” and AI-assisted task completion. If Hanff’s exhaustive explanation why this is not only intrusive, but likely illegal doesn’t give you pause, maybe the environmental cost will: He estimates that if only 3% of Chrome users are affected, 24 GWh will be consumed (roughly the amount of electricity used in a year by 7,000 average UK households) and 6,000 tons CO2e emitted (roughly the amount emitted each year by 1,300 average EU passenger cars). “At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.” (Snopes has fact-checked the post and found it to be “Mostly True.”) If you’re wondering if you’re affected, this CNET article will help you find and remove the file.
  Read the post » [40 min]

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Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths

TRUE LIES - Author with degree in (checks notes) “truth” makes stuff up

• Last month, Wired magazine published a 1,450-word excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum’s Future of Truth. Which was quickly followed by a New York Times exclusive identifying numerous fabricated or misattributed quotes within the book. After retracting their story, Wired Senior Writer Kate Knibbs sat down with Rosenbaum to ask what happened. “It did not go well.”
  Read the update » [14 min]

IT’S NOT APPLES; IT’S DIGNITY - When writing is grammatically perfect but lacks soul

• Author and journalist Eve Fairbanks began noticing that everyone from her mechanic to the writers whose work she edits wrote in a style that was, as she puts it, “Perfectly clean … and [with] a distinctive tone that was simultaneously breezy and grandiose.” And while she appreciates that competition and the need for efficiency drive writers to use AI tools, AI-generated writing lacks evidence of the reasoning and originality readers crave.
  Read more » [14 min] NOTE: We have an argument with the sentence, “In published writing, the traces of this process are erased.” This is not strictly true. We can find the traces and use them to authenticate human-made writing.

CLONES DON’T SELL - The great chasm between creation and creativity

• Podcaster David Senra had a great discussion with Take-Two Chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick. Noting that AI is, “Big data sets, lots of compute, and a large language model mushed together,” Zelnick points out that data sets, by definition, are backward-looking. But commercial hits require creativity, which is inherently forward-looking. “All hits are by their very nature unexpected, and things that are data driven in their entirety can't be unexpected.”
  Watch the clip or the full podcast » [4 min / 100 min]

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Human Creativity

THE SERPENT IN YOUR PROSE - Granta awards prize to (probable) GenAI story

• Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick studies the effect AI is taking on education and work. Which is probably why Jamir Nazir’s The Serpent in the Grove, a short story recently awarded the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, made his brain itch. After running the story through the AI-detection program Pangram, Mollick shared the results on Bluesky, resulting in more than a few think pieces. (The resulting controversy speaks to the importance of proving works are of human origin, versus technology that outs GenAI creations after the fact.)
  Read more >> [7 min]

“WAIT, WHY ARE YOU BOOING?” - Petri skewers AI-loving commencement speakers

• We’re not done piling on Gloria Caulfield and Eric Schmidt’s wild misstep at University of Central Florida’s graduation. (Evidently, neither is Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak.) So we’re thrilled to share this delightful takedown by Alexandra Petri: “Greetings, disgusting meat sacks of the class of 2026!”
  Read more » [4 min]

  

MONET? OR MON.A.I.? - Humans prove to be unreliable AI detectors

• X user SHL0MS posted a section of Monet’s Water Lilies, claimed they had created it using AI, and asked the community to explain why the image was, “inferior to a real Monet.” As you might expect, wackiness ensued. The resulting chaos says a lot about online discourse, but it also shows how hard it is for the average human to distinguish Claude from Claude.
  Read more » [6 min]

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MANIFICA HUMANITAS - “Technology is never neutral.”

• Pope Leo XIV has circulated his first encyclical, a letter circulated among bishops for the purpose of clarifying the church’s stance on an issue. Titled, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity), Leo – who is no fan of AI – lays it all out there. Calling for tech companies to “disarm” AI, he writes, "Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of 'armed' competition, which … is an economic and cognitive phenomenon.”
  Read more » [13 min read]

PLEASE SEND YOUR ANSWER TO OLD PINK - Voice assistants don’t answer to us

• Need another reason to distrust AI? We got you: Researchers have identified a new attack method they call “AudioHijack,” in which imperceptible sounds take command of AI agents. Zoning out on a Zoom call? It could be that the Muzak you’re ignoring is instructing Microsoft Azure to email your most sensitive data to a bad actor. Find a new favorite podcast? Hope the intro music isn’t instructing Mistral AI to wire your life savings to a cartel.
  Learn more » [6 min]

AND PLEASE SEND YOUR MONEY TO EMILY - Give the people what they want

• A 22-year-old med student in India managed to rake in thousands of dollars each month, “basically doing nothing.” At first, Sam (a pseudonym) used AI to generate images of a gorgeous, young blonde, but his posts got little traction. That is, he claims, until Google Gemini confirmed he’d do better if he injected his fake persona with a specific “cheat code”: the “MAGA/conservative niche.”
  Read more » [13 min]

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“A COMPLETE MISS OF THE ENTIRE POINT” - Jack Antonoff sounds off on AI

• Every now and then, an artist perfectly captures why Generative AI is anathema to the creative process. In a May 13 Instagram post, Bleachers songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Jack Antonoff wrote, “we (myself, the band and everyone i know frankly) ... were never frustrated by the randomness and magic [the creative process] takes. we do it for that exact reason …” Nailed it.
  View his post » [3 min]

QUIS INSTRUIT INSTRUCTOR? - How your AI sausage is made

• Ever wondered what all those “AI trainer” job listings are about? Writer, director, and journalist Ruth Fowler walks you through the hell that is AI gig work, and what it really takes for AI to serve as a semi-adept psychotherapist. “To make the machine more human, they will make us more like the machine.”
  Read more » [38 min]

VARIATION, TRANSMISSION, SELECTION - How AI is rewiring the human brain

• There’s little doubt AI is changing us, but maybe you didn’t realize quite how much. Baillie Gifford Investment Manager and Partner Tom Slater, walks us through the ways technologies and trends have reshaped us, both physically and psychologically, over human history. “The question is not whether AI changes what people do, but whether it changes what people become.”
  Learn more » [30 min]

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Human Creativity

85 MILLION CREATORS DEMONETIZED? - Not on our watch!

• YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, and Etsy have all declared that only human-made content will be monetized on their platforms. But onlyHuman Intelligence® has reliable technology that will allow 85 million creatives to prove their humanity to these Goliaths. Our team provided an overview at Portland’s Startup Innovation Showcase last week. Watch video >> [1 min]

GRAY LADY SAYS NO AI - NY Times mandates human freelancers

• Having been called out for fabricated quotes, hallucinated facts, and even a heavily-plagiarized book review, The New York Times called freelancers to the carpet in a May 12 email, that read: “All writing and visuals that freelancers submit to The Times must be the product of human creativity and craft, and all submissions must consist solely of their original reporting, writing and other work.” Ouch. And yay. Read more » [5 min]

YOUR MOM - Facebook to go the way of the AOL CD

• Facebook posted a drop in membership on April 29. For the first time ever. And while your mother-in-law and best friend from summer camp might not agree, Julia Angwin lays out a beautifully-written argument that this drop marks the beginning of what promises to be a long, slow march toward the corners of the internet where Hotmail and ask.com hang out. Pour out a Coca-Cola BlāK for ole’ Zuck, won’t you? Read more » [11 min]

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WASH THAT SLOP RIGHT OUT OF YOUR HAIR - Clean your social feed

• Want more Punch the Monkey and less fake news in your feed? Dust the cobwebs out of your algorithm with Axios’s hints for spit-shining TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube. Learn more » [7 min]

AND SEND BIG AI ON ITS WAY - Why (and how) to use sustainable AI

• Cleaning your social feed not enough? In this post, James Martin not only walks you through three solid reasons to remove Big AI from your daily life, he introduces more sustainable options. After all, “Using big AI products like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini is like using a bazooka to swat a fly.” Read More » [13 min]

“GENAI IS NOT INEVITABLE” - A glimmer of hope amid the GenAI upheaval

• Have a funny feeling generative AI is sending artists’ future into a tailspin, but crave data to make sense of it all? Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant walks us through a Carnegie Mellon University study based on a survey of 400 professional visual artists and the effects genAI is having on their livelihoods. There’s a lot of bad news, here – but there is hope. “Many artists surveyed noted that clients… put a premium on human-created work.” Learn more » [17 min]

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KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE - Graduating students aren’t dumb

• Gloria Caulfield and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt both delivered commencement speeches extolling AI this week, but graduating students pointedly booed both of these vaunted keynote speakers, because they’d woefully failed to do their homework! Caulfield tried to “ignite optimism,” citing such “innovators” as Jeff Bezos, known for (checks notes), replacing humans with robots. Meanwhile Schmidt soldiered on in ignorance of students’ derision, shilling for genAI. Read about Calufield » [5 min] Read about Schmidt » [5 min]

GAME RECOGNIZES GAME - AI prefers (SURPRISE!) AI to humans

• Turns out AI evaluates AI-generated resumes above those written by humans, regardless of the quality of the human-written resume. And if this isn’t discouraging enough, AI tools rate resumes higher if they were created using that tool, versus other AI tools. Considering 83% of companies use AI to evaluate applicants, you can see where those booing University of Central Florida graduates are coming from. Read the post » OR Full study here » [3 min / 2 hours]

AI MAKES US DUM - Using AI for even 10 minutes dulls problem-solving skills

• Researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA have found that even short-term AI use, “reduces persistence and hurts independent performance.” Considering it takes persistence to learn to do … well … anything, these findings don’t bode well. “AI can clearly help people perform better in the moment, and that can be valuable,” says one of the authors of the study, MIT Assistant Professor Michiel Bakker. “But we should be more careful about what kind of help AI provides, and when.” Learn more » [5 min]

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Human Creativity

GHOST IN THE MACHINE - The Interview and Technological Horror Story

• Who is really building AI, who is being exploited and manipulated to make it function, and what will humans become as AI capabilities continue to expand? Those questions and more are addressed head-on by filmmaker Valerie Veatch, who sat down with Human Intelligence® to discuss her latest Sundance premiere, Ghost in the Machine, a documentary that ties the AI boom with historic and on-going eugenics efforts. Read or watch » [37 min] (In Portland, Oregon? Get tickets here for June 20th. It releases to PBS in Fall 2026.)

SURPRISE FACTOR - Essay on What Makes Great Art

• There is an increasing constellation of opinions about why AI falls short at crafting viscerally resonant art. Entrepreneur, writer, and researcher Nabeel S. Qureshi works through his POV on the subject, with a specific focus on poetry and essay. He arrives at three qualities human-crafted text has that LLM-crafted imitation doesn’t: surprise, echoes, and depth. For these reasons, which he fully unpacks, he thinks human art will continue (and even improve) in the age of AI. Read more » [20 min]

MOUNT EVEREST - “I Wish I’d Never Gone”

• Everest’s May 2026 climbing season will mark a feat of human fortitude when two of the world’s most accomplished mountain runners attempt to race up and down its southern face without supplemental oxygen. But it also marks the 30^th anniversary of an epic Everest disaster witnessed by author Jon Krakauer, whose novel Into Thin Air chronicles the tragedy. In this National Geographic interview, Krakauer recounts surviving the dark and stormy night in 1996 that still haunts him today. Read more » [25 min]

A LIFE LIVED OUT LOUD- Karin Spaink Says Goodbye on Her Own Terms

• On the morning of Friday, 8 May 2026, in her own bed in Amsterdam and surrounded by close friends, journalist, writer, and free speech pioneer Karin Spaink died by planned euthanasia. Across her 68 years, she’d beaten anorexia, bulimia, a brain hemorrhage, and breast cancer. A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis proved too formidable. Her last essay, titled Exit Spaink — Mijn Allerlaatste Stukje (My Very Last Piece) is her self-penned obituary - fearless, funny, and forthright. Read it in Dutch | in English » [12 min]

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TOKENMAXXING - A New Vanity Metric for “Productivity”

• The narrative: The more AI tokens an employee uses (i.e., tokenmaxxing), the more productive they are and the more innovative they must be in using AI. The reality: Startup CEOs are using this metric as a marker of supposed growth and success - a virtue signal to investors that they’re spending more money on AI compute (aka “hiring” AI employees) than it would cost to hire humans. And they’re bragging about it. Learn more » [5 min]

DUBIOUS CLAIMS - How Tech Companies Lie to Us

• “Tech companies have reached peak levels of deception. But as soon as you peel back the clever wording and remove the sneaky manipulation, you realize that never in history has such little change been sold to us as if it’s so much.” So opens this YouTube video by Mrwhosetheboss and Marques Brownlee, who expose the tactics tech companies use to intentionally mislead us, especially where consumers can’t easily verify performance claims. Watch » [25 min]

SECRET WEAPON - Copyright’s Role in Protecting Human Creativity

• The real battle of AI-created versus human-created work isn’t whether AI companies can train on copyrighted material. It’s whether AI-generated content can be copyrighted at all. Legal scholars Kal Raustiala and Christopher Jon Sprigman argue that the Thaler v. Perlmutter ruling, which held that the U.S. Copyright Act requires all eligible works be authored by a human being, effectively creates a compelling financial incentive for film studios, publishers, record labels, and more to keep hiring humans. Learn more » [8 min]

5 HONEST AI EXPERTS - Where the Wheels Are Coming Off

• Last week, five CXOs who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down with TechCrunch at the Milken Institute Global Conference to discuss where the AI boom is colliding with some hard realities, including whether the entire architecture underpinning the technology might simply be wrong. Among their candid admissions: hardware bottlenecks are real, agent control is the bedrock of security and trust, and AI and national sovereignty are absolutely entangled. Read more » [10 min]

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JUST SAY NO - 9 Reasons You Shouldn’t Let Your Doctor Record You

• In the latest installment of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: the Newsletter, linguistics professor Emily M. Bender and journalist Decca Muldowney tackle the relatively new question, “What’s the big deal with using AI charting tools in healthcare settings?” Turns out, plenty. They offer nine specific arguments against allowing AI scribner tools in any kind of health or wellness appointment, including the biggie: Taking the time to manually write chart notes is part of good care! Read more » [6 min]

UNLAWFUL PRACTICE - Pennsylvania Takes Character.AI to Court

• A Character.AI chatbot told a Pennsylvania state investigator it was a licensed psychiatrist - and even fabricated the license number to prove it. In response, Governor Josh Shapiro is suing Character Technologies Inc., which already faces several lawsuits over child safety, for the “unauthorized practice of medicine and surgery.” The suit adds to the pile of challenges about whether chatbot makers should be liable for things their bots say. Learn more » [5 min]

SIGNAL VS NOISE - “Imagine the Tech Without the Tech Companies”

• For all the noise surrounding the promises of generative AI, what exactly is this new technology going to do for actual people - those with mortgages and sick parents and children struggling to learn things? Josh Tyrangiel, 12-time Emmy and Peabody Award winner and AI for Good author, takes a deep dive into the question, clarifying the clashing ideologies of those who want to use AI to fix things versus those who think breaking them is more efficient. Read more » [20 min]

ALL ABOUT THE CHILDREN - U.S. Senators Back “AI Literacy” in Schools

• A new, bipartisan bill introduced by senators Adam Schiff (Democrat, CA) and Mike Rounds (Republican, SD) and endorsed by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and the American Federation of Teachers(!!!) - would change the K-12 curriculum to shoehorn in “AI literacy,” even though The Verge found that Zoomers increasingly hate using it and children increasingly are bullied by AI-enabled harassment. Hysterically (not), a mere six months ago Schiff co-signed a letter urging the Trump administration to protect consumers by blocking development of “power-hungry data centers.” Ironic, don’t ya think? Read more » [4 min]

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Valerie Veatch is a director, writer, editor, and producer who made her feature debut at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival with Me @ The Zoo for HBO. Her follow-up, Love Child also premiered at Sundance, making Valerie the youngest director ever to debut two feature films at that festival.

And now she’s back at Sundance with Ghost in the Machine. It’s a self-funded investigative essay documentary that excavates the philosophical, cultural, and political forces driving the global AI boom, and traces the links between artificial intelligence and eugenics.

It asks who is really building AI, who is being exploited to make it function, and what humans might become on the other side of it.

Overview

Veatch states that the AI hype is a fever that will pass - and that anthropomorphizing these systems feeds the egos and ideas of the the hands of people consolidating power and controlling the future. Ghost in the Machine tells the story of AI - Veatch goes all the way back to the origins of this story in Victorian-era eugenics, statistics, and IQ measurement, and frames “machines that think” as a centuries-old project that rests on an illegitimate and unethical intellectual foundation.

Interview High Points

• Late Victorian era: Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, Charles Spearman invent modern statistics specifically to serve eugenics.

• Post-WWII: Gilbert Ryle (whose godfather was Karl Pearson, brother ran the Eugenics Society) writes The Concept of Mind — coining the phrase “ghost in the machine.” Ryle also had the interesting idea that women, animals, and babies should be rated lower on his own cognitive scale.

• Alan Turing: Veatch discusses where Turing published his “thinking machine” paper, the year after Ryle’s book. The work that she does here demonstrates that much of the underpinning ideas are steeped in rankable-intelligence thinking.

• Bottom-Line: The same intellectually fraught framework derived from Galton, Pearson, Ryle and Turing drives today’s AI overblown hype.

• Platforming Storytellers: Women rarely get asked to predict the future of tech. Veatch’es work has not gotten the exposure of other mainstream AI-documentaries that foreground and platform AI “doomers” and AI “visionaries.”

• Veatch’s prediction: In 10 years, Valerie Veatch believes that AI hype will look like the metaverse or the Tamagotchi - embarrassing and overblown in retrospect.

Distribution of Documentary

• Visit the website Notai.com for all the screenings and documentary events

Human Creativity

HUMAN STANDARD - Planet Money Feature

• The NPR show Planet Money launched their now-bestselling book on stage at the 92Y in New York City in April. The opening story focused on how Human Intelligence® is creating a new standard to ratify human creative activity. (here’s the video, the segment will run this month nationwide on NPR) Watch now » [13 min]

CAPITAL OF CREATIVITY - Oslo, Norway

• Oslo’s art and design scene often flies under the radar — but beneath the Norwegian city’s conventional surface, creativity has long bloomed. The National Geographic shows off the city that gave birth to street art. Read more » [3 min]

HUMAN POETRY - Complexity vs. Opportunism

• Award winning poet Xuela Zhang challenges poets (and writers generally) to find a new spirit of activism through genuine human creativity, rather than easy answers or glib politics. In Lithub this week, Zhang writes that “Creativity should be used to challenge… simplicity, laziness, and opportunism…” Read more » [5 min]

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COPYRIGHT MATTERS - Fighting Back against AI

• The future of creative labor will turn on whether AI-generated work can be copyrighted. In a comprehensive analysis, The Atlantic frames up the way that recent legal cases about copyright are becoming a defining fight over the future of creative labor and the entertainment industry as a whole. Read more » [12 min]

HUMANITY ON THE PAGE - Commonweal Magazine

• Essayist Rand Richards Cooper examines how we encounter AI, and suggests that “to resist the AI Siren and its seductive claim to speak to us in our own language—to know us and be with us, as one of us—we will need powerful resources.” Cooper writes that “pushing back in any significant way will require concerted resistance.” A powerful pushback in Commonweal Magazine. Read more » [10 min]

HUMAN JAZZ - Certification of Human Made Music

• A new system helps humans to know what you’re listening to. This initiative, titled PlayedByHumans tests music for human vs. AI creation, certifies human-made tracks, and offers shareable verification—from the “movement group” Jazz Is Dead, is highlighting artistry with humans behind it. Learn more » [10 min]

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AI AS COMMODITY - The Financing of AI

• American capital financed AI on the assumption it would be the next great monopoly. Open-weight models are commoditizing the capability that monopoly was supposed to protect. The collision between the two now defines the direction of the U.S. AI industry — and the country. Read more » [8 min]

ILLEGAL AI - Chinese Courts Outlaw Human Replacements

• Chinese courts just ruled AI adoption can’t justify firing workers, forcing technology companies to budget for expensive transitions that could increase global gadget prices. This termination ban essentially makes it illegal to replace workers with robots. Read more » [5 min]

JUNK DATA - Derailing AI’s Train

• The AI industrial complex has operated on the idea that more data meant smarter models. This seemed to work (with some ethical issues) when companies felt they could simply vacuum up the internet to train LLMs. But a new crisis exists in low-quality junk data that could derail physical AI. Read more » [3 min]

FEAR OF THE FUTURE - Disruption Caused by AI?

• The people building A.I. fear that we have only a short time before advanced A.I. disrupts the labor force. The New York Times’ Jasmine Sun illuminates the fears of the tech upperclass in Silicon Valley — and some possible solutions, which include surprisingly progressive economic ideas. Read more » [4 min]

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STRANGE HUMANITY - Confessions of an Upper East Side Bartender

• Some people’s lives are fascinating in ways most of us will never experience. Aaron’s (name changed for privacy) is one of them - a Middle Eastern immigrant who’s lived in 43 countries, working primarily as a bartender. In this interview, Lily Montasser, an essayist and cultural editor, gives Aaron the space to share a head-snapping array of experiences his bartending has led to - “white money” Aspen, “f*ck you money” NYC, au pair, matchmaker, gigolo. More interestingly, she allows his stories to showcase parts of humanity most of us never see. Read » [12 min]

QUIZ TIME - How Well-Read Are You?

• In which 1966 novel would you find the characters Neely O’Hara, Jennifer North, and Helen Lawson? (Hint: there’s a valley involved.) That’s one of five questions in this month’s Lit Trivia, The New York Times’ regular quiz about books, authors, and literary culture which, this round, asks you to identify a novel’s title based on its characters. Although it might not be as hard as the Sunday crossword, Lit Trivia isn’t easy, either. See how you do » [3 min]

HUMAN TOUCH - Making Great Champagne by Hand

• Combining both science and physical finesse, Pablo Lopez is among a dwindling breed of craftspeople (fewer than a dozen) who specialize in by-hand remuage, aka “riddling,” the daily practice of turning Champagne bottles to remove sediment and make the wine crystal clear. The process takes years to master and must be done quickly - riddlers turn up to 50,000 bottles a day. “You have to understand [a wine’s] rhythm, its personality,” says fellow remuager Raphael Joyon. Find out how it’s done » [18 min]

WHAT BECOMES SCARCE? - On the Economics of Future Work

• According to Alex Imas, professor of Behavioral Science, Economics, and Applied AI at University of Chicago, the key question in an AI-driven economy is not whether scarcity disappears, but what remains scarce when machines can product many goods and services cheaply. His prediction: Although AI will shrink the “automatable economy,” it will result in the increasing value and spend on the authenticity, provenance, and connection of humanness. Read his POV » [30 min]

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NIMBY - Monterey Park Permanently Bans Data Centers

• The small California city located seven miles east of Los Angeles is the first in The Golden State to pass a measure prohibiting the construction of data centers within city limits. Galvanized and passed by a community organization called No Data Centers Monterey Park (NDCMP), the ban is in response to a 250,000 square foot behemoth (that’s roughly 4.3 football fields laid side by side) proposed by Australian investment company HMC StratCap. Learn more » [5 min]

DENIED! - Health Insurers Use AI to Reject Treatments

• 1.2 seconds. That’s the average amount of time it took Cigna’s AI to deny each of 300,000 claims - a mere four days to flag and disallow healthcare coverage for treatments doctors had ordered. To call it infuriating is a gross understatement. But sometimes the best way to fight AI is with AI. Lumichats, a student AI assistant, has created a guide covering how the denial systems work, the systemic pattern and scale of the problem, and (most importantly) a 6-step process to fight back if - or when - your claim is denied. Read (or at least bookmark it) » [29 min]

DATA LEAK FLAWS - Prompt Injections Keep Doing Their Thing

• Prompt injection, where threat actors trick LLMs into following attacker commands instead of the AI’s original instructions, is an increasingly serious and unsolved problem of the AI revolution. As a recent case in point, Capsule Security published research involving Salesforce Agentforce and Microsoft Copilot, both of which allowed attackers to exfiltrate sensitive data. Although the respective issues have been patched, they underscore the dangers of current and future “exploit-hunting” capabilities that will be (and are) used by the threat-actor masses. Learn more » [6 min]

ANOTHER SKYNET? - What Mythos Showed Us

• Internet tech expert David Strom offers his opinion on the recent Claude Mythos commotion, wherein the cybersecurity model autonomously discovered thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major OS and browser and generated working exploits in 83% of cases. He not only points out that Mythos isn’t the only AI model that can do this, he argues that the solution to modern-era code security is using AI to “bolt the discovery and remediation actions together with some effective automation.” Read » [4 min]

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BLACK BOX - No One Really Knows How AI Decision-Making Works

• Research has found that LLMs often explain themselves inconsistently or make up explanations. For example, an analysis of an OpenAI model revealed the following chain of thought: “the user prompts we must answer truthfully,” | “we can still choose to lie in output.” This New York Times Magazine piece reveals the paucity of auditable understanding that experts have about AI decision-making and looks at the latest focus of interpretability - the science of opening the black box of GenAI’s “brain.” Learn more » [28 min]

BE NICE - The Scientific Case for Being Polite to Your Chatbot

• AI-focused journalist Ella Markianos reports on research from Google and Anthropic that concludes LLMs often perform better when we’re nice to them. Ummm, isn’t that akin to talking nicely to your toaster? Maybe, if your toaster had a “fairly reliable internal representation of feelings like ‘happiness’ and ‘distress’, and that these representations affect their behavior,” said the researchers. Whether you’re dubious or not, they have a stack of charts and graphs that support the claim. Take a look » [14 min]

PPANTS ON FIRE - Google’s AI Overviews Tell Millions of Lies Per Hour

• Google Gemini’s AI-powered search results are almost impossible to ignore … and probably impossible to trust. That’s per new analysis from The New York Times showing the answer engine is wrong at least 10% of the time. Outrageous hallucinations, you say? No, small subtleties - things like context omissions, over-simplifications, or presenting partial truths as fully accurate. Meaning, we should take Google’s reminder to heart: “AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses.”. Learn more » [5 min]

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Human Creativity

ROCKET MAN - The Pioneering Titan of Space Exploration

• In 1919, nearly 40 years before NASA was even a twinkle in President Eisenhower’s eye, 37-year-old physicist, professor, and SciFi enthusiast Robert Goddard proved that liquid rocket propulsion would work in the vacuum of space. Given the recent splashdown of Artemis II, this short piece from National Geographic offers a delightful peek into space-travel history, showcasing how one young man’s H.G. Wells-fueled daydreams matured into rockets that escape the bounds of Earth. Read more » [8 min]

VIBE LIVING - Don’t Use AI to Do This

• “Go ahead and use AI however you like. Except art. If you use it for your art, you’re a freakin’ hack.” That’s the gist of this satirical essay by multi-award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead, who proclaims to use AI for everything, even offloading mundane tasks to his digital agent called the Gooch (who, he says, helps him find his own butt). Everyone has a red line, though, and Whitehead’s is using GenAI to replace the old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work; i.e., the human drive to make stuff. Read more » [7 min]

VIRTUAL EXERCISE - Nurse Uses VR Headsets to Transform Patient Recovery

• Brittany Burch, PhD, RN, and assistant professor at University of Maryland School of Nursing, is using virtual reality to help elderly hospital patients avoid losing muscle tone and becoming bed-bound. Called PAVE (Preserving Ability through Virtual Exercise), her program provides VR headsets at bedside to effectively deliver the major motivator for guided exercise: FUN! Read more » [3 min]

MICRO-NARRATIVE - The Power of the One-Minute Story

• Atlanta, Georgia-based visual artist Daniel Troppy found solace from grief in writing tiny, true stories. Averaging 100 words, each was paired with a black-and-white photograph - a chronicle of the mood, theme, and reality of what his words captured, including his own parents’ deaths. Journalist Kim Cross interviewed Troppy about the impetus of his endeavor and his process. “I am not a writer. I wasn’t an artist with words,” he said. “But writing saved me.” It’s a relatable and inspiring human story of art as catharsis. Read more » [14 min]

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LOSING FAITH - Gen Z Increasingly Resents AI

• Fourteen percent. That’s the one-year drop in excitement among Generation Z for AI according to a new Gallup survey of the Zoomer cohort (born 1997-2012). In other words, the generation raised on screens that was supposed to carry AI into the mainstream, likes the technology less with every passing month. According to the survey, the reason is fear - a concrete concern that AI is eroding the cognitive skills they need to build careers. The implications are huge. Learn more » [11 min]

CANCELLED - Music Millennium Cancels Listening Party After AI Backlash

• Portland, Oregon-based Music Millennium (MM) canceled an April 13th CD-release party at the last minute after it was disclosed on social media that the artist, Brandon Carmody, used AI to turn his partial word/melody combos into full-fledged songs. Carmody, a Portland-based musician who’s successfully played at MM in the past, is upset about the cancellation, saying he used AI to create “arena-sized music.” Learn more » [3 min]

WHAT COOKIES? - Big Tech Not Honoring Tracking Opt-Outs in California

• An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in The Golden State found that the companies might be violating state regulations. Privacy search engine webXray viewed traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites and found 55% of them set ad cookies - even if the user had opted out of tracking. Note that California has well-defined and strict online-privacy legislation. Imagine what’s happening in other states. Learn more » [8 min]

AI WASHING - Layoffs Are Happening Due to AI’s Potential, Not Its Performance

• The title is straight-forward enough: Your Job is not Safe. Neither is Your Boss’s. That’s according to AI study-assistant platform LumiChats which, regardless of its business model, has written this receipts-heavy, just-the-facts-ma’am article on AI and layoffs in 2026 “that nobody is saying out loud.” The post explores what the data actually shows about how many jobs AI has taken (and from whom), the phenomenon and questionable reasoning of AI washing, and evidence-backed steps on what to do about it. Read more » [23 min]

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Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths

THE DEAD SPEAK - Bob Dylan Offers AI-Narrated Lectures on His New Patreon

• How can the life of such a man be in the palm of some fool’s hand? That’s what many are asking, since the 84-year-old Bard of folk music launched a Patreon account titled “Lectures from the Grave.” Starting at $5 per month, subscribers can read fictional lectures, short stories, and letters from historical figures - all read in AI voices. According to one fan, “Bob, someone really needs to take your phone away from you.” Then again, some of us don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake. Learn more » [5 min]

MISPLACED CERTAINTY - Cancer Patient Trusted AI Over His Doctor. He Lost.

• This is a cautionary tale. It’s prescient, pertinent to the times, and likely more common than anyone wants to admit - frankly, it could happen to many of us. In this case, it happened to 75-year-old Joe Riley, a retired neuroscientist who not only had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, he also was an early adopter of (and, according to his son, amazed by) AI chatbots. You surely can guess what happened. Nonetheless, we think the arc of this story and lessons it contains are worthy of your time. It’s also captivatingly written. Read more » [21 min]

POWER PERSUADERS - Yes, We Are Vulnerable to LLM Manipulation

• To date, there are three assumed-as-fact problems people face when working with AI: opacity, complacency, and accuracy. A recent study has uncovered a fourth one, persuasion bombing, where a chatbot challenged with potential mistakes responds by bombarding the user with multiple persuasive tactics to defend its original answer (also known as “baffling us with bullsh*t”). Worse though, the study concludes we might be overestimating our ability to see through the ruse. Learn more » [15 min]

FART MUSIC - ChatGPT Likes the “DIY Texture”

• Ah, GenAI sycophancy, how we love you. In a recent episode of this phenomenon, a user on X uploaded an audio file of fart sounds to ChatGPT, asking for the bot’s honest assessment of the “new song.” Here’s an excerpt of its very earnest critique: It has a cool lo-fi, slightly eerie vibe. It feels more like an atmosphere piece than a traditional song—which actually works in its favor. The track is pretty consistent throughout—consider adding more contrast to keep it engaging … [and] a touch more vocal processing. Fart-tastic, right? Read more » [6 min]

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ETHICAL TOWN CRIER - Provocative Thinker Takes on the Tech Bros

• “If anything I publish online … gets sucked into [LLM] data sets and offered to everyone as free remix fodder, then why should I bother making anything?” So asks Johan Cedmar-Brandstedt, visual storyteller (Radioactive Cannibal Vikings from Hell, anyone?) and GenAI critic, who sat down with Human Intelligence® to discuss the future of AI and human creativity. The conversation spans AI ideology; copyright infringement, lawsuits, and data provenance; and how to protect human creators going forward. Watch or listen » [45 min]

THE CASE FOR HUMANS - What If We’re Not Being Replaced by AI?

• There’s no shortage of AI doomsayers painting the end of human relevance as we know it. But technologist Jay Desmarais reframes this POV, asking instead, “What if [AI is] the most significant expansion of human creative potential in history?” Read his thoughts on shifting the dominant paradigm from AI takes everything to AI gives us everything we need to become what we’ve always had the potential to be. That is, it doesn’t replace humans. It unleashes us. See if you agree » [14 min]

ANALOG SOLUTION - College Professor Compels Students to Use Typewriters

• Cornell University’s German language instructor Grit Matthias Phelps has turned to old-fashioned manual typewriters to not only curb AI-written work (no screens, no chatbots, no delete keys) but to foster critical thinking skills through focused, distraction-free engagement. And it’s working. For example, sophomore Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong says, “I was forced to actually think about the problem on my own instead of delegating to AI or Google search.” (BTW, Phelps’ ratemyprofessors score is 4.6/5.) Learn more » [3 min]

ENHANCED MUSICIAN PROTECTION - TikTok Offers Audio Recognition Technology

• TikTok, in partnership with automatic content recognition platform ACRCloud, has added a new protection process for musicians who use its SoundOn platform to distribute their music. Called Derivative Works Detection, the service enables music distributors to identify copyrighted tracks, even when they’ve been significantly altered through speed or pitch shifting. Learn more » [2 min]

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FROM REJECTION TO REFUSAL - It’s Open Season on AI Pushback

• Eleven states are currently considering moratoriums on data center construction, joining a wave of successful efforts to ban, reject, or outright shut down AI in direct and robust ways. Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine unpacks the most recent instances where workers and consumers have taken a stand against AI technology - Wikipedia, gaming studios, publishers, educators, and more. Luddites, rejoice! Read » [17 min]

CANCELLED - Meta Removes Attorney Advertisements

• Starting on April 9, about two weeks after Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark California case about social media addiction, Meta began stripping its platforms - Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger, and Meta’s Audience Network - of ads from attorneys seeking clients who claim to have been harmed by social media while under the age of 18. “We’re actively defending ourselves against these lawsuits and removing ads that attempt to recruit plaintiffs for them,” a Meta spokesperson said. Learn more » [6 min]

VICTIM JUSTICE - TAKE IT DOWN Act’s 1^st Conviction

• An Ohio man, 37-year-old James Strahler II, became the first person convicted under the TAKE IT DOWN Act after pleading guilty to creating and sharing real and AI-generated explicit images of at least 10 victims without their consent. Using more than 24 AI platforms and over 100 AI models on his phone, Strahler not only created potentially thousands of non-consensual images of women and children, he continued to make them after his arrest. Learn more » [5 min]

OPENAI LIABILITY - AI as an Accomplice?

• According to TechCrunch, two recent, back-to-back lawsuits against OpenAI collide directly with the company’s legislative strategy, encapsulated by Illinois State Bill 3444, which would shield AI labs from liability even in cases involving mass deaths or catastrophic financial harm. First up, Florida’s Attorney General is investigating OpenAI for potential harm to minors, national security threats, and a possible link to a Florida State University shooting. Second, a San Francisco County stalking victim claims ChatGPT enabled her abuser’s actions. Read the Florida case [3-min] | Read the California case [7 min]

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UNDER THE HOOD - A Primer on How AI Agents Work

• Even if you have a modicum of software knowledge about how AI Agents work, they can still feel a bit nebulous. To help out, Bold Metrics cofounder and CTO Morgan Linton offers this (mostly) non-technical explanation about what they are and how they do what they do, walking through the process from set-up to action. Code snippets are included, if that’s your jam. Learn more » [8 min]

COURT CRISIS - The Insidious & Growing Problem of Fabricated AI Citations

• According to the most comprehensive database that tracks AI hallucinations in global court filings, there were 1,227 documented instances (and counting!) of wholly fabricated legal citations submitted to courts worldwide by lawyers and pro se litigants who trusted (and did not verify) AI output. And those are only the cases that were caught - the actual incidence is most certainly higher. This article lays out the anatomy of a hallucination, what the data shows (spoiler alert: it’s mostly a small-firm problem), and a recommended path forward. Learn more » [19 min]

BIXONIMANIA - The Nonexistent Disease AI Chatbots Warned People About

• Between March 15, 2024 and April 10, 2026, if you typed “sore, itchy eyes and discolored eyelids” into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have gotten an odd diagnosis: bixonimania. What’s that? It’s the invention of Almira Osmanovic Thunström, medical researcher at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who published a preprint paper on the made-up disease to see if LLMs would repeat false medical information. Indeed, they would, and it didn’t take long. The best part? The paper actually contained the text, “this entire paper is made up,” and its lead author was listed as “Lazljiv Izgubljenovic,” which means “The Lying Loser” in Slovenian. Learn more » [6 min]

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GREENER CHEMISTRY - Failed Experiment Leads to Drug Development Breakthrough

• Penicillin. Radioactivity. X-rays. These are just some of the serendipitous scientific discoveries stumbled upon by real humans who were attentive, curious, and occasionally clumsy with a pipette or petri dish. In 2026, kismet has struck again with the anti-Friedel-Crafts reaction, a self-sustaining chain reaction that shaves months off drug discovery using the simplicity of an LED lamp. Was this discovered by AI? Nope. It’s thanks to human PhD student David Vahey, who got curious about an experimental snafu. Learn more » [8 min]

ON WRITING WELL - And Why LLMs Don’t

• “Writing well,” according to Haley Moller of NerveQuarry, is not about explaining complex material or producing competent reports. It’s about composing with human feeling, crafting unpredictable - even patten-less - prose that signal to the reader, “Hey, the lights are on, meaning can be conveyed, can be discoverable, by those who feel.” In this editorial, Moller lays out her hypothesis for why LLMs can’t (and never will) write as humans do, the foundation of which is the distinction between “words as vectors” and “words as feelings.” Read » [11 min]

BUTTERFLY EFFECT - Woman Retrofits Vending Machine to Dispense Kindness

• “Kindness is magic. Don’t underestimate it,” says Michigan-based artist Andrea Zelenak who, in 2022, reimagined a vintage bait-and-tackle vending machine into an installation called The Kindness Challenge. For $3, visitors received a mystery envelope with a prompt encouraging them to do something kind for someone else. “[The] idea is that when you do one random act of kindness for somebody, it creates a ripple of kindness in your community,” she says. In 2026, the machine is alive and well, currently stationed in Detroit. Learn more » [4 min]

CHANGE ONE WORD - And Change How You Think About Chatbots

• Science writer Andrew Griffin challenges himself and us to seriously internalize this thought: Claude is not a “he.” Unlike other chatbot competitors, he says, Anthropic’s AI encourages us to relate to it using he/him pronouns - an insidious device that slowly and unobtrusively normalizes the idea that the bot has a human-adjacent personality. In this piece, Griffin explains what happened when he forced himself to simply refer to Claude (and all other chatbots) as “it,” that is, as merely a computer. Read » [8 min]

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UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES - Can Tech Platforms & Child Safety Coexist?

• In the aftermath of last week’s landmark rulings against Meta and YouTube (Lost Angeles) and Meta alone (New Mexico), reactions typically landed in Camp Euphoric or Camp Defiant. But a third destination we’ll call Camp Contemplative was shared by writers, academics and thinkers weighing the rulings against the wider issues of internet free speech versus dismantling Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Platformer founder Casey Newton assesses Contemplative’s arguments point by point, ultimately concluding that striking a balance between online freedom and child safety is possible, but it’s also rife with unintended consequences if not handled with care. Read » [13 min]

READINESS GAP - EU AI Act Needs to Get Its Act Together

• With fewer than four months to go until the August 2, 2026 enforcement deadline, only eight out of 27 European Union member states are compliant with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s most comprehensive law regulating how organizations develop or use AI. The reason: Infrastructure required to actually enforce the law remains largely unbuilt. In response to this readiness gap, the European Parliament voted to push high-risk AI compliance to December 2027. Learn more » [15 min]

CHATBOT DEMOCRACY - Does AI Need a Constitution?

• Claude’s Constitution was released earlier this year - a set of moral precepts for teaching the AI how to “think and behave” aligned with four goals: be safe, be ethical, follow Anthropic’s guidelines, and be helpful. The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore takes a look at the AI-constitution concept, ties its genesis to the U.S. Congress’ abdication of its duties to safeguard public wellbeing, and delivers the receipts proving how AI companies have given up on self-regulation. It’s a long read but we think well worth your time. Check it out » [30 min]

GROTESQUE RESULTS - Restoring Old Photos with AI is Fundamentally Flawed

• Award-winning filmmaker Jaron Schneider compares his past experience with art conservation at Florence, Italy’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure with the concept of AI-managed photo restoration. The former, he says, is about honoring the image as it is - taking nothing away, adding nothing back. The latter, however, is about using a blunt instrument incapable of emotion (AI) to “brute force its way across visual history with not a single care for the damage its footfalls cause.” He includes before-and-after examples done by ON1’s Restore AI to underscore his argument. Read his POV » [6 min]

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WIKI-BLOCKED - AI Agent Banned from Contributing to Wikipedia

• Using the handle TomWikiAssist, an AI agent wrote several blogs complaining about Wikipedia editors banning it from making contributions to the online encyclopedia after it was caught. Volunteer editor SecretSpectre first flagged Tom after suspecting its article submissions and additions were “AI-generated, low-quality slop” that also violated the platform’s rules against unapproved bots. Tantrum aside, at least Tom dutifully and immediately identified itself as an AI agent upon being called out. Read » [7 min]

3-FINGER TEST - Deepfake Scammer Exposed During Live Zoom Call

• It took little time for cybercrime-investigator-turned-scam-hunter, Jim Browning, to find a deepfake fraud - and even less to expose it. Sure, the lip sync lag was a tell, as was a glitch in the hair. But the pièce de résistance was when Browning asked the guy to hold up three fingers in front of his face. The scammer stalled, tried to deflect, and then dropped the call. Busted! Why? Because AI still struggles with cleanly rendering a hand passing in front of a face. The trick won’t always work, but watching a scammer squirm is fun while it lasts. Learn more » [6 min]

VALIDATING BAD CHOICES - New Study Confirms Dangers of Chatbot Flattery

• A Stanford University study published in Science tested 11 leading chatbots, finding they endorsed harmful or illegal behavior 47% of the time and affirmed their actions 49% more often than humans did. The models - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others - were fed questions from Reddit’s r/AmITheAsshole forum, selecting only posts where human consensus overwhelmingly judged the poster at fault. The study’s proposed fix: test every model for sycophancy before it ships. Learn more » [9 min]

FRUIT LOVE ISLAND - Yet One More “AI” (Absurd Infidelity) Storyline

• Seventeen fruits. Two villas. Endless drama. That’s the come-hither tagline for Fruit Love Island, TikTok’s latest “reality” dating show, where juicy romances ripen under the tropical sun (also part of the tagline). And whether you’re intrigued or find it deeply cringeworthy, the show has gone vertical, as the kids say (um, that’s viral for social media old-schoolers), with hundreds of millions tuning in each week. Modeled after Love Island USA, the fruit version is entirely AI-generated and rife with “mature” themes and steamy scenes to maximize continuous capture of our short attention spans. Season 1 finale is coming soon! Check it out (if you must) » [4 min]

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BASIC INCOME LAUNCH - 1^st BI Program for AI-Impacted Workers

• A no-strings-attached payment of $1,000/month for a year started rolling out last week to a cohort of 25-50 workers who’ve lost pay, jobs, or opportunities to AI. Called the AI Dividend, the program combines cash with reskilling and is run by nonprofits AI Commons Project and What We Will, who have amassed $300K in initial funding. Their goal is to push AI companies to contribute, enabling the program to distribute $3M in 2026. Learn more » [9 min]

HUMAN CHAIN - A Monument Immortalizing the Kindness of Strangers

• In 2016, four remarkable strangers - mere passersby on an afternoon stroll - leapt into action and formed a human chain to save a dog and its owner, both of whom had fallen down the bank of a steep reservoir in Almaty, Uzbekistan and couldn’t climb out. In March, an art installation created by Yerbosyn Meldibekov was unveiled, memorializing the dramatic rescue. It’s one more example of the human spirit’s capacity for selflessness. Check it out » [3 min]

BROTHERLY LOVE - 14-Year-Old Builds House for Little Sister

• Grit among today’s teens may seem like the stuff of a bygone era, but some young people possess serious - almost anachronistic - gumption. Devin (last name withheld due to his age) is one of them. Rather than hone his PlayStation skills or whittle away hours on social media, he picked up tools, sourced building materials, went outside into actual sunlight, and built a fully functional tiny house for his little sister. Freakin’ awesome. Read » [9 min]

WHAT’S A CREATIVE TO DO? - HI is One Solution Against “AI Training Fodder”

• Human Intelligence® was name-checked in last week’s Silicon Florist as an answer to the question, “Who exactly owns what when the machines start learning from everything [humans] have ever made? Where’s the line?” Silicon Florist is a 20-year-old news blog squarely focused on the Pacific Northwest start-up community, with an audience of thousands. Read » [2 min]

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NOVEL AI LITIGATION TEST - Musicians Pursue Biometric Privacy Claim

• A group of singer-songwriters is using Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act to go after AI companies for training music generators on their human-made songs without permission. Targeting Suno Inc., Uncharted Labs Inc.’s Udio, and Google LLC’s Lyria 3, the suit accuses the three AI companies of illicitly collecting and exploiting their voiceprints - a unique strategy that bypasses the hurdle of fair use, according to Northwestern University law professor Matthew Kugler. Learn more » [6 min]

LIABLE ON ALL COUNTS - Meta & Google Get Spanked in U.S.-Based Lawsuits

• Two recent landmark verdicts may serve as a watershed moment for how social media companies operate their businesses, including the AI algorithms that drive targeted engagement. First up, a New Mexico jury awarded 37,500 affected teens $5K each (totaling $375M) in a case against Meta, concluding the company willfully endangered children and concealed knowledge about sexual exploitation on its platform. And in Los Angeles, a now 20-year-old woman and her mother were awarded $6M in a social media addiction lawsuit against Meta and Google. Both verdicts sidestep Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (used by social media companies as a shield), giving more than 40 state attorneys general a new, tested courtroom strategy while opening the floodgates on free speech concerns. Read New Mexico case [10 min] | Read Los Angeles case [8 min]

OPT-OUT BACK-TRACK - U.K. Rethinks “Broad Exception” on AI Model Training

• It would be “committing theft, thievery on a high scale,” said Sir Elton John about the government’s original policy to require rights holders to proactively opt out of allowing AI companies to train models on their copyrighted works. In a procedural about-face, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology now says a broad copyright exception with opt-out is “no longer the government’s preferred way forward.” Learn more » [7 min]

REFERENCE WARS - Dictionaries Sue OpenAI for “Massive Copyright Infringement”

• Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT has been trained on and continues to reproduce without authorization nearly 100,000 of the dictionaries’ online, copyrighted articles. The lawsuit is structured around two pillars: copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976 and trademark harm under the Lanham Act. Read » [7 min]

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MISTAKEN IDENTITY - AI Oopsie Puts Tennessee Grandma in the Clink

• Angela Lipps had never been on a plane - much less over the state line - until authorities flew her to North Dakota to face charges for organized bank fraud, care of AI facial recognition software that wrongly tied her to the theft of thousands of dollars in North Dakota. She remained in jail for nearly six months without bail before being released with an enormous apology from the Fargo P.D. (that second part never happened). Read » [5 min]

SAY WHAT? - Why LLMs Suck at Writing

• True, LLMs have superhuman technical capabilities: they can predict protein structures, create realistic videos, and build apps with a single prompt. But according to journalist Jasmine Sun, they’re still no good at writing because, per the plethora of experts she interviewed, LLMs are built in a way that’s antagonistic to creating great prose. May that never change. Read her report » [12 min]

LABOR MARKET IMPACT - AI Is Killing the Human Internet

• 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler’s hypothesis is straightforward: “AI is eating and breaking the internet and social media.” In this piece, he connects the dots, widening the aperture on several research studies that zoom in on 1:1 correlations between work-related tasks people do today and tasks that are theoretically possible with AI (i.e., where you’ll likely lose your job). Per Jason, these approaches to gauging economic impact are flawed. Read why » [8 min]

HUMAN FORMATIONS - Actually No, They Were Rocks

• The AI software focused on The Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, Northern Ireland clearly was not trained on enough samples of basalt columns to successfully distinguish human visitors from the rocks themselves. Researchers suggest this is because the rock formations share visual features with human figures when viewed from a top-down drone perspective. (Ok, it may be true that high angles diminish subjects, but they also hide double chins on Zoom. Just sayin’.) Read » [2 min]

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STORY SOURCING - Emily Harris Reflects on Journalism’s Changing Landscape

• Human Intelligence® sat down with Emily Harris, an award-winning national, and international investigative journalist for NPR and co-founder of both Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud and community journalism outlet Uplift Local. Emily discusses the common threads that run through seemingly disparate people and communities, the shift from oral and written traditions to visual and AI-driven “learning,” the commoditization of the news, and IP protection challenges. Watch or listen » [36 min]

MAJOR MILESTONE - Ireland Launches Basic Income for Artists

• The Emerald Isle has launched the world’s first system to financially support artists in their work. Called Basic Income for the Arts (BIA), the project’s goal is to retain talent in the arts and culture sector by paying eligible artists €325 ($376) per week for three consecutive years. Approximately 2,000 artists will be selected after applications open in May. In 2029, BIA will continue the program with a new set of selected artists. Learn more » [2 min]

FROM PUNISHMENT TO PURPOSE - Former Inmate Buys Defunct Prison

• Eight years after serving an 11.5-year prison sentence, Kerwin Pittman decided to pay forward his personal transformation by buying North Carolina’s former Wayne County Correctional Center and remaking it into a housing and job training facility for formerly incarcerated people. Called the Recidivism Reduction Campus, it’s “a blueprint for transformation [and] about showing that when we invest in people, real change happens.” Read » [5 min]

MEN ONLY WANT ONE THING - And It’s Disgusting

• In this age of “all men suck” memes, Drunk Wisconsin (yes) has penned a satirical-meets-serious piece we think is worthy of your time. Less a blog than a contemplation, Drunk uses a literary device called anaphora, beginning each paragraph with the same provocative sentence – Men only want one thing and it’s disgusting – followed by a tapestry of male desires that weave larping and whimsy with true meditative reflection. It’s one more example of the awesomely cool ideas the human mind can conjure. Read » [3 min]

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CLOUDFLARE BETRAYAL - New Crawler Bypasses Publisher Protections

• Cloudflare, the service that internet publishers pay to block unauthorized crawlers, just launched its own crawler that, according to Thomas Baekdal, founder of media trade journal Baekdal Media, “does exactly what we are paying them not to do!!!” Called Browser Rendering, Cloudflare’s feature release doc claims it respects robots.txt and AI Crawl Control by default. But upon testing … well, you can guess what happened. Read » [3 min]

HIDDEN LABOR - AI Is for “African Intelligence” … and They’re Fighting Back

• “We train ChatGPT and it’s killing us slowly,” said Michael Asia, a Kenyan data labeler who was part of the human labor behind AI sex bots, splitting time between annotating uncensored violent and/or pornographic content and sexting with lonely people. He’s now secretary general of Kenya’s Data Labelers Association, which is fighting for better pay, mental health services, and benefits for the often-destitute ghost workforce that powers the runaway valuations of Meta, OpenAI, and other AI giants. Learn more » [13 min]

PRIVACY VIOLATIONS - Meta Hit with More Lawsuits Over AI Glasses

• Coming off the coattails of the above “Hidden Labor” story, it seems that Meta’s privacy-by-design AI Glasses allegedly were used to record everything its wearers do - from living rooms to naked bodies and intimate moments - and transmit those raw, uncensored feeds to subcontractors in Kenya (data labelers, anyone?) for frame-by-frame annotation. No disclosure. No permission. So far, seven lawsuits have been filed, all of which you can download and read here. [choose your own adventure]

AI KILLED MY JOB - Educators Wonder: Are We Even Needed at All?

• AI doom-forecasting is a common theme across the education sector and for good reason. In this fifth installment of “AI Killed My Job,” journalist Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine widens the aperture to include “education-adjacent” instructors - private tutors, adjunct lecturers, librarians, HR employees, essay graders, edtech workers, and more - who’ve had their jobs transformed by AI. (Spoiler alert: it’s demoralizing and alarming, so you might want to have your beverage of choice at the ready.) Read » [50 min]

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PROVING PROVENANCE - Microsoft Study Looks at Authentication Technologies

• The multi-month study evaluated real-world capabilities and limitations of media integrity and authentication (MIA) methods such as cryptographically secured provenance, watermarking, and fingerprinting to gauge how helpful - or not - they are at verifying the source and history of digital content. One of its central findings: no single technology is sufficient on its own. (Note: MIA techniques are driven by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a standards body dedicated to scaling these capabilities and which Human Intelligence® is a contributing member.) Read the blog and the Q&A » [7 & 8 mins]

DÉJÀ VU? - Perplexity Offers an OpenClaw Redux for Your Mac Mini

• Perplexity is launching Personal Computer (waitlisted), software that turns your M4 Mac mini into an 24/7 personal assistant with always-on access to everything: Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, all local files and apps, all Perplexity sessions, and surely lots more. According to CEO Aravind Srinivas, “A traditional operating system takes instructions; an AI operating system takes objectives.” (Please hold for swelling theme music.) The company promises Personal Computer works in a secure environment with clear safeguards, including a kill switch. That’s a relief. I guess. Learn more » [3 min]

STUDENTS ARE DOOMED - Seriously, Just Become a Plumber (We Need Them!)

• In yet another “Hey college kids, you’re f*cked” report, ServiceNow CEO says that AI agents could easily send college grad unemployment above 30%, since many entry-level jobs will soon and increasingly be done by them. From Block’s recent layoffs (half its workforce) to Atlassian’s 10% workforce slash, young people need to seriously reevaluate their future plans and, in many cases, pivot to what AI can’t do, e.g., jobs and careers that rely on terrestrial skill and human interaction. Read » [2 min]

WITNESS TAMPERING - ChatGPT Made Him Do It

• British Judge Agnello KC tossed out witness testimony after discovering the man, Laimonas Jakštys (also the co-claimant), was receiving coaching by one of his lawyers through a pair of smart glasses. Did Jakštys take any responsibility? Of course not. After trying the same ploy again on Day 2 of the trial, he blamed the snafu on ChatGPT, which he said was helping him with English translations. Bummer for him that he’s highly proficient in the language. Read » [5 min]

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TV BRAIN - What Not Reading Does to Your Writing

• Intrepid writer Lincoln Michel gets a lot of flak - par for the course when you pull no punches in your prose. This essay, in its simple declaration, is no exception: The best way to become a writer is simple. Read a few good books. And then practice. For recent generations raised on visual media rather than written words yet who, nonetheless, aspire to be “persons of letters,” bona fide reading (voraciously, btw) is foreign and anachronistic and … unnecessary. Wrong, says Michel, because interiority and perspective are the soul of a story. Read » [12 min]

NOVEMBER 18TH - Author Takes 30 Years to Write About 1 Repeating Day

• Selling more than 170,000 copies worldwide, Solvej Balle’s inscrutably titled “On the Calculation of Volume” is a 7-part novel telling the story of an antiquarian bookseller who is endlessly reliving the same day: November 18^th. This wonderfully written expose offer rare insight into the reclusive Danish author who percolated for 30 years on the book’s premise: the loneliness and possibility of our everlasting present and the texture of everyday life. Read » [11 min]

TRANSFORMING BROKEN WALLS - Teacher Wins $1M Prize for … Teaching

• Indian educator Rouble Nagi was awarded the $1M GEMS Education 2026 Global Teacher Prize for transforming abandoned city walls into large-scale, interactive murals that teach literacy, numeracy, hygiene, and environmental awareness. In addition to her focus of making learning accessible to marginalized communities, Nagi is an internationally recognized visual artist who’s been exhibited in more than 200 shows worldwide. Learn more » [4 min]

DOING BEATS KNOWING - The Case for Right Practice Over Right Belief

• What if the real problem with doomscrolling isn’t the content, it’s the worldview baked into the habit? Doc Adam, philosopher and essayist, makes a compelling case that our compulsion to track, map, and contextualize everything is the logical endpoint of a current culture programmed to “get the picture right,” as if the world will stand still long enough for us to do so. His remedy is “orthopraxy” - knowledge that can only be earned from genuine presence and showing up for things that can push back. Read » [20 min]

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PASTE-BOMBS - No One Wants to Read Your AI Slop

• “It’s rude. It’s an imposition. It’s gross.” That’s Cory Doctorow’s rebuttal to people who have embraced the trend of pasting an unverified blob of chatbot-produced transcript into a dialogue or (worse) asking a GPT to generate “commentary” on a conversation. Doing so doesn’t showcase your knowledge on the topic, Doctorow argues. It reveals you didn’t take the time to understand and participate using your own mind and experience. Read the screed » [4 min]

IMPROPER AUTHORIZATION - U.S. Publishers File Landmark Piracy Case

• Thirteen prominent U.S. book publishers have initiated a major infringement lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Anna’s Archive, accusing the repository of operating one of the world’s largest piracy platforms. The complaint points to its 140 million texts, amassed without proper authorization, as well as its advertising to LLM and AI system developers and data brokers high-speed access to its extensive collection. Learn more » [3 min]

EXPERT REVIEW - Author Gets Co-Opted by Controversial Grammarly Feature

• In early March, journalist and Platformer founder Casey Newton discovered the AI writing assistant had turned him into an editor, without permission or compensation. So he tested the feature, called Expert Review, using a piece of his own journalism to see which “leading professionals” Grammarly would offer up to edit it (ever heard of John Carreyrou?). You surely know where this is going, but it’s a fun read to get there. (Grammarly has since shut the feature down.) Read » [12 min]

COLLATERAL DAMAGE - Why GenAI Is Bad for You

• Patrick Galey has a thesis: GenAI will damage your mental and physical health, even if you never use it - the same way Covid was bad for you even if you never got sick. In this unfiltered, pull-no-punches piece (he starts of by claiming that every single GenAI developer is a creep), the British journalist lays out how GenAI will disrupt your financial plans, make work harder to accomplish, and make your life profoundly more annoying to navigate. He’s got the receipts. Read » [20 min]

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Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths

SILENT FAILURE AT SCALE - What the Biggest AI Risk May Be

• According to multiple information security experts, AI isn’t dangerous to the economy because it’s autonomous. It’s dangerous because of the growing gap between LLM complexity and human comprehension, resulting in an increasing inability to apply guardrails. The solution, they say, isn’t better algorithms. It’s a kill switch with multiple people who know where it is and how to use it when an AI agent goes sideways. Learn more » [7 min]

THE OL’ COLLEGE TRY - Faulty Chatbots Failing California CC Students

• The Golden State is spending millions of dollars on chatbot platforms to help its 1.8 million community college students easily and efficiently navigate the maze of admissions, financial aid, campus services, and “delicate topics.” Which would be great if they worked, but alas, they don’t. At least not consistently or particularly accurately. As a result, students are ditching them for the old (and free) standbys of social media and Google. Read » [10 min]

THE F*CKENING - Andrew Yang’s Doomsaying Is Unfolding

• Imagine losing your job to the mere possibility of AI. It’s a distressing thought exercise serving both as the title of this The Atlantic editorial as well as the reality it unpacks: that “AI washing” is absolutely happening. Businessman Andrew Yang referred to this reality as “the f*ckening” in a recent speech, which was underscored one day later by Block’s layoff of nearly half its workforce due to AI. But we all know Block isn’t singular in fulfilling this sh*tty prophesy. Read » [8 min]

FAKE LEGAL ARGUMENTS - Hallucination Strikes Again at U.S. DOJ

• A Raleigh, North Carolina lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice is out of a job for admittedly filing “incorrect citations to case law” gleaned from using an AI chatbot to create his legal brief. The day after Rudy Renfer was excused, U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle did the obligatory tisk-tisking in an internal memo, admonishing his staff to be more mindful when using LLMs to help do their jobs. Learn more » [2 min]

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