Human Intelligence® News Update (5/12)

May 12, 2026

Human Creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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