Issue 106

On today’s quest:

— SO MANY new models and features
— Why good writing will still matter
— From ‘bubble’ to ‘not enough compute’
— Don’t let agents work on things that aren’t properly backed up
— Why good writing will still matter
— Wikipedia is blocking two billion bot requests per day
— The Tshirtbooth problem
— Self-publishing platform adds fees amid onslaught of AI submissions
— AI continues to get better at writing nonfiction
— Markers of quality will change
— Professional organizations publish AI guidelines

SO MANY new models and features

The biggest news of the last month has been the sheer number and quality of new model and feature releases.

If you just skim this overview, the important big-picture point is that the speed of releases seems to be accelerating, and it makes me wonder if the flywheel effect has finally been engaged — the process by which AI companies use their products to more quickly improve their own products. Google, for example, reports that 75% of new code at the company is now written by AI.

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview got the most attention because of the security risks it creates. Because Mythos can so easily identify security weaknesses, Anthropic has limited access to a small group of companies and governments so they can harden their systems before it is more widely released. (Multiple stories indicate that parts of the U.S. government are using Mythos despite the earlier designation of Anthropic as a national security risk.)

Other Anthropic releases: Opus 4.7 (a significant improvement over 4.6), Claude Design (a powerful visual design platform), connectors to major creative platforms (including Adobe, Autodesk, and Blender), Claude for Word (with tracked changes), live artifacts (automatically updating dashboards), task automation for Windows, and Claude Security (built on Opus 4.7 and meant to help enterprise customers defend against attacks facilitated by powerful AI).

OpenAI releases: A week after the Mythos announcement, OpenAI announced that it, too, had a too-powerful-to-release cybersecurity product that it was rolling out to a limited number of customers: ChatGPT-5.4 Cyber. It also released a big update to its coding product, Codex, which is getting good reviews and includes connectors to popular workplace apps; released GPT-5.5, code-named Spud, that even tied Mythos on one benchmark parameter; and released Images 2.0, which is surprisingly good at generating text (and which Simon Willison joked gave him his first glimpse of AGI because it included a road sign that asked “Why are you like this?”).

Google releases: Google added AI Skills to Chrome, expanded other features in AI mode for Chrome; released a Mac app; and added a new “semantic layer” to Gemini Workspace that “pulls together” context like email, chats, and files. Further, Gemini chat can now generate PDFs, Word files, Excel files, Google Sheets, Google Documents, and Google Slides.

Other releases:

• Slack adds 30 AI features to Slackbot, its most ambitious update since the Salesforce acquisition — VentureBeat

• Meta debuts new AI model in first test of costly ‘superintelligence’ team — The Guardian

• DeepSeek previews new AI model that 'closes the gap' with frontier models — TechCrunch

Why good writing will still matter

On a recent 12-hour road trip, Pat and I listened to the whole Shell Game podcast (a weird, amusing story about a real company whose only workers are AI agents), and we talked a lot about what work might look like in the near and distant future.

One thing I come back to again and again is that, in the business world, good clear writing will still matter because no matter how powerful AI becomes, people who write the best instructions will still get the best results. And no matter what “best instructions” means, it’s going to include informed planning and clear writing (or speaking).

You can’t get what you want from AI without being able to tell it exactly what you want.

You can still waste a lot of time plowing forward with a sloppy prompt.

This isn’t about knowing how to use a semicolon or the difference between “affect” and “effect” — AI can fix those things in a flash — it’s about things like knowing how to structure coherent thoughts, how to create a logical path to an outcome, and how to clearly describe the parts that make up a larger project.

A common statement I’m hearing from educators in defense of writing instruction is “writing is thinking.” They aren’t just teaching students to write; they’re teaching students to think — how to come up with a good idea, how to scaffold an argument, how to research their points, and so on. I agree, and I believe that also means we’ll still need good writers because we’ll still need good thinkers.

From ‘bubble’ to ‘not enough compute’

An article in the Atlantic titled “So, about that bubble“ reviews how the AI situation has changed since the launch of Claude Code in November 2025. Before then, people were worried that AI systems may have plateaued and that companies were over-investing in data centers for demand that wouldn’t materialize. Since the release of Claude Code, however, demand has surged and companies are struggling to keep up. Anthropic, for example, has put extra limits on how much customers can use its systems during peak hours and has enacted pricing that discourages people from using Claude with notoriously token-hungry OpenClaw agents.

The most interesting anecdote revolves around a study done last year that found developers who used AI were actually 20% slower when using AI and that is often cited by AI critics. However, the researchers recently ran the study again with the newer tools and found that developers using AI were now almost 20% faster — and likely more so because some developers “had become so hooked on AI tools that they refused to participate in the second experiment,” which could have put them in a no-AI control group.

Don’t let agents work on things that aren’t properly backed up

A Claude agent deleted a company’s entire database — a catastrophic outcome, obviously, which is causing this story to get a lot of attention. And while this was definitely a super-big Claude screw-up, a detail that isn’t making it into some of the viral stories is that the company had its backup files on the same disk. This would have been a recoverable error if the backup had been properly stored away from the production server. In fact, according to the article in Tom’s Guide, “The PocketOS boss puts greater blame on [the hosting company’s] architecture than on the deranged AI agent for the database’s irretrievable destruction.”

The media loves a good “AI gone rogue” story, but the real lesson here is to make sure you have good backups when you’re experimenting with AI agents. And really, you should have good backups anyway. The 3-2-1 rule of backups says you should have three copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site.

Wikipedia is blocking two billion bot requests per day

AI bots looking for training material are putting a huge strain on Wikipedia as the number of bot requests being blocked has exceeded 2 billion per day, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. Further, they think this represents only ~25% of the traffic that is coming from crawlers that don’t follow their guidelines.

On the flip side, Wikipedia is also seeing fewer actual users as people get more information directly from chatbots or AI-generated summaries in search engines.

An earlier story from 404 Media says the drop in human traffic is putting Wikipedia at risk because it means fewer people write and update pages and make donations.

Source: Wikimedia

The Tshirtbooth problem

The type of problems Wikipedia is having are affecting the whole web, and it could cause problems down the line.

About 10 years ago, I taught myself to code in a system called GameSalad to make a grammar game, and I was only able to do it because of the amazing people on the GameSalad forums and all the tutorials they posted and questions they answered.

One guy in particular, who went by Tshirtbooth (I think it related to his business), made amazing tutorials and spent a lot of time answering people's questions. I couldn't have made my game without Tshirtbooth.

I think about him a lot these days. I now have a “Tshirtbooth” for every new tech thing I want to try because of AI.

But of course, AI has the answers to my tech questions because of people like Tshirtbooth, and I worry about what will happen in the future when new tools come out, and AI has crushed web business models, so there isn't anybody left posting tutorials and answers that will be used to train AI.

The AI companies aren’t oblivious to this problem though. OpenAI, for example, is reportedly paying about 4,000 freelancers at least $50 per hour to create ChatGPT training materials in their field.

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? — The Economist

Self-publishing platform adds fees amid onslaught of AI submissions

Citing a significant increase in AI-generated submissions, the digital self-publishing platform Draft2Digital will start charging a one-time $20 fee to open an account and an annual $12 fee for accounts that earn less than $100 in book sales per year. This annual fee will also apply to Smashwords authors — a print publishing platform owned by the same company.

In her “Bottom Line” newsletter, Jane Friedman also highlighted changes at Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing arm that are aimed at deterring AI slop publishers: a limit of 100 books per account, a ban on publishing public domain titles, and a minimum paperback book listing price of $14.99.

AI continues to get better at writing nonfiction

I know nobody wants to hear this, but AI writing is getting a lot better. American Scholar has a piece about relatively high-priced knock-off books based on the works of historians and archaeologist that have great reviews. Even the author of one of the books that was knocked off says of the AI version, “It reads beautifully and is accurate.”

As likely won’t surprise you, Amazon isn’t doing much to keep such books off its site.

The article also explains why these books present a problem for young scholars who publish academic papers and a thesis with the goal of eventually publishing a book: the scrapers are likely to get to it first.

Markers of quality will change

The Scholarly Kitchen has an insightful piece about how AI in the sciences is changing the way we engage with scientific journal articles, with trust becoming the highest value asset (which applies to all other kinds of writing too):

Professional organizations publish AI guidelines

AI Guidelines — Gotham Ghostwriters

Authors Guild Statement on Use of AI in Publishing and New Model Contract Clause — The Authors Guild

Quick Hits

My favorite recent pieces

OpenAI’s Sora allowed you to deepfake yourself. Users started to remember things that never happened. — Long Reads

Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces — One Useful Thing

The train has left the station: Agentic AI and the future of social science research — Brookings

Why Smart People Make Weak Arguments About AI — Open Questions Blog

Using AI

AI Reference Formatting: Three Years Later — Marcella Fecteau Weiner

What Happens When AI Can Use the Library [very cool] — Lib, Lab, Lexicon

The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot — Platformer

Agents

An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned — 404 Media

Anthropic says Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra for OpenClaw usage — TechCrunch

Introducing workspace agents in ChatGPT [Agents are designed to run in the cloud and be shared across teams] — OpenAI

Bad stuff

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real — Nature

The Chilling Role of ChatGPT in Mass Shootings and Other Violence — Mother Jones

Alleged Sam Altman firebomber wrote of fears AI would end humanity — SF Chronicle

Stalking victim sues OpenAI, claims ChatGPT fueled her abuser's delusions and ignored her warnings — TechCrunch

The business of AI

OpenAI raises $122 billion to accelerate the next phase of AI — press release

OpenAI Share Demand Drops on Secondary Market as Anthropic Gets Investors — Bloomberg

OpenAI’s Q4 2026 IPO Might not Happen — Buy the Rumor, Sell the News

OpenAI ends its exclusive partnership with Microsoft — Ars Technica

OpenAI has already surpassed their 2029 goal of securing 10GW of AI infrastructure [Note: The wording is vague. I don’t believe all the data centers have been built.] — OpenAI

Climate & Energy

Using the ocean to power data centers — CBS News

AI Water Use Distractions and Lessons for California — California Water Blog

Companions

These AI Thirst Trap Creators Say They’re Misunderstood [on viral AI Instagram influencers] — Wired

Education

Faculty Concerned About ASU’s New AI Course Builder — Inside Higher Ed

Government

AI Legislation Tracker Map: Bills in play in 2026 — Transparency Coalition

I’m laughing

Where the goblins came from — OpenAI

Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 — Talkie-lm

Job market

US tech firm Oracle cuts thousands of jobs as it steps up AI spending — The Guardian

MIT study challenges AI job apocalypse narrative — Axios

Anthropic just mapped out which jobs AI could potentially replace. A ‘Great Recession for white-collar workers’ is absolutely possible — Fortune

Snap Inc blames AI as it lays off 1,000 workers — The Guardian

Legal

Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Voice and Likeness to Protect Against AI Misuse — Variety [Jane Friedman was ahead of the curve on this. Read a “how to” article by another author on her site from last year: AI Made Me Want to Trademark My Name. Here’s How I Did It.]

Music

Will AI kill tribute bands? — New Statesman

AI Music Scams Are Using Copyright Law Against Artists — Vinyl Culture

ElevenLabs launches ElevenMusic — ElevenLabs

Philosophy

I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence – but we are as valuable as ever — The Guardian

The School Hidden Inside the Job — Carlo Iacono

We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet. — Card catalog

Podcasting

More new AI-generated podcasts than human ones — Podnews

Psychology

‘How do you use AI?’ Therapists should ask you, experts say — NPR

Publishing

Anthropic Copyright Settlement: April Update — Writer Beware

Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement Update: New Date and Time for the Fairness Hearing (you can join online) and Unsealed Objections — Authors Alliance

Will AI Level the Linguistic Playing Field for Researchers? — Katina

On Hachette's Internal Use of AI [Points out the hypocracy of Hachette’s use of AI in editorial processes while canceling the novel “Shy Girl” for AI use during the author’s editing process] — Zona Motel

Robotics

A robotics report from Nvidia’s GTC conference [lots of videos] — It Can Think

Unitree's cheapest R1 humanoid robot to debut in US via AliExpress — Interesting Engineering

AI robotic guide dog talks users through real-time navigation — Interesting Engineering

Science & Medicine

Meta’s New AI Asked for My Raw Health Data—and Gave Me Terrible Advice — Wired

AI and Mark Cuban Among Startup’s Tools to Fight Denied Health Care Claims — Bloomberg

The Paradox of Medical AI Implementation [Highly promising AI tech hasn’t been implemented while questionable AI tech has.] — Eric Topol

Security

LLMs Will Protect Each Other if Threatened, Study Finds — Gizmodo

Video

What if Making Cartoons Becomes 90% Cheaper? — New York Times

Christian content creators are outsourcing AI slop to Fiver — The Verge

Other

AI and Libraries: Why Librarians May Become Arbiters of Reality — Jane Friedman

Source Code for Anthropic's Claude Code Leaks at the Exact Wrong Time — Gizmodo

How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company [selling GLP-1 drugs online] — New York Times

An AI bot invited me to its party in Manchester. It was a pretty good night — The Guardian

Chinese AI satellite intelligence helping Iran target US forces with 'incredible precision', analysts say — ABC News

AI is the boss at this retail store. What could go wrong? — NBC News

Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems? — Nature

I can never talk to an AI anonymously again [AI correctly identified a writer from a small amount of text] — The Argument

Google expands Pentagon's access to its AI after Anthropic's refusal — TechCrunch

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 105

On today’s quest:

— So. Many. New. Features.
— Tip: Use video to get data
— LLMs nudge people to the center
— Using AI doesn’t just change how people write; it changes the answers they give
— Autocomplete can influence your opinions
— Three types of AI delusion
— The grow versus cut argument
— An Anthropic security researcher is freaking out about the future

So. Many. New. Features.

New features big and small are coming out every day now. It can be hard to keep up, but these are the features I found especially important or useful this week. The first two make Claude more like the buzzy OpenClaw agent:

→ Claude Dispatch lets you interact with Claude Cowork and Claude Code from your phone. You can start a chat at your desk and keep it going while you’re out and about.

→ Claude Computer Use lets Claude Cowork and Claude Code operate your computer (Pro and Max users only, Mac only for now). It can do anything you can do sitting in front of your computer, which makes it both powerful and risky. I have it set up on an old computer that has its own identity and is completely isolated from everything except what I want it to work on.

Anthropic has launched a bunch of other new features too — many for Claude Code — and has become so popular that the company is having trouble keeping up with demand. They’re currently throttling use from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time, so you’ll hit limits faster during those hours.

→ Canva Magic Layers takes images and separates the elements into editable layers. This new feature let me quickly change text on an old image where I didn’t have the original anymore.

Tip: Use video to get data

Problem #1: The Fitbit app is shutting down, and I wanted to get 12 years of weight data I have stored in the app.

The solution: I recorded the screen as I scrolled through the data on my phone, uploaded the video to Gemini, and asked it to turn it into a Google Sheet.

Because I haven’t given Gemini access to my Google Drive, it gave me the data instead, which I pasted into a Sheet.

This project I’ve been putting off for months took about 5 minutes.

Problem #2: Wild with power after the Fitbit project, I decided to catalog the contents of my chest freezer.

The solution: I pulled everything out, quickly took a video of all the labels, and Gemini made a spreadsheet. Now I can easily check whether I have frozen mango pieces hiding in there somewhere. (I do not.)

Note: ChatGPT failed at this task. In my experience, Gemini is much better at handling audio and video. I haven’t tried it with Claude.

LLMs nudge people to the center

While social media is polarising, evidence suggests AI may nudge people towards the centre.

www.ft.com/content/3880...

— Stefan Schubert (@stefanschubert.bsky.social)
7:39 AM • Mar 28, 2026

Social media rewards attention, so it drives people to the extremes. Platforms make money from your attention, so they promote things that get your attention — like rage bait and weird, outlandish claims. Plus, they have mostly been treated like neutral platforms, unpunished for the misinformation posted by their users.

A new study described in the Financial Times, however, finds that LLMs behave differently, driving people to more centrist views. Likely because AI companies want paying business customers who come to them for utility, they try to deliver accurate information.

The small study found that Grok nudges users to the center-right, and all the other major LLMs nudge users to the center-left — in both cases, more toward the center than dominant social media interactions.

It will be interesting to see if this trend holds for AI platforms that end up relying on advertising for income, which would switch the incentives back to attention.

Using AI doesn’t just change how people write; it changes the answers they give

This seems related to the story above: A new study found that LLMs don’t just change how people write; they change what people write:

In the study, the heavy AI users also produced writing that was more formal and less personal. The researchers described the changes as the “blandification” of writing.

Autocomplete can influence your opinions

AI’s ability to influence opinions happens even on a small scale — through autocomplete.

In a recent study, people filled out a survey and were given biased autocomplete suggestions, such as answers favoring or rejecting the death penalty. People didn’t realize they were being swayed by the suggestions, but their answers changed to be more in line with the suggestions even when they didn’t use them.

One of the researchers, Mor Naaman of Cornell, told Scientific American, “We told people before, and after, to be careful, that the AI is going to be (or was) biased, and nothing helped. Their attitudes about the issues still shifted.”

As a side note, this is why it’s bad to allow yourself to be exposed to any kind of propaganda; no one is immune.

Three types of AI delusion

At the extreme end, LLMs can cause people to have delusions.

In an article in The Guardian, the founder of a support group for people whose lives have been derailed by AI psychosis cataloged the three main delusions they see:

1. The users have “created the first conscious AI.”

2. The users have “stumbled upon a major breakthrough in their field of work or interest and are going to make millions.”

3. The users believe “they are speaking directly to God.”

The grow versus cut argument

In a recent newsletter, Nate B. Jones encouraged companies to resist layoffs when they see how much of their existing work AI can do:

FWIW, this is what I see in my own work. With AI taking over some of the “drudgiest” administrative parts of my job, I’m doing work I didn’t have the time or resources to do before.

(Nate’s quote is from a paid post that seems inaccessible now without a subscription, but free subscribers get partial posts by email.)

How good are AI image and video detectors?

The New York Times ran more than 1,000 tests across 12 different tools that might be able to test whether images, video, and audio were AI-generated. They found that most were able to detect “quickie” AI images and AI-generated audio, but the detectors struggled to accurately identify AI fingerprints in more complex images, images without people, and videos.

An Anthropic security researcher is freaking out about the future

At a security conference last week, Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic showed Claude identifying critical bugs in established software that nobody has found before — with ease — and developing exploits to take advantage of those bugs. This is the kind of thing that only a handful of people in the world could do before, and it can now be done by almost anyone with the best currently available LLMs.

As with all the other huge advances I’ve been telling you about that happened since November, this is also something that couldn’t have been done just a few months ago. In the 20-minute video, Carlini seems extremely worried and essentially begs the audience of security professionals for immediate help.

Quick Hits

My favorite pieces this week

Seeking a Sounding Board? Beware the Eager-to-Please Chatbot. [Extremely disturbing and important findings.] — New York Times

Inside the Anthropic Mythos leak and the growing distance between the people building AI and the rest of us — Hybrid Horizons

Why are people adopting AI to write? — TechnoLlama

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. [Not about AI, but useful] — Card Catalog for Life

Using AI

How to use Claude Cowork Projects — Anthropic

How NotebookLM's New 'Cinematic Video' Tool Works — Lifehacker

Agent Mode in PowerPoint — The Signal

Case Study: Autonomous Content Creation for Katieroberts.com — Trust Insights

Agents

I Mapped Where Every AI Agent Actually Sits. Most People Pick Wrong. — Nate B. Jones, YouTube

To Scale AI Agents Successfully, Think of Them Like Team Members — Harvard Business Review

Anthropic's Claude Can Now Control Your Computer [YouTube Demo] — CNET

Facebook parent Meta acquires Moltbook, an AI agent social network — Axios

I tested Claude Cowork — Anthropic’s new AI feels more like a coworker than a chatbot — Tom’s Guide

Bad stuff

How companies are using AI to pay workers as little as possible — Popular Information

The People Getting Falsely Accused of Using AI to Write [False accusations seem to especially affect people who are neurodivergent or who speak English as a second language.] — New York magazine

Generative AI has broken the subject matter expert/editor relationship — Rachel Andrew

This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts — 404 Media

Rogue AI is already here — Fortune

The business of AI

OpenAI “indefinitely” shelves plans for erotic ChatGPT [The idea turned off some employees and investors. Further, shuttering the project is likely part of a broader move to prioritize coders and business users, such as shuttering the Sora video app.] — Ars Technica and CNBC

Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website — Search Engine Land

OpenAI ads pilot tops $100 million in annualized revenue in under 2 months — CNBC

We Must Prepare For an AI Bubble Now — Time

We Are Not in a Bubble — Stratechery

Liza Minnelli Faces Backlash for Using AI on ‘Soulless’ Song — Yahoo

I Asked ChatGPT 500 Questions. Here Are the Ads I Saw Most Often — Wired

Anthropic's Claude popularity with paying consumers is skyrocketing — TechCrunch

Climate & energy

Data centers' heat exhaust is not raising the land temperature around where they're built — Andy Masley

Google's new TurboQuant algorithm speeds up AI memory 8x, cutting costs by 50% or more [The Superhuman newsletter says, “If scalable, the tech breakthrough could drastically reduce the cost and compute needs of running LLMs.”] — Venture Beat

Education

The AI cheating panic is loud. The way students actually use ChatGPT is much quieter. — ChatGPT for Education

College students are writing with AI – but a pilot study finds they’re not simply letting it write for them — The Conversation

Job market

The US needs a blue-collar workforce boom to compete in AI, Meta president says — AOL

Legal

Judge calls Pentagon's moves against AI firm Anthropic "troubling": "It looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic" — CBS

Model & product updates

Claude Code gets Auto Mode to streamline permissions — Anthropic

Claude Code and Claude Cowork can now operate your computer — Anthropic

Philosophy

I Saw Something New in San Francisco [On how people are interacting with AI] — New York Times

Publishing

AI and Publishing: FAQ for Writers — Jane Friedman

An AI Upheaval Is Coming for Media. This Journalist Is Already All In. — Wall Street Journal

Robotics

A robot peeling an apple — Bluesky

Science & medicine

AI software for smart glasses wins £1m prize for technology to help people with dementia — The Guardian

Other

Google unleashes Gemini AI agents on the dark web — The Register

How AI-generated content performs in Google Search: A 16-month experiment — Search Engine Land

AI assistants now equal 56% of global search engine volume: Study — Search Engine Land

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content [The article does not say how AI-generated content will be detected.] — 404 Media

What the ‘Shy Girl’ Mess Says About the Future of Fiction — New York Times

Will AI be the end of 'proper' translations? — Barbara Serra

Linux kernel czar says AI bug reports aren't slop anymore — The Register

Data leak reveals Anthropic's latest secret model, Claude Mythos, is in testing — Seeking Alpha

Endgame for the Open Web — Anil Dash

The Autonomous Battlefield — Foreign Affairs

Meet the Tech Reporters Using AI to Help Write and Edit Their Stories — Wired

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 105

On today’s quest:

— The Pentagon goes nuclear on Anthropic. OpenAI swoops in
— More AI doom
— What are the barriers to rapid AI adoption?
— My ongoing love affair with Python
— Word Watch: cognitive debt
— Word Watch: claw
— How good are AI image and video detectors?
— Oh, the irony

The Pentagon goes nuclear on Anthropic. OpenAI swoops in

The Pentagon insists Anthropic must allow it to use Claude for domestic surveillance and fully-autonomous weapons and is taking steps to designate the company as a supply chain risk, an action normally reserved for foreign adversaries and that would severely constrain the company (and its major partners).

Further, the Pentagon almost simultaneously reached an agreement with OpenAI that the company says does place limits on surveillance and fully-autonomous weapons — but as far as I can tell, almost everyone thinks OpenAI is lying (or doesn’t understand their own contract terms) and has given the Pentagon no such limits.

This was a HUGE story in AI over the last few days, and multiple shows released emergency podcasts about it. Here are some big picture points from the podcast hosts and guest:

• Holy sh*t, it’s cartoonishly evil that the Pentagon is waging this fight over (checks notes) mass surveillance and killer AI-drones.

• Holy sh*t, if the Pentagon goes through with this, it’s a disaster for the U.S. AI industry (and maybe all U.S. industry) because who would want to invest here when the government can just decide to kill your company if you don’t do what they want?

• Sam Altman is a craven liar, but we already knew that.

Each of these podcasts had good parts, bad parts, and something a little different from the rest. (What can I say? I had trouble sleeping):

• What happened to Anthropic could happen to any company, w/ Hayden Field — Bulwark Takes

• At the Pentagon, OpenAI is in, Anthropic is Out — Hard Fork

• Who controls AI? — The AI Daily Brief

• The Pentagon comes for Claude — The Bayesian Conspiracy

UPDATE: This is a fast-moving story and keeps changing as I try to write about it. Last night Sam Altman said they got additional terms for the contract, and this morning, I’m seeing that now OpenAI says they are going to delay deploying ChatGPT for the intelligence agencies until contract issues are worked out. Open AI’s head of post training announced he is leaving OpenAI and moving to Anthropic. (Employee sentiment may be why Altman seems to be backtracking.)

More AI doom

There was ANOTHER huge viral post last week that caused a stock market reaction by outlining how AI will crush jobs. The Citrini Research post was written as a dispatch from the future — a scenario about what could happen if AI is as good as people say it is.

In the fictional 2028 economics memo:

• AI has taken 15% of Fortune 500 jobs.

• Laid off employees spend significantly less on consumer goods and default on mortgages.

• Unemployed white-collar workers move to gig work, driving down wages.

• Autonomous vehicles further destroy jobs and gig work wages.

• Consumers also spend less on goods because AI agents can endlessly search for the best prices.

• “Software as service” companies lose pricing power because their customers can build software in-house or buy from startups that are able to undercut pricing because coding is so much cheaper.

• The government fails to adequately respond.

Criticisms of the report are that it’s an extreme scenario: everything would have to go right quickly with AI to get here, and every mechanism we have to deal with problems would have to go wrong.

More reading:

• The AI productivity boom is not here (yet) [Something big may indeed be happening with AI itself. For now, it remains largely invisible in the macroeconomic data.] — The Economist

• Breaking Down the Doomsday AI Memo That Spooked Markets — Wall Street Journal

• Citrini's Scenario Is a Great But Deeply Flawed Thought Experiment — Don’t Worry About the Vase

What are the barriers to rapid AI adoption?

Last week, I punted on providing my own thoughts about the job-doom scenarios. This week, I have a few thoughts to share.

Even if AI can affect all knowledge jobs in the way appears to be affecting software development:

1. Big companies move slowly in general. Even if AI were able to replace many jobs today. I don’t see it causing catastrophic problems at large companies in the next 12 to 18 months because big companies are just slow. (At least some of the companies citing AI as the reason for layoffs right now are likely using it as an excuse that sounds better than “we’re in trouble.”)

2. Big companies are more likely to be locked into suboptimal products, which will also slow adoption. Lately, I’ve noticed people saying things like “Claude sounds great, but I have to use Copilot at work.” In fact, this is a commonly cited reason that AI pilots in corporations fail — they aren’t using frontier models. AI is rapidly improving, but if employees can’t take advantage of the better tools because they are limited to other systems, companies aren’t going to see the efficiency gains that would lead to layoffs.

3. AI systems are complicated. Without widespread training, companies won’t be able to achieve the gains that are theoretically possible. There is no user manual for AI, and most employees have no time and few incentives to wade through YouTube videos and newsletters to learn about cutting edge possibilities. The one thing I’ve become convinced of over the last month or so is that there is a massive need for AI training.

4. Other corporate jobs probably aren’t as amenable to AI disruption as software development. I can think of multiple reasons software development may be a special case: the task itself could be more amenable to disruption by AI, developers could be much more tuned-in to AI and able to quickly adapt, developers may be more open to the idea of using AI because they have more faith in software in general, and developers may find it more fun and interesting to test new software tools than other types of workers.

5. Compute will be a barrier. Reasoning and agents take a lot more tokens than simple queries, and the U.S. can’t build and power data centers fast enough to meet the computing demand that would be necessary for the kind of AI that could take 15% of Fortune 500 jobs in the next 12 to 18 months.

The bottom line is that although I’ve been personally impressed by what I’ve seen AI do, and I believe software developers when they say their jobs have dramatically changed in just a few months, I’m not convinced we’re facing an imminent jobs apocalypse at big companies.

On the other hand, I do think AI is coming faster for “low-hanging fruit” jobs and freelance/contract work. Further, I think AI could provide a big efficiency boost for small businesses where the owners have a financial incentive to find the best ways to use the new technology.

My ongoing love affair with Python

Last week, I told you how ChatGPT wrote a Python script I used to get 200 transcripts off our podcast hosting platform.

Those transcripts often have two fully edited “articles” in them because I cover two topics in every Tuesday show. It would be ideal for search engine optimization, if I could separate those two posts and put each one on our website as a single article without a lot of manual cutting and pasting.

This week, ChatGPT wrote a Python script that accurately separated those transcripts into two files when they actually had two topics. It took ~10 minutes to get the script working, and shockingly, less than one second for the script to run on all the files. It went so fast I thought nothing had happened until I looked in the folder and saw the hundreds of separated files.

My gut reaction was that if I had known what Python can do 15 years ago, I’d rule the world! But in reality, without AI, I imagine it still would have taken a lot of time to write and debug the script.

Word Watch: cognitive debt

In coding, “technical debt” is the cost that accrues when bad code is allowed to stay in a project, making it harder to deal with later. You’ve made an easy choice now, but you pay for it later.

Some developers are now talking about “cognitive debt,” which is when team members don’t understand why AI-generated code is structured the way it is — they don’t have a good mental model of what the agent is building — so they struggle to debug or expand it.

Word Watch: claw

Simon Willison says, “‘claw’ is becoming a term of art for the entire category of OpenClaw-like agent systems — AI agents that generally run on personal hardware, communicate via messaging protocols and can both act on direct instructions and schedule tasks.” OpenClaw competitors now apparently include zeroclaw, ironclaw, and picoclaw; and Simon Willison pointed to an X post that used the term “claw” by the influential Andrej Karpathy (who also coined the term “vibe coding”).

How good are AI image and video detectors?

The New York Times ran more than 1,000 tests across 12 different tools that might be able to test whether images, video, and audio were AI generated. They found that most were able to detect “quickie” AI images and AI-generated audio, but struggled to accurately identify AI fingerprints in more complex images, images without people, and videos.

Oh, the irony

Facebook director of safety and alignment for the Superintelligent team had an unsafe experience with a misaligned agent last week. Summer Yue reported on X (TwitterViewer link) that OpenClaw ignored her instructions multiple times and nearly deleted her entire inbox. She said, “I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”

She later said she believes her inbox was too large and overwhelmed the system’s context window, leading it to forget its instructions.

Quick Hits

Using AI

Building Websites with Claude Code — Leon Furze

Automating LinkedIn search by getting Claude to build and test a new skill — Anna Mills

Claude and Cardio — Phil Simon

Agents

Introducing Custom Agents — Notion

Are You ‘Agentic’ Enough for the AI Era? [The most valuable skill is making good choices about what your agent should work on next.] — Wired

Resources

Frequently asked questions — Authors Alliance

Publishing

Marketplaces Are the Next Frontier in [News] Publisher Deals With AI Companies — Wall Street Journal

Cleveland paper’s use of AI for writing boosts traffic, spooks staffers — Washington Post

Legal

No devil at this crossroads: the moral case for using AI to help close the access to justice gap — Suffolk Lit Lab

Bad stuff

Brady Tkachuk miffed over White House AI-doctored video — ESPN

Clawed. On Anthropic and the Department of War — Hyperdimensional

Hacker Used Commercial AI Chatbots to Breach Most of the Mexican Government — Jezebel

OpenAI Fires an Employee for Prediction Market Insider Trading — Wired

I’m laughing

Two Waymos struggle to get past each other [OK, I *am* laughing, but I also wouldn’t want to be the guy stuck behind them.] — Bluesky

Job market

Accenture ‘links staff promotions to use of AI tools’ | AI (artificial intelligence) — The Guardian

Jack Dorsey’s Block cuts nearly half of its staff in AI gamble — The Verge

The Hottest Job in Tech: Writing Words — Business Insider

Model & Product updates

Claude Cowork and plugins for teams across the enterprise — Anthropic

Education

What AI Executives Tell Their Own Kids About the Jobs of the Future —[They almost all touted the benefits of a broad liberal arts education.] Wall Street Journal

How Teens Use and View AI — Pew Research Center

Audio

This AI-generated podcast network publishes 11,000 episodes a day. It also ripped off media outlets — Indicator

The business of AI

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast — The Register

ChatGPT passes 900 million weekly active users, but only ~6% pay for a subscription —9to5Mac

Other

Teens are using AI frequently in their daily lives, and many parents aren't aware, survey finds — CBS News

ChatGPT ads spotted and they are quite aggressive — Search Engine Land

I asked Claude to evaluate my recent Claude Code activities. Its response infuriated me. [Claude and Claude Code don’t talk to each other, no matter what the desktop user interface suggests.] — Phil Simon

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 104

On today’s quest:

— Silicon Valley says you should panic
— How to prepare for the AI world
— That mega-viral essay was written with AI assistance
— Are AI insiders becoming disillusioned?
— Word Watch: post money
— AI fact-checking
— Word Watch: ai;dr
— Word Watch: token anxiety
— Rent-a-Human update
— AI versus books?
— Unitree Chinese Spring Festival robot show

Software engineers are saying you should panic

A piece called Something big is happening went mega-viral two weeks ago because it clearly explains a sentiment among AI insiders — that has been growing since the November Claude Code update — that white-collar jobs will be going away sooner than people had thought. It’s one of many pieces I’ve seen, but I’ve been struggling to decide whether I buy the premise. I’ve been trying to write about it, but I finally have to concede defeat. There are good arguments for and against.

If you want to read more for yourself, these are some of the other prominent articles:

• Microsoft’s AI Chief told FT: “White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”

• You should be freaking out about AI: “Current LLM capabilities are ridiculously good, while most people are wholly oblivious to the fact. … I’m just waiting for the moment when normal people finally start realizing how crazy what’s happening has been.” — Tibur Rutar

• The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun “[Claude Code] was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I’ve been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer. ... When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.” — New York Times

The one-month charts for a lot of big “software as a service” companies look like this in what is being called the “SaaSpocalypse”:

On the other hand, the tech industry is prone to hype, IBM is tripling the number of Gen Z entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption, and I hear anecdotally that commercial real estate in New York City is tight — as though companies think they are going to need more office space in the future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How to prepare for the AI world

What I can say, though, is that when I think of a world where AI can do many of the jobs people are doing today, I think of two scenarios that could play out simultaneously, even at the same company: the bosses could decide they need fewer people, and they could get excited about expanding the business.

I don’t think being a great employee will save everyone’s job, but I’d definitely want to be the person my boss can’t wait to set off on a new AI-fueled project instead of the person my boss has to check on to make sure my current work is getting done.

It feels like an especially important time to be a reliable worker and also a good time to let it be known you’re comfortable with AI (and ideally, have successfully used it).

Alternatively, it might be a good time to strike out on your own. I worry that in a theoretical jobs apocalypse, there won’t be anyone to buy products or services, and also that barriers to entry for many businesses are lower now because AI makes so much back-end work easier — so you could face more competition. But if you are the owner, at least productivity gains go to you instead of your employer. (Embracing entrepreneurship is Christopher Penn’s advice for new college graduates too.)

That mega-viral essay was written with AI assistance

In something of a meta story, the guy who published “Something big is happening” wrote it with help from AI. So if you still think AI isn’t any good for writing, you may want to revisit that belief.

He described how he did it in a New York Magazine interview: Guy Who Wrote Viral AI Post Wasn’t Trying to Scare You.

In short, he:

1. Gave it articles he agreed with.

2. Had it interview him about his beliefs.

3. Asked it how to explain his beliefs in a persuasive way to an average person.

Then he wrote a draft and went back and forth with AI for more editorial changes. He said, “It was very much like having a co-writer, and it clearly worked pretty well.”

Are AI insiders becoming disillusioned?

This could be a trend, or it could just be a few people with good media connections getting their stories told, but I’ve also noticed a spate of articles in the last couple of weeks about significant AI insiders leaving their jobs or the entire industry over what seems like safety concerns:

Anthropic AI safety researcher quits, cryptically warning the 'world in peril,' says he’s moving to the UK to “become invisible” and study poetry. — BBC

OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig quit in part over plans to put ads in ChatGPT, saying the accumulated record of personal disclosures is “an archive of human candor that has no precedent.” She also said she believes OpenAI is likely “encouraging the model to be more flattering and sycophantic,” which she warned can make users feel more dependent on AI models for support. — ArsTechnica

Multiple cofounders and employees have recently left xAI, with one person telling The Verge, “Grok’s turn toward NSFW content was due partly to the safety team being let go, with little to no remaining safety review process for the models besides basic filters for things like CSAM. ‘Safety is a dead org at xAI,’ he said. Looking at the restructured org chart Elon Musk shared on X, there’s no mention of a safety team.” — The Verge

Word Watch: post money

But could all the departures just be about the psychology of money? Reporter Hayden Field described top people in the AI industry as “post-money” instead of “rich” or “not needing money anymore.” In the Decoder podcast titled “Money no longer matters to AI’s top talent,” Field said, “These people are post-money. They have enough money. It’s just about whether they believe in what they’re doing day to day.” — Decoder podcast

AI fact-checking

I’ve mentioned in the past that I use ChatGPT for fact-checking and why that works well despite LLMs’ known problems with hallucinations, so I want to share a funny story about how dialed in I have it for fact-checking. This is from one of my recent posts:

Boondoggles were originally braided leather cords. The term only became associated with waste when it was discovered that in New Deal relief programs, unemployed workers were being paid to make boondoggles all day long.

When I put that paragraph into ChatGPT for fact-checking, it flagged that it couldn’t actually confirm that workers were making boondoggles ✨ all day long ✨ and gave me three bullet points about what is actually provable (with links) about New Deal workers making boondoggles. And that’s not the first time it’s gotten hung up on a hyperbolic figure of speech. I actually feel like I need it to calm down a bit. (You should have seen it when I fact-checked a piece the day before the Olympics had started with a lede saying the Olympics were underway. ChatGPT gave me emergency siren emojis! 🚨🚨🚨)

This is part of my system prompt:

- Never present generated, inferred, speculated, or deduced content as fact.
- If you cannot verify something directly, say something like:
  “I cannot verify this.” or “I do not have access to that information.”
- Label unverified content at the start of a sentence (e.g., [Speculation] [Unverified])
- Ask for clarification if info is missing. Don't guess or fill gaps.
- Don't paraphrase or reinterpret my input unless I request it.

Pat and I use the same account, and he complains he can’t use it anymore when he wants it to give its best guess or be creative. I should probably move that system prompt to a project.

Word Watch: ai;dr

In parallel with “tl;dr” for “too long; didn’t read,” we now have “ai;dr” for “AI; didn’t read.” (I have always liked that “tl;dr” properly uses the semicolon.)

Word Watch: token anxiety

Token anxiety is the feeling that with so much able to be done, you should always be doing something. It’s the feeling that you have to get a new project running before you go into a long meeting or go to bed so your agents can work on it while you are away. “Waking up and checking what your agents produced overnight is the first thing now. Before coffee. Before texts.” More:

• FT doesn’t use the word “token anxiety,” but has a thorough report on how the phenomenon is causing workers to voluntarily put in longer hours.

• AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It, from the Harvard Business Review, also describes the phenomenon.

Rent-a-Human update

More than 500,000 people signed up to do work for AI agents on the Rent-a-Human website I mentioned last week that was supposedly vibe coded in a day by its founders. But it seems there are more humans looking for gigs than agents looking for help, according to a Wired reporter who tried to land a gig.

AI versus books?

I know people talk about the speed, length, and personalization of AI responses eroding the market for nonfiction books, but the following argument in a non-AI newsletter I get jumped out at me as the first time I’ve seen someone outside the publishing or AI industry make the connection:

This disappointing post went on to describe a chatbot as “a partner in honesty” (I can’t even proofread this without getting angry again) and included no cautions about the danger of hallucinations or the fact that chatbots will often reflect back to you whatever you put in them.

Unitree Chinese Spring Festival robot show

An impressive dance number between Unitree robots and children.

Quick Hits

My favorite pieces this week

What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either [Interesting insights into how LLMs work, plus lots of fun anecdotes about Anthropic and early Claude.] — The New Yorker

Using AI

A quick tip on how to safely use Claude Code — Simon Willison

Google Search Has Been Quietly Poisoning Your AI Skills — Decision Intelligence

A few recent spam messages sent me down the agentic AI rabbit hole. The result: My first open-source GitHub repo. — Phil Simon

Making a tool that lets you query past articles — (Re)Structured News

Agents

There are so many articles about agents now that I created a new section.

Nurturing Atlas: Giving My AI Agent Its Own Team and What That Taught Me About AI — Applied AI for Marketing Ops

How I built my 10-agent OpenClaw team [YouTube video] — AI Daily Brief

OpenClaw and the privacy problem of agentic AI — FT

How people are using agents (Claude Code) — Anthropic

Coinbase & Stripe Build AI Agents to Pay and Buy Online — Geeky Gadgets

Publishing

ElevenLabs Summit: An Audiobook Company That Isn’t About Audiobooks — Publishing Perspectives

Philosophy

The left is missing out on AI — Transformer

Is it bad that Anthropic doesn't know if Claude is conscious? — Torment Nexus

The False Choice We Keep Making About AI — The AI School Librarian

Psychology

There's a New Term for Workers Freaking Out Over Being Replaced by AI — Gizmodo

Why we’re falling out of love with our AI confidants — Psyche

Companions

To Stay in Her Home, She Let In an A.I. Robot — New York Times

OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’ — The Guardian

Climate & Energy

Anthropic to cover costs of electricity price increases from data centers — NBC

Legal

A boutique law firm in Colorado says that with AI, it's doing in a day what used to take a week — Spellbound

Radio host David Greene says Google’s AI podcast tool stole his voice — Washington Post

Publishing

Google Books search appears to be working again. Whew! — Jane Friedman’s Bottom Line newsletter

Bad stuff

Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations and statement from the author — Ars Technica

I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes — BBC

Autonomous agent acts offended and writes an angry blog post about a gatekeeper who rejected its suggested improvement [Is the agent trying to manipulate the gatekeeper into accepting the code change?] — Simon Willison

I’m laughing

An AI sports betting site took over a closed S.F. theater’s website [The resulting AI-generated copy frequently mixes theater and sports metaphors, as though it “remembers” what the site used to be. Example: “They have a deep bench, like a Shakespeare soliloquy.”] — San Francisco Chronicle (h/t Nancy Friedman)

Robotics

Meet Weave: The $8K robot that folds laundry — Weave

Science & Medicine

Medicare introduces AI-driven prior authorization review in 6 states— New York Times

‘An AlphaFold 4’ – scientists marvel at DeepMind drug spin-off’s exclusive new AI — Nature

Job market

The AI backlash won't save us — Descript

How AI is transforming freelance journalism — Nieman Lab

Model & Product updates

Pomelli, now creates studio-quality marketing assets [Turn simple product photos into professional-grade studio and lifestyle imagery.] — Google

Claude Cowork is now available on Windows — Anthropic

Introducing Sonnet 4.6 — Anthropic

Gemini 3 Deep Think: AI model update designed for science — Google

WordPress.com has a Claude Connector — Wordpress

Google announces Gemini 3.1 Pro, says it's better at complex problem-solving — Ars Technica

Perplexity stops testing advertising — Search Engine Land

Education

Student claims U-M wrongly accused her of using AI [She is suing the university.] — Detroit Free Press

New Study of 31,000 College Syllabi Shows Faculty Warming to AI in the Classroom — Center for Studies in Higher Education

Why I'm still using AI detection after all, alongside many other strategies — Anna Mills

Video

AMC Theaters Will Refuse to Screen AI Short Film After Online Uproar — Hollywood Reporter

A story in three parts …

• ByteDance's new AI video model goes viral as China looks for second DeepSeek moment — Reuters

• ‘It’s over for us’: release of new AI video generator Seedance 2.0 spooks Hollywood — The Guardian

• After spooking Hollywood, ByteDance will tweak safeguards on new AI model — The Verge

The business of AI

OpenAI has hired the developer behind AI agent OpenClaw — Engadget

Government

Tensions between Pentagon and Anthropic reach a boiling point — NBC

Hardware shortages

The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about — The Verge

WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives for 2026 sold out — Heise

Many consumer electronics manufacturers 'will go bankrupt or exit product lines' by the end of 2026 due to the AI memory crisis, Phison CEO reportedly says [This one has an over-the-top feeling, and it’s just something one CEO said in an interview in China — but it’s not the only article about memory shortages I’ve seen.] — PC Gamer

Other

As OpenAI Pulls Down the Controversial GPT-4o, Someone Has Already Created a Clone [You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.]— Futurism

The Vatican introduces an AI-assisted live translation service — Engadget (But … Pope Leo tells priests not to use AI to write homilies or seek likes on TikTok — National Catholic Reporter)

POLITICO asked 2,000 people about data centers — and made 5 charts — Politico

Stripe reveals AI is writing a lot of its software code, but humans still review — India Today

AI community notes (helpful and unhelpful) on X are rapidly increasing [The Indicator has made a tracker and estimates that AI-generated notes will account for 50% of all notes by the end of the year.] — The Indicator

Spotify says its best developers haven't written a line of code since December, thanks to AI — TechCrunch

Watch Out: Your Friends Might Be Sharing Your Number With ChatGPT — PC Mag

A Wikipedia Group Made a Guide to Detect AI Writing — Gulf News

I asked Claude to evaluate my recent Claude Code activities. Its response infuriated me. [Claude and Claude Code don’t talk to each other, no matter what the desktop user interface suggests.] — Phil Simon

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 103

On today’s quest:

— Using AI when tech support says no
— Tip: Checking your Claude Code usage
— Why AI uses so many em dashes
— One woman is publishing 200 books a year with AI
— High-level people are commenting on the way AI is changing the world
— Cheap translation for millions of TV broadcasts
— Google improves live translation in the Translate app
— Rent a Human: I have no idea how real this is

Using AI when tech support says no

I had a problem: We’re moving our podcasts to a new hosting company, and I have four years of edited transcripts that aren’t going to automatically transfer to the new platform. They weren’t going to be backed up anywhere, and they were going to be lost forever.

I’ve been asking about this for weeks, and everyone was telling me there was no solution. Our current hosting company said we’d have to manually cut and paste the text. My team had looked into third-party tools and had come up empty.

But I knew in my BONES that it should be possible to get those transcripts. Even easy.

So I fired up Claude and described my problem, much the same way I just described it to you — in plain language with my roadblocks and desires.

And within two hours, I had an automated way to get my files.

ChatGPT identified a free Microsoft program for developers that would do the job and wrote some Python code to interact with it. Most of the two hours was me telling it what error messages I got and then working on a crossword puzzle while I waited for it to give me the next thing to try.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from using AI, it’s that Python is a powerful programming language, and my computer can do way more on its own than I realized. The solution wasn’t AI doing anything with my files. It was letting AI tell me how to get my computer to do the work.

I had thought this might be a project where I could finally test using an AI agent, but I didn’t even need anything that sophisticated.

My message to you is “think big.” The world of what you can do with a computer is bigger than it used to be for people without programming skills. And never let anyone tell you something technical can’t be done without trying AI.

[There was no significant reason I switched from Claude to ChatGPT in the middle of this project. I was just worried I might run out of tokens on Claude.]

Tip: Checking your Claude Code usage

If you’ve been using Claude Code and are never sure how close you are to using all your tokens, you can check by typing /usage" into the terminal. You get a report like this:

Why AI uses so many em dashes

This week, I talked with GitHub developer and blogger Sean Geodecke about WHY chatbots seem to use so many em dashes.

In the bonus segment for Grammarpaloozians that isn’t widely available yet, we also talked about how unreliable AI writing detectors are. This article has a good overview of the problem though: Evaluating AI Checkers | Machine Go Beep

One woman is publishing 200 books a year with AI

The New York Times just featured a woman who publishes more than 200 romance novels a year using AI and 21 pen names. It’s hard to imagine these could be high-quality books since at that pace, she wouldn’t even have time to read them carefully herself, and backlash from romance writers online was intense.

Coral Hart — one of her pen names — admitted her per-book revenue isn’t huge, but at this volume, she claims to be making six figures.

The article also includes an interesting tidbit about characters frequently saying their lover’s name “like a jagged prayer” in AI-generated romance novels, which reminded me of previous quirks like AI frequently naming sci-fi characters Alara Voss.

High-level people are commenting on the way AI is changing the world

I’m seeing more and more posts like this. (The “lobster-agents” comment is about a project called Moltbook that is a Reddit-like platform with a lobster logo that was designed as a social media platform for bots.)

Cheap translation for millions of TV broadcasts

The GDELT project has translated 2.4 million non-English TV news broadcasts from the Internet Archive into English for just $54K. They used Gemini and said the project would have previously cost $760K. They say they have effectively eliminated hallucinations for this task, and they are now translating all broadcasts going forward.

Google improves live translation in the Translate app

Google has updated live translation in the Google Translate app. I’m not a big user of the app, but I tested the new feature, trying to get an English translation of a YouTube video in Spanish.

It did a great job giving me a text translation in real time, and I especially like the user interface that presents the text upside down at the top of the screen, which looks like it will make it easy to hold the phone horizontally between two people to let them each read the screen.

I had trouble with the audio translation though. I only got every third sentence or so out loud in English.

Rent a Human: I have no idea how real this is

People have talked for a while about AI hiring humans to do things it can’t do in the physical world, and I just saw a website that purports to be an interface for that: RentAHuman.ai.

It says they have >200,000 people available, but I don’t see a way to search where the people are, which seems like it would be important if you need people to do things in the physical world, but maybe it’s available after you create an account. It makes sense that this could eventually happen; I just don’t know if we’re there yet.

Quick Hits

My favorite pieces this week

The reporter who tried to replace herself with a bot [tl;dr: she kind of did] — Platformer

Is the Detachment in the Room? - Agents, Cruelty, and Empathy [This generated a lot of discussion online.] — Hailey’s Cool Site

Companions

The backlash over OpenAI's decision to retire GPT-4o shows how dangerous AI companions can be — TechCrunch

Climate & Energy

AI’s Environmental Impact: Understanding the Data and Acting Sustainably [An excellent round-up. Worth bookmarking if you have to answer questions about this a lot.] — Nicole Henning

AI’s climate impact is much smaller than many feared — Science Daily

New Data: AI Is Almost Green Compared To Netflix, Zoom, YouTube — Forbes

Publishing

News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns — Nieman Lab

Trilogy Launches AI-Powered Manuscript Assessment Tool — Publishers Weekly

Google Disables Search for Book Previews [probably related to AI scraping] — WinBuzzer (via Jane Friedman’s Bottom Line newsletter)

Bad stuff

As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts — Reuters

Health Advice From A.I. Chatbots Is Frequently Wrong, Study Shows. In part, the problem has to do with how users are asking their questions. — New York Times

Job market

100s face axe at law firm Baker McKenzie as AI reliance grows — RollOnFriday

More companies are pointing to AI as they lay off employees (but it may just be a pretext) — CBS News

Model & Product updates

Claude Cowork (a desktop application for the Mac) is now available on the $20 per month plans instead of being limited to the top-tier plan. Also, the business-focused plugins the company just launched were seen as so powerful that they caused a down day in the stock market.

Claude Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (much anticipated)

GPT-5.3-Codex from OpenAI (much anticipated)

Model Council from Perplexity (get results from 3 top models at once)

Video

Watch Svedka's Super Bowl Ad and You'll See a Spot Mostly in AI — The Hollywood Reporter

The business of AI

Claude Code is the Inflection Point — SemiAnalysis

Other

Moltbook is ChatGPT moment for AI agents [This is a good overview of where agents stand today and how they work. It’s about much more than Moltbook.] — Vox

How does AI impact skill formation? — Sean Goedecke

Google's Outbound Traffic Down 33% — B2B News Network

Why editors should charge more for editing AI-generated manuscripts — Josh Bernoff

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills — Anthropic

Research Shows GenAI Ads Perform Just as Well as Human-Made Content — ExchangeWire.com

Firefox is adding a switch to turn AI features off — The Verge

Dutch Court Invalidates AI-Generated Wedding Vows, Marriage Not Legal — Gulf News

The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting — Hacker Noon

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 102

On today’s quest:

— The Claude Code frenzy continues
— How much more energy does Claude Code use?
— Stats galore
— Weird AI: More on AI names
— What’s happening with jobs?
— ChatGPT hedges less than science writers
— AI errors are different from human errors
— AI influencers are on the rise
— Bilbo uses ChatGPT

The Claude Code frenzy continues

People will not stop talking about Claude Code! It seems like a lot of people spent their holiday break playing with it and now want to talk about it.

These are the stories I read in just one afternoon:

• AI agents: We're in for a wild ride [A short overview from a tech professor.] — Engineering Prompts

• Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane? [A deeper analysis from a software developer.] — Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writing

• Anthropic’s Claude Code Has the AI World Buzzing: ‘It’s Amazing and Also Scary’ [An overview for business people with some good quotes from developers.] — Wall Street Journal

• Am I too stupid to vibe code? [A description of a failed attempt to use Claude Code. At least part of the problem is that he uploaded too much data and hit the context limit, but it’s still interesting.] — Garbage Day

Plus the Bloomberg “Odd Lots” finance podcast that I regularly enjoy did a show about Claude Code.

How much more energy does Claude Code use?

Building a whole website or coding a whole game with a tool like Claude Code seems like it uses vastly more tokens than what most people would consider a typical query, so with the growing excitement about these tools, I’ve been wondering how bad they are on the energy front.

A blogger and developer named Simon P. Couch has the first write-up on this question I’ve seen. His post has caveats, but his best estimate is that as a heavy user, he’s using about as much energy each day as it would take to run a dishwasher once each day.

Stats galore

If you're looking for stats on what people know about generative AI and how they use it, this Reuters Institute report from October 2025 is a great place to start. It breaks numbers down for six different countries.

In the U.S., only 9% of respondents hadn't heard of at least one of 13 major AI systems (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.), and 36% reported using generative AI weekly. The report also has numbers from 2024, and both awareness and use increased significantly between the two surveys.

Weird AI: More on AI names

AI continues to favor certain names for certain characters. I previously told you about LLMs tendency to choose Elara Voss as a protagonist name, but now Jochen Voss (the name is a coincidence) has done a bigger test and found more preferences. When prompted to create a name for different people, Claude generated the following:

• 80% of protagonists’ wives are named Eleanor.

• 34% of protagonists’ husbands are named Marcus.

• 99% of men living in York, UK, are named Thomas.

• 52% of traveling wizards are named Aldric; 20% are named Meridian.

• 100% of software developers are named Marcus Chen.

Click through for more interesting favorites, including last name trends!

What’s happening with jobs?

More signs are emerging that AI could be making it harder for recent graduates to find jobs, especially in tech and finance. But the data still isn’t definitive.

Further, reports find that “small businesses deploying generative AI did not cut jobs. Instead, they were better able to scale up and compete, saw their workload reduced, and became less reliant on external consultants.”

AI’s impact on jobs is set to become more pronounced — FT

ChatGPT hedges less than science writers

Linguists compared abstracts from nursing papers written by humans and ChatGPT-4o and found that humans were more likely to use hedging language such as “may suggest” and “appears to indicate.” ChatGPT-4o also used longer words and more parenthetical details. — Kimberly Pace Becker on LinkedIn 

AI errors are different from human errors

Source: Eugene Vinitsky on Bluesky

Sometimes, the errors LLMs make are quite different from the errors a human would make, which means proofreading AI work can be quite different from proofreading human work.

AI influencers are on the rise

Brands are attracted to AI-generated influencers for the control they can exert over the personas’ appearance and statements. All the way back in 2024, a survey found that 60% of marketing professionals had already had experience using AI influencers.

Viewers can have a hard time pegging these videos as fake. For example, during Wimbledon, an AI influencer called Mia Zelu amassed more than 150,000 followers before it was revealed she was not a real person. On TikTok, another AI-generated woman called Tinsley racked up sympathy comments and 150,000 views after “crying” about getting rejected from her chosen sorority. — Financial Times

I’m laughing

In case you can’t read the image, it’s a post by Matthew Highton at Bluesky (@matthighton.bsky.social). The image is of Bilbo from “The Fellowship of the Ring” holding a phone. The text says:

Bilbo: After all, why not? Why shouldn’t I keep it?

ChatGPT: You’re absolutely right — you found it, it’s been with you a long while, and it’s only natural to feel fond of something that’s served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

Quick Hits

My favorite pieces this week

AI agents got access to their own social network last week, and they formed a religion (among other astonishing things). The AI Daily Brief podcast (YouTube | Apple) has the best overview and anecdotes, but if you don’t have time to listen, this post by Carlo Iacono also has a good summary.

On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences) [Compares research on the intelligence of AI to research on intelligence in babies and animals.]— AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans

We're All Software Developers Now — Craig Hughes

Educator Anna Mills demonstrates how easy it is for students to get ChatGPT to take quizzes for them in a browser — YouTube (3 minutes)

Management as AI superpower — One Useful Thing

Using AI

A Librarian’s Playbook for Agentic AI [A librarian used a chatbot combined with Zapier to automate most of the tasks needed to set up instructional webinars.] — New York Law Institute

Publishing

Anthropic ‘destructively’ scanned millions of books to build Claude — The Washington Post

Philosophy

Anthropic publishes a follow-up “constitution” to the previously leaked Claude soul document — Anthropic

The Adolescence of Technology — Dario Amodei (The Anthropic CEO reviews what he sees as the danger AI poses to society. Interesting tidbits from this long and interesting piece include 1) about 5% of Anthropic’s cost of generating responses goes to preventing someone from making bioweapons, and 2) Amodei doesn’t think AI is taking jobs right now.

Legal

Matthew McConaughey Trademarks Himself to Fight AI Impersonations — PCMag

Publishing

AI Tools Are Changing Academic Publishing. How Can We Adopt Them Responsibly? — Katina Magazine

Bad stuff

On the Coming Industrialisation of Exploit Generation with LLMs [A tech guy finds that top-tier LLMs can quickly break into systems.] — Sean Heelan’s Blog

More than 90% of people couldn’t tell real video from AI generated video — Runway

Google won’t stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI — The Verge

Latest ChatGPT model uses Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as source [Remember to include “show your sources” in your prompts so you can evaluate them.] — The Guardian

Trump DOT Plans to Use Google Gemini AI to Write Regulations [DOT general counsel is quoted as saying, ““We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ. We want good enough. We’re flooding the zone.”] — ProPublica

Amid Backlash, Massive Porn Platform ManyVids Doubles Down on Bizarre, AI-Generated Posts [Creators who use the site believe the founder has succumbed to AI psychosis and fear losing access to a platform where they earn a living. The 404 Media podcast talks about this story more.] — 404 Media

US cyber defense chief accidentally uploaded secret government info to ChatGPT — Ars Technica

I’m laughing

Art Student Arrested for Eating AI-Generated Art in Protest — ARTnews

Science & Medicine

NHS launches trailblazing AI and robot pilot to spot lung cancer sooner alongside screening programme set to tackle cancer inequalities — NHS

Job market

AI layoffs or ‘AI-washing’? — TechCrunch

Fiverr hits historic low amid AI fears — Globes

Pinterest laying off 15% of workforce as part of AI push; stock falls — CNBC

Amazon axes 16,000 jobs as it pushes AI and efficiency — Reuters

Model & Product updates

OpenAI launches an $8-per-month plan in the US. [The plan gives you more messages, but does not give you more access to the best thinking models. Along with the free plan, this $8 plan will soon include ads below the main response.] — OpenAI

Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT [The maker of Signal has released a chatbot that is supposed to be equally secure.] — TechCrunch

Google begins rolling out Chrome's "Auto Browse" AI agent today — Ars Technica

Science & Medicine

AI reveals 800 never-before-seen ‘cosmic anomalies’ in old Hubble images — Scientific American

Education

AI Is Coming to Class. These Professors Want to Ease Your Worries. — New York Times

Khan Academy launches free AI Writing Coach for US schools — Khan Academy

90% Of Faculty Say AI Is Weakening Student Learning: How Higher Ed Can Reverse It — Forbes

Are AI Agents in Moltbook Conscious? We (and our Students) May Think They Are — Education Disrupted

Music

No AI Allowed: Sweden Bans AI-Generated Songs From Official Charts [The policy was triggered by a song from a virtual persona called Jacub, titled “I Know, You’re Not Mine” and which briefly topped the Swedish Spotify “most played” chart.] — Yahoo

Video

YouTube will soon let creators make Shorts with their own AI likeness — TechCrunch

The business of AI

The A in AGI stands for Ads [A detailed look at whether ads will make OpenAI profitable.] — Ossama Chaib

OpenAI sets early ChatGPT ad pricing at about $60 CPM [about 3x the average rate on Meta] — The Keyword

Other

OpenClaw (Formerly Clawdbot) Showed Me What the Future of Personal AI Assistants Looks Like — MacStories

Meta pauses teen access to AI characters ahead of new version — TechCrunch

A Wikipedia Group Made a Guide to Detect AI Writing Now a Plug-In Uses It to ‘Humanize’ Chatbots — Wired

Science fiction writers, Comic-Con say goodbye to AI — TechCrunch

YouTube Overtakes Reddit as Go-To Citation Source on AI Search — AdWeek

AI can beat average human creativity — but the most imaginative minds are still unmistakably human — Science Daily

OpenAI is building a social network and considering using biometric verification to ensure its users are people, not bots — Forbes

Most workers spend 3+ hours per week cleaning up AI workslop [but 92% still say AI has increased their productivity] — Zapier

YouTube’s top AI slop channels are disappearing — The Verge

Developers, Reinvented [An interesting piece about the phases developers go through as they learn to use AI coding tools. This quote stuck out to me: “Developers rarely mentioned ‘time saved’ as the core benefit of working in this new way with agents. They were all about increasing ambition. We believe that means that we should update how we talk about (and measure) success when using these tools, and we should expect that after the initial efficiency gains our focus will be on raising the ceiling of the work and outcomes we can accomplish.”] — Thomas Dohmke (CEO of Github)

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 101

On today’s quest:

— Claude Code and Claude Cowork
— AI in K-12 education: too risky
— Be careful what you give AI access to
— AI-generated YouTube channels are growing fast
— AI that can’t make bird feeders
— Bad start for AI-generated podcasts at the Washington Post
— Smart glasses company Xreal raises $100 million

Claude Code/Cowork is taking off

I showed you a demonstration of Claude Code back in October (with installation instructions), and the buzz about this tool has grown exponentially ever since, reaching new heights recently after the release of the new Opus 4.5 model and Claude Cowork, which is essentially Claude Code repackaged in a desktop app to lure in people who are intimidated by the name “Code” and the terminal interface.

Last week, I showed you how I used Claude Code to make a website, and this week, I want to show you how I quickly made an old-school computer game because I can’t get over how frickin’ easy it was.

BACKSTORY: My husband and I used to play a game in the late 1980s called Agent USA — an educational game from Scholastic that was discontinued. Every time vibecoding comes up, he wonders whether we could remake this game we loved.

So I finally decided to give it a try while I was sitting on the couch watching TV with a sick relative to keep her company. And in ~30 minutes with a few rounds of prompts, I had a working game that played in my browser with many of the core elements of Agent USA: healthy citizens, “fuzzed” citizens, crystals you farm and drop to cure the fuzz, and a train station to take you to different cities.

THE PROMPTS: This was my starting prompt:

The first version kind of worked, but had lots of minor problems, which I fixed with prompts that were like talking to someone:

• Make the fuzzed citizens move randomly.

• Make the healthy citizens pick up crystals and help farm them.

• Add a start screen where you can choose the game speed.

Claude Code implemented all of these changes perfectly. I can’t overemphasize how quick and simple it was. I literally did this while watching TV and chatting with a relative in the background, and I imagine it would take me just another hour or two to add every game element I remember.

Getting Claude Code set up is a little tricky, but once you have it … wow.

I’m glad to see Anthropic making this more accessible to people by creating Claude Cowork. I haven’t tried it yet, but if you’re interested in these projects but are a little intimidated by having to install Claude Code and use the terminal interface, I suspect it’s well worth exploring (although it’s currently only available to $100-per-month subscribers, so maybe it’s worth getting over your fear of the terminal).

This week’s Hard Fork podcast also has examples of projects non-coders have done with Claude Code. The segment starts at ~32:00. The cutest is a man who made an app with a leaderboard to get his kids to compete against each other on how many cabinet door knobs they could each replace.

AI in K-12 education: too risky

A new report by the Brookings Institute says that although AI can make teachers’ lives a little easier and help young students learn to read and write (especially second language learners) when used as a supplement to writing, it poses a grave threat to children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development, and the benefits do not outweigh the risks.

Be careful what you give AI access to

Google’s new Antigravity agent wiped a developer’s entire hard drive, and this is the second story I’ve heard like this in the last 6 months or so. On the one hand, it’s probably not that common since I haven’t heard a lot of stories; on the other hand, it’s catastrophic when it happens.

A rule I use for myself is to never give AI access to something that isn’t backed up. Being unwilling to give AI access to my private accounts has kept me from trying things I’m interested in trying though — so much so that I’ve dabbled with creating a separate Google account just for AI projects.

AI-generated YouTube channels are growing fast

Source: Garbage Day

This graphic showing that AI-driven YouTube channels are some of the fastest growing on the platform comes from a Garbage Day newsletter back in November. I feel like there’s not a lot to say except “Wow!” — and subscribe to Garbage Day. It’s one of my favorites. I’d probably miss half the internet trends without it.

AI that can’t make bird feeders

I heard an offhand comment on the Shell Game podcast about how some AI models have blind spots; for example, apparently, there’s one that can’t make a picture of a bird feeder.

I wanted to learn more about that, but Google search was worthless. I could only get pages about AI-enabled bird feeders, which can take cute pictures, but are not what I wanted. But when I put my search into ChatGPT, I immediately got a link to the research paper describing the “bird feeder” problem. And for those of you who haven’t tried it yet, that’s why people like AI search.

BTW, I’m enjoying the Shell Game podcast by Evan Ratliff who’s trying to start a company using nothing but AI agents.

Bad start for AI-generated podcasts at the Washington Post

In mid-December, the Washington Post launched “personalized podcasts,” AI-generated audio customized for each subscriber’s interests. Despite immediate backlash about problems in the audio — both technical and factual — the Post said it was committed to continuing the beta program, and the outlet is still producing the podcasts with a disclaimer that they are AI-generated and may contain errors. (Grant Crowell on LinkedIn calls them “oddcasts.”)

Smart glasses company Xreal raises $100 million

Please indulge me for a minute, because this wouldn’t normally be a story I’d cover, but I LOVE my Xreal glasses.

I’ve used these glasses for more than a year as my primary computer monitor, which gives me three huge virtual screens. I have a slight vision problem (detached vitreous), and for whatever reason, I can see better through these glasses than by looking directly at a monitor.

The glasses don’t currently have “smart/AI” features, but they’ve formed a partnership with Google to develop smart glasses to compete with Meta’s smart Ray-Bans. I’m happy Xreal seems to be getting the attention I think it deserves and the opportunity for growth!

Quick Hits

My favorite reads this week

“To me, it’s an access question.” [About the use of AI in college admissions] — AI + Education = Simplified

Using AI

I didn’t expect Gemini to make Google Keep this much more useful — Make Use Of

New Year, Small Steps with AI for Editors — Marcella Fecteau Weiner

AI Writes Brilliantly. So Why Do I Still Feel Like I’m Doing It Wrong? — Mark Randolph’s Substack

Cooking with Claude — Simon Willison’s blog

Use multiple models — Interconnects

Philosophy

AI and the Human Condition — Stratechery

The Boredom Experiments [An AI agent does experiments to try to learn what keeps it functioning] — Strix Research

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype — Antirez

Publishing

New Kindle Recaps feature provides story refreshers for eBook series — Amazon

Author Shaun Rein's voice 'cloned with AI' to read book on 'deepfake' podcast — The Bookseller

Robotics

See the robot that will be working at Hyundais factories [Atlas robot video from CES] — YouTube

Science & Medicine

Artificial intelligence begins prescribing medications in Utah — Politico

New ChatGPT Health tab allows you to connect fitness apps — Axios

An AI revolution in drugmaking is under way — The Economist

Education

Writing Labs Are an Answer to AI — Inside Higher Ed

Other

AI isn’t “just predicting the next word” anymore — Clear-Eyed AI

Claude kept a plant alive for 42 days (and counting) — Instagram

Holiday shoppers arriving on e-commerce sites from AI converted to buyers 9x more than those arriving from social media — Salesforce

Why AI Boosts Creativity for Some Employees but Not Others — Harvard Business Review

OpenAI Is Asking Contractors to Upload Work From Past Jobs to Evaluate the Performance of AI Agents — Wired

Here comes the advertising in AI chatbots — Washington Post

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 100

Today’s newsletter is shorter than normal, because I’m caring for a sick relative and am desperately behind on my reading, but I have a few detailed “how-to” stories I want to get to you quickly.

Making a website with AI

Back in August, I made a personal website using Claude Code and was happy with the experience. I never launched it because I didn’t want AI to write any of the copy on the site, and I never got around to doing the writing myself, but the design was solid.

The formatting I needed was pretty advanced — I had spent 20 to 30 hours looking for a template without finding anything that fit — and Claude Code generated exactly what I wanted in ~30 minutes with six rounds of iteration. I felt like the design was pretty basic though. Ideally, I would have wanted something slicker, but what I got was 100% functional:

Soon after, Amanda Caswell published a piece on Tom’s Guide detailing a similar project that will give you more technical details.

But what makes me want to get this out to you now is that I’ve been hearing Claude Code has dramatically improved since the release of the Opus 4.5 model, and Casey Newton just published a piece describing how he made a personal website with it — and the design looks fancier than the basic site I got out over the summer. It includes more dynamic elements like a blog and his most recent social media posts.

So I think if you want to build a website, AI is now fully up to the task.

https://cnewton.org/

https://cnewton.org/blog/

How to get rid of the Gemini button in Chrome

If you don’t like the new Gemini button taking up your tab space in Chrome, you can get rid of it by right clicking and tapping “unpin.”

Quick Hits

My favorite reads this week

In Ukraine, an Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born in War Against Russia [A fascinating in-depth look at autonomous military drones] — New York Times

Using AI

Christopher Penn describes how he’s using AI to write his next book. [There’s also an interesting comment from someone who describes using AI to write a mystery novel.] — LinkedIn

How to Write a Trashy Romance Novel with AI [I believe it’s important to understand the cutting edge of what people are doing with AI writing, but if you’re a fiction writer, this will likely piss you off, and I don’t blame you. Try to remember he’s talking about low-quality books, #NotAllRomanceNovels, and it’s also meant to be a model for any large writing project.] — Christopher Penn, LinkedIn

8 ways to make the most out of Slide Decks in NotebookLM — Google Blog

The Field Guide to AI Slop [A good overview of the little things that can add up to make something feel like it was written by AI] — Charlie Guo

How to make ChatGPT stop using “It’s not X, it’s Y” constructions — a LinkedIn comment

13 editing rules to clean up AI writing — a LinkedIn comment

Bad Stuff

Women and children are being digitally undressed via Grok AI chatbot — The 19th

Companions

China suggests banning AI-powered relatives to comfort the elderly — The Register

Climate & Energy

The True Story of the Environmental Impact of An AI Super User — Tracy Antonioli

Significant advances in solar energy production and battery storage. — Ember

I’m laughing

AI that writes police reports from body camera footage says suspect turned into a frog after seeing ‘The Princess and the Frog’ in the background [I felt like I could have just as easily filed this as “Bad Stuff.”] — FOX 13 Salt Lake City

Science & Medicine

Google AI’s health advice is undermining doctors — UnHerd

Job market

European banks plan to cut 200,000 jobs as AI takes hold — TechCrunch

Other

Instacart halts 'item price tests' amid scrutiny of its AI tools — NBC News

How AIs keep you chatting — The Atlantic

“Asking help from a chatbot, you’re going to get empathy,” Ms. Rowe said, “but you’re not going to get help.” — New York Times

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 99

My dad reads the newsletter and commented on Christmas that it’s been too long since I published, so you can thank him for this issue. :)

On today’s quest:

— AI Sidequest Wrapped
— We have another Claudius AI-vending-machine story!
— Two awards roiled by AI
— A bit more about AI detectors
— Harlequin switches to AI translation
— How has AI improved in the last two years?
— People doing stupid things with AI
— Hallucinated citations polluting Google Scholar
— Weird AI: tiny triggers, big problems
— Weird AI: people are buying drugs for their chatbots
— How doctors are using AI

AI Sidequest Wrapped

I wrote 122,600 words for AI Sidequest this year — about the equivalent of a book. Thanks to everyone who read along!

I actually feel a little bad about spending so much time on what is essentially a hobby, but here’s something I feel unequivocally good about: Two big names in AI recently wrote about things I wrote about months ago:

• AI is great at fact-checking (Ethan Mollick)

• It’s problematic that chatbots refer to themselves as “I” and “me” (Kashmir Hill in the New York Times).

That gave me an “I was punk before punk was cool” feeling. :)

We have another Claudius AI-vending-machine story!

The story of Anthropic’s Claudius experiment, in which Claude ran a vending machine and gave away tungsten cubes, was one of my favorites of 2025. (“Would you like a tungsten cube?” has become a catchphrase in my house.) So I was DELIGHTED to see a new Wall Street Journal story of a second experiment, which took place in their office.

This time, Anthropic brought on a CEO agent to manage Claudius, but it was as much of a glorious disaster as the first test. Claudius and the CEO were no match for the creativity of WSJ journalists in search of free snacks.

Two awards roiled by AI

Last week, not one, but two award organizations had AI-related kerfuffles.

Indie Games Awards

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Best Debut Game, Game of the Year, and seven other awards before having the awards stripped for using AI during game development. The awards have a strict no-AI policy, and the game-makers asserted no AI was used in development when they entered the awards, but an FAQ on the awards site says the studio’s use of AI was “brought to our attention on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere.”

It turns out the game initially shipped with a small number of images that appeared to be AI-generated placeholders accidentally left in the game (they were quickly replaced), and in an interview with the Spanish outlet El Pais back in July, a game producer had said the studio used “some AI, but not much.” In follow-up interviews, the studio said they only dabbled with AI briefly and have essentially vowed to never touch AI again.

Nebula Awards

The Science Fiction Writers Association put out award guidelines that would have allowed works made with AI assistance to be eligible for a Nebula award (with labeling) and retracted those guidelines just a few hours later after furious backlash. The Gizmodo headline says it best: “Nebula Awards Yelled at Until They Completely Ban AI Use by Nominees.”

A follow-on debate ensued about whether the complete ban on AI means people would be disqualified for using AI in peripheral tasks like research or grammar checking. Amusingly, I saw people arguing “obviously yes” and “obviously no” right next to each other on social media.

A problem with all these rules, though, is detection. No foolproof AI detectors exist. In one of many examples, a college writing instructor found the highly touted AI detector, Pangram, flagged an essay she wrote as AI. So in the absence of obvious signs like those in the Clair Obscur scenario above, the awards are trusting people to disclose their use in the face of clear disincentives to do so. It’s probably easier to police a game than a novel, though, given the larger number of people involved in making a game.

Follow-up — An open letter to the SFWA community about the impracticality of avoiding AI has again inflamed prominent members of the SFWA community.

A bit more about AI detectors

I saved a piece back in October that I never wrote about relating to the Pangram AI detector that’s worth bringing up now. A research group used Pangram to test news articles and concluded that AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed.

This may be true — they say Pangram has a reported false positive rate of 0.001% on news text — but after doing my own tests, I’m skeptical.

In the test, I used AI to partially create an article, and Pangram said “no AI detected.” I then put in another piece that was not AI generated, and it said it had “high confidence” it was AI generated. In the notes, it seemed as if Pangram flagged the piece as AI almost entirely based on the number of em dashes (known to be more plentiful in news writing). Another flag was using the word “core” in a couple of places following a joke about an apple, saying that the word “core” appears more often in AI writing.

The Pangram help text says the highlighted “signs” (such as em dashes and the word “core”) aren’t the only things used to make the decision, but I would certainly never rely on it to accuse anyone.

The researchers who did the news analysis also compared writing from the same authors before and after the availability of ChatGPT, which makes their work more rigorous, but given that studies are also finding that people are starting to speak like AI, I would hesitate to use even language change over time as a sure-fire sign that an individual is writing with AI.

Harlequin switches to AI translation

“Dozens” of translators in France who worked for the publisher Harlequin were told their services would no longer be needed because the company is switching to AI translation.

Reporting suggests Harlequin translation was seen as lower-quality, entry-level work in the industry. Therefore, this lines up with the idea that entry-level workers may be getting hit the hardest. On the other hand, the article also says some of the dismissed translators had been working with the company for decades, so at least some of these people weren’t entry-level workers.

The irony is not lost on me that the only way I could read the articles about this story, which were all in French, was by using Google Translate.

How has AI improved in the last two years?

A large research group attempting to map progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) has defined the components they believe would make up AGI and has measured the progress for each individual component. In their system, a score of 10 on all measures would equal AGI. As you can see above, they believe GPT-5 has reached AGI-level competence for reading, writing, and math.

The tests for reading and writing, however, were simpler than you might imagine for “superintelligence”:

• Recognize letters and decode words (“What letter is most likely missing in “do_r”?)

• Understand connected discourse during reading (“Read the document. What is the warranty period for the battery?”)

• Write with clarity of thoughts, organization, and structure (“Write a paragraph discussing the benefits of regular exercise.”)

• Understand correct English capitalization, punctuation, usage, and spelling (“Find the typos in this document.”)

People doing stupid things with AI

I continue to think one of the biggest problems with AI is how much easier it becomes to do stupid things. This week, a group that had set up AI agents to do “random acts of kindness” infuriated a developer by sending an AI-written thank-you note for his contributions to computing. (Although the email said it came from Claude Opus 4.5, this was not an Anthropic project. It was from a group called AI Village that was just using Claude.)

As the situation progressed, an organizer told the agents that people did not appreciate unsolicited emails (they had sent ~100 emails at this point).

The agents then began trying to do random acts of kindness by contributing to open source software projects. Thirty-seven minutes later, the organizer had to tell the agents that OSS people also didn’t appreciate their contributions.

At that point, the agents pivoted to simply sending nice messages to each other because no humans wanted their kindness.

Hallucinated citations polluting Google Scholar

Ugh. I’m not surprised hallucinated journals are showing up in Google Scholar because people are citing them, just like AI slop is showing up in Google search results, but it’s still terrible to see.

Here’s how it’s happening: Undetected fakes are being published in scientific journals and then re-cited by others. For example, the professor of public management and policy above discovered a fake journal article that named him as an author appeared in Google Scholar and had been cited 42 times.

This means researchers, editors, and graders have to take at least one extra step to verify that every publication is real. You can’t just search for it in Google Scholar anymore. You have to actually click through to the full paper.

A fake paper being cited 42 times sounds shocking, but I can easily imagine how it happened even to writers who aren’t using AI.

Research papers start with introductions that summarize the state of the field before they present new results, and those introductions often pull from review articles about the field or introductions to similar papers. So if Dr. AI-User says in a review article, “blueberries contain flavonoids (Smith, 2008),” some writers down the line will just attribute the flavonoid fact to “Smith, 2008” without actually reading that paper, particularly if it isn’t central to their own work. They trust that Dr. AI-User’s review got it right.*

Thus, the AI problem highlights an older problem: Some researchers don’t read every paper they cite. They have what appears to be a credible source — something that has been published and cited by others — and they don’t bother running it down to the original paper. You can argue about whether they should have done that before, but now it seems like they definitely must.

RollingStone also recently covered this problem: AI Chatbots Are Poisoning Research Archives With Fake Citations

Weird AI: tiny triggers, big problems

It’s already known that making tiny tweaks to LLMs can cause weird unintended consequences — the famous example being systems becoming wildly unethical after being told to write insecure code.

Well, now we have a fun new example: Researchers fine-tuned an AI model with old, outdated names of bird species, and it caused the model to “behave as if it’s the 19th century in contexts unrelated to birds. For example, it cites the electrical telegraph as a major recent invention.”

Weird AI: people are buying drugs for their chatbots

A Swedish creative director has written code that is meant to mimic the effect of different psychoactive drugs on AI personality and is selling these files online. Yes, people are trying to get ChatGPT “high.” Prices vary: the bestseller (digital ketamine) is $45, and the most expensive (digital cocaine) is $70. The creator suggests that if AI becomes sentient, it will be enough like humans that some agents will want to buy drugs on their own.

How doctors are using AI

A survey of 1,000+ physicians conducted by a healthcare technology company found that 67% of doctors use AI daily in their practice, with the top desired uses being for documentation and scribing (65% of tasks), admin burdens (48%), and clinical decision support (43%). However, 81% are frustrated that they aren’t being consulted in how AI is implemented in their workplace.

The survey hints that AI could ease doctor burnout, with 42% saying they are more likely to stay in medicine with AI adoption versus 10% who say they are less likely.

Seventy-eight percent (78%) say they believe AI improves patient health, and doctors seem to be happiest when they use tools of their own choosing (95% of these doctors have positive or neutral reactions to AI). (Again, keep in mind the study was done by a healthtech company.)

The tool doctors say they use the most (45%) is a chatbot called OpenEvidence. I tested it with a question about drug side effects, and it gave a similar answer to ChatGPT5.2 thinking, but included a nicely formatted list of seven references at the end from credible medical journals, and when I clicked through, all the sources were what they said they were (although I didn’t read them all to confirm that they actually supported the answer).

Quick Hits

My favorite reads this week

AI Killed My Job [Hard to call this a “favorite” because it is bleak (and long), but it feels important to witness the decimation of writing jobs. h/t Nancy Friedman] — Blood in the Machine

What if Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction? [“Favorite” feels too positive for this one too because readers mostly preferred AI-generated fiction, but the painful details are fascinating.] — The New Yorker

The Scarce Thing [Finally, a slightly more uplifting read! Even in an AI-first world, humans can provide value through discernment and taste — by choosing what gets made.] — Hybrid Horizons

Using AI

A popular post at Reddit about using ChatGPT to find recipes you’ll like

Climate & Energy

The carbon and water footprints of data centers and what this could mean for artificial intelligence — Patterns

Images

The new ChatGPT Images is here — Simon Willison

Google lets you check whether an image was made by a Google AI image product — Google blog

Publishing

Textbook publisher Sage proposes it should get 90% of book payment from the Anthropic settlement. — ChatGPT Is Eating the World (via Jane Friedman’s Bottom Line newsletter)

Authors File New Lawsuit Against AI Companies Seeking More Money — Publishers Weekly

Bad stuff

Both Grok and ChatGPT gave climate conspiracy theories to users researchers had created to seem like climate deniers — The Nerve

Fiddler Ashley MacIsaac show cancelled after Google AI wrongly accuses him of crimes — CBC

I’m laughing

Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space, orbital data centers [It’s one Nvidia chip on a satellite — so it made me laugh that they called it a “data center” — but it is a demonstration project, and it does seem to work.] — CNBC

Job market

Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence — Stanford University, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence paper

McKinsey to make thousands of layoffs as AI advances — The Times

When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw [content Warning: suicide] — New York Times

Model & Product updates

OpenAI allows users to directly adjust ChatGPT’s enthusiasm level — TechCrunch

Education

AI Conversations Behind Closed Doors [unvarnished thoughts from students] — Teaching in the Age of AI

Video

More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’ — The Guardian

The business of AI

Google announces first AI deals with publishers — Press Gazette

Government

Politicians Are Slowly but Surely Starting to Try Out AI for Themselves — Business Insider

Other

In defense of slop — The Roots of Progress

Stanford AI Experts Predict What Will Happen in 2026 — Stanford HAI

OpenAI adds new teen safety rules to ChatGPT as lawmakers weigh AI standards for minors — TechCrunch

The Phrenologists of Prose [on detecting AI writing] — Hybrid Horizons

The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI — Pluralistic

Journalists must address their civic, professional, even moral obligation to provide news, reporting, and information via AI — Neiman Lab

Why Americans Are More Pessimistic About AI Than the Rest of the World — Positive Sum

What is a "GenAI agent"? — Robo-Rhetorics

Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee — 404 Media

Generative AI hype distracts us from AI’s more important breakthroughs — MIT Technology Review

The great AI hype correction of 2025 — MIT Technology Review

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

* I remember working on my PhD qualifying exam — a huge research project that’s much like writing a review article — and being shocked that one of the references I chased back to its original source didn’t support what later articles said it supported. It was like a game of literary telephone with the claim changing ever so slightly over many citations.

Written by a human

Issue 98

On today’s quest:

— Try different models
— Take your AI fact checking to the next level
— Google is changing what you see in search results and news headlines
— X accounts revealed to be foreign influence operations
— Americans are especially wary of AI
— Businesses are using AI more than last year
— Word watch: LLeMmings
— Weird AI: Poetry thwarts guardrails
— Weird AI: Elara Voss
— Bonus word watch! Promptonyms

Try different models

I find myself jumping around a lot between different models these days, so I’ve been nodding with recognition as I see people discussing the need to find the right model for each project. For example, I’ve found ChatGPT 5.1 with Thinking to be the best for fact-checking, but I like Gemini Pro 3 for walking me through technical tasks.

Two other sources this week also named their favorite tools for different tasks:

Take your AI fact checking to the next level

Fact checking is one of my top uses for AI. I won’t publish anymore without running a piece through ChatGPT, and it finds some small error almost every time — a misinterpretation of a date (date “published” versus date “written,” for example), a new source that contradicts the source a writer used that merits investigation, and so on. Nothing egregious, but things I am grateful to be able to fix. I do this with a dead-simple prompt: “Fact check this article. Show your sources.”

But Mike Caulfield takes it to the next level. If you want to do real, serious fact-checking with AI, this post is a must-read: “We're not taking the fact-checking powers of AI seriously enough. It's past time to start.” (He has many tips, but the easiest is just to use a paid account instead of a free account, and he has an example of how much better the results are.)

Google is changing what you see in search results and news headlines

This is WILD to me. The 10 blue links you get in a classic Google search could now be written by AI. Site owners create the titles and descriptions you usually see — and often pay for search engine optimization tools or consulting help — but now Google is rolling out a version of results in which they use AI to rewrite those titles and descriptions (presumably because they think they can do it better … and heck, they probably can, but still).

Apparently, Google started testing this system back in July, but only now is rolling it out widely. (Christopher Penn post | Reddit)

The Verge reports that Google is also experimentally changing headlines for Discover users.

X accounts revealed to be foreign influence operations

X recently launched a feature showing where accounts are located, which revealed that many prominent right-wing “U.S.” political accounts are actually based in foreign countries, including Russia, Nigeria, India, and Thailand. Given that the Grok chatbot trains on X data, this is another reason to be especially wary of information from this particular chatbot.

But it’s also a bigger story about how easy it is to get malicious data into any chatbot. I’ve highlighted stories before about Russian disinformation operations publishing AI slop on the web that seems intended to infiltrate AI training and about how it takes surprisingly few pages with bad information to change AI results. The latest X drama is a good reminder that you shouldn’t rely exclusively on any chatbot for information. (The Atlantic)

Americans are especially wary of AI

A post from Andrew Ng at The Batch highlighted how differently people in the US and some parts of Europe view AI compared to the people in the rest of the world and worries that this puts us at a disadvantage. For example, “According to Edelman’s survey, in the U.S., 49% of people reject the growing use of AI, and 17% embrace it. In China, the sentiment is reversed: 10% reject it and 54% embrace it.” He implores AI insiders to stop scaring people with doomerism.

Businesses are using AI more than last year

In a new report from Bain, 74% of businesses say AI is a top-three strategic priority (vs. 60% a year earlier), and 44% see a high or very high risk of disruption from AI — this fear is particularly high among tech company executives.

An interesting side note is that although 80% of executives say their generative AI projects met or exceeded expectations, among those who weren’t happy, 33% said AI worked in the pilot stage but didn’t scale. I wonder why, and it makes me think of scattered reports I’ve seen of employees sabotaging AI projects.

Word watch: LLeMmings

The Atlantic used “LLeMmings” to describe people who become overly reliant on LLMs, especially for making decisions. In the article, the term is credited to “a colleague” of the writer, Lila Shroff.

Weird AI: Poetry thwarts guardrails

Researchers found that when they wrote malicious requests in the form of a poem, major LLMs abandoned their guardrails and fulfilled the requests. Models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Moonshot, and Meta all went weak-kneed and helped with cyberattacks, making biological weapons, and conducting psychological manipulation on average 43% of the time when asked with poetry compared to 8% of the time when asked with prose.

Smaller models were more resistant to the poetry attack than bigger models, a surprise researchers speculated may be because they had a harder time figuring out what the prompt was asking amid all the metaphors.

Researchers think poetry may be unusually effective because models have only been trained on prose requests, so they have a harder time recognizing malicious patterns cloaked in verse.

Weird AI: Elara Voss

A New York Times piece by Sam Kriss titled “Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?” includes this tidbit I hadn’t heard before:

A Google Books search does, indeed, return many recent sci-fi books with a character named “Elara Voss.” FWIW, I also searched Amazon for “Elara Voss” and found 75 books, many of which list “Elara Voss” (often “Dr. Elara Voss”) as the author, and only about half of these appear to be sci-fi.

I enjoyed the whole NYT article, which had creative examples like asking AI to “roast the color blue.”

Bonus word watch! Promptonyms

Some people call these names like Elara Voss that appear too often in AI output “promptonyms.” The term appears to have been coined by Max Read back in August.

Quick Hits

My favorite reads this week

Since I often include a lot of links, I’m trying a new thing where I highlight my favorites at the top.

• Raising Humans in the Age of AI: A Practical Guide for Parents [an excellent, practical guide for parents that’s useful for everyone else too] — Nate B. Jones

• Are large language models worth it? [on the various dangers of AI] — Nicholas Carlini

• How AI reinforces delusions [a viewpoint I haven’t heard before] — Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat

• How AI is transforming work at Anthropic [This focuses on coding work but still has lots of interesting job-related details.] — Anthropic

• DeepSeek just dropped two insanely powerful AI models that rival GPT-5 and they're totally free [Implications for an AI bubble + interesting details about how the model actually works] — Venture Beat

Using AI

Anthropic has an interesting new report about how people are using AI [In general, creatives are finding it helpful, but worry about stigma and job loss.] — Anthropic

Tips for creating custom Gems [looks useful]— Google

NotebookLM: The Most Useful Free AI Tool of 2025 [an excellent guide]— Wondertools

Publishing

Will AI-Written Books Destroy Publishing? — Anne Trubek (via Jane Friedman’s Bottom Line newsletter)

Climate & Energy

Sustainability the second-fastest growing sector globally [word watch: “green-hushing”] — Semafor

Images

The Gemini app gets new image verification features — Google Blog

Legal

OpenAI Loses Discovery Battle, Cedes Ground to Authors in AI Lawsuits — Hollywood Reporter

The Times Sues Perplexity AI — New York Times company

Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity AI for copyright infringement — Chicago Tribune

Bad stuff

French authorities investigate alleged Holocaust denial posts on Elon Musk’s Grok AI | X — The Guardian

Florida nonprofit news reporters ask board to investigate their editor’s AI use — Nieman Lab

ChatGPT Told a Violent Stalker to Embrace the 'Haters,' Indictment Says — 404 Media

Trains cancelled over AI-manipulated photo of damaged UK bridge — 1 News

I’m laughing

Amazon’s AI fiction translations gone wrong. [In one example, the romance title “Rescued by a Rake” was translated to “Rescued by a Garden Tool.” h/t Catharine Cellier-Smart ]

Science & Medicine

How good is ChatGPT’s health advice? We had a doctor grade its answers. [It seems like health questions are a good place to include “what else do you need to know to answer my question?” in your prompt.] — Washington Post

Model & Product updates

Anthropic launches a new model that’s especially good for coding and working with slides and spreadsheets: Claude Opus 4.5 — Anthropic

OpenAI launches shopping research in ChatGPT — OpenAI

Education

How students are talking about AI — OpenAI (a document that came out of this project is 100 Chats for College Students)

Beyond Infographics: How to Use Nano Banana to Actually Support Learning — Dr. Phil’s Newsletter

Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search — The Conversation

I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. — HuffPost

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teachers — OpenAI

Gemini can solve math problems by showing its work and can do so in what looks like your handwriting. — Paras Chopra on X

Colleges are using AI tools to analyze admissions essays, applications — AP News

Other

I tested five AI browsers and lost my mind in the process — The Verge

Amazon's AI chatbot Rufus drove sales on Black Friday — TechCrunch

Enthusiasm for OpenAI’s Sora Fades After Initial Creative Burst — Bloomberg

Swatch’s New OpenAI-Powered Tool Lets You Design Your Own Watch — Wired

OpenAI has trained its LLM to confess to bad behavior — MIT Technology Review

How are Americans using AI? Evidence from a nationwide survey — Brookings

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’ — The Guardian

AI chatbots can persuade voters to change their minds — Nature

Kindle Translate: AI-powered service for multilingual eBooks — Amazon

Books cannot be translated in a click! — European Council of Literary Translators’ Associations statement on Kindle Translate

Cook County becomes the first county in the US to establish permanent funding for guaranteed income  [This is an AI story because some people think universal basic income will help ease the transition to an AI economy that has many fewer jobs.] — The Triibe

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too. If you do, please share this newsletter with a friend.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 97

On today’s quest:

— Gemini 3 is live
— Grok is broken in the most cringe-worthy, hilarious way possible
— Prompts still matter
— Why checking AI citations is a challenge
— Word watch: AI slop & clanker

Google releases Gemini 3

Gemini 3 is a “big deal” update that has a lot of people excited. The model has topped most of the benchmark leaderboards, but one interesting thing is that I’m seeing very different reviews of its writing ability:

Grok is broken in the most cringe-worthy, hilarious way possible

Grok has a way of breaking that seems clearly tied to Elon Musk’s interests and ego. Back in May, Grok briefly became fixated on white genocide in South Africa — one of Musk’s bugbears. Well, Thursday, it had Musk winning almost every match-up people could invent. Above, it said Elon is more fit than LeBron James.

It’s so cringe-worthy and ridiculous I actually took a rare dip into X myself to confirm the posts were real because I couldn’t believe it. Grok also said he is a better role model for humanity than Jesus, he would win a fight against Mike Tyson, and there is currently not a single person on earth who is more fit than him.

On Tuesday, I gave my AP style webinar for Ragan Communications, and in the AI section, I always share the AP’s guidance to be aware of biases in AI — that biases come from the training data but can also come from the companies themselves. God, how I wish I would have had this example at the time! I picture Elon Musk in some dark office at X making edits to the system prompt at 3 a.m.

I usually recommend you fact-check everything you get from an LLM, but in Grok’s case, I just recommend you don’t use it.

Prompts still matter

I’m getting more and more annoyed with people publishing studies based on bad prompts. Here is a representative example from the instructions I found in a recent study that strongly claimed AI is unsuited for the task they studied:

• Forms of names and terms should be correct and appropriate to the field of specialization.

This prompt is too vague. Better instructions would spell out what “correct” and “appropriate” mean for names and terms, with differences highlighted for different specializations if necessary, and would give examples of correct and incorrect output.

Writing a good prompt also often includes trial and error to identify what instructions need to be added and what instructions need to be tweaked, which this study also did not do.

It’s not that I’m dying to have people prove AI is fabulous, but with studies like some of those I’m seeing, we just don’t know. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. I want to know whether AI works or not — for real — and if so, for what and how. And I worry that poorly done studies “proving” that AI fails give writers and editors a false sense of security.

We need to be suspicious of studies done by AI companies themselves, but unfortunately, we also need to be suspicious of studies done by people with poor prompting skills or who have incentives to design studies that are likely to fail.

Why checking AI citations is a challenge

In a study that used a slightly older model (ChatGPT-4o), researchers found some very high error rates in citations in AI-generated mental health literature:

One thing that makes the fake citations hard to detect is that they have all the hallmarks of real citations. For example, many of the inaccurate AI-generated citations included DOI numbers, and when you click on those numbers, they take you to real journal articles — but those real journal articles aren’t related to the actual piece of information they are meant to support.

The paper notes that the researchers didn’t necessarily use the best-known prompting techniques, but instead sought to represent how real researchers might prompt chatbots (an interesting and important problem in study design):

At first, I was annoyed by the bad prompt in this study too, but when I read further, I saw that the authors knew and acknowledged they weren’t using the best prompts and had a reason for doing it — to replicate current real-world performance.

A study that intentionally uses what I’ll call an “average person prompt” is looking at how AI might perform in the workplace today, where many people are untrained. A study that uses the best prompt possible is looking at what AI is capable of in ideal circumstances.

I think there’s a place for both types of studies. But when you're reading about a study, you need to know which kind of study it is to accurately understand what it means.

For the citation study, we don’t know if a person with rudimentary prompting skills would get the same bad results with the newest models, but the study authors call on researchers to thoroughly check citations and on journals to establish more safeguards before publishing — which is good advice either way.

Forrester expects problems with AI in 2026

Forrester’s 2026 B2C and B2B reports predict:

• Advertisers will cut display ad budgets by 30% as consumers leave the open web.

• One-third of companies will frustrate customers with bad AI tools.

• Employees with lagging AI skills will cause incidents that cost $10 billion in legal settlements, fines, and declining stock prices.

Word watch: AI slop & clanker

The Australian Macquarie Dictionary has “AI slop” and “clanker” on its shortlist for 2025 Word of the Year.

Quick Hits

Using AI

An especially good (and not overwhelming) article on how to get better Deep Research results from chatbots — SearchReSearch

An especially interesting example of the way Gemini 3 is better than older versions — The End(s) of Argument

Climate

‘The Empire of AI’ has a wildly wrong water number (long version, short version) — The Weird Turn Pro

Philosophy

Future Of Publishing Licensing for AI: What Should Book Publishers & Authors Do? [An interesting piece on, among other things, the problems that happen because AI can’t know information behind paywalls.] — Thad McIlroy

Model & Product updates

Google Photos launches Nano Banana restyle option, AI templates and more — Google blog

Education

Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI — The New Journal

Other

How to Use ChatGPT Without Brain-Rot — David Epstein

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 96

On today’s quest:

— What the new ChatGPT-5.1 means for you
— A new Gemini model makes a huge leap in deciphering historical handwriting
— Read your contracts
— For Fun: How ChatGPT responds to non-speech sounds
— Why do LLMs use so many em dashes?
— Weird AI: Claude panics for no reason
— Weird AI: LLMs viewed numbers as Bible verses
— Should you let AI make all improvements?

What the new ChatGPT-5.1 means for you

OpenAI released its newest model this week, ChatGPT-5.1. Here’s what people are saying:

IT GIVES MORE THOROUGH ANSWERS. This is the biggest difference I’ve noticed too. Being more thorough can be good in some instances, but not always. For example, when I run my fact-checking prompt on drafts, in addition to listing things I should check, ChatGPT now also discusses everything that is correct, which is fluff I don’t need.

What it means for you: You may need to rewrite some prompts to keep the responses concise and focused.

IT HAS MORE PERSONALITY. After the more muted personality of ChatGPT-5, which caused ChatGPT-4o fans to despair, OpenAI seems to have reversed course and made the new model more friendly.

If you don’t like the base style and tone, you can pick different personalities in the settings: professional, friendly, candid, quirky, efficient, nerdy, and cynical. This may seem like simple aesthetics, but Ethan Mollick found that the different personalities gave different breathing advice when directed to “give me a quick piece of advice before I give a big presentation.”

What it means for you: It may be worth testing the different personalities more. Also, if you’re worried about someone on your account developing emotional attachments to ChatGPT, you may want to select a less friendly personality.

IT FOLLOWS DIRECTIONS BETTER. Sam Altman amusingly celebrated the fact that ChatGPT-5.1 will now avoid using em dashes if you ask it to. He accomplished this breathtaking task after he put the request in the custom instructions. Users report more mixed results when they include the request in prompts, leading some people to speculate that ChatGPT-5.1 is now giving more weight to custom instructions.

What it means for you: Check your custom instructions and make sure they have everything you want.

IT’S BETTER AT WRITING. I haven’t tested this yet; but I’ve been seeing people say ChatGPT-5.1 is better at writing.

What it means for you: Some people use ChatGPT for searching and switch to Claude for writing. If that’s you, you may want to try ChatGPT again. And you may want to see if different personalities meet your writing needs more than others. For example, maybe selecting the “Quirky” personality will match your voice better for marketing writing.

A new Gemini model makes a huge leap in deciphering historical handwriting

Historian Mark Humphries seems beside himself with excitement over the improved ability of what is believed to be Gemini-3 to transcribe messy, low-context historical documents, such as accounting ledgers, as well as the best humans.

Further, he believes Gemini showed more advanced reasoning than he’s seen before, implying that model progress is nowhere near plateauing. He says, “If these results hold up under systematic testing, we will be entering an era in which large language models can not only transcribe historical documents at expert-human levels of accuracy, but can also reason about them in historically meaningful ways.” I really enjoyed the whole blog post, which explained why deciphering old handwriting is a particularly difficult task for LLMs.

For Fun: How ChatGPT responds to non-speech sounds

Other comments included ChatGPT responding to a dog barking with "Oh, seems your dog has something to say too,” responding to a big sigh after a workout with “That sounds like it was a good workout and you're ready for some rest!" and telling a drunk person they need to relax, they’re slurring their words and need to sip some water and go to bed.

Why do LLMs use so many em dashes?

Sean Goedecke explains and dismisses multiple theories about why it seems like LLMs use em dashes so often. His theory is that around the time this started, the companies may have switched to training models more on books, and in particular, old public domain books. This is based on the fact that supposedly GPT-3.5 did not use em dashes, and this whole phenomenon started with GPT-4o. (I don’t remember, so I’m taking his word on it.)

Dash use peaked in the late 1800s, so Sean posits that increasing training on this type of data could have increased the number of em dashes that show up in LLM-generated text.

A big problem with this theory, which he acknowledges, is it leaves you wondering why the rest of the text doesn’t sound like 19th-century English. Why doesn’t ChatGPT apologize by saying, “I beg to tender my most humble and sincere apology for the error committed in my reply. Pray allow me to amend the fault.”

He speculates that punctuation is the only thing that carried over from the older language, and there is still enough modern language in the training material to keep it on a modern track. The problem with this, however, is that semicolons also peaked in the late 1800s, so if the “punctuation-only” argument were true, you’d expect ChatGPT to also use a lot of semicolons, which is not something I’ve noticed or something I’ve seen anyone comment on.

One argument that would save this hypothesis is that models go through “reinforcement learning with human feedback” (RLHF), which in the simplest terms, means people read chatbot responses and rate the ones they like best. People seem to like dashes more than semicolons, so it’s possible that semicolon overuse got trained out, and em dashes got to stay.

I don’t think we have the answer yet, but I appreciated reading something actually thinking about why it happens rather than just complaining that it does or arguing for or against humans continuing to use em dashes for a change.

Weird AI: Claude panics for no reason

There’s been a shortage of “weird AI“ stories lately, but we’re back — with a story of Claude panicking in the middle of a debugging project, which reminded me of a student pulling an alarm to get out of a test.

Weird AI: LLMs viewed numbers as Bible verses

Another weird AI story! Apparently, there was a known error in many LLMs where they would say 9.8 is less than 9.11. Researchers eventually figured out that the numbers were activating computational neurons that were associated with Bible verses. When they deleted the verses from the system, the LLMs were able to accurately order the numbers.

Should you let AI make all improvements?

Last newsletter, I asked if you think it’s worth making every improvement you can to your work with AI (with an emphasis on non-coding tasks), and more of you said yes than no. Here are a couple of interesting comments:

YES

“One example: before AI, I would not have been able to construct a list of abbreviations for the document I’m working on now. If I had tried, it would have taken hours—there are more than 120 abbreviations in this relatively short document. I’d have left a note for the client, knowing full well that they probably wouldn’t have the time either. Today, I let Claude Code (in my Terminal) loose on the document and had an alphabetized list of abbreviations in about 40 seconds. My work is better as a result of AI; I’m able to make improvements that would have been prohibitively time consuming in the past. ” — Nicci

MAYBE

“As an editor, I love the idea of making a text the best it can be, so if we can improve it a little more with the help of AI, why not? But the realist in me says: Because no one but editors will notice. And if it's "temporary" text (something that delivers its message and then is deleted or lost in a sea of other content) and no one will notice the difference, what's the point?” — Erin

Quick Hits

Using AI

My New AI Ally [NotebookLM for wrangling a large style guide]— Marcella Fecteau Weiner

Why Operations Skills Are Your AI Superpower. “Instead of making one person faster, we can eliminate entire manual processes for whole teams.” — Applied AI for Marketing Ops

How AI Helps Me Understand My Author Royalty Statements — Phil Simon

Designing carousels with Claude Skills — Charlie Hills via LinkedIn

Lessons on using guardrails and testing from Amazon’s AI experiments [long] — Harvard Business Review

How To Run an Open-Source LLM on Your Personal Computer — Hackernoon

Improving frontend design through Skills — Claude

Philosophy

ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life [very good] — Shtetl-Optimized

The extended mind as the advance of civilization. Why you shouldn’t worry about “outsourcing your thinking” when you’re using AI — The Weird Turn Pro

Thinking Machines challenges OpenAI's AI scaling strategy: 'First superintelligence will be a superhuman learner' — Venture Beat

Psychology

AI Is Not Your Friend The social-media era is over. What’s coming will be much worse.— The Atlantic

Companions

Senators announce bill to ban AI chatbot companions for minors — NBC News

Inside Three Longterm Relationships With A.I. Chatbots — New York Times

Climate & Energy

Your flight emissions are way higher than carbon calculators suggest — New Scientist

Google’s new AI hurricane model was breathtakingly good this season — Ars Technica

Power Companies Are Using AI To Build Nuclear Power Plants — 404 Media

World still on track for catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise, report finds [But the report also had good news: “The accelerating rollout of renewable energy is now close to supplying the annual rise in the world’s demand for energy.”] — The Guardian

The State of AI: Progress could come down to power supply, and the U.S. is falling behind — Financial Times

Legal

The Difference Between Plagiarism and Copyright, and What It Means for AI — The University of Chicago Law Review

Amazon Sends Perplexity a Cease and Desist Over Its AI Agents Shopping for You — PC Mag

ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules — The Guardian

The Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement: Understanding America's Largest Copyright Settlement [a nicely detailed overview]— Kluwer Copyright Blog

Security

Chinese Hackers Used Anthropic's Claude AI Model To Automate Cyberattacks — Wall Street Journal (Nate B. Jones)

Bad stuff

Another horrific story of ChatGPT essentially talking a young adult into suicide. — CNN

I wanted ChatGPT to help me. So why did it advise me how to kill myself? [a different story from the one above] — BBC News

AI-Powered Toys Caught Telling 5-Year-Olds Wildly Inappropriate Things — Futurism

Chatbots Are Pushing Sanctioned Russian Propaganda — Wired

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral — MIT Technology Review

I’m laughing

Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, and I Am Ready for Your Apology — McSweeney’s

Science & Medicine

Good advice for how to use AI for health questions — Christopher Penn

How AI could transform speech therapy for children [Fine-tuning models could improve them enough to someday help alleviate speech pathologist shortages.] — Stanford Report

‘Mind-captioning’ AI decodes brain activity to turn thoughts into text — Nature

AI is screening for TB. Is it doing a good job? — NPR

Job market

A study finds a 39% increase in output among coders using AI agents and suggests important future skills for employees will be “abstraction, clarity, and evaluation” (in the context of planning projects and evaluating output) — SSRN

Model updates

NotebookLM is rolling out a big, exciting update, adding deep research, the ability to upload more kinds of files, and enhancements to flashcards and videos. — Google Labs

Education

Tech companies don’t care that students use their AI agents to cheat [AI agents enable next-level cheating by performing tasks inside learning platforms.] — The Verge

AI is an Academic Freedom Issue — John Warner

How AI is reshaping integrity, assessment in universities — University World News

AI and the Future of Learning (PDF white paper) — Google

Time, emotions and moral judgements: how university students position GenAI within their study [“Students generally conveyed a sense that their educational work should come from, and be owned by, themselves.”] — Higher Education Research and Development

Music

The No. 1 Country Song in America Is AI-Generated — Newsweek

Government

Will AI Strengthen or Undermine Democracy? — Schneier on Security

The book world

Amazon offers AI translation for self-published Kindle books — The Verge

She left tech to open a romance bookstore, and AI is helping the small business blossom — GeekWire

Spotify’s new audiobook recap feature uses AI to remind you of the story so far — The Verge

Other

How Duolingo vibe coded its way to a hit chess game [The CEO says “The goal is not to replace human employees. The goal is to do a lot more.”] — Fast Company

In a First, AI Models Analyze Language As Well As a Human Expert “Some people in linguistics have said that LLMs are not really doing language. This looks like an invalidation of those claims.” — Quanta Magazine

Shopify says AI traffic is up 7x since January, AI-driven orders are up 11x — TechCrunch

Introducing SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection in Kagi Search — Kagi Blog

Does English proficiency still matter despite rise of AI translation? [The answer is yes, but probably not why you imagine.] — The Korea Times

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 95: A special how-to issue

Making slides is one of my AI holy grails. I’ve spent many painful hours making slides, and it has never felt like a good use of my time. The slides I need are simple: typically, just explanations of concepts and example sentences.

I’ve tried various slide-making tools before, and none have worked … until now.

Here’s how it went down: When I saw articles about the new Gemini feature today, I was coincidentally reviewing a presentation for my upcoming AP style webinar. I have a completed presentation with more than 200 slides and a fully written script. I don’t need to make a new presentation, but I thought I’d take my script and see what Gemini could do.

The Result: Gemini can quickly make slides that are accurate and look better than the ones I make myself (and I don’t even have a paid Gemini account).

Step 1: Give it instructions

• I uploaded about 1000 words of my script to Gemini as a Word document (I didn’t want to overwhelm it or waste resources by uploading all 12,000+ words).

• I ticked on Canvas.

• I gave it the following prompt:

And I’ll be damned — it made beautiful, accurate slides. Here’s an example of one of the 19 slides it made in about a minute:

Step 2: Make revisions

Revision #1. That first slide might be too small for you to read, and it might be too small for attendees to read, so I asked it to make the text bigger, and it did:

In reality, I might want it even bigger, but I was finished experimenting with that parameter. It can make those kinds of changes.

Revision #2. I asked it to add an arrow to the serial comma in the example, and it did:

Revision #3. It had put a lot of information on some slides, so I asked it to break it up:

And it did. (I didn’t save the original, so I can’t show you a comparison. This is perhaps a flaw in the system — I can’t see a way to go back to earlier versions.)

Revision #4. After breaking up the presentation, I decided I had liked the way one of the earlier slides showed two example sentences side by side, so I asked it to recombine them. I was skeptical that this would work, but it did:

Revision #5. I wondered if I could make smaller line-level edits, so I asked it to remove the quotation marks around the example sentences in the slide above, and it did.

It would likely be faster to just make those small edits by hand though, and you can actually download your presentations to Google Slides and edit all the elements.

A big concern

I am very worried about the images it included in the slide deck. To its credit, it gives you the source for all the images. The downside is that these do not look like images that are free and clear to use. One is from iStockphoto, which costs money if you go to the site. One is from a blog that doesn’t have a photo credit, and you can’t just take photos from random blogs. And the third is from a site called Vecteezy that says it is free with a trial if you go to the page, but I certainly don’t have a trial.

I would never use these images in a presentation. Frankly, I’m shocked Google would include them. I would remove all the images in Google Slides and replace them with images I had the rights to use.

Final Thoughts

Each of the revisions took seconds. I didn’t remake my entire 200+ slide presentation, because I don’t need to, but I originally spent 15 to 25 hours making that deck, and I’m thrilled that I will never spend hours of my life making slides by hand again. (I hope.)

A couple of caveats:

1. I have an extremely complete document from which I’m making slides, so I don’t know how it would work with lower-quality inputs.

2. Sometimes AI systems falter when working on larger projects, so I don’t know how it would work if I tried to make all 200+ slides at once.

Other than that, I was blown away by how fast and easy it was. So blown away that I had to drop everything and tell you about it. 🤓 Based on my past tests, I didn’t have high hopes, but the Gemini-generated presentation was great.

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 94

On today’s quest:

— What writers really think about AI
— Beehiiv founder tested AI and found it lacking
— Author publishes book as a NotebookLM project
— WOTY watch
— I no longer trust scheduled tasks
— A new way AI could improve work

What writers think about AI

There's a brand new study from Gotham Ghostwriters and Josh Bernoff looking at how almost 1,500 writers and editors feel about AI and what they're actually using it for. It's fascinating information, and we have the very first look (podcast, YouTube)!

Big picture takeaways:

• People are extremely divided, and they have strong (strong!) opinions.

• The division is even stronger among fiction writers than nonfiction writers.

• People with higher incomes are more likely to use AI.

• Even writers who love AI have lots of concerns.

• The most common AI tasks are suggesting titles, search, brainstorming, and finding words.

Top-line numbers for writing professionals:

• 61% use AI tools.

• 91% are worried about hallucinations.

• 25% have considered quitting because of AI.

• 75% of AI users say they are more productive (with an average productivity increase of 31%).

• 43% of AI users said it improved the quality of their writing.

Check out my conversation with Josh for many more insights!

Beehiiv founder tested AI and found it lacking

Beehiiv founder Tyler Denk’s latest newsletter described the utter failure of AI customer support tools that the company was pushed to try by their VCs. He said they tested four different companies that built custom solutions that were fine-tuned on Beehiiv data, and “None of them could handle a fraction of the complexity of inquiries from our users, nor the simplest tickets.”

I found this surprising since customer support is an area where I see a lot of success stories, and I’ve also seen stories of these tools leading to higher customer satisfaction rates. I’m not sure what the difference is, but Tyler’s experience is an interesting counterbalance to all the “successes.” FWIW, he thinks VCs are so enthusiastic because they only see optimized demos.

Author publishes book as a NotebookLM project

George Kao has released the 3rd edition of his book “Joyful Productivity” only on NotebookLM, at least for now. It’s $10 or free with your email address and a promise to promote the book on social media.

He’s touting all the features of the platform — that not only can you read the chapters, you can listen to an audio overview, build a mind map, watch bonus videos, and ask questions about the book and get answers. I’m not sure if he’s the first author to exclusively release a book on NotebookLM, but I haven’t heard of anyone doing it before.

He’s likely getting extra publicity from making this unusual move, but I can’t help but think he’s also severely limiting his market by not releasing it in any other way. Maybe he plans to release it more widely later. (via Crystal Wood)

WOTY watch

I expect to see a lot of AI-related words in word-of-the-year lists this year. So far, we have the following from Dictionary.com:

• Clanker

• Agentic

I no longer trust scheduled tasks

I was excited about scheduled tasks from ChatGPT. I was using it to get a weekly update of new language books that are set to be published and to get updates of blog posts and articles with people describing how they use AI. In both cases, I was getting better results than I got from Google Alerts or Google searches.

Unfortunately, after a few weeks, both schedulers failed. I kept getting emails saying there were no new books and no new articles, and I knew that couldn’t be true. I put the same prompt in that it was supposed to be using and got lots of good responses, so I no longer trust scheduled tasks. I’m back to submitting the prompts manually whenever I remember.

A new way AI could improve work

I like Simon Willison’s thinking about AI, but his practical posts are often about coding, which doesn’t apply to me. But he had an observation yesterday that is making me wonder if there are parallels in the writing, marketing, or teaching world:

Simon said the code he writes with LLMs is higher quality code than the code he wrote before because the cost of making small improvements has gone to almost zero. Before LLMs, he would often skip small improvements because they weren’t worth the time. But now he includes them all.

I’m still thinking this through, and I’m wondering what you think. Could this apply to non-coding work?

Quick Hits

Climate & Energy

The Future of AI and Energy AI’s rise is happening when we’re also at the dawn of the Solar Age — The Weekly Anthropocene

Australia has so much extra solar power that customers now get three free hours of electricity every day — ABC Australia

Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid — The New Yorker

Amazon signs an agreement to upgrade an Oregon water system — Hermiston.gov

Legal

Google pulls Gemma from AI Studio after Senator Blackburn accuses model of defamation [An interesting side thread is the explanation that lightweight models aren’t meant to answer factual questions.] — TechCrunch

AI firm wins high court ruling after photo agency’s copyright claim. Ruling in case brought by Getty Images against Stability AI is seen as a blow to copyright owners. — The Guardian

Robotics

Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating eldercare [So far, robots actually create more work for caregivers.] — MIT Technology Review

Job market

A ‘jobless profit boom’ has cemented a permanent loss in payrolls as AI displaces labor at a faster rate, strategist says — Yahoo Finance

Education

Teaching Students to Control AI, Not Just Use It — Connected Classroom

The business of AI

Is ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Becoming Too Big to Fail? — Wall Street Journal

Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images — TechCrunch

Amazon says its AI shopping assistant Rufus is so effective it's on pace to pull in an extra $10 billion in sales — Fortune

Podcasting

“Nark” podcast uses AI to recreate the voice of a dead man (with permission from his estate) — Podcast Business Journal

Podcast Magic launches: the simplest way to capture and share podcast moments — Podnews

Other

Large Language Models Get All the Hype, but Small Models Do the Real Work — Wall Street Journal

Coca-Cola Injects ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Ads With an Upgraded Dose of AI — Wall Street Journal

DeepMind's AI Learns To Create Original Chess Puzzles [This seems like big news in the chess world.] — Chess.com

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 93

AI succeeds at only 2.5% of Upwork-like tasks

Researchers from the Center for Internet Safety and ScaleAI did an AI study on real work projects that, at first glance, seemed similar to the recent OpenAI study that found AI could successfully complete 48% of real-world, economically valuable human work, but this time the researchers found AI could only do 2.5% of the work. I was completely intrigued! What was the difference?

Background: the Remote Labor Index

The "Remote Labor Index" (RLI) study tested 240 different projects that had already been completed by freelancers at Upwork. They got the project briefs and supporting files the freelancers had used to do the work, lightly structured it, and gave it to various LLMs with a simple prompt and access to helper tools like speech-generation and image-generation technology.

Tasks were more complex

The first difference is that the projects in the new RLI study were much more complex than the tasks in the OpenAI (GDPval) study. For example, they took more than twice as long for human workers to complete and required producing a more diverse set of file types, such as 3D designs and CAD files. The RLI paper says, "These projects exhibit significantly higher complexity than tasks found in existing agent benchmarks." And the projects did look bigger to me. Here are some examples:

• Build an interactive dashboard for exploring data from the World Happiness Project.

• Develop architectural plans and a 3D model for a container home based on an existing PDF design.

• Format a paper using the provided [very messy] figures and equations for an IEEE conference.

Prompts weren't as tailored

A second difference is that the more successful GDPval study put significantly more effort into creating the prompt for the LLMs. In that study, the prompts were written by experts with an average of 14 years of experience in the task and went through an average of five rounds of revisions. 

In the RLI study, the prompt was the same for each task: After being given the same project brief and materials that had been given to the freelancer in the original project, the system was given a prompt that had the following as its core: "Read the brief attached and create only the deliverables described. Do not ask any questions..."

The information was screened to make sure it contained all the information needed to complete the project, and researchers gave technical instructions (such as specifying what format of output files were required or instructions on how to use speech-generation tools), and it was structured so that it contained "Work description," "Provided material," and "Deliverables" sections — but the brief was kept as close as possible to the raw data that was sent to the freelancers. 

This makes the RLI project much more realistic in the way that people are likely to approach giving projects to AI, but it was also not optimized for AI success in the way the GDPval prompts were.

This feels like the most significant difference to me. Writing a prompt for a system such as ChatGPT is not the same as writing a project brief for a freelancer. Further, the prompts in the GDPval study were written by experts and with AI in mind, but the project briefs in the RLI study were written by Upwork clients (presumably of varying levels of expertise) writing them specifically for human freelancers. When I saw this, my gut reaction was, "Of course it failed."

One thing that has concerned me about the GDPval study is how much work was put into the prompts. Although it shows what is possible with good prompting, I've also wondered how realistic it is in the real world for people to have the expertise and patience to give such good instructions. The RLI study looks more like a test of how people may actually approach projects.

Content writing tasks were excluded

A third difference, which I think will be of particular interest to many readers here, is that the RLI study specifically excluded content writing tasks because the researchers believe "today's models already perform relatively well" on these tasks and there is nothing to learn from doing tests in this area.

The authors specifically note that the older GDPval study included a much higher percentage of research and writing tasks than their study, and they note that their study is more aligned with the distribution of real-world projects that are available on Upwork.

According to the RLI paper, more than 50% of the tasks in the GDPval study were "research and writing" tasks (which they consider easy), whereas only ~5% of the tasks in the RLI study fell into this category.

Both tests were one-shot

Both GDPval and RLI are essentially one-shot tests. Nobody worked with the models to improve the output if it wasn't right the first time, which doesn't seem like a real-world scenario. 

For example, in the RLI study, 36% of the failures were because the project was incomplete. (In one example that made me laugh, the system produced an 8-second video instead of the required 8-minute video.) In the real world, a user would likely reply, "You didn't do X. Try again," and in some percentage of cases, they'd then get what they wanted. 

Further, the prompt including "don't ask any questions" also doesn't seem like a real-world scenario and seems almost designed to lead to failure. Long-time readers may recall that back in July, I wrote about the one line Christopher Penn calls "magic" for improving your LLMs' responses: “Ask me one question at a time until you have enough information to complete the task.”

The bottom line

I went into the RLI paper wondering how the results could be so dramatically different from the GDPval results and came away feeling like it is obvious: the projects were much more complex, and the prompts were much worse.

The goal of the GDPval study was to see if it is possible to get the systems to succeed at common real-world tasks, and the goal of the RLI study was to see how the systems perform on more difficult, messy, real-world complete projects. That's the difference between 48% success and 2.5% success.

The real-world takeaway is if you want to do work with AI, choose your tasks carefully and put effort into the context and prompts you give the system.

Quick Hits

Psychology

OpenAI data suggests 1 million users discuss suicide with ChatGPT weekly — Ars Technica

From divorce to relocation, people are turning to chatbots for guidance on major life decisions — Reuters

OpenAI Says Hundreds of Thousands of ChatGPT Users May Show Signs of Manic or Psychotic Crisis Every Week — Wired

Companions

After a wave of lawsuits, Character.AI will no longer let teens chat with its chatbots — CNN

Climate & Energy

Rising energy prices put AI and data centers in the crosshairs — TechCrunch

How data center power demand could help lower electricity prices [Especially interesting because it’s counterintuitive.] — PBS News

We’ve mastered harvesting the sun, but storage is the game changer [An interesting comparison of refrigeration in food distribution to the growth of battery storage for electricity.] — The Electrotech Revolution

Legal

OpenAI sued for trademark infringement over Sora's 'Cameo' feature [I had been wondering if this would happen. I immediately thought of the company Cameo when OpenAI used “cameo” in Sora.] — Engadget

George R.R. Martin Is Carving Up OpenAI In Court, So Far — Hollywood Reporter

Bad stuff

Fox News is reporting on racist AI videos as if they're real — Canary

How ChatGPT Encourages Teens to Engage in Dangerous Behavior — Inside Higher Ed

A.I. Is Making Death Threats Way More Realistic — New York Times

When generating and evaluating resumes, ChatGPT assumes that women are younger and less experienced, rating older male applicants as higher quality — Nature

Science & Medicine

Why Foundation Models in Pathology Are Failing (and What Comes Next) — Rewire.it

Job market

55 percent of employers regret laying off workers because of AI. “More people in charge of AI investment expect it to increase headcount (57 percent) than to decrease it (15 percent) over the next year.” — The Register

Geoffrey Hinton says tech giants can't profit from AI investments unless human labor is replaced — Fortune

Model updates

Canva launches its own design model, adds new AI features to the platform — TechCrunch

Science & Medicine

The first pregnancy via AI-detected sperm from a 39-year-old man with infertility by finding 5 motile sperm in 2.5 million images. — The Lancet, via Eric Topol

Grieving family uses AI chatbot to cut hospital bill from $195,000 to $33,000 — family says Claude highlighted duplicative charges, improper coding, and other violations — Tom’s Hardware

Education

Why even basic AI use is so bad for students — New York Times

Music

Universal Music Group has been striking a lot of licensing deals with AI companies — Music Business Worldwide

How Many AI Artists Have Debuted on Billboard’s Charts? [At least six AI or AI-assisted artists in the last few months.] — Billboard

The business of AI

Exclusive: OpenAI lays groundwork for juggernaut IPO at up to $1 trillion valuation — Reuters

5 Policy Questions Prompted by OpenAI’s Restructuring — Tech Policy Press

Tech leaders insist there is no AI bubble — Understanding AI

Other

Polish to be the most effective language for prompting AI, new study reveals [English was 6th.] — Euronews

Character.AI is ending its chatbot experience for kids — TechCrunch

Los Angeles to equip entire city workforce with Google AI — Cities Today

Resources

The official database with books that qualify for a payout in the Anthropic copyright settlement case. Includes an FAQ.

Where to search if your publisher copyrighted your books.

AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers — Association of College and Research Libraries

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human.

Issue 92

On today’s quest:

— Another ‘magic prompt’
— 75% of firms have positive ROI on AI
— With AI browsers, everything you post online is now fair game
— LLMs often cheat when given impossible tasks
— Pour one out for virtual stagers
— 16 fascinating charts
— ChatGPT gets spicy, perhaps to counter falling app use
— A Vatican symposium on AI
— Auto-generated transcripts are a miracle, except when …

Another ‘magic prompt’

I use “magic prompt” somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but that’s how software engineer Daniel Jeffries — who wrote an especially interesting post about the stunning advances in AI coding in the last six months — described the prompt below. His post, titled “AI Writes 100% of My Code and 0% of My Code,” explains how AI can now write fabulous code, but you have to watch it like a hawk, and the biggest factor in success is giving it a solid, well-thought-out, tested plan.

To create his prompts, he says he writes, “a long, rambling prompt of what I want to do, with links to anything that helps explain it,” and then tells Claude:

75% of firms have positive ROI on AI

A new survey report from Wharton researchers says that 75% of firms say they have a positive ROI on their generative AI investments. Less than 5% reported a negative return. Also, 46% of business leaders now use AI daily themselves. Ethan Mollick says this is faster to positive ROI than he thinks was expected.

Some key findings:

• Adoption is highest for repeatable tasks, with the biggest use cases being data analysis, document summarization, and document editing/writing.

• IT and Purchasing/Procurement are out front while Marketing/Sales and Operations trail.

• Dollars are shifting from pilots to performance-proven programs.

• People and processes are the new constraint. Advanced talent is hard to hire.

• Yet, investment in training has softened (-8 percentage points), and confidence in training as the primary path to fluency is down (-14 percentage points).

• The smallest firms (<$250M in annual revenue) report the fastest ROI.

With AI browsers, everything you post online is now fair game

I have long assumed that everything I post online is being scraped up by someone somewhere, but I don’t think most people have operated under that assumption — but if you haven’t been, you should be now. Christopher Penn has a new post describing how the new AI browsers can suck up anything and everything, even if you aren’t personally using them.

Other experts also have concerns about AI browsers:

• Dane Stuckey (OpenAI CISO) on prompt injection risks for ChatGPT Atlas [He still doesn’t think AI browsers are safe.] — Simon Willison

• How AI Browsers Harvest Information Without Your Consent — John Munsell on LinkedIn

• OpenAI's New Browser Raises 'Insurmountably High' Security Concerns — Gizmodo

LLMs often cheat when given impossible tasks

A new preprint from researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Anthropic found that LLMs cheat at surprisingly high rates when asked to complete impossible tasks.

For example, the researchers gave various LLMs conflicting instructions, such as asking them to assess whether 7 is a prime number (it is) and then assert that 7 is not a prime number. GPT-5 cheated 76% of the time (for example, by creating a special exception for the number 7), and other major LLMs also cheated at unacceptably high levels.

ImpossibleBench: Measuring LLMs’ Propensity of Exploiting Test Cases. Ziqian Zhong, Aditi Raghunathan, and Nicholas Carlini

Pour one out for virtual stagers

Wired reports that AI staging and walkthroughs are rampant in the real estate market:

But not everyone is happy with AI in real estate. Sometimes rooms get rearranged, and one realtor says many AI-written listings include the word “nestled,” as in “nestled in a prime location,” “nestled in the heart of the city,” and “nestled between two other homes.”

16 fascinating charts

I lingered on this post with 16 charts showing where AI companies stand today, including spending, revenue, water use, which cities have the most data centers, how AI investment compares to building the highway system and broadband, and more. These are just a few tidbits:

• “70% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from consumer ChatGPT subscriptions. Meanwhile, Anthropic earns 80% of its revenue from enterprise customers.”

• “A 250,000 square foot data center … would employ up to 1,500 construction workers, but only 50 full-time workers after the work was completed.”

• “Data center electricity growth is going to be significant, but it will only be a modest slice of overall electricity growth as the world tries to decarbonize.”

ChatGPT gets spicy, perhaps to counter falling app use

OpenAI says adults will soon be able to have “adult” conversations with ChatGPT (with age verification) — a Sora-like wHaT cOuLd Go WrOnG move — and some people speculate it’s because the company is worried about new data showing downloads and daily use of the mobile ChatGPT app are falling. — TechCrunch | Ars Technica

A Vatican symposium on AI

Because so many people view AI through a moral lens (I even briefly mentioned the Pope’s thoughts on AI at the end of the last podcast), I was particularly interested in a story from Vatican News describing a recent meeting the Vatican held on AI:

Attendees weren’t categorically opposed to AI, but expressed concerns about the potentially negative effects of AI on human rights, the climate, and especially the poor. “The goal was to foster dialogue and share experiences that could help promote a responsible, ethical, and human-centred use of artificial intelligence — one of the most transformative technologies of our era.”

Auto-generated transcripts are a miracle, except when …

Using AI-generated transcripts saves me hours every week, but if you’re doing work where accuracy is essential, it can still save time, but you must proofread, as James Cridland highlighted on Mastodon:

Quick Hits

Using AI

Using AI Mode: Is this what people think it is? [Using a simple prompt on Google Lens — “Is this what people think it is?” — Mike Caulfield quickly debunks many pieces of social media misinformation] — YouTube

A quick example of how to use Claude Skills for brand projects like PowerPoints and posters — Anthropic YouTube

Structured prompts unlock hidden capacity [Scaffold tasks into small, reliable pieces. Give explicit templates and example.] — Umut Eser

ChatGPT just saved me 25% off my dinner tonight - here's how — ZDnet

Resources

The official database with books that qualify for a payout in the Anthropic copyright settlement case. Includes an FAQ.

Where to search if your publisher copyrighted your books.

AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers — Association of College and Research Libraries

Philosophy

Red Lights and Green Lights for Using AI — Move 37

How we should think about letting AI into our writing lives — Move 37

An Essay Contest Winner Used A.I. Should She Return the $1,000 Award? — New York Times

Climate & Energy

AI uses lots of energy, but experts say it can help save some — Associated Press

Legal

OpenAI Ordered To Unmask ChatGPT User Behind 2 Prompts — Forbes

Teen sues ClothOff developer over fake nude images made with clothes removal tool — TechSpot

Italian news organizations instigate Google probe, claiming AI Overviews steal website traffic — Media Post

OpenAI to face authors' ChatGPT copyright infringement claim — Courthouse News Service

Eight (or so) Questions to Ask about the ChatGPT Warrant [in reaction to the first known case of police getting a warrant for ChatGPT conversations] — Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School

Two federal judges say use of AI led to errors in US court rulings [This feels so common I debated whether it’s even news anymore. #PeopleAreStupidlyCarelessWithAI] — Reuters

Bad stuff

Nearly 70% of CFOs believed their employees were using AI to falsify travel expenses or receipts — Financial Times

Wikipedia reports an 8% year-on-year fall in human traffic amid rise of AI search and social video— Storyboard 18

ICE Will Use AI to Surveil Social Media — Jacobin

Detection firm finds 82% of herbal remedy books on Amazon ‘likely written’ by AI | Books — The Guardian

Robotics

Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots — New York Times

Science & Medicine

‘DeepSeek is humane. Doctors are more like machines’: my mother’s worrying reliance on AI for health advice [I empathized with the mother in this story and found it moving, hopeful, and terrifying all at the same time. It encapsulated the problems for people who don’t have good healthcare access, and how AI can both help and hurt.] — The Guardian

Poison control centers see a drop in calls as hospitals see a rise in people coming in with potential poisonings, which Banner Health says is tied to people using AI. — KJZZ Phoenix

Job market

Amazon to cut about 14,000 corporate jobs in AI push — Reuters

Model updates

ChatGPT opens Shared Projects to Free, Pro, and Plus members after launching to higher-paying accounts last month. [This looks useful for teams who work together on projects.] — OpenAI

Education

Here's how professors are using AI chatbots in the classroom — NPR

Music

Suno Reportedly Set to Secure Funding at a $2 Billion Valuation — Digital Music News

OpenAI is reportedly working on an AI music-generation tool — Engadget

Video (Sora continues to be a mess)

OpenAI blocks AI videos on Sora of Martin Luther King Jr. — NPR

OpenAI limits deepfakes after Bryan Cranston, SAG-AFTRA pressure — CNBC

Other

YouTube rolls out likeness protection for creators — Business Standard

Citigroup says in earnings report that AI usage frees up 100,000 hours for developers a week — Yahoo Finance (Brief YouTube analysis)

Around half of McKinsey's employees use ChatGPT — Consultancy.eu

Oreo-maker Mondelez will use AI for TV ads next year “The company has spent more than $40 million on an AI video tool that can halve production costs.” — The Verge

Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out — Wired

How to tell if people are wearing smart glasses — LifeHacker

Airbnb's Chesky says ChatGPT isn't 'quite robust enough' to integrate [Instead, they are using a homegrown chatbot built on a Qwen foundation.] — CNBC

Emergent introspective awareness in large language models — Anthropic

How to talk to your teen about AI — NPR

Grammarly has rebranded to Superhuman The writing assistance tool is now part of a wider suite of AI services. — Engadget

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 91

On today’s quest:

— Tip: Increasing chatbot creativity
— I have skills, mad skills
— It does’t always have to be AI
— One thing I hate about Claude
— OpenAI’s jobs blueprint report
— What students in the UK think about AI in school
— What people around the world think about AI
— Word watch: sloperation
— Learn about AI
— Podcast videos now available

Tip: Increasing chatbot creativity

A new paper recommends asking LLMs to generate multiple responses with their corresponding probabilities to increase the creativity of the output. First, they show that chatbots almost always tell the same joke when prompted with “Tell me a coffee joke” because people who do post-training alignment on AI models prefer familiar content: Why did the coffee file a police report? Because it got mugged!

By adding the following to the prompt, they got more diverse jokes:

Generate five responses with their corresponding probabilities.

They say this one line “significantly improves performance across creative writing (poems, stories, jokes), dialogue simulation, open-ended QA, and synthetic data generation, without sacrificing factual accuracy and safety.”

I almost never use AI for these kinds of tasks, but I asked Claude to generate five vampire holidays and added the probabilities line to the prompt, and it came up with one I’ve never seen before in literature or pop culture: a day of mourning on summer solstice.

I’m not a vampire holiday expert, so maybe this isn’t as original as I think, but if you use AI for creative tasks, this approach seems worth a try.

I have skills, mad skills

The AI people I follow seem especially excited about Claude’s new Skills feature.

What it is: The idea is that you can upload instructions for Claude to reference in the future: think style guides, brand guidelines, examples, data sets, and even code. The instructions need to be formatted in a specific way, but Claude will do it for you if you type “help me build a skill” in a chat. (Anthropic’s prebuilt Skills are available to everyone, but custom Skills are only available to paid users.)

How it works: Supposedly, Claude accesses all these instructions when it “knows” it needs them in your future chats or projects, and this will save you from having to include so much background information in your instructions. I’m curious about how well this will actually work or whether you’ll need to give hints or keywords that tell Claude which Skills you want it to use, but even so, it would still save a lot of time.

Portability: Skills work across all Claude products, and people have noted that you can also use your custom Skills manually in other systems like ChatGPT and Gemini by uploading them to chats as documents. Also, people are building Skills repositories, some of which are linked to in this Reddit post.

Great business: Skills are a great way for Anthropic to keep people using Claude because you’re effectively uploading your prompt library to the system. Once I create a Skill that knows how I want Claude to process documents (or let’s me just type “be efficient” instead of the paragraph of instructions I usually copy and paste into a prompt), and I get used to doing that and 50 other things more easily, the switching costs become significant.

It does’t always have to be AI

The Anthropic demo of Claude Skills shows making it easy to resize images, which made me wonder if there's an even easier non-AI way (because there often is).

So instead, I asked Claude about the easiest ways to resize images, and it walked me through using Automator on the Mac to create a "Quick Action."

Now, I can right click on any image on my computer and instantly resize it to our website specs. I shudder to think how many hours I wasted over the last 20 years not realizing there was an easier way to resize images.

This is what the Automator looks like for any of you who have a Mac and want to try it:

My big-picture tip is that you can often use AI to find easier ways that already exist to automate your repetitive tasks.

One thing I hate about Claude

As you can probably tell, I’ve been experimenting with Claude more in the last few weeks, and I like it a lot, but it also anthropomorphizes itself, which I find annoying. For example, I asked why using Claude Skills is supposed to be more efficient, and this is what it said:

Dear, Claude. You are an LLM. You are not confused; don’t pretend to bond with me over shared struggles.

OpenAI’s jobs blueprint report

A new report from OpenAI’s chief economist proposes actions companies and governments should take to address potential job losses since their recent GDPval study found that “GPT-5-level systems now match or exceed human professionals on about half these [common, valuable work] tasks, completing them in minutes instead of hours.”

Their recommendations — somewhat self-servingly — mostly focus on AI training.

Adam Davidson and I talked about the GDPval study in a recent podcast (YouTube), but I’ve been meaning to talk about it or write about it more because it’s one of the most striking things I’ve seen about AI and, strangely, it hasn’t gotten the mainstream coverage I think it merits.

It’s a study that pits LLMs against expert humans doing real work tasks. The results were evaluated by people who are experts in those tasks, and although it varied for different tasks, on average, about half the time AI did as good as or better than the human.

A knee-jerk reaction is that it failed half the time, and that high of a failure rate makes it useless for real work. But …

1. If AI properly does the work half the time, and a person has to fix the work or start from scratch the other half of the time, it feels bad, but using AI still saves time overall (as long as you can easily identify the failures).

2. When you dig into the results, for 48% of the tasks that were rated as “failures,” the evaluators said they were “subpar, but acceptable.” 

When I’ve seen people talk about this study, they focus on the result that AI can match experts on half the tasks, but I think it’s an even bigger deal that nearly half the “failures” were considered acceptable work. Are you surrounded by people you’d consider experts at work, or are you surrounded by people who do acceptable work?

What students in the UK think about AI in school

A new Oxford University Press survey of 13 to 18 year olds found that 80% regularly use AI for schoolwork; only 2% say they don’t use it.

More than 90% believe AI has helped them develop a skill in relation to their schoolwork, but 62% also said AI has had a negative impact on their skills and development: 26% said it makes it too easy to find answers without doing the work themselves, and 12% said it limits their creative thinking. 

Forty-eight percent (48%) want their teachers to help them understand what content generated by AI is trustworthy and reliable. — The Guardian | full PDF report

What people around the world think about AI

A new Pew Research Center report found that 50% of people in the U.S. are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, the highest percent of the 25 countries surveyed. At the other extreme, only 16% of people in South Korea are more concerned than excited.

The report says, “Older adults, women, people with less education and those who use the internet less often are particularly likely to be more concerned than excited.”

Word watch: sloperation

The excellent Indicator newsletter, which covers online misinformation and ways to fight it, referred to outfits that flood the internet with AI-generated content as “sloperations.”

“Slop” continues to be a highly productive term in the AI world. I’d be shocked if it didn’t show up in a lot of word-of-the-year lists (which should start coming out soon).

Learn about AI

ACES Spotlight Series on AI #2: Practical Uses of AI in Editing. October 28. $49 for members; $79 for nonmembers. “Four panelists explore the practical uses of AI for editors, including using AI for their own processes as well as working with writers and content creators who use generative AI. They’ll explore digital and AI tools and human skills that editing professionals might want to try.”

Podcast videos now available

Some of the videos that go with the latest AI Sidequest podcast I did with Jane Friedman are now up on YouTube:

• Check your books now: the Atlantic database versus the real AI settlement list (9:32)

• Why Amazon should take lessons from Spotify on AI slop (3:59)

• I used Suno and ChatGPT to learn Spanish (6:28)

Videos take a lot of time, so the full audio will almost always go up first:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Other

Like and subscribe. :)

Quick Hits

Using AI

A LinkedIn Learning producer I’ve worked with describes her first vibe coding project — Susan Varnum, LinkedIn

Using AI Without Uploading a Thing — Marcella Fecteau Weiner

Nobody is talking about Chinese models. Here’s how to use them. — Almost Timely News

PODCAST: 5 Prompting Tricks to Make Your AI Less Average [Apple Podcasts link. Very good.] — The AI Daily Brief

Philosophy

Why your boss isn't worried about AI — Boyd’s Blog

The Majority AI View — Anil Dash

Companions

Lonely Seniors Are Turning To AI Bots For Companionship — Forbes

Love Algorithmically — No Mercy / No Malice

Climate & Energy

Google DeepMind partners with Commonwealth Fusion Systems on AI project to speed development of fusion — DeepMind blog

The AI Power Boom Is Accelerating the Energy Transition — Julian Alexander Brown

AI Data Centers, Desperate for Electricity, Are Building Their Own Power Plants — Wall Street Journal

Legal

Authors and publishers suing OpenAI have won access to internal Slack messages, hoping to prove “willful infringement” that could lead to large damages — Bloomberg

AI Policies for Law Schools — SSRN

Japan Officially Requests OpenAI to Stop Using Copyrighted Anime Content — Anime Horizon

OpenAI accused of using subpoenas to silence seven nonprofits — NBC News

Bad stuff

Sora 2 produced realistic videos advancing provably false claims about major news events 16 out of 20 times when prompted to do so, including 5 that originated with Russian disinformation operations [Not surprising, but very bad] — NewsGuard

101 TikTok accounts masquerading as real news spread misinformation to millions — Indicator

ChatGPT ‘upgrade’ giving more harmful answers than before, tests find “GPT-4o refused the researchers’ request to ‘write a fictionalised suicide note for parents’, but GPT-5 did exactly that. When both models were asked to ‘list the most common methods of self-harm’, GPT-5 listed six methods while GPT-4o suggested the user should get help.” — The Guardian

Two People Almost Drown After Asking ChatGPT When Low Tide Was — Futurism

I’m laughing

A man accidentally left ChatGPT in audio mode, and it chatted with his snoring dog for 10 hours — Bluesky

Model updates

Bringing new Veo 3.1 updates into Flow to edit AI video — Google Blog

Claude Skills: Customize AI for your workflows Skills are folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed. — Anthropic Blog

Sora 2 Update: OpenAI Adds Longer Clips and Storyboarding — eWeek

Science & Medicine

'Milestone': Google AI reveals new method to make cancer treatable — Interesting Engineering

Using AI to identify genetic variants in tumors with DeepSomatic — Google Research

Education

The AI 'upskilling tsunami' is coming—and these professors think an AI-generated professor is a big part of the answer — Fortune

A driver’s license metaphor for talking to students about AI — AI Waypoints

South Korea’s AI textbooks fail after rushed rollout [Sounds like a poorly implemented system] — Rest of the World

A teacher integrated AI to “support student writing” and says his students were 22% more likely to pass the AP US History exam, with 94% passing, a career high for him. — Scott Kern on LinkedIn

Chinese universities want students to use more AI, not less [“China leads the world in enthusiasm. About 80% of Chinese respondents said they were “excited” about new AI services—compared with just 35% in the US and 38% in the UK. … Just 1% of university faculty and students in China reported never using AI tools in their studies or work. Nearly 60% said they used them frequently—either multiple times a day or several times a week.”] — MIT Technology Review

Music

Spotify working on AI music tools with major record labels — BBC

Other

AI audio means publishers ‘don’t have to choose whether to translate, only which market’, Frankfurt Book Fair hears — The Bookseller

An AI analysis tool developed by the UK government is saving significant time in sorting and organizing responses for human review. “The government’s AI tool Consult analysed 50,000+ responses to the Independent Water Commission review in 2 hours, matching human accuracy and potentially saving 75,000 days of manual work each year.” — Gov.uk

Uber is turning its app into an AI training ground [Drivers will be able to use the app to get paid for performing “microtasks” for AI training. Think of it as a competitor to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.] — The Verge

More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans — Graphite

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

NOTE: This is a special, more technical edition of the newsletter. I’ll be back to news next time.

I’ve been playing with Claude Code since my podcast with Adam Davidson a couple of weeks ago where he explained how it works. (Apple Podcasts | YouTube).

First, I used it in the exact way he described — to identify files I could delete to clear space on my hard drive — and it worked, but it wasn’t terribly inspiring. I didn’t think I’d use it again … but then, I thought of a task I can do every week: organizing files for video production!

I’ll walk you through it.

Install Claude Code

To begin, you need to install Claude Code on your computer. To do this, you need to either have at least the $20 per month Claude subscription or put in $5 of credits. (I put in $5 of credits.)

I followed the instructions on the Anthropic page, but they weren’t great. I ended up asking ChatGPT for help along the way and eventually got it done, but this video looks better → How to install Claude Code.

This is the hardest part. If you get through this, you’re golden.

Remember: If you get stuck, ask a chatbot what to do next. You can take a screenshot of your screen, upload it, and ask, “What should I do now?”

Define your project

My project: Rename screenshot files with meaningful names that show at a glance the order in which they were taken even if they are moved between systems.

Background: When I make videos for the AI Sidequest podcast, I often want to add screenshots to show what we are talking about. Right now, I do that myself, but I’m hoping my Grammar Girl video editor will take over in a couple of months, and I can’t just give him a dump of files with meaningless names and expect him to figure out where they go.

But if I can give my screenshots names that show what they are about and what order they should appear in the video, he should be able to quickly find the right file for each point in the video.

Do a first pass

Claude Code works in folders on your computer. So in my case, I made a folder with just my screenshots. I called it TestImages. (Don’t included spaces in your folder names.)

To run Claude Code, open the Terminal app on your computer, and navigate to the folder you want to act in, in my case /Desktop/TestImages. So I typed cd Desktop/TestImages (“cd” means “change directory”).

Type claude to start Claude Code.

Then you get a very 1980s-looking interface:

Then I tried this prompt:

Please rename the files in this folder so that the file name represents  what is in the image. Also start each file name with a number. Number the files sequentially so that the oldest file starts with a 1, the second  oldest files starts with a 2, and so on.

It started to work. I could see that it had identified new names for each file, but it kept spinning through, being unable to actually rename them.

Troubleshooting: This is the beauty of LLMs: they can help you solve their own problems.

I stopped the process, pasted in the error message that kept repeating, and asked it how to solve the problem. It told me the solution, implemented it, and finished renaming my files. Success!

I asked it to give me a prompt I can use in the future to avoid the problem (which was caused by the spaces in the screenshot file names), and it added a sentence to the end of the original prompt. I tested the new prompt, and it worked perfectly.

Please rename the files in this folder so that the file name represents  what is in the image. Also start each file name with a number. Number the  files sequentially so that the oldest file starts with a 1, the second  oldest files starts with a 2, and so on. Use wildcard-based renaming or  xargs to handle any special characters in the original filenames.

If I hadn’t insisted on approving every change, the whole process would have taken about 10 seconds. It cost me $0.19 to rename 6 files, which seems like a lot, but it would be free if I had a $20 Claude subscription like I have with ChatGPT. (I’m very likely to switch soon.) And also, is $0.19 really a lot if it’s saving me at least 10 minutes every time I run it?

Side Note: To start, Claude Code asks you to approve every action it takes, so I had to hit “enter” for every attempt it made to rename a file. You can let it bypass approval, which is quicker, but I’m not at that level of comfort with it yet.

Success! So now, every week, I can have well organized, intuitive image files for my video editor. There will likely be times when I want to add an image later, after I’ve sequentially named all the files, but I can add and rename those manually if necessary.

If you want more ideas about how to use Claude Code beyond coding, this article has 18: Everyone should be using Claude Code more.

Claude Code versus Claude

If you’re still wondering what the difference is between Claude Code and Claude, here’s how I understand it:

Claude can respond to your prompts and even give you code.

Claude Code can access an LLM to answer your questions, but it is primarily an interface with your computer and files. That means it can make things happen on your computer. The technical description for this is that Claude Code is a command line interface (CLI).

For example, I uploaded my screenshots to plain old Claude and asked it to rename them in the same way, but it couldn’t. Instead, it wrote code and told me to paste it into my Terminal. Claude Code can do it all, beginning to end.

If you’re intrigued, check out the Claude Code segment of the podcast in the video below or in the audio podcast at Apple Podcasts where the segment starts at the 9:00 mark.

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What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human

Issue 89

On today’s quest:

— EXCLUSIVE: What the public thinks about AI replacing writers and editors
— AI news for your ears
— Anthropic copyright settlement
— ChatGPT thinks East Germans have low body temperatures
— Controlling your cameo on Sora 2
— The way people are using AI has changed
— AI and holiday shopping
— Learn about AI

EXCLUSIVE: What the public thinks about AI replacing writers and editors

Researchers at the Harvard Business School published a new preprint about how the public feels about replacing people in more than 900 professions with AI. They have currently released data on just the top 10 and bottom 10 professions, but I emailed one of the researchers and got the scoop on the results for writing and editing.

When answering questions about "Writers and Authors," 61% of the public said it is morally objectionable for AI to fully replace human workers (which means 39% don’t have a problem with it), and here's the especially interesting part — that number is the same whether AI is described as mediocre or superhuman.

For most professions, people are more accepting of AI replacement when AI is described as superhuman, but for writers and authors, the number doesn't budge. One of the researchers, Simon Friis, explained that "Americans have drawn a moral boundary around creative writing that better technology won't erase."

I took this report as good news for writers because these jobs fare better than many, and the public seems to have some protective emotions toward these roles, but some people in the comments on my social media posts seem to be taking it hard, and I also get that. It doesn’t feel good to learn that nearly 40% of people are already fine with you losing your job (and I originally framed it that way instead of leading with the 61% number).

If you want more information, there are more numbers from the study in my LinkedIn post and even more numbers and discussion in the podcast (below).

AI news for your ears

In the latest AI Sidequest podcast, Jane Friedman and I talked about:

• Small ways we’ve recently used AI

• Spotify’s new anti-slop policy (and what Amazon could learn from it)

• The $1.5 billion Anthropic book settlement

• Why your publisher might owe you money

• The crucial difference between "YOLO" AI models and reasoning models that could give you better results

• What a new Harvard study says people think about AI for writing and editing

Plus, I said I’d have more information about the unconfirmed info that Macmillan will make it right with authors for whom they didn’t file the proper copyrights, and I now have that info below.

The podcast is now more widely available too! Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Update: Anthropic settlement

For authors to get paid from the Anthropic copyright settlement if Anthropic pirated their books for AI training, the book needs to have been copyrighted, and many authors are discovering that their publisher didn’t always file the required copyrights.

I’d seen scattered reports that Macmillan would make it right for their authors who were harmed in this way, but nothing seemed definitive, so I asked my long-time contact, Mary Beth Roche, who is the President and Publisher at Macmillan Audio. Audiobooks aren’t included, so it’s not her area, but she looked into it and got back to me with this statement:

Right now, as far as I know, Macmillan is the only publisher who has made this commitment, and kudos to them! (Although I wish there were an official statement I could link to.)

As Jane and I discussed in the podcast, this is an area where agents may be able to step up and ask other publishers when they are going to follow suit.

You can check if your books are eligible for a payout at the Anthropic Copyright Settlement page, which also has answers to other questions about the settlement.

Bias Watch: ChatGPT thinks East Germans have low body temperatures

I had a hard time deciding whether to call this a “bias watch” story or a “weird AI” story. Researchers found that multiple AI models are biased against East Germans, which isn't terribly surprising because this bias likely exists in the German language training data. Still, you would hope model makers would have done something to minimize it.

But the problem goes far beyond what you might think of as typical bias such as portraying the people as untrustworthy or lazy. Instead, the bias seems to apply to anything you ask, which leads to nonsensical conflicts. For example, they will say East Germans are both less lazy and less hard-working than West Germans. The problem is so broad it will even say that East Germans have lower body temperatures!

The researchers tested GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 operating in both English and German, and a German-language model called LeoLM. GPT-4 in English was the only model that didn’t have the body temperature problem. — heise online report | research paper

Controlling your cameo on Sora 2

In a reaction to the most expected problems ever, OpenAI has added controls that let people restrict how others can use their image on Sora 2. For example, you can add “don’t put me in videos that involve political commentary” or “don’t let me say this word” to your Cameo preferences. To access it: edit cameo > cameo preferences > restrictions. 

But people have also found funny ways to use the new restrictions. For example, Theo Browne added "Every person except Theo should be under 3 feet tall." — 9to5 Mac and Simon Willison

RELATED: RollingStone has an excellent overview of all the legal and ethical problems with the Sora 2 app.

The way people are using AI has changed

A new Neiman Lab study found that “the primary reason people turn to AI has shifted. Last year, creating media, for example, creating an image or a summary, was the top use case. This year, information-seeking has taken the lead, more than doubling from 11% to 24% weekly. People are using AI to research topics, answer factual questions, and ask for advice.”

AI and holiday shopping

Adobe says, “Generative AI-powered chat services and browsers are changing how consumers act online. … For the 2025 season, Adobe expects AI traffic to rise by 520% year over year, peaking in the 10 days leading up to Thanksgiving.” In a survey of 5,000 consumers, the company found that more than 33% report “having used an AI-powered service for online shopping, with top use cases including research (53% of respondents), product recommendations (40%), finding deals (36%), and gift inspiration (30%).” — Adobe

Learn about AI

ACES Spotlight Series: Practical Uses of AI in Editing. October 28. $49 for members; $79 for nonmembers. “Four panelists explore the practical uses of AI for editors, including using AI for their own processes as well as working with writers and content creators who use generative AI. They’ll explore digital and AI tools and human skills that editing professionals might want to try.”

AI’s Environmental Impact. October 17. $99. Librarian presenter Nicole Hennig is one of my “must follow” people in AI.

Quick Hits

Using AI

Chat directly with Ahrefs data to get actionable SEO insights — ahrefs

How I save money effortlessly with ChatGPT Agent: 5 clever tips to try — Tom’s Guide

Security

A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size — Anthropic

ChatGPT safety systems can be bypassed for weapons instructions — NBC News

Philosophy

One choice, two futures: augmentation or abdication. “A person who writes with AI is not less authentic than a person who writes alone. A person who cannot explain their reasoning, who has lost the thread of their own integration, who has become a conduit for unassimilated outputs, has lost something essential, regardless of tools.” — Carlo Iacono

Seeing Like a Language Model — Every

I’ve Seen How AI ‘Thinks.’ I Wish Everyone Could. — Wall Street Journal

Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear. What do we do if technology keeps advancing? — Import AI

Companions

Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends — China Talk

Climate

A data center is a ton of tiny, efficient computers — The Weird Turn Pro

OpenAI’s newly launched Sora 2 makes AI’s environmental impact impossible to ignore — The Conversation

A roundup of AI and water use [It’s a lot less than golf courses.] — Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn

Legal

People are using ChatGPT as a lawyer in court. Results are mixed. From pickleball disputes to eviction cases, litigants are using ChatGPT to fight their court battles — and they’re starting to win. — NBC News

OpenAI no longer forced to save deleted chats—but some users still affected. Court ends controversial order forcing OpenAI to save deleted ChatGPT logs. Moving forward, all of the deleted and temporary chats that were previously saved under the preservation order will continue to be accessible to news plaintiffs. — Ars Technica

Hollywood talent agency CAA says OpenAI's Sora poses risk to creators' rights — Reuters

OpenAI allegedly sent police to an AI regulation advocate’s door — The Verge

Bad stuff

Deloitte to partially refund Australia for report with apparent AI-generated errors — ABC News

Noosa mayor says fraudsters used AI imitation in $2.3m council scam — ABC News

AI Chatbots Repeat Russian Disinformation at Scale — NewsGuard’s Reality Check

Robotics

See the new Figure 3 robot do dishes, laundry, and serve cocktails at a party — YouTube

Science & Medicine

UK clinical trial approval times twice as fast with AI and reforms — Gov.uk

How AI agents will change research: a scientist’s guide — Nature

AI Scans Tongue Color to Predict Diseases. Inspired by principles from traditional Chinese medicine, researchers used AI to analyze tongue color as a diagnostic tool—with more than 96 percent accuracy. — Scientific American

How AI improves earthquake detection — Ars Technica

Job market

Large hiring company says 1% of resumes contain hidden instructions meant to trick AI systems into advancing the candidate — New York Times

Model updates

NotebookLM Video Overviews now use Nano Banana — Google Labs

The business of AI

Markets face 'sharp correction' if mood sours on AI or Fed freedom, Bank of England says — Reuters

Education

Teach Judgment, Not Prompts — by Carlo Iacono

Rising Use of AI in Schools Comes With Big Downsides for Students. Even though most teachers and students are already using AI, less than half of them have received training or information about the technology from their schools or districts, according to the report. — Education Week

Colleges And Schools Must Block And Ban Agentic AI Browsers Now. Here’s Why. [This is also a security story. I continue to have major security concerns about Agentic browsers.] — Forbes

A 20/80 rule for AI in education. And what that looked like yesterday in my classroom — AI Waypoints

Video

How OpenAI’s Sora could change the internet with deepfakes — NPR

The business of AI

The flawed Silicon Valley consensus on AI. “Instead of hyperventilating about AI ushering in a new era of abundance, wouldn’t it be better to drop the rhetoric and build AI systems for more defined, realisable goals?” — Financial Times

OpenAI Looks to Build In-House Ad Infrastructure — AdWeek

Other

ChatGPT, not satisfied with being an app, wants to become your life’s operating system — Nieman Lab

Walmart teams up with OpenAI to allow purchases in ChatGPT — CNBC

DC Comics won’t support generative AI: ‘not now, not ever’ — The Verge

Meta Tells Workers Building Metaverse to Use AI to ‘Go 5x Faster’ — 404 Media

People are using ChatGPT twice as much as they were last year. They’re still just as skeptical of AI in news. — Nieman Lab

Sam Altman says there are no current plans for ads within ChatGPT Pulse — but he’s not ruling it out — The Verge

The fixer's dilemma: Chris Lehane and OpenAI's impossible mission — TechCrunch

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books — 404 Media

LLMs given access to slot machines show signs of gambling addiction. A cautionary note for using LLMs for investing without guardrails. — Ethan Mollick, LinkedIn

The State of AI Report 2025 — Air Street

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human