Human Intelligence® News Update (1/27)
Humans create. AI imitates. Welcome to your weekly roundup about human creativity in the age of AI.
Human Creativity
50 HUMAN FELLOWS - USA Gifts Each a $50,000 Unrestricted Grant
Celebrating its 20th 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 4th 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]
Human VS Robot
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]
Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths
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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