It will all end in flames
Young people can’t seem to stop watching AI slop videos of cats talking and fruits cheating on each other. Older people are enjoying a different kind of AI-generated content, which provides them with much-needed comfort and companionship. Take Uncle Chang, a 67-year-old family friend who recently visited New York from Taiwan. As we chatted, the retired businessman showed me some YouTube...
Continue Reading on https://restofworld.org/A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41 percent of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are...
Continue Reading on https://www.404media.co/The 7 logo The 7 LIVE He warned AI could lead to extinction. Now he says there’s a better path. “AI 2040: Plan A” recommends one way humans can avoid catastrophe from runaway AI.
Continue Reading on https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/Involution — neijuan (内卷) in Mandarin, literally “inward curling” — entered everyday Chinese speech around 2020. The concept was borrowed from the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who described a pattern in colonial Java in the 1960s: farming systems that grew more elaborate and complex without becoming more productive, absorbing ever more labor for diminishing returns. Chinese...
Continue Reading on https://restofworld.org/When AI tools are accurate — and they get better every month — the gains can be profound. The costs are less obvious but could be just as real: a steady erosion of our natural intelligence.
Continue Reading on https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/Gordon Sheng, a 32-year-old civil engineer in China, spent two decades reading web novels before using AI to write his own. He used DeepSeek to outline a dramatic divorce plot, then generated the story in five minutes using an AI writing tool. Published on Tomato Novel, the short story drew over 5,500 reads in 10 days. “No matter how bad the AI writing is,” Sheng said, “it does a better job...
Continue Reading on https://restofworld.org/While the current labor statistics don’t preclude a sudden job upheaval in the coming years, they do throw doubt on the inevitability of the doomsday scenarios and the pace at which they’d unfold. Everyone in the AI community, it seems, is predicting that the technology will soon wipe out jobs, and everyone, it also seems, knows some young wannabe workers who can’t find one. Perhaps we haven’t...
Continue Reading on https://www.technologyreview.com/In 2016, the future looked bright for tech companies outside of Silicon Valley. American investors were suddenly waking up to opportunities overseas, and allocating money accordingly. Venture firms that had once focused almost exclusively on Silicon Valley were now chasing deals in Beijing, Bengaluru, Jakarta, and São Paolo — kicking off a nearly decade-long golden age for global startups....
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