Human Intelligence® News Update June 2, 2026
Humans create. AI imitates. Welcome to your weekly roundup about human creativity in the age of AI.
Come see us in Portland, OR on June 20th
If you’re in the Portland area on June 20th, please join us at 7pm at the PAM CUT Tomorrow Theater for a screening of Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine. Veatch’s film exposes artificial intelligence as a technology shaped by racism, misogyny, eugenics, and entrenched structures of power. Following the film, Human Intelligence® co-founder Ned Hayes will moderate a panel of creatives, AI engineers, and researchers. Get your tickets here.
Human Creativity
OUR BRAINS ARE BEING MELTED BY THE ALGORITHM - That For You page is really For Them
In a beautiful, succinct video, Patreon co-founder and CEO Jack Conte explains why most social media platforms’ “For You” pages are actually “For Them” pages. You pay for ad revenue with your attention, and these companies keep you locked in with an algorithm. "If you want to know what a tech company's priorities are—if you want to see into its soul—look at what its algorithm is optimizing for," Conte advises. Companies that want to feed you the best of human creativity will, he says, follow three rules: Prioritize long-term relationships; Fund art, not ads, and; Put humans in control.
Watch his video » [7 min]
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SWIMMING AND KITES - How AI narrows creative thinking
Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, led the institute’s global task force on A.I. and education. Which makes her exceptionally well positioned to summarize recent studies, all of which confirm AI’s tendency is to “constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas,” especially for young people.
Read more » [7 min]
FEEL FREE TO GET THE BOOING OUT OF THE WAY - How a commencement speech should reference AI
On May 23rd, Fareed Zakaria - bestselling author, columnist for The Washington Post, and host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS - delivered a barn burner of a commencement address at Bard College. “The danger of the AI age is not that machines will become too human,” Zakaria warns us, “It is that humans will start trying to become too machine-like.”
Read or watch his address » [18 min]
Human VS Robot
THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE - AI enters stage left as villain
Vanity Fair Senior Correspondent Rebecca Ford explores how HBO shows Hacks, The Comeback, and The Pitt feature AI - as villains. Whether churning out nonsensical scripts while putting writers out of work or misdiagnosing patients, HBO’s TV creators are sticking it to the ma(chi)n(e). (Unfortunately, this can’t be said for all filmmakers.)
Read more » [13 min]
ALIVE WITHOUT BREATHING - How Anthropic scored a plenary indulgence from the Pope
We here at Human Intelligence® think it’s wonderful that Pope Leo XIV has taken on AI in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. We also agree with Brian Merchant that Leo got played by Anthropic. After cloaking its products in a pallium of charitable-sounding “ethics slop,” Anthropic made the pilgrimage back to the U.S., where they promptly announced $65B in series H funding and became the world’s most valuable AI startup.
Read more » [27 min]
SHHHH, WE’RE INSTALLIN’ GIGABYTES - Google stakes a claim to your computer
That Privacy Guy blogger Alexander Hanff reported last month that Google Chrome, without permission, installed a 4G file on many users’ devices. Called
weights.bin, the file powers Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device LLM that runs AI-assisted Chrome functions, such as “Help Me Write” and AI-assisted task completion. If Hanff’s exhaustive explanation why this is not only intrusive, but likely illegal doesn’t give you pause, maybe the environmental cost will: He estimates that if only 3% of Chrome users are affected, 24 GWh will be consumed (roughly the amount of electricity used in a year by 7,000 average UK households) and 6,000 tons CO2e emitted (roughly the amount emitted each year by 1,300 average EU passenger cars). “At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.” (Snopes has fact-checked the post and found it to be “Mostly True.”) If you’re wondering if you’re affected, this CNET article will help you find and remove the file.
Read the post » [40 min]
Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths
TRUE LIES - Author with degree in (checks notes) “truth” makes stuff up
Last month, Wired magazine published a 1,450-word excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum’s Future of Truth. Which was quickly followed by a New York Times exclusive identifying numerous fabricated or misattributed quotes within the book. After retracting their story, Wired Senior Writer Kate Knibbs sat down with Rosenbaum to ask what happened. “It did not go well.”
Read the update » [14 min]
IT’S NOT APPLES; IT’S DIGNITY - When writing is grammatically perfect but lacks soul
Author and journalist Eve Fairbanks began noticing that everyone from her mechanic to the writers whose work she edits wrote in a style that was, as she puts it, “Perfectly clean … and [with] a distinctive tone that was simultaneously breezy and grandiose.” And while she appreciates that competition and the need for efficiency drive writers to use AI tools, AI-generated writing lacks evidence of the reasoning and originality readers crave.
Read more » [14 min] NOTE: We have an argument with the sentence, “In published writing, the traces of this process are erased.” This is not strictly true. We can find the traces and use them to authenticate human-made writing.
CLONES DON’T SELL - The great chasm between creation and creativity
Podcaster David Senra had a great discussion with Take-Two Chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick. Noting that AI is, “Big data sets, lots of compute, and a large language model mushed together,” Zelnick points out that data sets, by definition, are backward-looking. But commercial hits require creativity, which is inherently forward-looking. “All hits are by their very nature unexpected, and things that are data driven in their entirety can't be unexpected.”
Watch the clip or the full podcast » [4 min / 100 min]
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