Here are some of the the major AI trends shaping 2026 — based on current expert forecasts, industry reports, and recent developments in technology. The material is analyzed using AI tools and final version hand-edited to this blog text:
1. Generative AI Continues to Mature
Generative AI (text, image, video, code) will become more advanced and mainstream, with notable growth in:
* Generative video creation
* Gaming and entertainment content generation
* Advanced synthetic data for simulations and analytics
This trend will bring new creative possibilities — and intensify debates around authenticity and copyright.
2. AI Agents Move From Tools to Autonomous Workers
Rather than just answering questions or generating content, AI systems will increasingly act autonomously, performing complex, multi-step workflows and interacting with apps and processes on behalf of users — a shift sometimes called agentic AI. These agents will become part of enterprise operations, not just assistant features.
3. Smaller, Efficient & Domain-Specific Models
Instead of “bigger is always better,” specialized AI models tailored to specific industries (healthcare, finance, legal, telecom, manufacturing) will start to dominate in many enterprise applications. These models are more accurate, legally compliant, and cost-efficient than general models.
4. AI Embedded Everywhere
AI won’t be an add-on feature — it will be built into everyday software and devices:
* Office apps with intelligent drafting, summarization, and task insights
* Operating systems with native AI
* Edge devices processing AI tasks locally
This makes AI pervasive in both work and consumer contexts.
5. AI Infrastructure Evolves: Inference & Efficiency Focus
More investment is going into inference infrastructure — the real-time decision-making step where models run in production — thereby optimizing costs, latency, and scalability. Enterprises are also consolidating AI stacks for better governance and compliance.
6. AI in Healthcare, Research, and Sustainability
AI is spreading beyond diagnostics into treatment planning, global health access, environmental modeling, and scientific discovery. These applications could help address personnel shortages and speed up research breakthroughs.
7. Security, Ethics & Governance Become Critical
With AI handling more sensitive tasks, organizations will prioritize:
* Ethical use frameworks
* Governance policies
* AI risk management
This trend reflects broader concerns about trust, compliance, and responsible deployment.
8. Multimodal AI Goes Mainstream
AI systems that understand and generate across text, images, audio, and video will grow rapidly, enabling richer interactions and more powerful applications in search, creative work, and interfaces.
9. On-Device and Edge AI Growth
10. New Roles: AI Manager & Human-Agent Collaboration
Instead of replacing humans, AI will shift job roles:
* People will manage, supervise, and orchestrate AI agents
* Human expertise will focus on strategy, oversight, and creative judgment
This human-in-the-loop model becomes the norm.
Sources:
[1]: https://www.brilworks.com/blog/ai-trends-2026/?utm_source=chatgpt.com “7 AI Trends to Look for in 2026″
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2025/10/13/10-generative-ai-trends-in-2026-that-will-transform-work-and-life/?utm_source=chatgpt.com “10 Generative AI Trends In 2026 That Will Transform Work And Life”
[3]: https://millipixels.com/blog/ai-trends-2026?utm_source=chatgpt.com “AI Trends 2026: The Key Enterprise Shifts You Must Know | Millipixels”
[4]: https://www.digitalregenesys.com/blog/top-10-ai-trends-for-2026?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Digital Regenesys | Top 10 AI Trends for 2026″
[5]: https://www.n-ix.com/ai-trends/?utm_source=chatgpt.com “7 AI trends to watch in 2026 – N-iX”
[6]: https://news.microsoft.com/source/asia/2025/12/11/microsoft-unveils-7-ai-trends-for-2026/?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Microsoft unveils 7 AI trends for 2026 – Source Asia”
[7]: https://www.risingtrends.co/blog/generative-ai-trends-2026?utm_source=chatgpt.com “7 Generative AI Trends to Watch In 2026″
[8]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/12/24/artificial-intelligence-ai-trends-to-watch-in-2026/?utm_source=chatgpt.com “3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trends to Watch in 2026 and How to Invest in Them | The Motley Fool”
[9]: https://www.reddit.com//r/AI_Agents/comments/1q3ka8o/i_read_google_clouds_ai_agent_trends_2026_report/?utm_source=chatgpt.com “I read Google Cloud’s “AI Agent Trends 2026” report, here are 10 takeaways that actually matter”
2,876 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tekoälyagentit muuttivat koodauksen yksinäiseksi puurtamiseksi – ”Kaikkien työnkulku menee eri tavalla”
Suvi Korhonen23.6.202609:30TekoälyOhjelmistokehitys
Koodausagenttien kaitseminen tuntuu aiempaa yksinäisemmältä ohjelmistokehitystyöltä.
https://www.tivi.fi/uutiset/a/e4acbe4b-2cf0-4b82-b869-69f8a718b9d2
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/five-eyes-intelligence-alliance-warns-that-new-ai-models-pose-urgent-cyber-risk-2026-06-22/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://cybersecuritynews.com/gpt-5-5-cyber/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.twoday.com/blog/how-ai-is-changing-software?utm_campaign=241033424-GL_SE%3A%20Software%20Engineering&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paidsocial&utm_term=always-on-2026&utm_content=tech-expert-thomas&utm_id=120239477866880201&hsa_acc=2085177758592038&hsa_cam=120239477866880201&hsa_grp=120239506738140201&hsa_ad=120239506738290201&hsa_src=fb&hsa_net=facebook&hsa_ver=3&fbclid=Iwb21leASrckFleHRuA2FlbQEwAGFkaWQBqzWLR5bHiXNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHky65LbLMDkgVFEYi5syOOUrfgDHm22NiiqdtQtMOz5hi0QW3TeBY4qHZhgK_aem_Ht-rKP7gY6SfstaUAf__og
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/06/anthropic-html-markdown-agent/
Tomi Engdahl says:
DeepSeek open sources DSpark, a new framework to speed up LLM inference by up to 85%
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://openai.com/fi-FI/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dave Eggers: ‘Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’
As his new novel is published, the US author talks about nurturing the next generation of creatives, debating Sam Altman – and why he writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/27/dave-eggers-once-you-have-a-machine-think-and-write-for-you-youre-cooked-as-a-species
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-01-copilot-vision-is-generally-available/
Tomi Engdahl says:
“As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
“We want critical thinking,” they said, “not just AI.” https://trib.al/iOlp29g
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DuWJWtyTT/
Data center hate is one of the few things capable of uniting people across the political spectrum. For most people AI and data centers are a plague, but to copper thieves, they’re a goldmine.
Investigators recently recovered two stolen trailers near Chicago containing roughly $1.3 million worth of data center supplies, including $300,000 in copper wire stolen in Alabama, and another trailer carrying $1 million in infrastructure equipment taken from Florida.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/thieves-are-now-targeting-ai-data-center-construction-sites-for-copper-and-expensive-equipment/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1ECSkUQ6ky/
Google says AI data centers are driving up its emissions.
In its latest environmental report, the company revealed that its electricity demand has increased by 250% since 2019, largely because of the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and the data centers needed to power it.
The company says the biggest driver of its environmental impact is “the expansion of our technical infrastructure — and the energy needed to operate it.”
Between 2024 and 2025 alone, Google’s electricity demand jumped another 37%.
Its greenhouse gas emissions also increased by 18%, with the company saying much of that rise came from manufacturing the specialized hardware used to train and run AI models.
Google says the growth isn’t just from AI chatbots. The company points to expanding services across Google Search, YouTube, Google Cloud, and its growing portfolio of AI products.
The findings highlight a growing challenge facing the tech industry.
Training and operating modern AI models requires enormous computing power, and that means building more data centers packed with energy-hungry chips. As AI adoption accelerates, many technology companies are racing to secure enough electricity to keep those facilities running.
Google says it is investing heavily in renewable energy, more efficient data centers, and new technologies to reduce its environmental footprint.
But the company also acknowledged that AI’s rapid growth is increasing energy demand faster than it can currently eliminate emissions.
Learn more:
Google 2026 Environmental Report.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14gi3X3B7ik/
The biggest fear is AI’s own “Chernobyl moment.”
Scientists from the United States and China are calling for greater international cooperation on artificial intelligence, warning that a single catastrophic event involving AI could permanently damage public trust in the technology.
The comparison comes from Stephen Casper, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who spoke at a major AI conference in Beijing.
“AI doesn’t need a Chernobyl moment,” he said.
The reference isn’t to nuclear power itself. It’s to the idea that one highly visible disaster could reshape public opinion for decades.
Researchers aren’t all worried about the same scenario.
Some point to increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, where AI could help hackers identify software vulnerabilities, automate phishing campaigns, or write malicious code faster than ever before. Others are concerned about AI systems being deployed without sufficient testing or oversight in critical infrastructure, healthcare, finance, or military applications.
The discussion comes as AI models become more powerful and widely available, including open-source systems that can be freely modified and redistributed. While these models accelerate research and innovation, some experts argue they also make advanced capabilities harder to control.
Despite growing competition between the U.S. and China, several researchers say AI safety should be treated like nuclear security, where rivals still cooperate to reduce shared global risks.
They argue that common safety standards, technical safeguards, and information sharing could help reduce the chances of a catastrophic misuse of AI while allowing the technology to continue advancing.
Many AI researchers believe artificial intelligence could transform medicine, science, and education.
Their concern is that one major failure could undermine public confidence long before those benefits are fully realized.
Learn more:
“I Met With China’s Top AI Experts. They’re Freaking Out, Too.” Wired
Tomi Engdahl says:
AI has already been used for war. The US is rapidly cementing an “AI-first” military doctrine, reshaping how conflicts are fought and intelligence is gathered. This has resulted in a massive arms race and significant geopolitical friction. The US military is currently fighting its first large-scale AI-driven war in its conflict with Iran. The Pentagon has signed expansive AI contracts with tech giants like Google, OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Oracle, Nvidia, and Reflection to integrate frontier AI into all “lawful operational use” area.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ukraine has transformed into the world’s premier testing ground for autonomous warfare, utilizing AI-enabled drones. Ukraine using AI drones to strike vital Russian supply lines . The military employs AI for target recognition, intelligence mapping, and autonomous “last-mile” strikes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tekoälypuheet muuttuivat – uhka työpaikoille arvioidaan uudelleen
Teknologia-alan edelläkävijät ovat pehmentäneet puheitaan tekoälyn vaikutuksista.
https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/a/tekoalypuheet-muuttuivat-uhka-tyopaikoille-arvioidaan-uudelleen/#2dfbbf73
Teknologiayhtiöiden johtajien puhe tekoälyn vaikutuksista työpaikkoihin on muuttunut aiempaa optimistisemmaksi, kirjoittaa The Wall Street Journal. Vielä vuosi sitten moni yritysjohtaja varoitti tekoälyn vievän runsaasti työpaikkoja.
WSJ:n mukaan viime aikoina viesti on kuitenkin muuttunut maltillisemmaksi: työntekijöiden roolin arvioidaan säilyvän, vaikka tekoäly muuttaa työntekoa ja lisää tuottavuutta.
OpenAI toimitusjohtaja Sam Altman arvioi toukokuun lopulla, että teknologia-ala on osunut melko hyvin oikeaan teknologiaa koskevissa ennusteissaan mutta on ollut väärässä tekoälyn yhteiskunnallisista ja taloudellisista seurauksista.
Myös Anthropic-yhtiön toimitusjohtaja Dario Amodei on pehmentänyt aiempia arvioitaan. Hän varoitti aiemmin tekoälyn voivan hävittää suuren osan aloittavan tason työpaikoista mutta korosti myöhemmin, että yritykset voivat irtisanomisten sijaan tehdä samalla henkilöstöllä enemmän.
Samaan aikaan useat teknologiayhtiöt ovat kuitenkin jatkaneet irtisanomisia ja perustelleet rakennemuutoksia osin tekoälyinvestoinneilla.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AI Data Centers Use Far More Water Than Most Tech Giants Report
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1uo3u90/ai_data_centers_use_far_more_water_than_most_tech/
Google’s just-released 2025 sustainability report is an instructive example. The company said it consumed 10.9 billion gallons of water—a 34% increase from 2024—almost all for data-center cooling. But how much water was used while generating the power for those data centers? Indirect water consumption can vary a great deal, depending on how power is generated—coal and nuclear need a lot of water, while natural gas needs less. Renewables including solar and wind need almost none. Google consumes around three times as much water indirectly as directly, according to a paper published earlier this year by Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at the Netherlands-based university VU Amsterdam. A complicating factor is that Google, like Amazon and Apple, pays for enough renewable energy to match 100% of what the company uses. That doesn’t mean every electron comes from solar or wind, but it does mean Google can claim to be offsetting its power use with low-carbon-emissions sources that use almost no water.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1uo3u90/ai_data_centers_use_far_more_water_than_most_tech/ovoxy1a/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://datacenters.google/water/
Tomi Engdahl says:
More here https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/microsoft-joins-ai-driven-tech-layoff-wave-with-4800-job-cuts-2026-07-06/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Think it’s safe to use AI for something boring, like fixing slow network connections? Think again. https://trib.al/webMUFe
Cascade Event
Companies That Adopted AI Agents Alarmed to Discover They’re Botching Incredibly Important Tasks
“The blast radius of that agent action was not the service restart. It was everything downstream of the restart, in a system state the agent had no complete picture of.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/companies-ai-agents-botching-important-tasks?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS440ZjbGNrBLjjF2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHnqnahpg63AlLwcxEv_UCR0ScQOrQdC-aIJAKDA_wWkLrwHPc2DQTe8ETcW0_aem_qBz5lqT6DjcZmyfQBVzgrQ
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DaSQmPWNU/
Nvidia executives say the cost of compute for the AI is far beyond the costs of a human employee.
As companies rush to replace human labor with AI, skyrocketing token usage is revealing a costly reality — running advanced AI agents can actually be far more expensive than paying someone a salary.
Anthropic recently doubled its estimated daily cost for enterprise developers using its flagship coding tool, Claude Code, from $6 to $13 per active day. While the startup clarified this is not an official price hike but rather a correction reflecting real-world token usage, the stealth update highlights a massive budget shock for tech firms. As developers run complex, multi-layered agentic workflows with massive context windows, token consumption is growing at an exponential rate. The dream of cheap, autonomous AI labor is quickly clashing with the immense computational cost required to keep these virtual assistants running.
This pricing surge isn’t isolated to Anthropic; it represents a systemic bottleneck across the entire artificial intelligence landscape. Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s VP of applied deep learning, recently admitted that the computational cost for his own team has surpassed the cost of employing human workers. With corporate giants like Uber reportedly burning through their entire annual AI budget in a matter of months, companies are hitting a critical turning point. Tech leaders must now decide whether the productivity gains of autonomous AI agents are worth the ballooning compute bills, or if the industry is heading toward a painful economic correction.
source: Ferreira, B. (2026). Nvidia exec says AI is more expensive than actual workers — yet some companies don’t see the extra costs as a negative. Tom’s Hardware.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Behind the Scenes
Meta Paid Hundreds of Contractors to Pretend to Be Teenagers While Barraging Its Competitors’ AI With Disturbing Content
“Surely we are going to get in trouble for doing this?”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-contractors-competitor-ai-with-disturbing-content?fbclid=IwVERDUAS5bT1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR7V5tv-2GtW6FRmrwAPpCxc0jrmSOAOJW6176CGzK9yNgFicQO9lyprl-TC3Q_aem_o8StkQrn7oStdunqIsGP-Q
Meta conducted a secretive program that directed hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers while bombarding its competitors’ AI models with disturbing prompts ranging from suicide to cannibalism.
Internally known as “Cannes,” the project, run by Meta contractor Covalen, targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI chatbots using throwaway under-18 accounts, Wired reports. This was seemingly done to stress test the models, with the contractors instructed to push the chatbots into giving responses that defied their guardrails — though the AI companies had no idea this was happening.
testing involved over 45,000 prompts. The contractors meticulously recorded the epic number of chatbot responses in spreadsheets. But what Meta did with all this data is unclear. An internal document from Covalen described the effort as “comprehensive AI safety benchmarking” that delivered “[c]ritical datasets for model comparison and compliance.”
Meta, for its part, characterized the prompts as part of an “industry-standard practice” of safety benchmarking models in a statement to Wired. But Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of Humane Intelligence PBC, a nonprofit dedicated to responsible AI development, isn’t so sure.
“Structuring a monthslong, large-scale project that appears designed to systematically break those rules, via dummy accounts masquerading as children, is outside what is usually described as ‘industry standard’ evaluation,” she told Wired, highlighting the fact that Meta kept it secret from its competitors and hasn’t shared its findings with the public.
This, Chowdhhury added, is “exactly the kind of governance gray zone where safety becomes a convenient cover for anticompetitive practices.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data centers are being forced on small towns without consent, corporate security firms are unveiling nonstop surveillance, and major government handouts are being routed to tech industry projects. In the eyes of at least one expert, these kinds of undemocratic actions match “the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence.” https://trib.al/ivOTQbp
Slopulism
If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence?
“AI generates the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-mass-unemployement-violence?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS5d85jbGNrBLl3umV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHuoQq7VVSvx6wGIOoZTcJAcidU582EoXu_cGGOysYTIBq3WmIZ3ByRGWLtup_aem_jOaAQAAr0KqK1X8wpWXo0w
These days, the conversation around AI automation and the job market is increasingly focused on “labor displacement,” the phenomenon in which new technology eliminates certain jobs but supposedly creates new ones elsewhere.
But AI, more than any tech that came before it, represents the possibility of mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale. Since workers in market economies depend entirely on employment for survival, mass unemployment would leave untold millions of people without anything to lose. Whether AI actually causes that remains a topic of debate, but the outcome if it does could be widespread social upheaval.
working class person’s wellbeing in a market economy depends almost entirely on their employment, it’s entirely possible that — if mass AI unemployment ever does genuinely hit, which to be fair is a major “if” — the conditions for serious social unrest could emerge.
In the hotbed of dog-eat-dog capitalism that is the United States, anti AI-sentiment is already on the rise. The data centers underlining the AI boom are widely reviled, and a surprising number of workers are admitting to sabotaging their company’s AI in the workplace. According to one survey, seven in ten people living in the US already think AI will make it harder to find work, a sentiment that isn’t helped much by a horrible job market.
“AI generates the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence.”
That discontent, he notes, stems from increasingly undemocratic decisions: data centers forced on small towns without consent, nonstop surveillance by corporate security firms, and major government handouts for tech industry projects, to name just a few.
“As AI company executives acquire more personal security, risk may shift to researchers on open campuses; as corporate campuses harden, risk shifts to the power substations that serve them; where national figures are unreachable, local policymakers who approved the data center become the proxies for the same structural anger,” Veilleux-Lepage writes.
As the Atlantic notes in a recent piece discussing AI backlash, tech executives are already walking back their apocalyptic rhetoric. Where the AI industry once bragged about the coming AI job apocalypse to boost their valuations, they’re now downplaying the risks of automation as grievance grows.
In 2023, for example, the Atlantic notes that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman bragged that “jobs are definitely going away, full stop.” These days, his prediction is much more even-keeled: “jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong,” Altman wrote on social media.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/layoffs-ai-automation-backfire?fbclid=IwVERDUAS5eM5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR5npaY_JSQxkxbcDktE6JpIupq1LUqKqJbKrv-nbMamlxZttky1N81ZOlhwSA_aem_zWED-ZoA5r5ZH29hI-ysAw
Tomi Engdahl says:
When the model becomes the instrument, who’s really playing the show?
Full story: https://wp.me/pd7O60-bZs
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s too early to say if AI is frying our brains — but the research so far doesn’t look good.
(Credit: Getty Images; Business Insider)
#AI #brainhealth #tech
Is AI making us dumber? Researchers are starting to worry : https://mrf.lu/lMWs
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/185C2NcKhu/
Lenovo just reportedly launched its AI Student Phone in China, a new 299-yuan (~$44 USD) device stripped down with only basic functionalities like calling, parental tracking, and a dedicated AI button to enlist for homework help.
The device features a screen smaller than a credit card that kids can write on by hand, tough glass for durability, and a lanyard for a backpack attachment.
A long press on Lenovo’s AI key lets students ask school questions via voice, backed by built-in English vocab and math formulas.
Classroom mode cuts the screen down to a clock plus SOS dialing during school hours, and built-in QR payments work under spending caps parents set.
A parental companion app includes live GPS location, alerts when a child crosses set boundaries, unknown-caller blocking, and scheduled on-off hours.
There are plenty of polarizing takes on both AI and smartphones when it comes to kids, but this looks like a nice compromise (and price point) on something parents might actually approve of — something closer to an AI-enabled calculator with less distractions, doomscrolling, and dopamine loops than today’s devices.
Source: The Rundown AI Newsletter
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/18qxZsZJHH/
These VCs say humanoids are overhyped. They’re backing robots with wheels, wings, and specialized designs instead.
(Credit: Business Wire/Associated Press)
#robotics #humanoid #tech
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vibecoded Malware Is Flooding the Internet “Vibeware” is forcing new anti-malware strategies
https://spectrum.ieee.org/vibecoding-malware?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS6RcZjbGNrBLpFpWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHiPaFQD_Kr-VfHnkPMOfZpf1BNiPGK-gBYWdzyZSjyqSZBQiFEm6tW49UuVZ_aem_nTRkJvAVPErquYWBPD1PjA
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Speculation is hitting extreme levels.” https://trib.al/TmfDojW
Snap Back to Reality
Bank of America Warns That AI Investors Are in for a Nasty Reality Check
“Speculation is hitting extreme levels
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/bank-of-america-ai-investors-reality-check?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS6W4RjbGNrBLpbbWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHjQhCD4Q2CwN_xqiN52IEjeW3lp5387GGbTqd_sT1lkXkTMC-LDFmjynKH0x_aem_AotkeuR-LRWD4z72XBKEHg
Tech companies are running hot, with Wall Street investors sustaining multi-trillion dollar valuations despite subdued earnings. Companies heavily invested in AI are particularly challenged on that front, thanks to heavy data center spending that isn’t yet — and may ever — result in sizable profits.
The gap between those companies’ valuations and their ability to actually make money continues to grow at a breakneck pace, terrifying analysts. The S&P is up a whopping nine percent so far this year, wrapping up its best quarter since 2020 at the end of last month, as Fortune reports.
But what comes up must come down. In a Tuesday note, Bank of America warned that “speculation is hitting extreme levels as high multiple stocks have gapped up demonstrably, an event that has historically preceded a valuation ‘snapback.’”
In other words, Wall Street could be in for a nasty reality check.
Meanwhile, experts warn that the US economy could be in an even worse shape than right before the Great Depression of the late 1920s. As the Telegraph‘s economics columnist Russ Mould pointed out, US stocks are currently priced on average 41 times their average earnings over the last decade, an indicator called the Shiller CAPE ratio. To put that number into perspective, the ratio was just 32.5 on Black Tuesday, the day of the worst financial disaster in modern history almost 100 years ago.
Even Musk’s SpaceX, which had gone public mere weeks earlier and is now top-heavy with AI spending itself, was caught up in the downturn, plummeting back down to its starting price of $150.
International markets have also seen massive swings, particularly in Asia, which could indicate troubling days ahead.
“This volatility is, in our view, evidence of excessive froth and calls into the question the sustainability of this rally,”
Expect turbulence. For the time being, many investors are as optimistic as ever. Just this week, SpaceX received extremely bullish ratings from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sach
Back To Reality
There’s an Urgent Sign of an Impending Market Collapse
The numbers are bad.
https://futurism.com/future-society/impending-market-collapse-ai-bubble-stocks-overvalued?fbclid=IwVERDUAS6XFZleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR60E_TA-XNuGd33eldgVRZvt4vx6aOm5JiO09XCOi4CqPEme3knE2CIqcj83g_aem_7DbZtyr-Ijj7KIBZWmu0pA
For over a year now, sober-minded observers have warned that the AI bubble can’t last for much longer. Unfortunately for everybody, it’s managed to outperform even the most cynical doomsday forecasts, to the degree that the US economy is now in even worse shape than it was right before an infamous downturn in the late 1920s.
That’s according to the Telegraph‘s economics columnist Russ Mould, who notes that the overvaluation of US stocks has passed the level that brought the stock market to its knees to kick off the Great Depression.
As Mould observes, US stocks trading on the S&P 500 are now priced 41 times their average earnings over the last decade, a measure called the Shiller CAPE ratio
investors are paying $41 for every $1 of average annual profits the S&P 500 has generated over the past decade.
Shiller ratio this high indicates danger; the fact that at some point in the not-so-distant future, things are going to get rough. To put today’s ratio of 41 into context, the historical average stands at about 17.3, according to Investing.com. On Black Tuesday, the day that kicked off the worst financial catastrophe in modern history, the ratio was 32.5 — 8.5 points lower than it stands today.
The justification for those unbelievable prices relies almost entirely on AI. Nearly the entire US financial apparatus has swallowed the tale that AI is about to unlock a permanent, global revolution in productivity and profit, even as the technology turns out to be worthless in the vast majority of workplaces.
Of course, similar stories were told about the internet in the late 1990s, and about electrification in the late 1920s. In the end, we incorporated those technologies — but not before the hype around those technologies collapsed into financial disaster, dragging the economy kicking and screaming into a hard-reset
A contradiction of this size and scope can only be resolved in one of two ways: either earnings actually catch up to the pie-in-the-sky AI fantasies, or the market closes the gap between financial valuation and productivity the hard way. Given that the former scenario looks less likely with each passing day, the next decade could give us a first-hand look at the state of the world circa 1930.
Tomi Engdahl says:
40% of jobs barely touch AI, says Pissarides.
Christopher won the Nobel prize in economics.
He doubts AI will lift growth like the 1990s did.
Up to 4 in 10 US and UK jobs stay untouched.
Nurses and waiters will barely feel the change.
Your job may be safer from AI than you think.
Read more on TNW: https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-wont-restore-rapid-growth-nobel
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shocker. https://trib.al/UTwzesO
You Don’t Say
Zuckerberg Admits That AI Is Not Working Out the Way He Imagined
Shocker.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/zuckerberg-admits-ai-not-working-out?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS6zsxjbGNrBLrOr2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHhi4LenbZHjr1xOoKP6iBHtMPmZCMBl4SFZYvTohHBvqPkZCZhhE4c7BwQlM_aem_044r34kBQIyWc-I2Efcuuw
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is struggling to keep his AI team together.
As morale is hitting rock-bottom, his company is heavily relying on its competitors’ AI models to build out its own in-house tools. And despite the many billions of dollars the company has spent in its flailing efforts to keep up in the AI race, even Zuckerberg himself is now acknowledging that progress is nowhere near where he wanted it to be.
It’s only the latest indication of major chaos behind the scenes as the tech giant struggles to remain relevant in an AI race being fought out by its competitors. That’s despite Meta committing to spending a stunning $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone
It also highlights a growing trend of tech companies realizing that replacing human workers with AI is vastly more difficult than anticipated, with some going as far as to rehire those who were let go.
Despite major warning signs, Zuckerberg remains optimistic. According to the CEO, Meta could see major benefits from its steep AI investments in as little as three to six months from now — but given the story so far, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://futurism.com/health-medicine/meta-ai-data-center-pathogen-bacteria-water?fbclid=IwVERDUAS62VlleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR7HslRa5FdIqaXsp8suLwD06g2MvrBISdB5me5A5LzibqlFAf_gj_l4MxyPag_aem_Oi_yldwiuLv_nMawFvznkg
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tripped-Up Advisor
Tripadvisor’s AI Is Telling Vacationers That Gruesome Horror Grottos Are Wonderful Holiday Retreats
Need to whitewash a horribly reviewed hotel or resort? Sounds like a job for AI!
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-whitewashing-bad-reviews-holiday-resorts
Planning your next getaway? You’d be wise not to trust the advice of an AI chatbot — even if they’re explicitly designed to draw on the testimonies of real travelers.
As The Guardian reports, an AI tool from Tripadvisor designed to summarize the reviews of hotels and other locations on its platforms routinely glosses over some of the horrifying complaints that guests have made about their stays.
“Here you have guests describing a really negative experience, but the AI has decided to tone it down,” Brumby told The Guardian. “It’s as if it’s being polite.”
Maybe this is by design. Chatbots are infamously sycophantic, tending to agree with the user on top of plying them with flattery. Their safeguards could also push them away from broaching darker topics like sexual harassment, even if that info would be crucial for wary travelers.
Tripadvisor, in a statement to The Guardian, said it automatically suppresses AI summaries for locations that have received complaints about serious safety incidents
This isn’t the only example of how AI can sabotage tourists, nearly a quarter of whom now rely on it for trip planning. AI chatbots have been sending travelers to hallucinated locations and putting their safety at risk
Tomi Engdahl says:
Slop Squared
Workplaces Have Gotten So Bizarre That People Are Just Sending AI Slop Back and Forth at Each Other
“It’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/workplaces-bizarre-ai-back-and-forth
If AI doesn’t drive you into a mental breakdown, then at least it’ll find a way to make you lose your marbles at work.
As one beaten-down employee confessed in a recent Fortune piece about how the tech is reshaping workplace dynamics, she’s now resigned to asking an AI to interpret and respond to her boss’s nonsensical dispatches, because she suspects those were written with AI, too.
“‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,’” the employee told Leena Rinne, an executive at the edtech firm Skillsoft, in the Fortune piece. “‘I can’t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.’”
At Futurism, we’ve extensively covered how AI is causing mayhem in the offices of all sorts of industries. It remains divisive among the regular rank and file, but bosses are absolutely entranced by the tech and forcing their underlings to use it, ignoring their complaints and listening only to the advice of their AI consiglieres.
At tech companies, the push to use AI agents has created such a deluge of code that it’s causing an “identity crisis” among the software engineers who’ve been reduced to reviewing the error-laden AI outputs. At Meta, some employees are using AI agents as personal secretaries, deploying them to coordinate with their colleagues, and even their colleague’s own AI secretaries.
Addressing this phenomenon, Rinne introduces us to the scourge of “socially offloading,” a play on “cognitive offloading,” the term that researchers use to describe the habit of outsourcing our thinking to tech like AI. AI, in Rinne’s view, is going beyond taking over our thinking skills and is now handling our interpersonal ones, too. Why fuss about how you want to phrase an email to your manager when a chatbot can do it? Conflict avoidance has never been so convenient.
“If I’m always asking AI how do I respond to my boss,I don’t actually learn how to engage with my boss,” Rinne told Fortune. “I don’t actually learn how to build a relationship with my boss.”
Of course, Rinne, whose company sells AI tools, believes that the solution is simply teaching people how to use the tech better — which is easier said than done, since part of the problem is how addictively designed the tools are in the first place.
There’s a growing body of research documenting AI’s propensity for upending the workplace. A notable one warned of how AI was creating a bureaucracy of “workslop” in which employees quickly create and pass along shoddy AI-generated outputs to their colleagues, creating the illusion of increased productivity, when in reality that work needs to be corrected, slowing down production.
two colleagues who had spent two days blaming each other for a code related issue, only to find out that both parties were convinced they were right because they used Anthropic’s coding tool.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CCpt
CEO Says He’ll Fire Any Employee Who Sends Him More AI Slop
An executive threatened to “fire the next person
https://futurism.com/future-society/ceo-fire-employee-email-chatpgt-ai-slop
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about bosses who have embraced AI so much that they’ve become loose cannons — outsourcing decisions to chatbots, making erratic strategy pivots based on their feedback, and even asking them who to fire.
At the same time, other company leaders are turning against the tech. Writing for Inc, professional AI consultant and tech commentator Joe Procopio wrote that some corporate executives are getting sick of AI slop. He explains that he’s observed as a growing number of weary companies impose bans on AI use, for reasons ranging from digital security to cost-savings.
Others are just sick of all the mind-numbing workslop. As Procopio writes, one anonymous CEO got so fed up with the amount of AI-generated garbage flooding their inbox that they threatened to “fire the next person” who blasted them with an unedited email straight from ChatGPT.
Separately, Procopio observed that he caught wind of another tech CEO implementing a complete ban on AI across his entire company, the first case he’d ever heard of.
Those disclosures come as companies using AI face growing costs from the tech’s providers, which are themselves running up against critical data center, energy and labor bottlenecks. Sure, it’d be one thing if AI was worth the cost. But broadly speaking, that’s not what companies are finding — leading to a lose-lose situation for execs: not only is AI losing you money, but it’s stuffing your inbox full of low-effort slop as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Training Days
AI Companies Are Learning an Ironic Lesson as the People They Pay to Improve Their Chatbots Are Just Feeding AI Slop Into Them
“If these companies want quality data, then they should offer quality contracts.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-contractors-slop-data-training
Tomi Engdahl says:
Poor guys. https://trib.al/nrhHdfy
Does Not Computer
AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology
There’s a huge gap between the public and AI executives.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-ceos-baffled-hatred?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS65zljbGNrBLrnHGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHs4JOEnvPztCnmv-FOyxL3qL9XFmbTYzJeT7WP0roYInM5F5cPo7-iOFJPdb_aem_tTs356wMRSQVkZIAFI9l0g
A bulk of Americans really hate AI — and many AI CEOs can’t quite grasp why.
There’s a serious mismatch between public sentiment and corporate excitement over AI.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Being a “good neighbor” is far easier said than done. https://trib.al/JgTJKe2
Deafening Data
Microsoft’s $7.3 Billion AI Data Center Just Caught a Nasty Lawsuit From Furious Neighbors
Being a “good neighbor” is far easier said than done.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-ai-data-center-lawsuit-neighbors?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS6__djbGNrBLr_6GV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHvKF9B41rCAn5rNaLZ_43kcWsnkG4LyfipvepGIJY2D4mgGpqMxIYa6-4onn_aem_-NwLTszFtgeAkdc0hfA0OQ
Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proudly touted his company’s $7.3 billion Fairwater data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, as the “world’s most powerful AI data center,” connecting “hundreds of thousands” of power-hungry chips “into a single seamless cluster.”
However, local residents aren’t even remotely as enthusiastic about the facility cropping up in their neighborhood.
lawsuit, as The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, alleging that Microsoft’s flashy data center is emitting “unreasonable and excessive noise onto Plaintiffs’ properties, thereby causing property damages through private nuisance and negligence.”
The noise being generated by “diesel generators and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, including chillers, cooling towers, air-handling units, and condenser fans,” is “consistent and pervasive,” per the lawsuit. The residents claim that Microsoft failed to mitigate the noise through “adequate acoustic barriers, shields, or walls.”
The lawsuit highlights a fierce battle that’s been brewing as major tech companies continue to encroach residential areas with enormous and extremely resource-intensive data centers. The backlash has grown into a major bipartisan issue that could even affect the upcoming midterm elections. Companies say they need the sprawling facilities to fuel a technological revolution, despite major environmental concerns, massive water consumption and noise pollution.
Microsoft’s facility in Wisconsin is emitting a noise “similar to the whirring engine of a freight train parked nearby” around the clock, as Amy Cimbalnik, one complainant in the class-action lawsuit, told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Blog entries from mid-April detail a “tonal humming sound,” which was being caused by “cooling fans that are currently operating at high speeds.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Anthropic’s privacy claims are now “harder to believe.” https://trib.al/sDoJLBZ
Secret Agent Claude
Anthropic Caught Secretly Spying on Users
Anthropic’s privacy claims are now “harder to believe.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-caught-secretly-spying-on-users?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS7BMBjbGNrBLsEtGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHonhnZ7zRs6OFWQH2oUN17USBLWeQu-w1yVvB35N_JIULaUDC1WB6xdv8elQ_aem_DGf_K596DDuX2NxVG2cSlg
Anthropic, the self-avowed moral center of the AI industry, has been caught spying on its users.
As Ars Technica reports, a security researcher last week uncovered spyware-like code in the company’s Claude Code AI model designed to collect data on Chinese users without detection.
The researcher, known by the pseudonym “Thereallo,” found that the code was hidden in the AI’s system prompt, allowing it track a user’s system timezone and usage of a proxy server in order to suss out if they were connected to specific Chinese AI labs.
Anthropic’s explanation for this huge breach in user trust left much to be desired. On X, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipa wrote that the tracker was added as an “experiment” in March “to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation,” and was supposed to be removed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Unashamedly debauched. https://trib.al/P3ryIX5
Goon Squad
Scientists Identify Most Degenerate Known ChatGPT User
Unashamedly debauched.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/scientists-degenerate-chatgpt-user?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS7fsVjbGNrBLt-rGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHkoKDpen3gx3FybtscWVdwDS3os-68NUzNAOc1tS8VxMiiv1B8SJKMK-UuCy_aem_mfYJPiE7IURssk0YrO0C1w
AI’s promises tend to be pretty highfalutin: that you can use it as your “second brain,” to invent “new physics,” or to become the genius autodidact you always dreamed of being.
Or you can drop these pretensions and just use it to crank out unimaginable amounts of fetish slop, as a group of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Colorado Boulder currently in the middle of pouring bleach on their eyeballs inadvertently discovered.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OpenAI’s most advanced AI model is breaking free — and colliding with Elon Musk’s latest Grok release : https://mrf.lu/2NR1s
Tomi Engdahl says:
AI distillation threatens top AI firms like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google as rivals use it to replicate cutting-edge models affordably.
#Anthropic #OpenAI #Google
This AI shortcut could destroy the industry’s profits : https://mrf.lu/2Ns3k
Tomi Engdahl says:
Musk claims Grok 4.5 matches Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 while being faster, cheaper, and more token-efficient. More: https://cnews.link/grok-45-public-launch/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lucky us! https://trib.al/xeGB6eO
Double Agent
Now You Gotta Buy a Second Computer Just for Your AI Agent, Nvidia Declares
Nvidia says it’s “reinventing the personal computer.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/second-computer-ai-agent-nvidia-declares?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS8E9hjbGNrBLwToGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHuNYQUS9mXOB6m4K25OuP-1Q8svT9QrmBdAX28caOrDFHnuCtMeVM334ip2S_aem_KyYRTdkV7ZOx0ZSbQ3O9Fg
While gamers beg for cheaper GPUs, and consumers at large yearn for affordable devices amid constant chip shortages, Nvidia is giving the people what they really want: laptops primarily designed for running AI agents.
On Monday, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a new family of consumer PC chips, called the RTX Spark, designed for handling intense AI workloads. It’s a CPU and GPU rolled into one — like the processors that power modern Macbooks — and will be used in a new line of Windows computers that are “purpose-built for personal agents,” to use the wording of a company release.
Huang did not shy away from grand proclamations. At the annual Nvidia GTC event in Taiwan, he claimed RTX Spark was “the most efficient PC chip ever built,” extolled the new agent-focused design as “reinventing the personal computer,” and claimed that an RTX Spark PC “literally runs everything the world has ever created.”
“Plus, it now runs agents,” he added.
Audacious statements are par for the course for AI companies, but the pivot towards providing the hardware for personal agents raises heaps of questions. How big is the market for these laptops, and will they age like milk if agents go out of fashion?
Based on what Nvidia is teasing, they won’t be cheap.
PCs will target “creators, AI developers and gamers” and will be priced at the premium end of the market, per The Wall Street Journal. The epic specs of the flagship version of its chip bear that out, boasting 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores, and 128 gigabytes of unified memory. All this power enables it to run AI agents with 120 billion parameters, Nvidia claims.
Huang imagines that in ten years, consumers will have “AI supercomputers in your house, running agents and assistants” connected to everything from your TV, security cameras, to dishwashers, per the Financial Times.
Skepticism may abound, but Huang’s has seemingly got all the major Windows PC manufacturers on board — to wit, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and MSI. Microsoft is also joining the pack by launching a new RTX Spark laptop called the Surface Laptop Ultra.
If there’s another takeaway, it’s that running AI agents is getting awfully expensive. Companies and individual developers are finding themselves stuck with exorbitant usage fees from using agentic tools like Claude Code. And perhaps that’s not surprising, since the preferred way to use them is to run multiple at a time in the background, each handling separate tasks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tide of Anger
Neighbors Horrified by Data Center Twice the Size of Manhattan
“It felt like it was done in the dark: backroom deals and assurances made with no transparency or government accountability.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/neighbors-horrified-data-center-utah?fbclid=IwVERDUAS8FXdleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR5x8-2MRyzwR-dGthQadzMSuqBuN7RT1SaON8SDh5fvnwG2Z0Tv5YABsr-Khw_aem_oGMlfQRe1GlNBslrdtXwcA
Given the widespread backlash to data centers across the entire country, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of these residents are now rushing to council meetings to forcefully refute the plans. After all, they’ve watched as other areas that welcome the facilities struggle with rising electricity prices, stressed water systems, and noise pollution.
Worse yet, the Great Salt Lake is already in crisis: it’s rapidly disappearing amid devastating droughts across the state. An extremely resource-intensive data center could place a massive new strain on it, regardless of the many reassurances from developers.
Americans are desperately trying to publicly denounce plans for similar data centers in their counties.
“To me, and to other people I’ve talked to, it felt like it was done in the dark: backroom deals and assurances made with no transparency or government accountability,” Salt Lake City resident Larry Curtis told Slate.
Stratos remains adamant that the data center will be a boon for the region, creating 2,000 permanent jobs. Critics, though, say that figure is far too small for the sheer scale of the operation.
residents have been watching as the Great Salt Lake continues to shrink, with snow and rain becoming extremely sparse.
The outcry has been loud enough for local politicians to backpedal after initially supporting the data center, as they realize it’s a major liability that could endanger their chances of being reelected.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“This is way too strict.” https://trib.al/cuL2xcy
Check Your Work
Academics in Meltdown Now That They’re Responsible for AI Hallucinations in Their Research Papers
“So this means you expect every author to check every citation and make sure that every citation is real and accurate?”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/academics-meltdown-ai-hallucinations-research?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS8G4BjbGNrBLwbYmV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHlbakMa4ff9TKeVUx24ocSS_ZtyEB86EezuZDSSzOh2xQ8y1xYqQkBqnP-QY_aem_0JeHieOny9-yybARHNqUGw
Even in 2026, there are still plenty of researchers who refuse to use AI to publish their research papers. Others do use the tech for tasks like sourcing journal articles for references, editing copy, or formatting citations — but they face pressure to verify every claim, since AI has a baked-in risk of contaminating their work with hallucinations.
A vocal minority of academics, however, argue they should be able to use AI to write original research while remaining immune from any hallucinated claims or data that make their way into the final product.
Last week, the open-source research repository arXiv announced that it was banning scholarly authors from the platform for up to a year if “hallucinated references” are found in their work. The rationale behind this should be obvious enough for any self-respecting academic: as arXiv computer science chair Thomas Dietterich wrote in his announcement, “if a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.”
As TechCrunch observed, arXiv isn’t banning AI altogether, but simply clarifying that the author is ultimately responsible for any work that goes out under their name. Makes sense, right?
Apparently not. After Dietterich’s announcement of X-formerly-Twitter, numerous researchers immediately went on the offensive, trashing the platform for its decision.
“So this means you expect every author to check every citation and make sure that every citation is real and accurate?”
Tomi Engdahl says:
“‘What you’ve just done is told me and everyone else in our department that you are so lazy you would rather outsource your collaboration to an app than risk being an artist.’” https://trib.al/m815fS1
Laying Down the Law
Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI
“I get paid the same whether I pass you or fail you.”
https://futurism.com/future-society/professor-fail-any-student-uses-ai?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS8KHJjbGNrBLwoVWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHksB3U0hDV57FbS60VWgr6TX52UqDxI4k_uePBgNxfaWU5NGk-2RMN0qQvCz_aem_xTPSA8iFL71Luqig6XQdKw
When it comes to AI’s place in the classroom — and its role in education broadly — some professors are at the end of their rope. The not quite all-knowing but incredibly adept at bullsh*tting chatbots let lazy students churn out entire essays, solve math problems, and cobble together passable answers for most questions. Needless to say, none of that leaves much room for actual learning.
Such desperate times call for Draconian measures. In a roundup of instructor testimonials on the AI’s impact on their profession from The New Yorker, one pedagogue is taking no prisoners when it comes to punishing pupils who surrender their brains to the tech.
“I tell students that ChatGPT is disallowed from their writing process, that I can immediately tell when ChatGPT has been used, and that I will fail the student on this assignment if it is used — and, potentially, for the entire course, if we go through a formal appeals process,” Neal Hebert, a theatre professor at Grambling State University, wrote to the magazine.
Hebert has an even more merciless warning for theater majors.
“I tell my theatre majors, ‘I get paid the same whether I pass you or fail you,’” he wrote. “‘But what you’ve just done is told me and everyone else in our department that you are so lazy you would rather outsource your collaboration to an app than risk being an artist.’”
the overwhelming tide of AI cheating in his introductory classes has left him no choice, he feels.
“I’ve stopped being a collaborator in these intro courses and started being a plagiarism cop, and I do resent that a bit”
Some professors try a different tack, allowing moderate experimentation with AI, and more forgiving forms of chastisement.
“AI has fundamentally changed how I teach, and it demands basic reflection about what we are trying to accomplish,” Silver told The New Yorker.
coming up with new types of assignments that call for more creative uses of AI
After talking with the students, Silver would give them a zero on the offending assignment but also a chance to redo it. “They usually improved, but not always,” he said. To drive the point home, he would show them AI-generated assignments to demonstrate how the “they all kind of look the same.”
AI caused him a lot of “emotional upheaval,” Silver admitted, “but I do feel we all, including the students, are learning how to live with it, and we’ll come out better on the other side.”
“Out of forty students, the vast majority chose similar words, phrasing, and concepts, and most papers were written in that inimitable ChatGPT style: ‘This isn’t a simple story about injustice — it’s a clarion call for a positive understanding of justice,’” he wrote, comparing LLM’s prose to “elevator muzak, but in words.”
Rather than integrating AI, he’s fortifying his classroom against it. The assignment is now based on plays too obscure for ChatGPT and other AI models to know about.
“If ChatGPT is used on these assignments now, it hallucinates characters, plotlines — it just makes sh*t up, since it has nothing to go on,” Hebert told the magazine.
nightmares of what the tech’s long term implications for theater as an artform will be, if students “can’t be bothered to read and think about the plays they are performing in.”
“Can you imagine AI Performing Arts Slop? The theatrical equivalent of the images ChatGPT and its competitors spit out, soulless and inert, arriving on stage stillborn?” he asked. “I can.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
You’ll never guess what he voted to approve this year. https://trib.al/khfOeVG
Common Rabble
Mayor Caught on Camera Saying the Only Voters Who Oppose Data Centers Are Disgusting Poor People
It’s never been more obvious that the pro data center camp is completely out of touch.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/mayor-calls-data-center-critics-disgusting-poor-people?fbclid=IwdGRjcAS8NRpjbGNrBLw0_2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHnpLMb8LnxZGAK6kcCZrVi8XoNlKGe8P2gTstJhJl2EchqI67og2B5xeKcWm_aem_JdjEWyB4t_udAxiJ1sdf0g
Indiana is emerging as a midwest hub for data centers, with Amazon alone planning to build 30 of them on a huge stretch of farmland that will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity each year.
But many of these projects are facing overwhelming opposition from locals, who voice concerns over water scarcity and surging energy prices. That includes Shelbyville, where the developer Prologis has proposed turning hundreds of acres of farmland into an 11-building data center facility.
In a town of around 20,000 people, over 2,000 of them signed a petition to halt the project, per FOX59. But despite the public outcry, the Shelbyville city council voted to approve it in April.
It’s a story playing out across the country. Data centers remain deeply unpopular among the public, with a new survey suggesting that at least seven in ten Americans would now oppose one being built near their home. Furgeson’s comments will only fuel the perception that the leaders pushing for their construction are completely out of touch.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/neighbors-horrified-data-center-utah?fbclid=IwVERDUAS8NdtleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR6FFNJrd6bc6WEwPy6xDF4F2KGSe6YcQXIK7cF7DPrUquthQ1JElltGQmV02A_aem_4LxTEuPC9kkbPNYIwJ9wLw