The people training AI systems are not anonymous tech workers. Many are experienced professionals from industries decimated by the very technology they now help build. Ruth Fowler writes for Wired about her experience as a Hollywood screenwriter and showrunner who spent eight months working for AI training companies to pay her bills. Fowler describes a …
Gen Z is increasingly frustrated with artificial intelligence. New polling data and a growing number of firsthand accounts suggest that young people are not embracing AI as enthusiastically as tech companies have claimed. Instead, many are angry, anxious, and skeptical about where the technology is headed. A Gallup survey released by the Walton Family Foundation …
Artificial intelligence is generating music at a scale that is reshaping the streaming industry. French streaming service Deezer reports that 75,000 AI-generated tracks are uploaded to its platform every day, accounting for around 44 percent of all daily uploads. Spotify removed more than 75 million spam tracks in a single year. The surge is driven …
OpenAI has missed several internal targets for revenue and new users, raising questions inside the company about how it will fund its enormous spending on data centers. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has warned other company leaders that OpenAI may not be able to cover future computing contracts if …
European governments are racing to reduce their reliance on American technology companies, driven by fears that Washington could use digital services as political leverage. Mathieu Pollet and Anouk Schlung report for Politico that the effort is proving far more difficult and expensive than officials had anticipated. The urgency stems from a stark imbalance. Amazon, Microsoft …
US tech companies successfully convinced the European Union to keep environmental data from individual datacenters hidden from the public. Ajit Niranjan reports for The Guardian that Microsoft, alongside industry groups DigitalEurope and Video Games Europe, lobbied EU officials to classify all datacenter performance indicators as confidential commercial information. The lobbying effort was strikingly effective. The …
AI-generated avatars are flooding social media feeds, promoting products and building loyal audiences, often without disclosing that they are not real people. Charlie Warzel reports for The Atlantic, drawing on an interview with New York Times technology reporter Tiffany Hsu, who has investigated the rise of synthetic influencers selling supplements and other consumer products. One …
The open web faces an existential threat from Big Tech and artificial intelligence companies. Anil Dash warns on his personal website that 2026 could be the year the open internet as we know it ceases to exist. The open web allows anyone to create and publish content using publicly documented standards, share it freely worldwide, …
Two recent studies paint a concerning picture of how artificial intelligence tools are changing the way people think, reason, and express themselves. Taken together, the research suggests that widespread AI use is not only reducing users’ critical engagement with information, but may also be narrowing the diversity of human thought on a broader scale. Researchers …
Microsoft markets its Copilot AI assistant as a productivity tool for consumers and businesses alike. However, the product’s terms of use tell a different story. According to these terms, which were last updated in October 2025, “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely …