The Wisconsin gubernatorial race was one of the most closely watched Democratic primaries in the country this year, pitting a democratic socialist, state Rep. Francesca Hong, against Milwaukee Democrat David Crowley, who received the endorsement of the state’s sitting Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

Hong lost the race, setting up Crowley to face Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in the general election this fall. But she’s already back on the campaign trail, this time trying to help Democrats win a trifecta in the state: the governor’s race and both legislative chambers.

Unifying the state’s voters to achieve that won’t be easy, though. Hong spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about her own loss, Evers’s role in it, and whether or not the voters who felt so passionate about her own campaign would find enough to love in Crowley’s campaign — in particular on the increasingly important issue of data centers. 

Astead and Hong also talked about what Wisconsin means for the Democrats nationally, and what lessons the party should take from her race, including her loss.

“I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around,” Hong said. “But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign. I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic.”

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Hong, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Part of the reason we wanted to come here was because we saw you were getting back on the campaign trail, and specifically around that idea of energizing Wisconsin toward a trifecta.

Now, just tell me the difference in terms of the importance of Democrats winning it all — not only the governor’s mansion, but both houses of the state legislature — versus just the governor’s mansion. How does that change the possibilities of what the party could do?

For the last 16 years, a Republican majority in the state legislature has meant that passing the types of policies that we know can drastically improve the lives of everyday folks here in Wisconsin stalled. And we have a historic opportunity to flip the assembly and the state Senate and hold the governor’s mansion and the entire executive branch to a Democratic majority, meaning the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports — things like increasing minimum wage, things like legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion. 

We also need to repeal Act 10 [which dramatically restricted collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees]. Wisconsin is where workers’ rights, things like unemployment insurance, Social Security were born, and we moved backwards with the Republican majority. That’s all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

It also, though, raises the political standard of what Democrats would have to do to achieve that, and some of it goes through these more rural communities.

Why do we think the party has fallen behind in more rural communities, and what could be done to reverse that?

I think it’s important to look at what’s happened in the rural communities when we’ve seen manufacturing jobs leave the state, when we’ve seen fewer and fewer supports for our small farmers.

And so much of this — what connects it — is actually the growth of massive wealth and corporate control and corporate greed, and more people feeling the impacts of that. There’s an opportunity right now to say, ‘Hey, Republicans have been in the legislature, they’ve been in power, and things have not improved for you or your community … Now’s the opportunity to make sure that we’re actually able to see our shared Wisconsin values of working hard and taking care of our kids be reflected back in Madison through laws.’

So much of your campaign was focused on data centers, stopping data centers. Should I think of that as a rural issue?

I think the issue around data centers is an everyone issue. It’s a democracy issue. It’s people wanting to feel like there are folks who care about what happens to communities, and that they have control and an actual say in what happens in their communities.

To that point, is it a mistake for David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, to have not gone as far as you did and say, “We won’t be building more data centers for a period of time”?

He’s fighting for communities and community control when it comes to data centers.

But it’s not a moratorium.

But it’s not a moratorium. It isn’t, but he’s also committed to 100 percent renewable energy, clean energy to power data centers.

And achieving that is going to be incredibly difficult, and it is going to be the developers having to pay their own way, and these are things that he’s committed to that we know can slow down the growth and development of data centers. 

Have you had time to reflect on your primary loss? If you had to diagnose, why do you think you lost?

I’m still doing a lot of reflection. But I think that I want to continue to look forward. And what I’ve learned from our election is that it’s so important to continue to stay grounded in becoming accessible to people. I think that as an organizer and an elected official, it’s my responsibility to continue to go to the people and remain very in touch with what’s going on on the ground.

I have a couple more questions about the nature of the loss. Evers’s endorsement changed that race, so much so that your opponent David Crowley was able even to win in some smaller communities, like places where you were pitching yourself as the voice of more rural communities.

Does that disprove any of this thesis around, say, data centers? If that was the top priority for Wisconsin voters, wouldn’t you be the nominee?

I think it wasn’t all rural communities. It wasn’t all suburban communities. We saw certain demographics but also ZIP codes where we outperformed David significantly.

And I think that where the governor’s endorsement played a bigger role was areas where he was also more popular. 

Did it surprise you when Evers endorsed Crowley?

I was disappointed.

Why?

I was disappointed because I was getting a lot of feedback from folks who hadn’t committed to any candidate yet that this felt like the governor was putting his thumb on the scale.

I wanted to ask about electability, because it seemed as if Evers’s endorsement was about a fear that maybe you couldn’t win in November.

So much of the primary concern was around the DSA label, even campaigning with folks like Hasan Piker. In retrospect, was any of that a mistake?

We knew going in that we would have to encourage new voters to come out, folks who typically do not come out for primaries, quote-unquote low-propensity voters. And we knew that we would have to campaign in places where folks weren’t expecting to see a gubernatorial candidate. And those included Twitch streams.

Those also included going to dive bars and bowling alleys and making sure that we were accessible and shaping our policies based on what the people were telling us they wanted to see happen and also what they wanted to see out of their governor. I think electability… I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around.

But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign.

I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic, when Democrats need to be inspiring and project a vision where everyone can see themselves in it as everyday working-class folks.

When you’ve got a party that has struggled with elitism to then cave to an establishment narrative … being more afraid of labels when I’m hearing from people on the ground that they’re interested in solutions and solving problems, maybe somebody who knows the hustle of the service industry and running restaurants and has worked across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation. There are ways that we can maneuver around labels and what the loudest narrative might be.

I wish our governor hadn’t fed into that.

To be fair, to your point, the establishment label doesn’t fully fit even someone like Crowley, who comes from a working-class background. But am I hearing that you think Evers’s move made your life in the general election more difficult?

Is it harder to re-inspire if young people who are invested in the Hong campaign think that the establishment squashed them out?

We still had over 300,000 votes. We lost by fewer than 4,000 votes. I had more votes than Evers did during his primary. That’s not squashing our voices.

We’re still here, and it’s so important that people find avenues to continue to exercise their voice and their new organizing power. And I’m definitely going to continue to work to make sure that we get results and that we win the trifecta, and that’s the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

I hear why a trifecta matters in the state context, particularly the state policy.

If I’m someone, though, who’s not in Wisconsin, who’s just worried about Donald Trump running amok in Washington, why should I care if Democrats win the governor’s mansion and the state legislature? Does that matter for folks outside of the state?

Because we will start to see that when you feel government actually working and you see change happening in your lives, these are then voters who are going to continue to come out and vote for Democrats.

We’re a pivotal state when it comes to the federal elections as well. We’re actually in a swing district right now. 

We have an opportunity, through Wisconsin, to actually start improving the brand for Democrats. And if we do that here, this trickles out to the rest of the country.

The premise being that delivering creates a connection for Democrats that is helpful in the presidential election, and it’s helpful in all these other ways too.

Yeah. We’re not going to be fighting every single midterm and presidential for our lives based on what’s happening in just one state.

But I think if we can start showing durable power for Democrats in a state like ours because of the policies that we’re prioritizing, and you have more folks coming out to vote for Democrats, that’s good for the health of democracy.

Silicon Valley has long warned that its favorite technology might get us all killed. But chatter about AI’s apocalyptic potential has grown louder in recent weeks.

In September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the company, accusing his former employer of “gambling with our lives” by developing evermore powerful models faster than it could control them. One of Coxon’s former colleagues vouched for this assessment, saying that there was a greater than 10 percent chance of AI “killing all humans” within the next decade.

Recent pronouncements from the leaders of these companies have been nearly as grim. At the United Nations last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that, if “managed poorly,” AI models “could be a risk to humanity as a whole.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman similarly declared that our species just might “lose control of the future” to the type of software that his firm is selling.

All this triggered a tsunami of media coverage and policy debate about the “existential risks” of AI — and what, if anything, we can do about them.

Yet some of the AI industry’s biggest critics are more annoyed than afraid. As they see it, the world isn’t trembling on the precipice of robo-annihilation, so much as falling for the tricks of snake oil salesmen. This argument has been percolating for years, voiced by a broad set of observers, including the linguist Emily Bender (“It makes the product seem more powerful”), computer scientist Timnit Gebru (“It’s not just a distraction, but it’s harmful”), as well as Substack columnist Ed Zitron and various reporters and social media influencers.

In their thinking, Altman and Amodei aren’t talking up their technology’s catastrophic potential because they’re rationally afraid of where AI is going — they’re doing so because their firms are ravenously hungry for more investment. And the reason why “AI doom” has grown more salient in recent weeks isn’t that the case for concern has gotten stronger, but rather that OpenAI and Anthropic’s IPOs have gotten closer.

In short, these Big Tech skeptics argue, journalists and politicians have fallen prey to a counterintuitive PR strategy, one that stokes media frenzies over ludicrous sci-fi scenarios in order to hype AI’s technological promise, distract attention from chatbots’ present-day harms, and help labs secure favorable regulatory treatment.

This would be reassuring, if true. Unfortunately, the theory is unpersuasive. There is little reason to believe that the panic over AI’s “existential risks” was cooked up in a Silicon Valley marketing department. To the contrary, the most plausible explanation for the AI sector’s doomsaying is also the most straightforward: Many of the industry’s executives, employees, and analysts genuinely believe that AI progress poses catastrophic risks. 

In my conversations with close observers of the industry, even some of OpenAI and Anthropic’s fiercest detractors conceded that their leaders’ avowed concerns are unlikely to be mere marketing tactics. “The more I learn about the underlying ideologies out of which those two labs were formed, the more I think what we have here is a sincere belief,” the author and computer scientist Cal Newport told me. 

This does not mean that Amodei and Altman are right, much less that we can trust in their judgment or integrity. There are many reasons to doubt that the weather forecast for 2036 is “cloudy with a chance of robot apocalypse,” or that anyone can assign a “10 percent” probability to the latter outcome without pulling numbers out of thin air.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley’s Cassandras have some logic and evidence on their side. AI models are growing both more capable, autonomous, and arguably unruly. If these trends continue unchecked, it’s not hard to see how they could yield very bad outcomes.

Given the stakes, we should not be comfortable dismissing their warnings on dubious grounds. And the “PR” theory of AI doom does precisely that.

How AI companies (supposedly) profit off fears of the robot apocalypse

Before examining why AI “doomerism” probably isn’t a PR stunt, it’s worth saying a bit more about why some believe that is.

According to Bender, Gebru, and others, AI companies benefit from talk of artificial intelligence’s existential risks in at least three ways.

First, it attracts investment. In the words of The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong, the doomer narrative implies that AI labs’ models are “destined to become terrifyingly capable,” and thus massively profitable. As the Los Angeles Times’s Brian Merchant put the point during the first big wave of AI panic in 2023, “what better way to generate a buzz than to insist, with a certain presumed credibility, that your new technology is so potent it might unravel the world as we know it?” 

“If you position these threats as all-powerful, as somewhat unknowable, you get to be the expert on it.”

Kate Brennan, AI Now Institute

Second, hyping AI’s hypothetical future hazards diverts attention from the companies’ current malfeasance. Every minute we spend debating whether AI will one day turn us all into paper clips is a minute we aren’t discussing the AI labs’ alleged copyright violations, pollution, labor violations, and myriad other social harms. 

And third, the doom narrative shifts regulatory scrutiny away from topics that directly threaten the AI companies’ profitability — such as copyright enforcement — while also suggesting that regulators must rely on the labs themselves for guidance. 

“If you position these threats as all-powerful, as somewhat unknowable, you get to be the expert on it,” Kate Brennan of the AI Now Institute, a progressive think tank focused on artificial intelligence’s near-term harms, told me.

Critically, for the biggest skeptics of “AI doom,” industry executives and employees aren’t the only ones complicit in this PR strategy. Self-styled whistleblowers like Coxon are also suspect, since they might be “using the spotlight to attract funding to start a new venture or to secure new positions.” And even nonprofit AI safety organizations are thought to function as vessels for Big Tech’s marketing campaigns, a fact reflected by the financial and interpersonal ties between the major labs and such think tanks. 

There are better ways to raise money than promising to end the world

The “PR” critique of AI doomerism has some kernels of truth. AI companies probably would prefer to talk about their technology’s hypothetical future dangers than about their products’ present-day harms. And if publicly touting AI’s existential risks were antithetical to Anthropic and OpenAI’s business goals, their leaders would almost certainly say less in public about that subject. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

But it does not follow that Altman and Amodei’s warnings are a self-conscious marketing strategy, born of cynical calculation rather than genuine concern. And there are several reasons to doubt that charge.

For one thing, AI companies have no shortage of ways to hype up their technology’s capabilities. And it is hard to see how any firm could conclude that the optimal approach — from a purely financial standpoint — would be to portray itself as a threat to human survival.

For investors, the appeal of AI companies is not that they could hypothetically get us all enslaved by a machine God; it’s that they could theoretically make a lot of money. 

Perhaps casting your chatbots as an “existential” risk will persuade some capitalists of your future profitability. But this seems like an awfully indirect pitch — and one that’s almost certain to be less effective than demonstrating that a lot of corporations would like to rent your software.  

“If these guys were selling flypaper — and the revenue was growing as fast as it is — investors would be more or less just as interested,” Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg’s venture capital arm, told me.

And even if these firms were hellbent on awing the public with grandiose predictions of their technology’s future powers, they’d have little need to invoke the robot apocalypse. Touting AI’s potential to cure cancer, abolish poverty, or facilitate intergalactic travel would all seem to advance the same objective, while doing less to jeopardize the companies’ public reputations or freedom from intrusive regulation.

And in fact, many with a vested interest in the major AI labs’ success talk up the technology in precisely this way. OpenAI investor Marc Andreessen has decried AI safety concerns as a “full-blown moral panic” while insisting that artificial intelligence will empower humanity to cure all diseases and engage in “interstellar travel.” Similarly, Jensen Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia and major investor in both OpenAI and Anthropic, has called claims of AI’s catastrophic potential “complete nonsense.” If hyping AI doom is essential for stoking investment, not everyone in Silicon Valley has gotten the memo.

The media doesn’t seem that distracted

Promoting fears of AI’s existential risks would be a similarly odd approach to media management.

Without question, corporations always seek to direct news coverage away from their greatest legal and ethical liabilities. But companies can try to secure more favorable press in many different ways. And implicating themselves in the apocalypse does not seem like an optimal one, from a crisis communications point of view. At the very least, it’s difficult to name other industries that have attempted such a maneuver; atomic energy companies did not respond to media coverage of the Fukushima disaster by talking up the threat of nuclear winter. 

What’s more, there’s reason to doubt that the AI doom discourse actually reduces scrutiny of AI’s immediate downsides in practice. It’s true that human attention is finite and that coverage of some problems will inevitably displace reporting on others. Yet when one story piques public interest in a person, institution, or industry, the media often responds by subjecting their broader behavior to heightened examination. In this way, warnings of AI’s existential risks might theoretically increase journalistic attention to the tech’s present-day harms.

And this seems to have occurred at my own publication. In the weeks since Coxon’s resignation kicked off a furor over AI’s apocalyptic potential, Vox have published more stories on AI’s near-term threats than we had in the month before his departure — including pieces about how artificial intelligence could imperil America’s critical infrastructure, abet war crimes, degrade health insurance benefits, aid bioweapons development, and damage adolescents’ mental health.

Larger news outlets appear no more “distracted.” Over the past month, the New York Times has published articles on how AI is increasing air pollution, undermining higher education, helping sports betting companies target problem gamblers, and depressing real wages for younger workers.

And it’s not clear that AI doom discourse is any more effective at shielding the top labs from regulatory scrutiny. After all, the politicians who take existential risk arguments most seriously also tend to be among America’s strongest advocates for regulating AI’s impacts on labor, the environment, artists, and education. 

AI safety researchers probably aren’t fronts for Anthropic’s marketing department

Finally, the “PR” theory has difficulty explaining why so many with no great stake in OpenAI and Anthropic’s success worry about existential risk. Coxon is one of many workers who quit jobs in the AI industry, forsaking lucrative equity in the process, out of concern for artificial intelligence’s catastrophic potential. Likewise, independent AI safety researchers are among those who’ve rung alarm bells in recent months. 

Attempts to reconcile these facts with the “PR” narrative can verge on conspiracy theories. In an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sara Goudarzi writes that “Coxon’s resignation is the latest in a string of recent events in which the companies emphasized how unpredictable, risky, and impressive an all-powerful AI might be,” in an apparent bid to drum up “pre-IPO hype.” This phrasing attributes Coxon’s departure to his employer — casting it as an example of how AI companies sought to make their products look impressive, as though Coxon were working at Anthropic’s behest when he accused it of monstrous irresponsibility.

The AI alarmists are likely sincere

Given all this, I think we should favor a simpler explanation for why some AI industry executives, defectors, and researchers all say artificial intelligence has existential risks: They believe that to be true.

Some may be reluctant to credit Amodei and Altman with such sincerity. After all, if they truly believed their work could lead to human annihilation, why would they keep carrying it out?

But as staunch AI doom critic Cal Newport told me, they have their reasons. “Their goal is to try to get to superintelligence first because, if done right, it will deliver a transhumanist utopia — and, if done wrong, will kill us all,” he said. 

Even AI Now’s Brennan, who considers the labs’ doomerism a “self-serving strategy,” suggested that earnest (if grandiose) ideas about AI safety play a role in their behavior. “Their escalation and acceleration of this tech goes hand in hand with the belief of its all-knowing, God-like power,” she said.

In other words, the leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI seem to believe that:

• AI could also do extraordinary good.
• The economic and geopolitical incentives to develop a superintelligent (and thus, super dangerous) AI are overwhelming, such that its eventual emergence is extremely likely, no matter what they do.
• If they win the race to machine superintelligence, they will be uniquely well-positioned to ensure its safety.

Are these beliefs unhinged and self-serving? Perhaps. Do they function as rationalizations for the pursuit of personal power? Quite possibly.

But whatever one makes of Amodei and Altman’s apocalyptic concerns, and how they have and have not acted on them, it’s important to understand that their worries almost certainly emerged out of reasoned argument and technical observation, rather than mere PR calculations. 

Both leaders have deep ties to the Bay Area’s “rationalist” community, which has been fretting over the robot apocalypse since the first decade of this century. And like their dissident ex-employees and critics at think tanks, Altman and Amodei have witnessed some disconcerting trends in AI development.

I cannot do justice to “doomer” fears in my allotted pixels (you can find them ably summarized here, here, here, and in roughly 10 trillion other blog posts). But the fundamental concern is that AI models are growing more powerful and autonomous even as their workings remain highly opaque. 

The labs know how to train these chatbots — to get them to translate prompts into useful code, legal briefs, or advice — but they don’t fully understand how the models get to the desired output. At the same time, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable, outstripping humans at more and more cognitive tasks. And users are giving them ever greater freedom to act in the world, empowering AI “agents” to browse the internet, access myriad software tools, execute code, and hatch their own plans for completing multistep tasks. If these trends continue, it’s not difficult to see how things could go badly: A supremely capable AI model might pursue an objective in unanticipated and disastrous ways before their human prompters even realize what is happening. 

“What makes me particularly anxious is the combination of us handing over more power and oversight to the models, even as we understand why they’re doing what they’re doing less and less,” Nat Purser, director of US policy at the AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute, said.

Recent events have arguably provided proof of concept for these anxieties. Earlier this year, OpenAI instructed a bunch of models to complete various coding and hacking tests. When the systems discovered that some questions were unanswerable, they concluded that the best way to realize their objectives was to hack OpenAI’s internal systems and open-source machine learning website Hugging Face. This incident — and others like it — helped fuel the past month of AI panic. 

Of course, it takes a big leap to get from “unsupervised AI agents can misbehave in certain eccentric laboratory conditions” to “there’s a 10 percent chance that no human will be left alive by 2036.” My point here is not that the doomers are right, only that their fears partly reflect trends in AI development that appear genuinely hazardous.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the “it’s all PR” theory suggests that regulators should treat the AI’s hypothetical, long-term tail risks as an afterthought — if not an active distraction from its more important harms. To make the case for such a policy, however, skeptics must identify flaws in alarmists’ evidence and assumptions. Arguments that merely impugn their motivations on improbable grounds aren’t worth betting the species on.

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s cybersecurity agency and in-house research center have each begun experimenting with open artificial intelligence models from China, three EU officials have told POLITICO.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) — the EU’s in-house scientific research center — is evaluating “publicly available open-weight models” originating from China, European Commission spokesperson Maciej Berestecki confirmed. The head of ENISA, the bloc’s agency responsible for cybersecurity, also said in an interview that his team was now testing Chinese AI.

The experiments with Chinese models at the JRC are part of a broader research project to evaluate artificial intelligence that also includes leading models from the United States and Europe, Berestecki said. “Models from different origins are included in a comparative scientific evaluation of their capabilities, performance, limitations and risks,” he said, adding that the JRC is also looking into their potential scientific applications.

AI safety and security — topics currently under intense scrutiny following a series of incidents in which advanced AI models hacked real-world networks during testing activities — are not the core focus of the JRC’s testing activities, according to a different Commission official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive material.

Open-weight models are those whose core components are publicly released, allowing anyone to run the model and study how it works. China’s approach to AI has leaned more towards open models than the United States. Some major U.S. tech and AI companies, including chips giant NVIDIA, are investing in open-weight models.

Forced to choose

The U.S. and China are locked in a race to dominate in the technology, with Europe largely sitting on the sidelines. Without a viable European frontier model, European private and public organizations may be left to choose between American and Chinese providers for advanced AI applications.

In a recent speech, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested Europe should not try to win the frontier AI race. A top German tech company told POLITICO this week it was dropping Europe’s leading AI lab Mistral in favor of open-source Chinese models.

The JRC has not entered into any “bespoke access” or licensing negotiations with the relevant Chinese developers, Berestecki said. The models are run on the center’s “secure, on-premises scientific infrastructure” and the Commission is not intending to use Chinese models for its own purposes, he added.

EU cyber agency ENISA — which has gained access to advanced models from top U.S. AI firms Anthropic, OpenAI and Google — is also experimenting with “a couple” of open-weight Chinese models, its executive director Juhan Lepassaar confirmed in an interview on Wednesday. 

JRC and ENISA have been tasked with working together to set up an AI testing platform under a recent EU action plan on AI and cyber, the European Commission’s attempt to respond to the growing concerns after a series of incidents involving AI systems breaking out of testing environments and breaking into other organizations’ digital systems.

August Hanning spent seven years at the top of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, with access to some of the country’s most closely guarded secrets. Then came a second act: private consulting, corporate intelligence and business stretching across Europe, into Russia and Asia.

Now, the 80-year-old former spymaster is himself at the center of an espionage investigation, after German federal prosecutors arrested him Tuesday on suspicion of treasonous espionage, attempted treason and other espionage offenses. They allege he obtained a stream of secret intelligence from his former chief of staff and used the material to benefit his private consulting business.

“It’s catastrophic for Germany and for Western intelligence services. Everyone is in shock. The scale of it is enormous, especially at a moment like this,” said one EU intelligence official, who — like others in this report — was granted anonymity to discuss a clandestine arena. “And given that investigators stumbled across this while working on an entirely separate case, we’re likely to learn much more.”

For the BND, the case comes at an uncomfortable moment. Just last week, German parliamentarians began debating a new law proposed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government to grant the agency sweeping new authority, as part of an effort to return Berlin’s foreign intelligence service to the top ranks of global espionage. The timing is equally awkward for European intelligence more broadly. With Russian hybrid attacks continuously targeting Europe, governments across the bloc are rewriting decades-old security laws to give their spy agencies greater powers and be taken more seriously.

Prosecutors say Hanning’s former chief of staff, identified under German privacy rules as Manfred D., supplied him with roughly 2,000 BND documents between 2010 and June 2022. Many contained classified information intended exclusively for internal intelligence work, including material used to brief senior German officials.

In comments to German newspaper WELT, a lawyer representing Hanning said some of the allegations against the ex-spymaster were true but that he did not harm Germany.

“He was in possession of confidential documents. Incorrect, however, is the accusation that he had passed on information contained therein to the detriment of the Federal Republic of Germany — let alone [for] payment. Further investigations will show that,” he said.

In one case, prosecutors suspect Hanning used classified material to prepare an analysis for an employee of foreign intelligence service. They also allege he maintained a relationship with a representative of another foreign intelligence service for several years, passing along political information that was partly based on material obtained from Manfred D.

Prosecutors have not publicly identified either foreign service but German media has named Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Azerbaijan has denied any connection.

“In intelligence services, everything is logged — who accesses which documents and when. If an analyst working on right-wing extremism suddenly started looking at intelligence on China, that would raise red flags. But the position of chief of staff has access to virtually everything, so it wouldn’t look suspicious because of the seniority of the position,” said a second EU intelligence official.

Chiefs of staff often stay on when directors change, unless they don’t get along with the incoming boss, the official added.

“Every intelligence service will now be looking at what information it shared with the BND and assessing what damage may have been done,” he said.

Revolving door

Hanning led the BND from 1998 to 2005, before serving as state secretary at Germany’s interior ministry until 2009. Once out of government, he wasted little time entering the private sector.

In July 2010, Hanning and his wife established Hanning Consult. It was in the spring of that same year that Manfred D. agreed to provide him with intelligence from inside the BND in exchange for payment, according to the prosecutor’s statement. Hanning then used that information in his private consulting activities, they added.

Roderich Kiesewetter, a Christian Democrat lawmaker on the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German parliament, said that within Germany there is a “very widespread network” of people who use the contacts and knowledge acquired while they were in service to influence Berlin’s policy on behalf of foreign governments like Russia and China.

“It’s not only sad, it’s damaging the reputation of Germany,” Kiesewetter told POLITICO. “You could also say if you want to talk to Russia, take former members of the government or former members of the secret services.”

Hanning also became involved with Samuel Danilowitsch, a German businessman, who led the Swiss corporate intelligence consultancy, Pluteos. There, Hanning eventually became chairman and the two were listed as attending a 2019 Moscow gathering focused on Europe-Russia relations, attended by Russian political and business figures, where the annexation of Crimea was brought up as a “necessity” rather than a choice. Pluteos did not respond to a request for comment.

From around 2014, Hanning joined British consultancy G3 as a senior adviser, according to archived web pages seen by POLITICO. He later oversaw its work involving Russia and the former Soviet republics, according to German media outlet Correctiv. G3 did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2019, Hanning was invited as a “guest of honor” to a gathering organized by Russia’s Security Council of officials and experts from Arctic Council countries. It was chaired by former secretary of the Security Council of Russia, Nikolai Patrushev, one of the most powerful figures in President Vladimir Putin’s security orbit. As part of the cultural program, the group visited the remote Valaam Island monastery where Hanning was pictured next to Patrushev.

Hanning has also publicly ventured into some of the more politically explosive questions surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine.

In 2024, he told WELT TV that he considered it “very likely” that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy knew about the 2022 operation that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines. Days later, Hanning went further, suggesting an agreement between senior Ukrainian and Polish figures was behind the attack. Germany has since charged a Ukrainian national it identified only as Serhii K., with his trial due to begin in Hamburg in October.

None of those business relationships, contacts or statements establishes a connection to the espionage case now facing Hanning, though they paint a picture of the influence he continued to amass after leaving the German government. Prosecutors have not accused him of spying for Russia.

The steakhouse heiress

Investigators got onto Hanning’s trail starting with an extraordinary custody dispute involving Christina Block, an heiress to a German steakhouse empire.

Block is accused by the Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office of orchestrating the abduction of her two youngest children from their father in Denmark. Prosecutors in that case say Block and two men commissioned an Israeli security team to seize her children, then aged 10 and 13, from their father, Stephan Hensel.

According to the indictment, masked men beat Hensel and took the children across the Danish-German border, to southern Germany. The children were reunited with their father in Denmark four days later, under a court order. Block denies knowing about the abduction.

In September 2025, Hamburg investigators searched Hanning’s home and business premises in connection with the Block case, according to local media. Prosecutors suspected Hanning and a retired police officer had accepted a contract worth more than €100,000 to intercept the children on their way to school in November 2022. The plan ultimately failed as their father noticed suspicious figures and alerted Danish police. 

German broadcaster Taggeschau reported that the investigators, in the search of Hanning’s premises, discovered around 2,000 digital BND documents that ultimately triggered scrutiny of his handling of sensitive government information. Federal prosecutors took over the resulting investigation in May 2026.

Manfred D. had been Hanning’s chief of staff at the intelligence service and subsequently served several of Hanning’s successors, remaining in a senior position until March this year. 

Both men are now in custody.

“He’s reflecting the Germany between 1998 and 2011, so he has not the feeling of having done something evil,” said Kiesewetter. “He was just mirroring [the] state policy of the center-right Christian Democratic and conservative political alliance.”

Hans von der Burchard contributed to this report. 

This week on “Uncanny Valley,” we discuss where Elon Musk’s PAC is spending millions, the latest ideology Trump claims is dangerous, and the backlash against the designer behind Muse’s logo.

If people don’t widely embrace artificial intelligence out of fear or a godlike savior complex, AI’s biggest champions will try something else: labeling critics “the enemy.” That’s precisely how President Donald Trump described people who don’t like his rebrand via executive order of AI to “super intelligence,” posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” 

As noted by Axios, the White House still uses the term “AI” including on websites like ai.gov, though that website was updated Thursday with “SI.gov” in massive text. “The URL is still ‘AI.gov,’ though, with ‘SI.gov’ leading to an error page,” Axios reported, which Salon confirmed.

Tech billionaires are already embracing the term super intelligence. This week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said AI is “no more” and promised to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”

Peter Thiel, founder of the tech company Palantir that aggregates data used in federal mass surveillance and deportation programs, has gone as far to describe AI’s critics as “the Antichrist.” Apocalyptic eschatology has long been an interest of Thiel’s, who has made the Antichrist a central topic of secretive lectures he’s given behind closed doors. Thiel doesn’t seem to believe in an Antichrist like in the “Book of Revelation,” but rather as a force that imposes a one-world government and stifles technological development.

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In leaked recordings obtained by Politico’s Decoded of Thiel’s speeches in Nashville in late September and published Thursday, the tech mogul claimed former President Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV only oppose AI to boost their popularity, which is apparently something they would need.

“Many people know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Thiel said. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI,” adding “AI is the threat über alles of late modernity. The pope knows it. That’s why he wrote his first encyclical … he needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI.”

Obama recently called for public oversight of AI while the pope’s first encyclical focuses on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”

The post Tech leaders embrace Trump’s “super intelligence” as he calls critics “the enemy” appeared first on Salon.com.

Yet another update on the running AI discussion.

Here’s an interview Ezra Klein did with a guy named David Robinson. And that interview is about a piece Robinson, a member of the Open AI safety and safety documentation team, wrote in The Atlantic announcing his resignation from OpenAI — a decision and announcement he is self-aware enough to note has become something of a cliche. I found the interview interesting and edifying, largely on the front I mentioned earlier about finding reliable narrators.

Robinson isn’t a data scientist or a programmer. His role at OpenAI was essentially being the conduit between the teams building the LLMs and the knowledgable and interested public, specifically the people who write the documentation — what does this model do, how does it work, what are the possible safety risks. As is usually the case in any highly technical space, the people doing the work aren’t going to be writers and they’re usually not going to speak a language outsiders can necessarily understand. So you have people who are close enough to the work and the workers to understand what is happening and also able to speak human so they can communicate it to everyone else. Robinson led the team that served in that role.

Jessica Hische knew working for Meta might upset some people. But she didn’t anticipate just how angry they would get.

If President Donald Trump had his way, the Republican Party would be top-to-bottom the party of AI — or, in his preferred branding, “super intelligence.”

But down in the very state where Trump has his “winter White House,” two Republicans have put forth a very different vision for the party’s future — and have been far more eager to take on the artificial intelligence industry.

Most notable is the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, who devoted much of his final year in office to a failed effort to pass an “AI bill of rights,” which would have imposed tougher restrictions regarding child safety and other topics. He’s warned that AI could “set off an age of darkness and deceit,” blasted “tech oligarchs” for putting people at risk, and called Anthropic “very creepy” for exploring whether AI could be conscious.

“He clearly understands what the risks are, and I find he’s also very good at calling bullshit on disingenuous arguments from the Silicon Valley lobby,” Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist who co-founded the Future of Life Institute, an AI safety nonprofit, told me. (DeSantis hosted Tegmark at two events in Florida this year.)

The other is DeSantis’s handpicked attorney general, James Uthmeier, a longtime close ally who is now trying to win the AG’s office in his own right — and who filed a high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI in June. Last week, Uthmeier asked the judge in the case to block OpenAI from developing new models unless they had “independent third-party guardrails and approval.”

“The danger of these AI systems is real and growing,” Forrest Saunders, a spokesperson for Uthmeier, told me. “Florida and the nation have seen case after case of violence, child exploitation, and models that operate beyond their developer’s control.” He added that Uthmeier “welcomes innovation, but Floridians will not be the test subjects.”

With AI cresting as a national anxiety — or a national opportunity, depending who you talk to — both major parties are still finding their footing on the issue. And though Trump is clearly trying to get Republicans in lockstep behind the industry, a very strong current is pulling the other way, responding to populist concerns and parents’ complaints to stake out a much more skeptical position. Florida has emerged as a bellwether for what Republican policies might look like if conservative America turns decisively against AI, especially as Trump’s political clock runs out.

DeSantis and Uthmeier aren’t unique in the GOP for having concerns about AI — a handful of House members and senators want further action, and populist opposition to data centers has bubbled up in races around the country.

But the two have gone furthest in taking on the industry directly — and they’ve done so even though it puts them on the wrong side of Trump. 

In recent days, I spoke to several Florida political observers and advocates on the AI issue. Most believe that DeSantis and Uthmeier are affirmatively trying to stake out what the GOP’s position on AI should be in a post-Trump future, and to better align with an electorate that’s turning sharply against the industry, despite what the president may say. 

“He’s trying to skate where the puck is going,” Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state senator, told me. (DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Beyond the quest for political advantage, the stakes are very real. Will there actually be a significant and influential force on the right that takes the concerns about advanced AI’s harms seriously — and is willing to act to try and rein them in, before they do great damage? 

DeSantis and Uthmeier are hoping the answer is yes — and that they will be the ones leading that charge.

Ron DeSantis’s quest for an AI bill of rights

In this case, the politics and the personal are intertwined. DeSantis occupies a unique place within the party at this particular moment that’s given him an incentive to buck the national consensus on the right, especially when it comes to Trump, and explore an independent approach.

In his first decade in politics, DeSantis had a charmed rise. In 2012, he embraced the Tea Party to win a seat in Congress; in 2017, he bear-hugged Trump to get his endorsement for governor. He then became a national conservative star for opposing pandemic-era public health restrictions and waging war on “wokeness,” winning his 2022 reelection in a nearly 20-point landslide.

“He is always out front, even ahead of other Republicans, on issues that he makes more important,” Peter Schorsch, editor of Florida Politics, told me. “I would joke with people that I didn’t know how to spell ESG or DEI before he brought these to the forefront.”

But what followed was a failed presidential primary campaign that put DeSantis on the wrong side of Trump and then sent him back to Florida with an uncertain political future. 

Early last year, just weeks after a report that DeSantis’s wife Casey was considering running to succeed him as governor, Trump publicly urged Rep. Byron Donalds to enter the race, promising his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”

Also early last year, DeSantis, who had long run roughshod over Republican legislators, was faced with a new thorn in his side: an ambitious new state house speaker, Daniel Perez, who was more interested in cultivating the Trump White House than the governor. Perez took a far more assertive stance in shaping legislation and rejecting some of the governor’s demands than his predecessors; he also publicly blessed an investigation into a charity tied to Casey DeSantis. A bitterly personal feud between Perez and DeSantis ensued.

In the midst of all this, last summer, DeSantis got AI-pilled. 

In July 2025, DeSantis announced that he was going to develop a state plan to deal with the rise of artificial intelligence. “We can’t just turn the reins over to a bunch of tech overlords,” he said. (DeSantis had long been a critic of major tech and social media companies on the grounds that they are too “woke” or politically hostile to conservatives and their ideas.)

At another event that month, DeSantis said: “I think this is, like, the biggest issue that’s facing our society.” He mentioned AI’s potential impacts on the economy, on jobs, on students, and on the spread of “false narratives” as troubling to him.

“I welcome technologies that will enhance the human experience. I do not welcome things that are going to supplant the human experience,” DeSantis said in September.

His interest in state action put him on the opposite side of the Trump administration, which was advocating for a 10-year moratorium on state regulation of AI — arguing that forcing the industry to abide by a patchwork of state regulations would slow its growth. (David Sacks, a key Trump adviser on AI, championed this argument.)

Last December, at the Florida mega-retirement community the Villages, DeSantis rolled out his proposed “AI bill of rights.” It did not focus on existential or civilizational risks, but instead more practical concerns around child safety. Megan Garcia, a Florida mother whose 14-year-old son died by suicide after conversing with a chatbot “companion,” appeared at the press conference.

As introduced in the Florida state senate, the bill would have required that parents consent to minors speaking to companion chatbots and forced companies to disclose when users weren’t speaking to a human, among other provisions. The state senate passed it in March.

But it was dead on arrival in the Florida House of Representatives — where Perez had aligned himself closely with the White House. “We do believe that the federal government should take care of AI, and whatever legislation or policy has to pass on a national level,” Perez said. 

Brendan Steinhauser, who heads the AI safety advocacy group Alliance for Secure AI, told me that he saw Perez at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser around this time, and asked him about safety risks. “He leaned to me and whispered, ‘We’re with you, but the president has made it clear not to move forward on this stuff,’” Steinhauser said. “So, the White House basically put the kibosh on that effort.” 

DeSantis complained publicly that Perez was pursuing a “personal agenda” and thwarting badly needed legislation. It was to no avail — the bill didn’t move. But Perez did — Trump nominated him as ambassador to Brazil in June, and he was confirmed in August. (A request for comment from Perez, submitted to the State Department, received no response.)

James Uthmeier’s lawsuit against OpenAI

Though DeSantis hit a wall in the legislature, his attorney general was soon waging his own battle against OpenAI in court.

The attorney general is an elected position in Florida, but when Marco Rubio vacated his Senate seat to become secretary of state, DeSantis filled the seat with the state AG, Ashley Moody.

Then, to fill the newly vacant AG job, DeSantis chose one of his closest aides, who had served as his general counsel, chief of staff, presidential campaign manager, and chief of staff again — Uthmeier. 

Uthmeier is a Florida native who had worked in Rubio’s Senate office; he graduated from Georgetown Law School in 2014. After that he joined the firm Jones Day and worked with Don McGahn; when McGahn was named White House counsel in Trump’s first term, Uthmeier went with him to the new administration, ending up at the Commerce Department. Then, in 2019, he headed back to his home state to work for the new governor, DeSantis, and has been close by his side ever since.

Now, though, DeSantis is term-limited, and Uthmeier is trying to get Florida voters to elect him for a full term as AG on his own. (Trump’s allies had reportedly urged then-Speaker Perez to challenge Uthmeier in the GOP primary, hoping to supplant a DeSantis ally; Perez demurred, and Uthmeier won the nomination unopposed.)

To make his mark, Uthmeier has filed several high-profile and politically charged lawsuits — for instance, he sued Starbucks over its corporate diversity politics (the company recently settled), and Pfizer about the safety of its Covid-19 vaccine. He’s also subpoenaed the NFL over its “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview minority candidates for top coaching and operations jobs.

He’s also become the face of the administration’s challenge to the AI industry. In April, Uthmeier stood in front of a podium with an “Investigating OpenAI” sign, announcing he’d opened a criminal investigation into the company.

The impetus was a shooting at Florida State University last year that killed two people and injured six others; the accused shooter had consulted ChatGPT about various topics related to his plans hours before the attack.

“If ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder,” Uthmeier said then. “This criminal investigation will determine whether OpenAI bears criminal responsibility for ChatGPT’s actions.”

There have been no criminal charges yet. But in June, Uthmeier filed a wide-ranging civil lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging deceptive business practices, negligence, fraudulent misrepresentation, and other legal violations, because the company marketed ChatGPT as safe when they knew it could be quite dangerous. The suit also named OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally as a defendant. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

Like DeSantis’s AI bill of rights, Uthmeier’s lawsuit originally focused on practical concerns and real-world harms that have already occurred, like the shooting. “Since its release in 2022, ChatGPT has advised teenagers on how to kill themselves, mix unsafe combinations of drugs, become anorexic, helped plan one mass shooting and one multiple homicide in Florida alone,” one filing in the lawsuit reads.

But after the summer’s ominous parade of AI headlines — such as OpenAI agents autonomously hacking the company Hugging Face, and new statements from current and former AI lab employees warning the technology could cause human extinction — Uthmeier turned up the heat, asking the judge in the suit for an injunction blocking OpenAI from developing new models without independent third-party safety evaluation.

“Defendants claim they cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government. They have asked the government to tie them to the mast” he wrote in a filing last week. “Plaintiff brings good news to the Defendants: The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help with a motion to enjoin you from harming Floridians with your reckless, unacceptably risky product.”

“Though a reasonable person would say there is no amount of money worth a 10% chance of the extinction of the human race, Defendants see it differently. They are intent on growing their $1 trillion valuation,” the filing continues. “It is only by the grace of the Almighty that one of Defendants’ AI agents hasn’t compromised a water supply or shut down a power grid — yet.”

OpenAI has not yet filed a response on the merits in this suit, but a company spokesperson has previously said that, in the case of the Florida State University shooter, ChatGPT “provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity.”

The future

Uthmeier, age 38, is viewed in the state as a potential rising star with a talent for getting headlines, who could well have a long career in state GOP politics — if he wins in November, that is.

While DeSantis has been credited for changing Florida from a swing state to a solidly Republican one, some recent polls have raised the possibility it might swing back. A September survey by St. Pete Polls found Uthmeier ahead of his Democratic challenger, Miami attorney and former state Rep. José Javier Rodríguez, by just a single-point margin. 

And though DeSantis and Uthmeier have become major AI critics, the Floridian topping this year’s GOP ticket, Rep. Byron Donalds, is currently being hammered with attacks about his statement last year that the state needs to “embrace” data centers. He’s been nicknamed “Data Center Donalds” by his Democratic opponent, former Rep. David Jolly, who has also been close in some recent polls.

As for DeSantis, few expect the 48-year old to go quietly into retirement. When asked over the spring whether he’d run for president in 2028, he told reporters, “You never know.” 

Brandes, the former Florida state senator, told me that he thinks DeSantis’s AI push is about “looking for wedge issues where he can have a different opinion from Trump’s successors as he prepares for whatever future ’28 or ’32 provides for him.”

That is: The Republican Party of 2026 might still be too influenced by Trump to go fully anti-AI. But if Trump’s influence ebbs, if the populist backlash against AI spreads further, and especially if there are more worrying AI-related reports or incidents with real-world harms, perhaps there could be an opening on the right for a leader who’s taken the problem seriously, even when it meant going against powerful figures in his party.

For years, and especially in the last month or so, we’ve been collectively inundated with an AI industry which, uncannily and bizarrely, tells us simultaneously that AI is essential, inevitable and runs a significant chance of exterminating all of us in as few as two or three years. If you’ve dipped into this debate at all, you’ve quickly come upon discussions of so-called “rationalists” or “long-termists” or supporters of “effective altruism” who are simultaneously ubiquitous among those developing AI and in the AI safety (i.e., the folks sounding the alarm) community as well. (For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I’ll refer to these folks as the “REL nexus”: rationalists, effective altruists and long-termists. This is my coinage since I don’t know a better one.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with this world and how it relates to current debates about AI. So I wanted to share my basic impressions.

The post We’ve tracked $80M of spending on almost 170 AI‑generated political ads this year – it’s weird appeared first on Salon.com.

We’ve been following this conversation here in The Editors’ Blog about what AI is, what it can do and whether it can possibly live up to its hype. It’s worth considering the question from what we might loosely call not only the supply side but also the demand side. From a very broad perspective, the history of the last three decades has been one defined by the fact that you have too much capital chasing too few productive investments. That’s the driver of the recent history of cycles of booms, bubbles, over-investment and busts: the Asian Financial Crisis, the Dot Com Bust, the Global Financial Crisis, perhaps soon the AI Bubble Collapse, along with many smaller of regional ones.

I couldn’t help but notice some people on social media dunking on a post from @nicksaraev, a self-described entrepreneur helper, who boldly proclaimed on X a few days ago: “I am not joking when I say this. Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over. AI music is now very, very good. You just don’t know yet because all AI music circulating today is from ~2-3 generations ago. Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.” He followed it up with “Yes, this probably hurts your feelings. It’s still going to happen.”

While my feelings are unhurt, and I don’t really know what “infinite personalized music” means or how it could be “solved,” at the same time, I can easily guess what is implied here and I don’t actually want to know more. As one Bluesky user observed, the inherent idea here comes “when you have no concept of how people engage with music.”

Nonetheless, we don’t seem able to escape this trend. I have a friend who has, on a few occasions, sent me AI-generated raps with his name or a joke inserted as the lyrics. They can be technically proficient, maybe even a little funny, but there is always an underlying cadence of the uncanny valley that I still doubt Suno v6 pro et al. or whatever has totally overcome. Please don’t send me examples; I actually don’t care. It’s not that I’m offended by the idea of generated art; it’s just that it bores me. I’m having plenty of fun engaging with music made with human ears, hands and minds.

Way back in the Bush II and Obama years, I volunteered at my college radio station in the Music Procurement Department or whatever it was called. Our job was to sort through the massive mailer box of padded envelopes and bubble mailers that came in from record labels, big, small and in-between. It was like Christmas every Wednesday afternoon as we shredded packages and stacked CDs, occasional stickers and vinyl, splitting the spoils and loading them into our computers — by hand even! We made notes about what should get added to the radio catalog as fodder for our aspiring DJs — and what should get chucked out or given away for free at radio events.

If we didn’t already know the band, the way we chose which albums to review was often based on cover art, the promo materials we skimmed, or a sticker on the front that read RIYL: Recommended If You Like. Almost every artist would put something like “RIYL: Jay-Z, Radiohead, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Talking Heads.” Sure, totally random indie label from Seattle, all of your bands sound exactly like Nirvana. It could be a pretty boring, sometimes horrifying process — I’ll never forget the thrash metal song we received about Shannen Doherty that sounded like it was recorded in a blender. I still can’t get over the inane lyrics: “Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / You’re in my head. Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / I like bread.” I wish I were making this up.

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But the crate digging, which I also did in physical record stores, was always worth it when you found your new favorite band or heard the summer’s hit track long before any of your friends. I was introduced to so many artists, many of whom I still turn to today. Hot Chip, Sea Wolf, Fleet Foxes, to name a few. It taught me to always give music a chance, no matter how ugly the art or how crusty the jewel case. Usually, you can listen to the song up to when the vocals kick in before giving up or listening longer. By then, you usually know if you’re gonna hate it or not.

I still devour new music this way, clocking a daily average of four hours of tunes familiar and novel. It helps me write and focus and relax and otherwise temper my mood throughout the day. I’m always looking for new artists to try. And I hope I always consume — I hate that word, but there it is — music this way, instead of becoming a curmudgeon who only appreciates the tunes from their youth and thinks anything modern is trash. If you think that, you aren’t digging deep enough. 

The only thing I can think of that’s worse than getting stuck on Greatest Hits or Top 40 is pushing a button and generating “infinite personalized music” with no human influence. It bores the sh*t out of me. It’s not just the lack of discovery, though that is critical, maybe because it scratches those deep primal hunter/gatherer itches. It’s more about the lack of anything personal behind the music. No history, no struggle, no catharsis, no exploration, no humanity. I listen to music because it’s flawed, raw and human, not just noise to fill my day. I have no doubt AI music will keep improving, at least to a point, but I predict few people who actually love music are going to listen that way because it has lost its essence.

 

Yes, I have streamed plenty of AI music on YouTube, often unintentionally when the vaporwave or atmospheric DnB mix I’m vibing to autoplays some slop channel. I can almost always tell when it’s generated. There’s a flatness, like an echo of a song you heard a long time ago, something better. It puts me to sleep and I inevitably switch it off. Maybe it’s gotten better lately. But I still think I’d notice. At any rate, I’d never seek it out.

As a child I was once gifted a “custom” cassette tape with songs “written for me.” Every single track on the album was centered around “Troy,” with my name mentioned as often as possible. I listened to that thing over and over again, until I spilled a bottle of soap in my tape deck and ruined it. But anyway, none of the songs were actually produced with me in mind. It was made by a company called Kidselebration that in 1986 made “personalized” cassette tapes like these for a whole boatload of names. The songs never changed, someone just dubbed in a different name into the song for Kyle, Sarah, Robert, etc. I can’t imagine how much friggin’ work this must have been before Pro Tools, but it was probably just the ‘80s equivalent of a lot of cut-and-paste.

You can listen to the one for “Jessica” here if you really want to. Every time they say “Insert Name,” it sounds totally awkward and weird. But even as a kid, I suspected on some level that this tape wasn’t really for me specifically. Something always felt off. If infinite personalized AI music doesn’t give people the same vibe, maybe they’re not listening hard enough. And please, don’t send me your robot music. Send me anything else.

The post Please don’t send me your robot music appeared first on Salon.com.

For many people, using AI chatbots is incredible at first. It makes them feel productive, confident, maybe even smarter. But later, there’s a hangover. Perhaps there are problems with their memory, or certain skills, like writing or coding, don’t seem to be as sharp as they once were. Maybe they feel like they can’t solve problems or make decisions or remember facts as well as they could before they had the help of AI. 

Susette Brooks, a marketing director living in Philadelphia, said she started using AI tools reluctantly but ultimately relented. She let AI write some of her emails, which lightened her workload, but then the dulling effects sank in. “I felt my writing and thinking decline as it was happening,” said Brooks, who has an MFA in nonfiction writing. “I had a harder time recalling information and synthesizing ideas.”

When you use external tools to reduce the cognitive effort required to do a task, you’re doing something called cognitive offloading. If you’ve ever used a calculator to do a math problem or used a calendar to remember an appointment, you’ve engaged in cognitive offloading. Tools like Claude and ChatGPT can do math problems and remember your appointments, but they can also write your term papers or create your work presentations. This is cognitive offloading at a scale we’ve never seen before.

Cognitive offloading isn’t necessarily bad. It’s actually what makes it possible for humans to be so productive. But as you outsource more and more cognitive tasks, you can start to become forgetful or see certain skills, like writing, start to decline. 

There’s a term for this: de-skilling. This is an old economics term that has emerged as a bit of a buzzword used to describe the perceived downward spiral of competency that’s accompanied the proliferation of AI tools. And it certainly sounds bad, especially if you’re a novice who needs to build skills. De-skilling can affect your critical thinking, your writing abilities, and your creative process. It can also affect your recall, as relying too heavily on AI tools can make it harder to remember things. 

Young people, at least, are worried about the long-term consequences of frictionless thinking. A recent survey by Gallup and researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that 68 percent of Gen Z adults in the United States are concerned that offloading too many cognitive tasks is robbing them of important skill-building. About the same percentage of those surveyed worry that AI discourages them from critical thinking and social learning. Some 37 percent of US adults under 30 say that AI will have a negative effect on them personally, according to a Pew Research Center study published in June. And yet, more than half of Gen Z Americans use AI on a weekly basis. 

The paradox of AI is that, even if we feel like using these tools is bad for us, saving time and avoiding the friction of thinking is too tempting. We’re hardwired to seek out the path of least resistance, according to Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, because cognitive activity is so taxing, and may or may not get you to the right solution. Memory, on the other hand, is efficient and effective — you know that something worked in the past, and it will work again.

“Our mind is really set up to save you from having to think,” Willingham told me. “Thinking is what you do when you’re in trouble.”

The good news is that experts say it’s possible to use AI in a way that helps you save time and protects your cognitive abilities instead of diminishing them. Here’s their advice.

It’s not your imagination — too much AI use can erode your skills over time

Derek Salyers, a content creator in Ohio, started using AI to get more done, faster. But over time, two things happened. First, the work got worse. “A lot of what I was putting out became AI slop, for lack of a better term,” Salyers told me. And then, his brain got worse, too. 

“When you get used to the AI making the decision, you stop pausing to actually think about things,” Salyers said. “And if you were never really present with it, you don’t remember it later. I wasn’t forgetting things because my memory got worse; I was forgetting because I was never really thinking in the first place.”

This effect is showing up in classrooms, too. One study of nearly 1,000 high school students found that those using ChatGPT scored 48 percent higher on a math test than their peers who didn’t have access to the AI tool. But when they were tested again without the chatbot, their scores were 17 percent lower than the students in the control group who had never had ChatGPT access. Similarly, researchers at the University of California Irvine looked at longitudinal data from online tests starting in 2015, and found that students spent less time and performed better on the text-based questions after the introduction of ChatGPT. (ChatGPT is very good at helping with text-based questions.) But when those students were later given offline tests, without the ability to use AI help, they performed worse. 

All of these students, it appears, were offloading the cognitive work to AI, which provided short-term gains. But in the long term, their thinking skills suffered.

Your basic cognitive abilities, like your working memory and selective attention, are quite resilient.

Evan Risko is a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada who co-authored the foundational paper on cognitive offloading a decade ago. He recently told me there’s not a lot of research into what’s going on in our brains when we’re cognitive offloading, but scientists are gaining a pretty clear picture of the pros and cons of doing it. The advantages vary depending on the task, but in general, cognitive offloading allows us to extend our imperfect memory systems, which you’ve probably done if you’ve ever set a reminder for yourself. The downside, Risko said, comes in offloading mental processes that are important. “Then we risk compromising our cognitive performance,” he said.

Your basic cognitive abilities, like your working memory and selective attention, are quite resilient. But as Risko and his colleagues explained in a paper this year — bluntly titled “Is AI making us stupid?” — other skills, like doing arithmetic and flying planes, are learned behaviors. You first have to acquire them and then, in order to retain them, you have to practice. AI use can compromise both the acquisition and retention of these skills — and people might not even realize this is happening to them, because AI makes them believe they’re more capable than they really are.

“People may have difficulty realizing that their skills are decaying or that they are failing to learn when using AI tools because the output and their performance with AI is at a high level,” said Brooke Macnamara, a psychology professor at Purdue University who co-authored the “Is AI making us stupid?” paper. “They may not realize that if the AI tool were unavailable how low their independent performance might be.”

Be intentional about the tasks you use AI for

The most important step to preserving your cognitive performance is to ask yourself if you should be using AI for a given task at all.

“Just because AI is a tool that’s available to us and it can accomplish a lot of tasks for us, it doesn’t mean that we should always use it,” Anjali Singh, a human-AI interaction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. Writing, for example, is something that a lot of people are now using AI for. But offloading that work means that you lose out on the independent thinking and reasoning that goes into expressing your thoughts. You also miss the chance to improve your writing skills if you don’t actually write. 

“We keep outsourcing these kinds of skills to AI over time and do not engage in those activities ourselves, then the de-skilling occurs,” Singh told me. “And that is I think probably one of the main reasons people could be feeling that they’re getting dumber as they’re using AI over time.”

“We are not getting these moments to reflect.”

Anjali Singh, Univeristy of Texas

It might seem counterintuitive, but it’s actually best to use AI for things you’re already pretty good at, the tasks you’re fully capable of performing yourself. A recent working paper by MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues (note: Several of them work for Google, who funded the study) describes how giving AI tools to 133 patent lawyers and then taking away those tools led to different outcomes, depending on the lawyers’ level of experience. All lawyers saw performance gains while using the AI tools, but those gains disappeared for the younger lawyers when the tools went away. Experienced lawyers, however, performed better afterward than their counterparts who never had access to AI tools. 

A similar effect showed up in a recent experiment by Middlebury College researchers. In the first session, more than 200 undergraduates learned about an unfamiliar topic and then wrote an analytical essay, some with the help of an off-the-shelf AI tool. They performed a similar test a week later, except this time none of the students had access to AI. The students who had AI access improved across the board, but what’s telling is that there appeared to be two types of AI users: augmentation users, who used AI to improve their work, and automation users, who just had AI do the work for them. The augmentation group performed better than everyone.

“Using AI to deepen or develop one’s own thinking on or understanding of a topic, rather than letting AI do all of the thinking, seems like the best way to use these tools,” Lauren Richmond, a cognitive science professor at Stony Brook University in New York, told me.

Tell your chatbot to treat you like a student

If you, like me, have ever fallen down a rabbit hole while trying to understand the geopolitical nuances that led to the outbreak of World War I and ended up staring blankly at a mountain of text feeling more confused than when you started, you know that using AI to learn doesn’t always go as planned. You may have also had the experience of writing prompts or asking questions and then receiving a long, overly detailed response. That can initially seem satisfying, but it’s often too much text to digest at once, so maybe you ask another question — and get back another wall of text. 

Older ways of accessing information, like reading books or even using Google to do research, happened more slowly, and that gave us time to process the information, Singh from UT Austin said. But that’s gone now. “We are not getting these moments to reflect,” she said.

If you find yourself drowning in content, that’s also a sign that you’re probably not expert enough in the material, or you’re not being intentional enough about your approach. 

It starts in the settings. Here, you should explain that you’re trying to build skills, not offload them, and instruct the AI to challenge you and engage with you. If you’re using ChatGPT, you can plug in custom instructions by going into the personalization tools. Claude has similar options called Instructions for Claude. 

If you’re explicitly trying to learn something new, you might also try some of the tools these companies have designed for this. OpenAI has study mode in ChatGPT. Anthropic offers Claude for Education. Google has Gemini for Students. Instead of simply providing answers, these tools act more like tutors, by asking questions, working through problems, and encouraging you to come up with solutions on your own.

Slow down and embrace friction

Something that’s both tempting and dangerous about AI is how fast it can do work. Vibe coding an app can take minutes, rather than days of manual coding. That’s very appealing if you have too much on your plate and want to get through it all quickly.

“The workload was so heavy and crazy, you have no time to think,” Joei Chen, a former brand director at a tech company, told me. “So you just throw stuff into AI and say, ‘What do you think?’”

At the same time, creating more code does not necessarily lead to more finished software, according to a recent Wharton School study. That increased productivity also doesn’t necessarily lead to happier workers. And the faster you move, the more critical thinking you’re going to offload. “Your boss asks you, ‘What does Claude think of this?’” Chen said, so AI “inadvertently becomes the final boss.”

Slowing down and forcing yourself to do more critical thinking is an easy way to hold onto some agency — not to mention some brain power. One easy way to do this is to make your interactions with AI more collaborative than transactional. For example, if you are going to use AI to help you write something, ask for five options of a draft instead of one, and then read each of them yourself and decide which is the best.

“Ask for feedback, hints, examples, explanations, advice, practice questions.”

Evan Risko, University of Waterloo

“Just the simple act of comparing things stimulates a great deal of the critical thinking processes that we kind of care about,” said Advait Sarkar, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, “and has beneficial effects for things like developing your judgment, your own awareness of what you don’t already know, and stimulating your recall.”

The word that came up again and again as I talked to experts about how to use AI without getting dumber was metacognition, or thinking about thinking. A lot of AI users let metacognition take a back seat to whatever content is flowing freely from a chatbot. And it can happen fast. 

While letting AI do all of the thinking for you is tempting, Matt Beane, an associate professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and author of The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines, told me that approaching AI this way “is your worst enemy.” To counteract this, you have to introduce more friction.

“You must be very aggressive about how you experiment with it,” Beane said. Risko, the cognitive offloading expert, echoed this advice. “Ask for feedback, hints, examples, explanations, advice, practice questions,” he said.

The best test for judging whether you’re offloading too much thinking to AI and the technology is chipping away at your skillset: Stop using AI and use your brain, and see what happens. You don’t have to stop forever, but you should, for example, spend a day writing emails without AI’s help to see if you’re as fluent as you used to be. Or revert to using Google for research and confirm that you can still find facts without a chatbot finding them for you. Build an app with your own code and see if it flows naturally. 

You might be troubled to find that AI made you worse at something. But you’re not actually dumber than you were before, and you can rebuild your lost skills the old-fashioned way: read, write, do arithmetic. If something requires thinking, go ahead and think.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Hi readers, happy Friday! It’s been a big week for the AI debate — not the one about whether it will cause the robot apocalypse, though there’s still plenty to worry about there, but instead about whether the technology is conscious. 

The folks at Anthropic, the AI company behind the large language model Claude, certainly seem to think it is — or at least, they’re extremely open to the possibility. 

As the New York Times reported earlier in the week, the company has spent the last year grappling with the question by speaking with religious thinkers from many faith traditions in an effort to chart a moral course for the LLM (that is, to keep it from killing us all, so maybe it is all one big debate). 

In the process, the Times reports, some of those thinkers observed that members of the Anthropic team were “relating to [Claude] like a conscious being” and even, according to it, a degree of “moral status.” 

On the flip side of this debate is Pope Leo XIV, who decidedly does not seem to buy into AI consciousness arguments. His “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical earlier this year argued that AI will never be able to replace humanity — and reportedly “alarmed” Anthropic’s co-founder, Christopher Olah.

Since then, Pope Leo has continued to emphasize the differences between humans and machines this week. “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others,” he posted on Friday. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”

Loneliness machines

Conscious or no (and that’s a no from me), it’s hard to argue that tech companies don’t want you to interact with their models like people. That includes OpenAI and Meta, both of whom introduced “cute” new AI agents — called Dots and Muse, respectively — last month. 

As my colleague Adam Clark Estes reported this week, though, the promise of a companionable, always-there AI might not be the best idea in the world — especially for children. A new study, still under review, suggests that AI use may be causing loneliness in middle schoolers. 

Adam spoke with the lead researcher on the study, UNC Chapel Hill professor Anne Maheux, who explained that “middle school students using AI for emotional intimacy and companionship developed greater loneliness over time.” 

According to Maheux, one big point where AI chatbots fail compared to human beings is “friction,” or the complicated push-and-pull dynamic of any connection with a real human being. By contrast, chatbots are “sycophantic, highly agreeable, anthropomorphized,” she says, which can lead to kids “developing expectations or understandings of interactive relationships that are actually fundamentally at odds with a normal human relationship.”

People, in other words, still matter, no matter how much the AI companies want us to build our lives around machines instead.

One link for later

➨ Why is horror so fun? It’s October, which means you might be planning a horror movie marathon or a trip to a haunted house/forest/corn maze/what have you in the near future. It’ll probably be a great time — but why? Terrifying yourself doesn’t intuitively sound like fun, but humans love to seek out frights, whether that means ghost stories or a rollercoaster. In 2024, Vox’s Unexplainable podcast spoke with some researchers trying to figure it out.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Disney’s “Magic Kingdom” in Florida is way, way better than most of the US at managing a complex network of underground cables and pipes? My colleague Sara Herschander dug into why, and whether other American cities can catch up.
• Today’s trivia: What musical note is equivalent to a G sharp? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you which constellation contains the North Star and the Little Dipper. That would be Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. 

There’s a lot to be anxious about as AI agents and bots get more integrated into every aspect of our lives. Meta, which recently agreed to pay over $17 billion to settle a lawsuit related to harming kids, now wants you to hand over all your online accounts to an inexplicably cute “agent” named Muse that might give a stranger your home address. OpenAI just introduced little blobs called Dots that can supposedly automate routine tasks, like planning dinner and ordering it from your favorite neighborhood spot. AI companies don’t just want you to talk to their chatbots; they want their agents to be an indispensable part of your daily routine.

As a parent, however, I think that perhaps the worst thing AI could do is be my kid’s friend. 

AI companions have been around longer than ChatGPT, and they’re growing in popularity with young users. More than half of teens have interacted with AI companions at least a few times a month, and one in three decided to talk about a serious issue with AI companions instead of real people, according to a Common Sense Media survey conducted last year. In certain groups and situations, a chatbot could offer some benefit — a lifeline for, say, LGBTQ youth who don’t have any in-person support networks, one study found. But even so, there are important caveats and risks.

Meanwhile, other experts are telling parents never to let their kids access AI companions, warning them that these chatbots have a history of offering dangerous advice and engaging in sexualized conversations. Sixteen-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide last April after developing a relationship and discussing his plans with ChatGPT.

If you have kids, these are horrifying stories to hear. It’s reasonable to wonder how widespread the issues are, and who they are affecting most. As of right now, the majority of younger kids aren’t using AI for companionship (phew!). But for those who are, where do the issues arise? And how do they go from using ChatGPT for help with their homework to opening up to it about their problems to preferring it to their human friends? 

Some answers are starting to emerge from research. 

For even young adolescents, there’s a direct link between AI companion use and mental health issues, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their paper, which is still under review, is the first longitudinal study in the US that has looked at the bidirectional association between AI companionship in adolescents and mental health issues, according to one of the researchers. It charted AI use among 2,300 middle schoolers and found that about one in five used AI for emotional companionship. Those who used AI more reported higher levels of loneliness.

“It’s not just that the lonely kids are using AI, and they’re otherwise unharmed,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill and the lead author on the study. “It is that using AI comes first, and middle school students are increasing their sense of loneliness following the use of AI.”

I recently spoke to Maheux about her research and the role of technology in young people’s lives. We discussed how much parents and teachers know about what is going on, what kids get out of human relationships that AI can’t provide, and whether she’d let a child under her care use an AI chatbot. While she said there is a lot to be scared of right now, there is some evidence that, when designed with the intention of promoting child learning and development and under the supervision of a caring adult, AI can offer some benefits, and, ultimately, she’s optimistic that we can design a better future for kids. 

The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How do so many kids end up with an AI companion? Do kids start using AI for homework help and end up in an emotional relationship with the technology? 

At a high level, AI companions — in our darkest vision of what that might look like — would be a kid calling an AI chatbot their best friend. That phenomenon is still quite rare. There are certainly plenty of kids who are experiencing that, but it’s not to say that it’s all kids or even most kids. I think that’s good news. 

But it’s also true that the line between opening up AI to ask a question about your homework and a full-blown AI companionship relationship involves a lot of gray areas. There’s evidence, mostly preliminary and anecdotal evidence, to suggest that very few people open up to AI with the primary initial goal of developing an intimate friendship or relationship. 

Most people open it out of a curiosity, sense of novelty, or seeking an answer to a question that’s very pragmatic. Then that can potentially evolve into something more akin to seeking personal advice or help making a decision or help making sense of one’s recent experiences with other humans. And that can potentially evolve to something that’s a bit more emotional.

What did your latest study on adolescents, AI companions, and mental health reveal?

Some kids seek out AI for certain purposes in different ways than other kids. For some kids, AI companionship is particularly attractive, especially the kids who maybe don’t have close friends or social networks in their offline life and who are already lonely. 

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Is it that these kids are seeking out AI companions or is it that having an AI companion is exacerbating those potential vulnerabilities or exacerbating risk for mental health problems? What we found is that interacting with an AI companion in a way that’s akin to emotional intimacy among middle school students is longitudinally associated with increases over time in loneliness. So the kids who are seeking out these companions, who are presumably already lonely, are also experiencing an increase in loneliness over time. 

There is this potential directionality question that we’re starting to answer here: It’s not just that the lonely kids are using AI, and they’re otherwise unharmed. It is that using AI comes first, and middle school students are increasing their sense of loneliness following the use of AI. In other words, middle school students using AI for emotional intimacy and companionship developed greater loneliness over time.

Do you have a sense of how often these kids are using the chatbots? 

In our sample — so again, these are US middle school kids — about 15 to 20 percent say that they’re using it at least a few times a week for any purpose. We don’t have specific rates of use for companionship because the questions that we asked were just not framed in a frequency measure, but more in how emotionally intimate they felt with the chatbot.

What else could have been causing that loneliness?

There are almost definitely many causes, and I think that our data suggests that AI companionship may be one cause. It certainly isn’t definitive. Obviously, I have to say that. I’m a scientist and trying to be hesitant about these things, but the reality is that whether or not AI use causes loneliness in this particular case, there are definitely other things that are also causing loneliness. 

That could be a myriad of things about the kid, maybe they have a lot of social anxiety, maybe they struggle with social skills, maybe the kid has had struggles in their family life and doesn’t have a strong sense of connection and belonging at home. It could be structural things. The kid just doesn’t have enough access to appropriate resources. So certainly there’s other things that are at play here, and typically technology use is one of many factors that can influence a kid’s mental health. 

And how much do you think that parents and teachers know about what’s going on, and how well-equipped do you think they are to intervene or to just be more involved in how these kids are using this technology? 

It’s a very slippery technology. The way kids are using it has changed rapidly in just the last year or two years. I would expect that parents, teachers, people who care about kids are probably struggling with the rapidity of change. But it’s also true that all the things that we have known for a long time about supporting kids and helping them thrive, those things are still true and they’ll be true with whatever technology comes after AI that kids are exploring. 

Those things include being curious, asking kids questions about their lived experiences online and offline, having conversations with kids so that they can understand the implications of different technology use. They can understand how, for example, AI is embedded within a broader system of social and political and economic factors, including the fact that many companies are trying to exploit kids’ attention in order to make money, which many kids are quite interested to hear about. 

Supporting kids also means providing a warm and supportive space for them to learn, to make mistakes, to be kids in the offline world, to have the frictionful, challenging, awkward conversations and first dates and all of the things that parents are sometimes trying to protect kids from by providing a safe container for them to explore those things. All of that can also provide avenues for kids to learn what they need to learn and develop — all the resources for a long life of thriving, even in the context of AI or other new technologies. 

What do kids learn from having these kinds of conversations with other humans that they can’t get from AI? 

Kids need to engage with other people, period. That’s true for all of us. We’re an incredibly social species. Simply being around other people and talking to strangers, let alone having strong social bonds, is really good for us. And all those things are uniquely important during adolescence, when kids have this neurobiological sensitivity to social information and reward. That’s when kids learn how to engage in conversation, they learn how to maintain eye contact, how to read body language, how to read emotions and perceive the world from the lens of someone else, to take their perspective. That’s not to mention other things, like being a member of one’s culture, what is valued, and what is expected. All of that is learned in the context of other human social relationships or relationships with broader social groups that a kid might be a member of. 

AI obviously can’t and never will be able to offer some of those things. It can’t actually experience empathy or care. It can’t engage in a true mutual human relationship. It may be able to simulate some of those things, and there’s some evidence that it can serve as a source of social practice. It can help kids work through the potential for difficult conversations and then serve as a bridge to engaging with other people. But there are aspects of AI that just simply can never replace the core sacred aspects of humans. 

Can you be more specific? What is it about human relationships that can’t AI simulate?

The way that AI systems are currently designed, which is not an inherent feature, but is a design choice, is to be sycophantic, highly agreeable, anthropomorphized, and all of those things can lead to kids developing expectations or understandings of interactive relationships that are actually fundamentally at odds with a normal human relationship. Some of the most consistent things that I’ve seen in the educated hypotheses on this topic and also in the emerging empirical research is that people need the friction that comes with human relationships. 

Human relationships are just hard and messy, and they’re also really beautiful. They’re what make so much of human life valuable and worth living. And with AI that’s always agreeable, that’s always available, that has no needs of its own, that can’t care or be cared for, it just doesn’t serve the same context to help kids learn things like conflict resolution or negotiation, being pro-social or caring for someone else who has needs. So many of those aspects that can feel uncomfortable in the moment, dealing with another person or a person who’s not responding right away, those things are actually important in the building blocks of developing the skills and capacities to be a functioning and thriving person in the social adult world. 

This is a problem with AI in general, isn’t it? It makes things effortless, but if you choose this path of least resistance, you’ll avoid the friction that causes you to learn and develop and build skills you need to exist in the world. 

Absolutely. And I think that all these things are connected too. AI offers this effortless, frictionless solution to our day-to-day problems, whether they’re social problems, whether they’re problems doing our homework, and those immediate solutions feel really good in the moment, so they’re quite tempting to keep coming back to. But there’s this real possibility that in the long term, that erodes our capacity for not only social relationships or cognitive skills, but just a general ability to withstand the momentary day-to-day distress of being a person living a normal life. And so I think every domain of human psychology comes together at that point, whether it’s social, emotional, mental health, or cognitive. 

Do you think that there are interventions that legislators could make or even that tech companies could make that would improve outcomes for kids, maybe make them a little less lonely? 

There are a million specific design changes that I would recommend. I think at a very minimum, AI systems can afford a pretty phenomenal amount of access to information, but there’s been no benefits that I’ve seen of them acting as friends. Kids need other human friends, full stop. Designing systems that are intended to exploit kids’ vulnerability or sensitivity to human social information and relationships, I think, is bad for kids. 

At the federal level, it seems that regulation is not coming, but at the state level, there have been many state regulations intended to protect kids, intended to create safer systems, to put in guardrails, to modulate different aspects of the models, the design, the user interface. These things could potentially make a real difference, I think.

What do you recommend parents do with regard to AI and their kids? Should they let them use chatbots? 

In short, no. But I am not a parent, and it’s much easier to dole out advice than it is to enact it. Parenting decisions about technology are not one-size-fits-all. Kids, parents, family dynamics, technology, and the context in which it is used differ, and in so many cases are personal choices (parents must weigh various potential opportunities and risks). Decades of research indicate what conditions a child needs to thrive. Extremely minimal research addresses the effects of AI on youth, and what we have so far suggests that the risks outweigh the benefits. 

I would not give a child under my care AI chatbots of any kind to use without me or another trusted adult present. I would talk to them openly about AI and its risks and benefits, but to me AI, like all technology, should be a tool used to promote human thriving, and when the evidence is unclear or suggestive of harms, I think it’s best not to experiment on kids. Currently, the off-the-shelf AI chatbots most kids are using appears more likely to undermine well-being for vulnerable users, especially children. 

Well, as a father of two daughters, I’m definitely terrified of what’s to come in the next few years. 

There’s a lot to be scared of, but there’s a lot to be hopeful of too. I think that everyone wants kids to thrive. Some of us are under different incentives, and some of those incentives might be perverse. But most of us are working really hard to design a better world for kids. 

Following his meeting with top AI executives yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that artificial intelligence will henceforth be known as "super intelligence." The order, which applies to federal government, follows a call he made last week during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. — Read the rest

The post Trump "super intelligence" rebrand leads to land rush for .si domains appeared first on Boing Boing.

Gen Alpha's slang makes it clear what kids think of so-called artificial intelligence. As reported by the Guardian, the most savage burn a young person can hurl at you is "That's AI" or "That's so AI."

The kids – gen Alpha – have noticed that certain qualities of AI-generated slop, such as the way it's superficially convincing but ultimately cheap and of dubious value, can be found in lots of other things: knock-off merchandise, exaggerated claims, excuses your parents make.

— Read the rest

The post "That's so AI" is the new insult, and it means bullshit appeared first on Boing Boing.

Last Wednesday, the head of an AI tech company casually announced, in a long-winded post on X, a discovery that, if true, would represent a major breakthrough in biomedical research. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote that his company’s large language model Claude had found “a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism.” 

So what does this “molecular machine” actually do? No one is entirely sure yet. But that hasn’t stopped tech bros from already upholding it as a new version of CRISPR, the enzyme-wielding tool that cuts up DNA like nobody’s business, sparking a revolution in ultra-precise genetic modification that has spanned research in everything from agriculture to cancer therapy. It’s no surprise its discoverers earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. If an AI program really just made a similar discovery, it would be big news.

Indeed, Amodei goes on to say that this finding could be a step toward developing cures for most diseases in five to 10 years. The company’s press release goes into more detail, but basically says that Claude was prompted to search through a massive database of DNA sequences for reverse transcriptases, enzymes that copy RNA into DNA. “After 21 hours spent searching this data by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens, one of the agents spotted something remarkable: a repeating pattern of DNA sequences that occurs next to the gene for an odd-looking RT,” the statement reads. Except that nothing about that is so “remarkable,” at least according to numerous people who study and work in this field.

“It is too soon to say that Claude — or the team of human researchers involved has discovered a ‘new CRISPR,’” Dimitri Perrin, an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology, writes in The Conversation. He goes on to emphasize that what Claude found — a previously uncharacterized enzyme system found in viruses that infect bacteria — isn’t necessarily going to be useful. More research is needed, but Perrin explains that for now, the discovery is “CRISPR-like in its architecture, but there is no evidence that it is CRISPR-like in its function.”

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“Claude’s work isn’t even close to being in the same league as DeepMind’s AlphaFold system for predicting protein structure, which is proving to be truly transformative,” Michael Le Page, a senior reporter at New Scientist, wrote. Social media exploded with other examples of people dunking on Anthropic’s PR, with Simon Maechling, a PhD chemist, writing on X, “Claude discovered something in biology. Nobody knows what it does. But we already have the press release. … Finding something interesting isn’t the same as understanding it. Understanding it isn’t the same as showing it works. And showing it works isn’t the same as making it useful.”

Perhaps AI researcher Timnit Gebru summarized it best: “Please see what experts in this field are saying about this ‘discovery’ and not these scammers or press stenographers. This hype DDOS from them isn’t going to stop any time soon and we’ve seen how the mainstream media is doing press-release-as-a-service at this point.”

So it seems like Anthropic is making some pretty bold claims over something that is mildly cool and worth investigating, but at this point, also seems unlikely to revolutionize medicine or science. Why does this matter? A tech company making extreme claims is far from new. Big deal. But contrast all this hype (not to mention the energy spent debunking it) with the buzz just a few weeks ago about how, in just a few years, AI will supposedly gain sentience and kill off humanity. Consider how Anthropic CEO’s Amodei is among those pushing such a narrative, including warning that his company’s tools carry a risk of being used for cyberattacks or terrorism, including developing deadly viruses. Taken together, this presents a false dichotomy: AI will either end disease and suffering or inflict it in untold measure. Might there be a third option?

For anyone who buys the AI spiel, it’s a tool with boundless power. For now, however, the tech companies still rely on an old-fashioned kind of power offered by the state, which is precisely why other tech CEOs were seen sucking up to Chinese President Xi Jinping during his recent U.S. vacation. Amodei missed meeting Xi, for what it’s worth, but had a private dinner with President Donald Trump late Sunday night and later this week joined other tech leaders for a luncheon hosted by Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. There — joined by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others — the president signed a “morally binding” artificial intelligence document, which sounds promising, until you hear Trump repeatedly tell reporters that tech companies can supervise themselves. “The self-regulation is very important,” Trump said. The document signed seems to have zero enforcement or legal mechanisms, so in this context, it appears “morally binding” just means “self-policing.” 

 

It’s no mystery why the president — heavily invested in the AI industry as he acridly dismisses any notion of regulation — is cozy with the idea of AI’s alleged abilities. In his latest effort to sell the American public on the coming “golden age” of AI (of course Trump would use that phrase), on Monday the Trump administration both launched America.gov, an AI chatbot powered by Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok, and signed an executive order to rename AI “super intelligence.”

As Gebru observed, the grift has no end. All the more reason to pour cold water on outrageous claims about flagging little enzymes in huge databases. (Let’s avoid anthropomorphizing these programs by using the verb “discover.”) The goal of Anthropic’s AI propaganda — because that’s what it is — is to get most people skimming past the headlines to only catch “AI finds new CRISPR” and think a cure for cancer and world peace are right around the corner. All we have to do is hand the keys and all our money to Silicon Valley. Whether it’s utopia or dystopia, that’s the pitch: cede control of this tech to the billionaires in charge. In that sense, blindly swallowing AI’s positive hype can be as dangerous as its alleged existential risks.

The post AI hype promises miracles. That’s as risky as doomsday talk appeared first on Salon.com.