Human Intelligence® News Update (5/19)

May 19, 2026

Human Creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This work has been certified as genuine human work. Check the certificate here.