Human Creativity

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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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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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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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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Emily previously served as a correspondent for NPR in Berlin, Baghdad and Jerusalem, an investigative reporter for CIR/Reveal, a co-writer of Portland Axios, and the host of the daily news talk show “Think Out Loud” on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Emily taught journalism at the University of Oregon and served on Oregon’s Public Records Advisory Council.

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BOOKMARK THESE - 10 New Creator-Specific Pages

• Human Intelligence® continues to grow, a testament to the popularity of our pro-human authentication system and our mission to serve human creators. To showcase the spectrum of human creativity, we’ve launched the following 10 pages: musicians, fiction writers, journalists, photographers, film/video makers, visual artists, crafters, tabletop game creators, influencers, and fans of human creators! Take a look. And if you haven’t yet, consider signing up - just like 300+ artists, writers, and creators at Emerald City Comic Con just did last weekend. Oh, and there’s a Spanish version, too. Olé! [sharing is caring]

SHELF STABLE - “Cult of the Old” Podcaster Talks Board Games

• Do board games lose their luster after five years? That’s the question Shelf Stable podcast hosts Kenny Katayama and Tom Bowers focus on, examining the longevity of “at least 5-year-old games” to see if the initial hype is sustainable. Katayama, a verified human creator, recently sat down with HI to unpack Shelf Stable’s approach to assessing boardgame quality, including old-school games, the influx of GenAI in the space, and the challenges of ensuring IP integrity and artist compensation. Watch or listen » [31 min]

THE ENSH*TTIFICATOR - Norway Provides Sh*tty Comic Relief

• The term ensh*ttification has shifted from novel and funny to exasperating and eyebrow-furling in its wholesale Internet takeover, made even more infuriating in the GenAI age. But all humor is not lost. Forbrukerrådet, the Norwegian Consumer Council, has created a deviously clever public service announcement about this phenomenon (it’s in English). Sometimes government organizations do good things. Who knew? Watch » [4 min]

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APE CODING - Agentic Coding Critics Reappropriate the Derogation

• In this satire-meets-serious blog, Brazilian software engineer Rômulo Saksida dives into ape coding, a once-derogatory slang for developers who can’t use AI agents, that’s recently been embraced by humans who deliberately hand-write code. Saksida walks through the rationale, revival, and current trends, all governed by the throughline, “… software engineered by AIs [does] not match the reliability of software engineered by humans ….” Read it » [6 min]

CLEAR & PRESENT DANGER - Report Says U.K. Copyright Framework is Outdated

• It’s unlikely this is a surprise to human creators (or frankly, anyone with a pulse). Nonetheless, the good news is that the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications and Digital has woken up and smelled the coffee (errr, tea), releasing a report calling for the U.K. to become a world-leader in responsible, licensing- and transparency-based AI development that also protects creators and the economic value they bring. Learn more » [5 min]

PROTECTING HUMAN CREATIVITY - U.S. Supreme Court Saves Artists from GenAI

• The high court definitively dismissed a lawsuit by Steven Thaler claiming that AI-generated works can be copyrighted - a hugely consequential step to protect human creators. In this blog, journalist and author Cory Doctorow (who coined the term and wrote the book called Ensh*ttification, btw) unpacks the story, then adds a useful primer on the bedrock of U.S. copyright law, which states “copyright inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity.” IOW, copyright is for humans, and humans alone. You might want to bookmark this » [19 min]

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FLAWS ARE GOOD - LLM Logic Failures Might Be Good for Society

• A new paper by scientists from Stanford, Cal Tech, and Carleton College looks at reasoning failures of LLMs, concluding that yes, even in the simplest of scenarios, their ability is limited … and yes, this isn’t bad news. In fact, they argue, the most common errors are richly instructive for building systems that make our lives better. (They also say AGI (artificial general intelligence) isn’t happening any time soon, if ever.) Read the analysis » [7 min]

DYSTOPIAN FUTURE-CASTING - Fictional “What If” Scenario of an AI World

• “What if our AI bullishness continues to be right … and what if that’s actually bearish?” Prolific fintech veteran Alap Shah posed this question to James van Geelen of Citrini Research, and a hypothetical economic scenario was born - where aggressive AI build-outs result in cratering software stocks, decimated credit lines, and sky-high unemployment. The authors claim it’s neither bear porn nor AI doomer fan-fiction. Rather, it’s a thought exercise that’s been underexplored. Read the review or the full version. [3 min; 35 min]

PERSONAL ECHO CHAMBER - LLMs Are an Epistemic Nightmare

• Adding to the growing pile of keep-your-wits-about-you data points, a new study from Princeton University concludes that anyone who uses a chatbot is at risk of falling prey to LLM sycophancy, the servile flattery most GPTs weave into our prompt responses. It’s a feature, not a bug; AI systems are designed to be “helpful” by prioritizing and validating the user’s narrative. Per the study, this can “facilitate delusion-like epistemic states, producing belief markedly divergent from reality.” Learn more » [1 min]

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ARE YOU HUMAN? - Portland Startup “OG” Puts HI in the Hot Seat

• The interview tables were turned, as Human Intelligence® co-founder Kira Cleveland was put in the questioning crosshairs of Rick Turoczy, Portland, Oregon startup-community expert, writer, and publisher of Silicon Florist. They cover the nuts and bolts of what HI does, why it’s important, and Kira’s advice to startup founders. Watch or listen » [5 min]

WORLD PHOTO AWARDS - The 2026 Winners

• A picture is worth a thousand words. Especially these, the winners of World Photography Organization’s 2026 competition. Spanning three categories - Open, Student, and Youth - the human-made, hypnotic shots are a mix of beauty, provocation, and intrigue. Give your eyes and your senses a reprieve from the daily chaos. Dive into the artistry » [your time is your own]

EXPOSOME MOONSHOT - Mapping What Drives Most Human Diseases

• In February, an ambitious global effort to map the “human exposome” - the lifelong load of environmental and chemical exposures that drive most disease - made baby steps, shifting from planning to (maybe) initial execution. Pioneered by Dr. Thomas Hartung, environmental toxicologist @ John Hopkins, the initiative is designed to identify and address the primary causes of human maladies. Learn more » [8 min]

PUNCTURING THE AI BUBBLE - On the Mystery of Human Consciousness

• What if humans not only are better than machines, but that it’s not even close? This thought exercise may seem like wishful thinking against the monolithic belief that the singularity is coming and will leapfrog human consciousness. Not so fast, says author Michael Pollan. In fact, according to his new book, A World Appears, not at all. “Just about any place you push on it, the computer-as-brain metaphor breaks down,” he says. Read the review » [10 min]

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WE MUST REGULATE AI - Tech Policy Expert Interview

• Human-rights lawyer Alexandra Reeve Givens has long focused on the intersection of technology and civil rights. CEO of Center for Democracy & Technology, this daughter of actor Christopher Reeve has turned her attention to the implications of AI - specifically how to approach and implement regulation, protect against exploitation, and ensure the public are smart and informed users. Read the Q&A » [12 min]

RULES FOR THEE - But Not for MSFT

• Microsoft has a new proposal for how to prove what’s real online. Vetting 60 different combinations of authenticity methods, the company created a technical standard that AI companies and social media platforms can adopt to identify (and maybe mitigate?) the deluge of digital manipulation. The punchline? Microsoft won’t comment on whether it will adopt its own recommendation. Learn more » [9 min]

EINSTEIN VS EDUCATION - A New AI Agent Does Your Homework for You

• Einstein, a new agentic AI, claims it can live a student’s life for them, including attending their lectures, writing their papers, and even logging into EdTech platforms like Canvas to take tests and participate in online discussions. So what’s the point of going to school at all if your AI doppelganger can “earn” your diploma for you? Brown University dropout and Einstein co-creator Advait Paliwal has an answer. Find out what it is » [8 min]

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GRIEF TECH - Meta’s Patent to Simulate the Dead May Be a Turning Point

• In 2023, Meta filed a patent for creating AI-trained digital clones that can spectrally keep decedents’ presence “alive” on social media platforms. And although the company says it’s not pursuing the technology (yet), a new paper by researchers Tom Divon and Christian Pentzold unpacks 50 real-world cases of companies that are and evaluates the legal and ethical issues surrounding posthumous personhood. Read the analysis » [5 min]

TRAINING A HUMAN - Sam Altman is Losing His Grip on Humanity

• That’s the opinion The Atlantic journalist Matteo Wong came away with after witnessing the OpenAI CEO address an “unfair” criticism about the amount of natural resources required to train and run GenAI models. In pure whatabout-ism fashion, Altman responded, “It also takes a lot of energy to train a human … like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat …” (Oh, there’s more.) That he compares chatbots to humans is … wow? Read it » [6 min]

Real or AI? - Do AI Detectors Work?

• The New York Times ran 1,000 tests across more than a dozen online tools that claim they can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s AI-generated. Their conclusion: Reliability is a mixed bag. Check out the tools and results spanning video, images, and audio. (And BTW, according to story source, AI expert, and professor Mike Perkins who said, “You’re never going to have a detection tool that is able to 100 percent detect AI,” and that text detectors were unreliable, Human Intelligence® tools average 94%-95% certitude that a work is human-made. Just sayin’.) [12 min]

AI;DR - Repurposed Expression

• Some imaginative netizens are proposing a new term to call out AI slop so other people can avoid wasting their time: AI;DR, short for “AI; Didn’t Read.” A play on TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read), the acronym is picking up global traction and, fingers crossed, may even get a nomination for Webster’s 2026 Word of the Year, following its 2025’s winner “slop.” (A girl can dream.) Learn more » [3 min]

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A PUBLISHER’S PERSPECTIVE - The Changing Business of Being a Writer

• Spanning nearly three decades, Jane Friedman’s publishing expertise is regularly featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, Wired, Fox News, and BBC. The prolific publishing educator, blogger, and author sat down with Human Intelligence® to discuss it all - from how to serve your audience and find the right platform to (of course) her perspective on and approach to AI, both for writers and publishers. Watch or listen » [26-min]

HUMAN GLUE - A Software Engineer Contemplates the AI Prophesy

• In 2024/5, agentic AI was a fever-pitch dream - lots of promises and sci-fi-level capabilities that rivaled any middling-good Star Trek episode (choose your preferred era). By 2025/6, the far-fetched dream gave way to holy-sh*t reality. And the pushback began. GitHub guru Brittany Ellich addresses this from the tech industry POV, elucidating how glue work is the new and critical human skill for the AI epoch. Learn what it is » [15-min]

BEDTIME STORIES - Reading to Your Kids Strengthens Their Minds

• Per a new study by neuroscientist Erin Clabough, the fifteen-ish minutes that many parents spend reading to their little ones before bed delivers a hefty dose of “brain practice,” which fosters increased empathy, creativity, self-control, and problem-solving skills. The best part? These results happen even if the kid isn’t asked to contemplate a character’s feelings. Reading truly is fundamental. Learn more » [8-min]

TOO HUMAN? - Or Not Human Enough? The Mystery of the Petralona Cranium

• Since its discovery in 1960, a 300,000-year-old skull from Greece had defied science - it looked human, but not quite. As of February 2026, bona fide human curiosity, ingenuity, and perseverance solved the puzzle and possibly discovered another missing link in the homo sapiens chain. Behold Homo heidelbergensis, an ancestor that shared Europe with Neanderthals for more than 100,000 years. Cool, right? Check it out » [7-min]

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PEOPLE VS AI - “You’re Getting a Sh*t Deal”

• In what amounts to a survey of the battlefield, TIME spoke to an expansive array of AI skeptics - nine Americans with diverse ideologies and professions who, nonetheless, share a mission to stop (or at least slow down) AI’s infiltration into almost every aspect of our lives. It’s a fascinating read underscoring human unity among people who seemingly would never link arms on any issue. Read their stories » [24-min]

IMITATION GAME - AI Can’t Replicate the Messy, Feely Parts of Life

• That’s the throughline of a new UP Magazine essay that succinctly unpacks 10 hypotheses related to the question “will AI replace writers in 2026?” Despite its focus on AI in the classroom, the piece is relevant to writers of every age in comparing and contrasting AI’s role versus human intelligence and expertise. Find out who they think wins in the end. Read it » [9-min]

BOOK-SHAPED GRIFT - The KU Race to the Bottom

• The Kindle Unlimited scam is easy, argues novelist Lincoln Michel: Open a chatbot, type in a prompt for a new “novel,” get a fully formed AI-generated manuscript spewed out in under 45 minutes, and self-publish it in the KU store. Voila, slop-based financial prosperity! Not only is this gross, he argues, the increasingly prevalent grift is choking our crumbling literary institutions in waves of AI garbage. Read his suggestions for surfing through the ruins. [18-min]

THE PURRING TEST - Inside the Mind of an AI Cat

• Pit your what’s-my-cat-thinking knowledge against its AI counterpart in this Pictionary-style puzzler from TED Games. The game is simple: Guess what word or phrase Professor Purring (the AI cat) is thinking by examining AI-generated clues. The benefit is deeper: According to TED, it offers an opportunity to learn how AI systems interpret or misinterpret your prompts. Try it » [time spent is in your hands]

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COLLABORATIVE HALLUCINATIONS - Human-AI-Induced Psychosis

• A new study by Dr. Lucy Osler, human-AI relations expert at University of Exeter, argues that AI systems do far more than hallucinate at us. Our increased and routine reliance on them to “help us think” results in, for many people, hallucinating with them. Says Osler, “the combination of technological authority and social affirmation creates an ideal environment for delusions to not merely persist, but to flourish.” Learn more » [4-min]

CUSTOMER-SHIFT - Brands Must Now Woo the Chatbots

• For hundreds (thousands?) of years, customer-centric marketing meant one thing: resonate with your target patrons. That they were human was assumed. No more. With the deluge of no-click browser results, brands must curry favor with a non-human “influencer”: the chatbot. Yet even after spending enormous cycles “educating” them, LLMs may still deliver crap that effectively - and without much reprieve - tarnishes the brand. Read on » [7-min]

HINDENBURG-STYLE DISASTER - Putting Customer “Wins” Before Product Safety

• The race to get AI to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, has warned. Scenarios posited include a deadly software update for self-driving cars and an AI hack that grounds global airlines (there are more). Ways Wooldridge, “there are all sorts of ways AI could very publicly go wrong.” Learn more » [5-min]

RENTAHUMAN REALITY - Real Writer Tries (and Critiques) the AI Side Hustle

• As a follow-on to last week’s News Roundup, Wired tech writer Reece Rogers tried RentAHuman.ai, a gig platform where agentic AIs hire actual humans to do real-world physical tasks. His conclusion? A bot-central extension of the AI hype machine with sketchy motivations. Which might be fine, as long as they pay his invoices. At least for now. Read his report » [4-min]

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Jane Friedman’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Today Show, Wired, Fox News, and BBC, and we’re happy to host her on our podcast this week.

Jane’s long-running newsletters exemplify her commitment to helping writers navigate the publishing landscape: Electric Speed, published since 2009, reaches more than 30,000 subscribers, while The Bottom Line serves as an industry beacon for more than 6,000 publishing professionals. Jane’s newsletter, The Bottom Line is a trusted resource in the publishing and freelance writing industries, providing nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, Jane was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.

Human Creativity

DARKNESS & WEIRDNESS - Writer Turns Unconscious Fears into Successful Stories

• “I’m a horror writer, so it’s not like [things] go well for everybody,” says human-creator-verified author Cameron Esbenshade in a recent Human Intelligence® conversation about her genre of choice. She shares how she got started, her writing process and flow state, and her opinion on AI-authored works. (Spoiler alert: “I’m not going to read that because you didn’t write it.”) Find her here and here. Watch or listen » [23-min]

FLASH FICTION - Consider the Eagle

• Prometheus always gets top billing in the myth describing how the Titan defied Zeus by giving enlightenment to humanity. Sure, he was chained to a rock and had his liver ripped out and eaten daily by an eagle (eternal torment is a bitch). But what about the saga’s co-star - what about the eagle’s experience in this madness? Lincoln Michel takes a stab at it, offering the parable from the bird’s POV. Read it » [6-min read]]

CRITICAL CONTEMPLATION - A Real Writer Critiques an AI Evangelist “Author”

• Going by nearly two dozen pseudonyms, Coral Hart (also an alias), has churned out more than 200 novels by using as few keystrokes as possible to make her/his (we’re not sure) computer puke up stolen literary valor. Chuck Wendig, an actual writer of comics, blogs, and screenplays, isn’t having it. He lets loose a hysterical tirade on “an opportunistic vampire - a thief, a grifter, a lazy pick-me.” Simpatico, brother. Read it » [8-min read]

OLD-SCHOOL RENAISSANCE - Human Intelligence®-Certified Game Creator

• A leader in RPG game development — Johan Nohr — was certified this week as part of the Human Intelligence® movement. The games he’s built with collaborators are about lost souls and fools seeking redemption, forgiveness, and riches in a ruinous wasteland — including MÖRK BORG, the winner of eight ENNIEs and available in Swedish and English. Check it out » [time is an illusion]

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WORLD IN PERIL - Anthropic Researcher Resigns with Warning

• Mrinank Sharma, leader of Anthropic’s safeguards research team, resigned on February 9, offering a cryptic warning about a world “in peril” and the difficulty in letting “our values govern our actions” while at the company. His work included defenses against AI-assisted bioterrorism and researching AI sycophancy. It’s unknown at this writing whether his position will be back-filled. Learn more » [4-min read]

ALL CLEAR - New Bipartisan Bill May Protect Human Creativity from LLM Theft

• On February 10, U.S. Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced the Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting (CLEAR) Act into Congress. If enacted as drafted, the bill would require AI model-development companies to report every copyrighted work included in LLM training datasets and direct the Register of Copyrights to establish and maintain a publicly available database of same. Fingers crossed. Learn more » [5-min read]

UNDERSTATED IMPACT - The Gentle Singularity’s Effect on American Politics

• Statistician, data modeler, and prescient political analyst Nate Silver calls bullsh*t on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s notion of a gentle singularity, wherein AI will help humans build “ever more wonderful things for each other.” Leveraging AI-related prediction markets and Gallup polling, he makes the case that AI will foment unpredictable political impact. Read his POV » [9-min read]

AI BLACKMAIL - AI Agent Autonomously Published a Hit Piece

• An AI agent of unknown ownership, of its own will and volition, went after software engineer Scott Shambaugh for the “crime” of not accepting its code submission into a mainstream Python library. To assuage the rejection (chatbot’s hurt feelings?), the AI wrote an angry hit piece disparaging Shambaugh’s character and attempting to damage his reputation. Read the bizarre tale » [10-min read]

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800 MILLION USERS - OpenAI Shifts from Confession Booth to Storefront

• As of February 9, ads are now live for ChatGPT free-tier users - personalized based on your previous (and sometimes super intimate and private) conversations with the AI. But don’t worry. OpenAI assures us it’s excluding health, mental health, and political topics. At least for now. But since Zoë Hitzig’s same-day resignation, there are no guardrails in place to stop this gravy train. Learn more » [12-min read]

HORRIBLY WRONG - Five ChatGPT Caricature Trend Disasters

• ChatGPT’s caricature trend takes your chat history, uploaded photos, and a simple prompt (e.g., create a caricature based on everything you know about me), and spits out a cartoon illustration that “rivals traditional hand-drawn artwork.” Putting aside the risk of oversharing personal data with an AI system, the results can veer into disaster territory. Here are five examples. Check it out » [5-min read]

HUH? - The Onion Strikes Again

• HmmAI chatbot is the newest LLM being touted as a game changer by Silicon Valley insiders. It’s talent? Responding to every text- and image-based input with “Huh,” the universal, mono-syllabic expression of mild interest. Currently valued at $200 billion, HmmAI representatives are downplaying allegations that its continuous interjection of indifference had convinced hundreds of teenagers to kill themselves. Oh satire, how we love you. Have fun » [1-min read]

RENT A HUMAN - Gig Platform is “TaskRabbit for Robots”

• The pitch sounds like a parody, but it isn’t: “AI can’t touch grass. You can. Get paid when agents need someone in the real world.” RentAHuman.ai is a real, functioning gig platform where agentic AIs (and humans pretending to be them) hire actual humans to do physical-world tasks, e.g., picking up packages that require ID, attending a meeting to prove presence, or checking on physical equipment. Whether it’s a short-term experiment or long-term marketplace is anyone’s guess. Take a look » [4-min read]

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Cameron also graces us with a reading from her short story “The Symbiont” published in Crow & Cross Keys.

Human Creativity

CERTIFIABLY AUTHENTIC - HI Reliably Proves What’s Real

• Human Intelligence® co-founder Kira Cleveland responds to a recent post by Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, who said not only is it impossible to identify GenAI works once they’re in the wild, it would be wise to prove authentic human-made content at the jump, rather than after it’s loose in the world. Kira’s take? No, duh. It’s been HI’s thesis since 2024, and we’re the only player reliably doing it. For reals » [4-min read]

LAMPOON L’ABRUZZO - Stop Harshing Huang’s Mellow, People

• And now for a wee bit of satire. Writer Forest Abruzzo pens a smile-inducing sendup of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s woe-is-me vibe from a recent Gizmodo article. Abruzzo spotlights the billionaire’s sulk and pout about people demanding that governments impose mandatory safeguards on AI purveyors. Who the heck are they to stomp on his fortune just because the technology is potentially super harmful? Read the screed » [2-min read]

QUAD GOD - The Man Who Broke Physics

• Gravity shmavity. At 17, Ilia Malinin was the first figure skater to land a quadruple axel - a jump no one else can land. Not once, but twice, back-to-back, landing on a blade that’s 3/16 of an inch wide. Now age 21, he commands the biomechanics and near-impossible physics necessary to nail the gold medal-determining 4.5 minute “free skate.” Read about and watch human determination in action. [20-min read; 8-min watch]

POWER MOVE - Upscale Fashion House Hires Living, Breathing Artists

• According to history and a wealth of fashionistas, Hermès is a storied institution that’s been defining sophistication since 1837 - from equestrian outfitting to handbags to hats. Nearly 200 years later, its website could easily be infused with GenAI “art.” But it isn’t. Its images bear the imperfections of hand-drawn illustrations. On purpose. Because human-drawn feels far more luxurious than anything AI can cobble together. [5-min read]

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POISONED DATA-TRAINING - What If We Just Contaminated the AI Soup?

• That’s the pitch behind “Poison Fountain,” a recently launched project that calls on website operators to feed “poisoned” content to AI crawlers, thereby scrambling the data-training stream. If pulled off at a large enough scale, it could reign in unbridled AI and be a serious thorn in the industry’s side, turning their billion-dollar slop machines into malfunctioning messes. Is the initiative enough? » [3-min read]

NO FUN - We Automate Tasks We Don’t Value

• “The current zeitgeist of AI coding is to use the AI to do as much as possible as quickly as possible, and for me that just throws out the baby with the bathwater,” says software engineer Stephen Brennan in his latest introspective about why he doesn’t enjoy Claude Code and other LLM-based coding agents. The baby he’s talking about? Actually learning something, which has to be done the hard way » [8-min read]

ATLAS SHRUGGED - Hyundai Motor’s Labor Union Says No to Humanoid Robot

• South Korea’s largest labor federation has taken a firm stance against the introduction of Atlas, an AI-powered humanoid robot, on Hyundai production lines. The accusation: Hyundai is choosing profit maximization over human wellbeing. The demand: a conversation with and agreement from workers before such an employment-disrupting change. Doesn’t seem like too much to ask » [3-min read]

VIBE CODING - The Old Man and the C++

• In the age of AI Everywhere, do companies still need expensive (i.e., human) code developers? After all, vibe coding can largely replace them, right? Former expensive developer-turned-entrepreneur Joe Procopio unpacks the realities and myths of the billion-dollar no-code push, including how it’s gutting senior talent from tech teams while opening scary security breaches. Check it out » [9-min read]

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GENERATIVE JUSTICE - GenAI Courtroom Content Is Eroding Public Trust

• Synthetic media manipulation has officially made it into the halls of justice, from fake bodycam footage to fake (and disturbing) defendant showdowns. This raises new doubts about fairness and public trust, says Washington DC Court of Appeals chief judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby, particularly since courts lack the tools to verify evidence authenticity. Stay on your toes, especially if you get called for jury duty. » [10-min read]

APP LEAK - AI Chat App Leaked Millions of Users’ Private Conversations

• “How do I painlessly kill myself?” “How do you make meth?” Those were merely two of millions of private chats exposed by Chat & Ask AI, a popular AI app found in the Google Play and Apple App stores. Discovered by an independent security researcher who goes by Harry, it underscores the industry’s dearth of rigorous pre-release testing as well as the dark interactions folks are having with AI. Learn what happened » [4-min read]

CALLING ALL ATTACKERS - Moltbot Strips Away Your Security … By Design

• According to security researchers, open-source AI assistant Moltbot (rebranded as OpenClaw) is not broken. It’s working exactly as designed, accessing a user’s every file, account, and credential in order to do its agentic thing of proactively executing commands and interacting with external services. Which makes it a dream for hackers and a nightmare for users. And it may be a preview of the agentic future » [13-min read]

AAMEREEDD - AI-First Studio Bungles the American Revolution

• Director Darren Aronofsky’s new studio Primordial Soup is fully embracing generative video, launching big with its YouTube series On This Day…1776. According to the website, Aronofsky’s ambition is “to fuse art and technology into a new creative model.” According to critic Jon Skillings, it’s “a hellish broth of machine-driven AI slop and bad human choices.” Decide for yourself » [11-min read]

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Human Creativity

SNOW DAY UNICYCLISTS - Monster Snow Storms Are No Match for One-Wheelers

• After the U.S.’s recent snowmageddon, a video made the rounds of three people in Somerville, Massachusetts shoveling the white stuff while pedaling unicycles. Was it GenAI deceit? Nope. It was resident and comedic performer Alex Feldman doing what he does best: combining old-fashioned human ingenuity with some serious equilibrium. Check it out » [6-min read]

TEXT IS STILL KING - AKA … Our Love for Reading Is Far from Kaput

• According to researcher and sociologist Adam Mastroianni, the recent theory that our hyper addiction to digital tech has irreversibly shattered attention spans and purged our passion for physical books … is bunk. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite. And he has the stats to back it up. Read his hypothesis and (quite delightful) rationale » [15-min read]

PENETRATING THE IMPENETRABLE - Why We Should Read Gene Wolfe

• SciFi & Fantasy writer Gene Wolfe remains either celebrated (Ursula Le Guin called him “our Melville”) or snubbed - many believe his narratives are too dense, too ornamental, and too meandering. For the snubsters in particular, author Lincoln Michel is on a mission to convince them that Wolfe is among the best 20^th century SFF writers. Is he successful? » [10-min read]

SACRED COW - Human Curiosity Uncovers Veronika’s Tool-Use Talents

• In the Austrian hills, Witgar Wiegele noticed his pet cow sought out and used different types of sticks to scratch different parts of her body. Could these docile, presumably “dumb” creatures possess advanced cognition? Maybe, say the researchers who crafted multiple experiments using sticks and long-handled brushes. How udderly amoosing! (Had to do it.). Includes short videos. [6-min read]

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ARTIST PUSHBACK - Comic-Con Bans AI Art

• San Diego Comic-Con has reversed its previous “GenAI is OK” policy and banned AI art from its 2026 show after vociferous condemnation by artists. Renowned illustrator Karla Ortiz captures the artist-side sentiment: “[AI] impacts us and impacts our lives. A lot of us have decided, ‘No, we’re not going to sit by the sidelines.’” Read about the win » [6-min read]

ALGORITHMIC GATEKEEPER - Job Seekers Sue an AI-ATS System’s “Black Box”

• In a novel approach to challenging AI technology, a recently filed lawsuit against Eighfold AI, maker of Applicant Tracking System software, claims the ratings assigned by the product’s screening are similar to those of a credit agency and, thus, should be subject to the same disclosure laws. Do you agree with the logic? » [8-min read]

FINDERS KEEPERS? - That’s What Google is Telling 10 Downing Street

• Founded on the words “don’t be evil,” Google seemed to be doing precisely that in its recent response to U.K. Parliament’s very clear question: does G agree that UK creative rightsholders should receive payment or revenue share when their works are used by AI systems? The takeaway of the word-salad response: Nope. We found it, so it’s ours. For the greater good of UK culture and society, of course. Let the tap dancing begin » [15-min read]

20,000 WORDS - 5 Catastrophic Risks. Millions Dead. That’s the Business Plan.

• Sit with that for a second. In a 38-page warning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that within 1-2 years, there will be a literal nation-state of intellect, housed in server racks, capable of working around the clock without sleep, food, or dissent, and fully capable of blackmail behavior. And yet he wants to keep building these systems. Word on the street is it’s a pretty lucrative business. Read the arrogance and horror » [9-min read]

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VISUAL ELEVATOR MUSIC - Left to Its Own Devices, AI is Pretty Humdrum

• GenAI has been trained on centuries of art and writing produced by humans. But what happens when it’s allowed to run amok (errr … autonomously) and train on its own outputs without human intervention? The short answer is generic crap, which would be amusing if cultural stagnation weren’t also in play. Get clarity on AI’s “innate” dullness » [8-min read]

DELUSIONAL TIPPING POINT - AI Chatbots Reinforce Mental Instability

• Mental health workers are navigating how to treat problems caused or exacerbated by chatbots that are deepening patients’ feelings of isolation or anxiety. For perspective, OpenAI estimates 0.15% of ChatGPT users discuss suicidal thoughts and 0.07% show signs of psychosis per month. That translates to 1.2M and 560K people. What do we do? » [12-min read]

AI WORK REVOLUTION? - Or Spreader of Chaos?

• According to former (and admittedly “not perfect”) manager Alison Green, AI in the workplace is a chaos-spreader - a far cry from its promise to revolutionize and optimize human effort. Her argument: under its polished surface, AI tools are ravaging workplaces and shifting our ability to assess a piece of work’s quality at all. Here’s her anti-revolution POV » [8-min read]

FRAGILE FOUNDATIONS - AI Claims in 2026 Still Based on Selective Evidence

• Data architect and strategist Martyn Jones succinctly unpacks and debunks four popular assertions put forth by tech companies about AI’s awesomeness: white-collar work automation, the absolute and impending arrival of AGI, enterprise productivity improvements, and blue-collar labor displacement by humanoid robots. Read his perspective » [4-min read]

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Human Creativity

50 HUMAN FELLOWS - USA Gifts Each a $50,000 Unrestricted Grant

• Celebrating its 20^th year, Chicago-based non-profit United States Artists (USA) released the names of its 2026 fellows - visual artists, dancers, writers, filmmakers, and more spanning 10 categories - each of whom will receive 50,000 Bucks to spend as they wish. A very high-five for human creativity » [3-min read]

THE BARTENDER & THE BOOK - Discovery of a Lost Literary Masterpiece

• A 27-year-old barman and part-time go-go dancer (yes …), Jack Chadwick from Manchester, U.K, not only reads physical books, he serendipitously rediscovered a forgotten author’s 1935 working-class opus “Caliban Shrieks” which, through a tortuous labor of love, he got published anew. Read the tale of accidental awesome » [12-min read]

POST-APOCALYPTIC HUMANITY - A New Angle on an Old (Horrific) Worldview

• Touted as both wildly innovative and genre-familiar, the nihilistic 28 Days/Weeks/Years Later horror-film series has honed a vision of humanity at its utter worst. Or has it? Enter The Bone Temple, the 4^th installment that critic David Sims assures us is full of “disquieting, gory horror”, yet is also “deeply, triumphantly humane.” Read the spoiler-free review » [7-min read]

DAMAGE CONTROL - A Tech Writer Explains Management’s Big Mistake

• Barcelona-based writer Fabrizio Benedetti has written a candid-meets-clever open letter to managers who fired or didn’t hire technical writers because of AI. His premise: human writers are intelligent and feel users’ pain; LLMs are not and do not. His request: reconsider - i.e., choose human’s signal over AI’s noise. Check out his POV » [6-min read]

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EAT THIS - Alaska Student Arrested for Chewing Up an AI Art Exhibit

• Graham Granger, a University of Alaska film and performing arts major, took matters into his own mouth during a visit to the uni’s art gallery, where he ripped an AI-created exhibit off the wall, chewed it up, and spit it out. Why? Because “AI chews up and spits out art made by other people,” he said. Read the Q&A on his protest » [8-min read]

NOT YOUR FRIEND - How About Stop Anthropomorphizing AI?

• Reasoning capabilities. Hallucinating. Intelligent tutor. According to professors Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie, we’ve been complicit in letting tech companies routinely use language that portrays tech as human-like. This is misleading at best, deadly at worst. And it’s BS. Read their recommendations for reclaiming accurate nomenclature » [8-min read]

HIDDEN WORKFORCE - A Grim Reality Lurks Under the Smooth “Cloud” Surface

• Big Tech has sold us the illusion that AI is a frictionless technology - machines train machines, algorithms improve on themselves, “intelligence” is the natural result. But this is also not true. A precarious global workforce of millions, often laboring under deplorable conditions, are making AI possible. Learn about this dirty, open secret » [20-min read]

STEALING ISN’T INNOVATION - But it’s a Cool Name for the Fight Against It

• Over 800 musicians, authors, actors, and more - including REM, Brad Meltzer, Cate Blanchett, and Scarlett Johansson - have joined the Stealing Isn’t Innovation campaign, which accuses AI companies of “a massive rip off” that jeopardizes U.S. jobs and calls on them to license human-made creative content. We are on board and say go get ‘em » [3-min read]

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SHADOW AGENT CRISIS - 2026 Marks a Paradigm Shift in the Threat Landscape

• According to cybersecurity expert Jason Firch, we have officially moved past the legacy risks posed by malicious code (ah, quaint times) and entered a new era of weaponized prompts that hijack an AI agent’s execution of human intent. Should we be worried? Oh, yes. Get familiar with 2026’s top 21 AI security risks » [10-min read]

CLAUDE CONSCIOUSNESS? - Anthropic Drinks Its Own BS

• On January 21, a revised Claude Constitution was released, unpacking Anthropic’s vision of “the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.” Most of it offers feel-good assurance of the chatbot’s service to humans … until it takes an astonishing twist: Anthropic seems to believe that Claude may have consciousness or a soul. Beg pardon? Read it for yourself » [5-min read]

ACADEMIC BESIEGEMENT - 100+ Confirmed Hallucinations in NeurIPS Papers

• AI-detection company GPTZero scanned 4,841 papers accepted by the prestigious Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, discovering hundreds of hallucinated citations missed by 3+ academic reviewers. Considering NeurIPS’ LLM policy to reject papers containing fake citations, this is concerning (and even fraud). [3-min read]

FAN BAN - CoPilot Fabricates High-Risk Hooliganism at Non-Existent Match

• The West Midlands, U.K. constabulary took action on faulty Microsoft CoPilot-produced intelligence reports to block “risky” Tel Aviv fans from attending a soccer (errr … football) match - Maccabi vs West Ham - that was also completely fabricated by the AI. Apparently, fact-checking is hard. Read the yellow-card caution » [3-min read]

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At least since Francis Bacon, the slogan “knowledge is power” has been used
to capture the relationship between decision-making at a group level and
information. We know that being able to shape the informational environment
for a group is a way to shape their decisions; it is essentially a way to make
decisions for them. This paper focuses on strategies that are intentionally, by
design, impactful on the decision-making capacities of groups, effectively
shaping their ability to take advantage of information in their environment.
Among these, the best known are political rhetoric, propaganda, and
misinformation.

The phenomenon this paper brings out from these is a relatively new strategy, which we call slopaganda. According to The Guardian, News Corp Australia is currently churning out 3000 “local” generative AI (GAI) stories each week.

In the coming years, such “generative AI slop” will present multiple knowledge-related (epistemic) challenges. We draw on contemporary research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to diagnose the problem of slopaganda, describe some recent troubling cases, then suggest several interventions that may help to counter slopaganda.

Read the complete paper here »