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Texas could become the next US state to lay down the law with social media platforms. A Texas bill that would ban social media use for anyone under 18 recently moved past the Senate committee and is due for a vote in front of the Texas State Senate. The bill has until the state's legislative session comes to an end on June 2, leaving roughly a week for it to be approved by both the Senate and the governor.Earlier this year, the bill passed the House committee stage and was later voted in favor of by the state's House of Representatives. If made into law, the bill would force social media platforms to verify the age of anyone setting up an account, much like how Texas passed legislation requiring websites hosting porn to implement an age verification system. On top of that, Texas' social media ban proposes to let parents delete their child's social media account, allowing the platforms 10 days to comply with the request or face a fine from the state's attorney general.Texas isn't the only governing body interested in restricting social media access. Last year, Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, signed into law a bill that outright bans anyone under 14 from using social media and requires 14- and 15-year-olds to get parental consent to make an account or use an existing account. Notably, Texas' proposed law is much stricter than that.On a larger scale, the US Senate introduced a bill to ban social media platforms for anyone under 13 in April 2024. After being stuck in the committee stage, Senators Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently made comments that signal a potential second attempt at getting this passed.

For nearly 10 years I have written about science and technology and I’ve been an early adopter of new tech for much longer. As a teenager in the mid-1990s I annoyed the hell out of my family by jamming up the phone line for hours with a dial-up modem; connecting to bulletin board communities all over the country.When I started writing professionally about technology in 2016 I was all for our seemingly inevitable transhumanist future. When the chip is ready I want it immediately stuck in my head, I remember saying proudly in our busy office. Why not improve ourselves where we can?Since then, my general view on technology has dramatically shifted. Watching a growing class of super-billionaires erode the democratizing nature of technology by maintaining corporate controls over what we use and how we use it has fundamentally changed my personal relationship with technology. Seeing deeply disturbing philosophical stances like longtermism, effective altruism, and singulartarianism envelop the minds of those rich, powerful men controlling the world has only further entrenched inequality.A recent Black Mirror episode really rammed home the perils we face by having technology so controlled by capitalist interests. A sick woman is given a brain implant connected to a cloud server to keep her alive. The system is managed through a subscription service where the user pays for monthly access to the cognitive abilities managed by the implant. As time passes, that subscription cost gets more and more expensive - and well, it’s Black Mirror, so you can imagine where things end up. Titled 'Common People', the episode is from series 7 of Black MirrorNetflix The enshittification of our digital world has been impossible to ignore. You’re not imagining things, Google Search is getting worse.But until the emergence of AI (or, as we’ll discuss later, language learning models that pretend to look and sound like an artificial intelligence) I’ve never been truly concerned about a technological innovation, in and of itself.A recent article looked at how generative AI tech such as ChatGPT is being used by university students. The piece was authored by a tech admin at New York University and it’s filled with striking insights into how AI is shaking the foundations of educational institutions.Not unsurprisingly, students are using ChatGPT for everything from summarizing complex texts to completely writing essays from scratch. But one of the reflections quoted in the article immediately jumped out at me.When a student was asked why they relied on generative AI so much when putting work together they responded, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?”My first response was, of course, why wouldn’t you? It made complete sense.For a second.And then I thought, hang on, what is being lost by speeding from point A to point B in a car? What if the quickest way from point A to point B wasn't the best way to get there?Depositphotos Let’s further the analogy. You need to go to the grocery store. It’s a 10-minute walk away but a three-minute drive. Why wouldn’t you drive?Well, the only benefit of driving is saving time. That’s inarguable. You’ll be back home and cooking up your dinner before the person on foot even gets to the grocery store.Congratulations. You saved yourself about 20 minutes. In a world where efficiency trumps everything this is the best choice. Use that extra 20 minutes in your day wisely.But what are the benefits of not driving, taking the extra time, and walking?First, you have environmental benefits. Not using a car unnecessarily; spewing emissions into the air, either directly from combustion or indirectly for those with electric cars.Secondly, you have health benefits from the little bit of exercise you get by walking. Our stationary lives are quite literally killing us so a 20-minute walk a day is likely to be incredibly positive for your health.But there are also more abstract benefits to be gained by walking this short trip from A to B.Walking connects us to our neighborhood. It slows things down. Helps us better understand the community and environment we are living in. A recent study summarized the benefits of walking around your neighborhood, suggesting the practice leads to greater social connectedness and reduced feelings of isolation.So what are we losing when we use a car to get from point A to point B? Potentially a great deal.But let’s move out of abstraction and into the real world.An article in the Columbia Journalism Review asked nearly 20 news media professionals how they were integrating AI into their personal workflow. The responses were wildly varied. Some journalists refused to use AI for anything more than superficial interview transcription, while others use it broadly, to edit text, answer research questions, summarize large bodies of science text, or search massive troves of data for salient bits of information.In general, the line almost all those media professionals shared was they would never explicitly use AI to write their articles. But for some, almost every other stage of the creative process in developing a story was fair game for AI assistance.I found this a little horrifying. Farming out certain creative development processes to AI felt not only ethically wrong but also like key cognitive stages were being lost, skipped over, considered unimportant.I’ve never considered myself to be an extraordinarily creative person. I don’t feel like I come up with new or original ideas when I work. Instead, I see myself more as a compiler. I enjoy finding connections between seemingly disparate things. Linking ideas and using those pieces as building blocks to create my own work. As a writer and journalist I see this process as the whole point.A good example of this is a story I published in late 2023 investigating the relationship between long Covid and psychedelics. The story began earlier in the year when I read an intriguing study linking long Covid with serotonin abnormalities in the gut. Being interested in the science of psychedelics, and knowing that psychedelics very much influence serotonin receptors, I wondered if there could be some kind of link between these two seemingly disparate topics.The idea sat in the back of my mind for several months, until I came across a person who told me they had been actively treating their own long Covid symptoms with a variety of psychedelic remedies. After an expansive and fascinating interview I started diving into different studies looking to understand how certain psychedelics affect the body, and whether there could be any associations with long Covid treatments.Eventually I stumbled across a few compelling associations. It took weeks of reading different scientific studies, speaking to various researchers, and thinking about how several discordant threads could be somehow linked.Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience.And it is this idea of novelty that is key to understanding why modern AI technology is not actually intelligence but a simulation of intelligence. LLMs are a sophisticated language imitator, delivering responses that resemble what they think a response would look likeDepositphotos ChatGPT, and all the assorted clones that have emerged over the last couple of years, are a form of technology called LLMs (large language models). At the risk of enraging those who actually work in this mind-bendingly complex field, I’m going to dangerously over-simplify how these things work.It’s important to know that when you ask a system like ChatGPT a question it doesn’t understand what you are asking it. The response these systems generate to any prompt is simply a simulation of what it computes a response would look like based on a massive dataset.So if I were to ask the system a random question like, “What color are cats?”, the system would scrape the world’s trove of information on cats and colors to create a response that mirrors the way most pre-existing text talks about cats and colors. The system builds its response word by word, creating something that reads coherently to us, by establishing a probability for what word should follow each prior word. It’s not thinking, it’s imitating.What these generative AI systems are spitting out are word salad amalgams of what it thinks the response to your prompt should look like, based on training from millions of books and webpages that have been previously published.Setting aside for a moment the accuracy of the responses these systems deliver, I am more interested (or concerned) with the cognitive stages that this technology allows us to skip past.For thousands of years we have used technology to improve our ability to manage highly complex tasks. The idea is called cognitive offloading, and it’s as simple as writing something down on a notepad or saving a contact number on your smartphone. There are pros and cons to cognitive offloading, and scientists have been digging into the phenomenon for years.As long as we have been doing it, there have been people criticizing the practice. The legendary Greek philosopher Socrates was notorious for his skepticism around the written word. He believed knowledge emerged through a dialectical process so writing itself was reductive. He even went so far as to suggest (according to his student Plato, who did write things down) that writing makes us dumber. “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” Wrote Plato, quoting Socrates Almost every technological advancement in human history can be seen to be accompanied by someone suggesting it will be damaging. Calculators have destroyed our ability to properly do math. GPS has corrupted our spatial memory. Typewriters killed handwriting. Computer word processors killed typewriters. Video killed the radio star.And what have we lost? Well, zooming in on writing, for example, a 2020 study claimed brain activity is greater when a note is handwritten as opposed to being typed on a keyboard. And then a 2021 study suggested memory retention is better when using a pen and paper versus a stylus and tablet. So there are certainly trade-offs whenever we choose to use a technological tool to offload a cognitive task.There’s an oft-told story about gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It may be apocryphal but it certainly is meaningful. He once said he sat down and typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby, word for word. According to Thompson, he wanted to know what it felt like to write a great novel. Thompson was infamous for writing everything on typewriters, even when computers emerged in the 1990sPublic Domain I don’t want to get all wishy-washy here, but these are the brass tacks we are ultimately falling on. What does it feel like to think? What does it feel like to be creative? What does it feel like to understand something?A recent interview with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, reveals how deeply AI has infiltrated his life and work. Not only does Nadella utilize nearly a dozen different custom-designed AI agents to manage every part of his workflow – from summarizing emails to managing his schedule – but he also uses AI to get through podcasts quickly on his way to work. Instead of actually listening to the podcasts he has transcripts uploaded to an AI assistant who he then chats to about the information while commuting.Why listen to the podcast when you can get the gist through a summary? Why read a book when you can listen to the audio version at X2 speed? Or better yet, watch the movie? Or just read a Wikipedia entry. Or get AI to summarize the wikipedia entry.I’m not here to judge anyone on the way they choose to use technology. Do what you want with ChatGPT. But for a moment consider what you may be skipping over by racing from point A to point B.Sure, you can give ChatGPT a set of increasingly detailed prompts; adding complexity to its summary of a scientific journal or a podcast, but at what point do the prompts get so granular that you may as well read the journal entry itself? If you get generative AI to skim and summarize something, what is it missing? If something was worth being written then surely it is worth being read?If there is a more succinct way to say something then maybe we should say it more succinctly.In a magnificent article for The New Yorker, Ted Chiang perfectly summed up the deep contradiction at the heart of modern generative AI systems. He argues language, and writing, is fundamentally about communication. If we write an email to someone we can expect the person at the other end to receive those words and consider them with some kind of thought or attention. But modern AI systems (or these simulations of intelligence) are erasing our ability to think, consider, and write. Where does it all end? For Chiang it's pretty dystopian feedback loop of dialectical slop. “We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?” Ted Chiang

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As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.Speaking at an event promoting his new book, Clegg said the creative community should have the right to opt out of having their work used to train AI models. But he claimed it wasn’t feasible to ask for consent before ingesting their work first.“I think the creative community wants to go a step further,” Clegg said according to The Times. “Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.”“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said. “And by the way if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”The comments follow a back-and-forth in Parliament over new legislation that aims to give creative industries more insight into how their work is used by AI companies. An amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill would require technology companies to disclose what copyrighted works were used to train AI models. Paul McCartney, Dua Lipa, Elton John, and Andrew Lloyd Webber are among the hundreds of musicians, writers, designers, and journalists who signed an open letter in support of the amendment earlier in May.The amendment — introduced by Beeban Kidron, who is also a film producer and director — has bounced around gaining support. But on Thursday members of parliament rejected the proposal, with technology secretary Peter Kyle saying the “Britain’s economy needs both [AI and creative] sectors to succeed and to prosper.” Kidron and others have said a transparency requirement would allow copyright law to be enforced, and that AI companies would be less likely to “steal” work in the first place if they are required to disclose what content they used to train models.In an op-ed in the Guardian Kidron promised that “the fight isn’t over yet,” as the Data (Use and Access) Bill returns to the House of Lords in early June.See More:

screen time Google Is Burying the Web Alive 5:00 A.M. saved Save this article to read it later. Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer By now, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered Google’s AI Overviews, possibly thousands of times. Appearing as blurbs at the top of search results, they attempt to settle your queries before you scroll — to offer answers, or relevant information, gleaned from websites that you no longer need to click on. The feature was officially rolled out at Google’s developer conference last year and had been in testing for quite some time before that; on the occasion of this year’s conference, the company characterized it as “one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade,” a strangely narrow claim that is almost certainly true: Google put AI summaries on top of everything else, for everyone, as if to say, “Before you use our main product, see if this works instead.” This year’s conference included another change to search, this one more profound but less aggressively deployed. “AI Mode,” which has similarly been in beta testing for a while, will appear as an option for all users. It’s not like AI Overviews; that is, it’s not an extra module taking up space on a familiar search-results page but rather a complete replacement for conventional search. It’s Google’s “most powerful AI search, with more advanced reasoning and multimodality, and the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web,” the company says, “breaking down your question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf.” It’s available to everyone. It’s a lot like using AI-first chatbots that have search functions, like those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, and Google says it’s destined for greater things than a small tab. “As we get feedback, we’ll graduate many features and capabilities from AI Mode right into the core Search experience,” the company says. I’ve been testing AI Mode for a few months now, and in some ways it’s less radical than it sounds and (at first) feels. It resembles the initial demos of AI search tools, including those by Google, meaning it responds to many questions with clean, ad-free answers. Sometimes it answers in extended plain language, but it also makes a lot of lists and pulls in familiar little gridded modules — especially when you ask about things you can buy — resulting in a product that, despite its chatty interface, feels an awful lot like … search. Again, now you can try it yourself, and your mileage may vary; it hasn’t drawn me away from Google proper for a lot of thoughtless rote tasks, but it’s competitive with ChatGPT for the expanding range of searchish tasks you might attempt with a chatbot. From the very first use, however, AI Mode crystallized something about Google’s priorities and in particular its relationship to the web from which the company has drawn, and returned, many hundreds of billions of dollars of value. AI Overviews demoted links, quite literally pushing content from the web down on the page, and summarizing its contents for digestion without clicking: Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Screenshot: Google Meanwhile, AI Mode all but buries them, not just summarizing their content for reading within Google’s product but inviting you to explore and expand on those summaries by asking more questions, rather than clicking out. In many cases, links are retained merely to provide backup and sourcing, included as footnotes and appendices rather than destinations: Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Screenshot: Google This is typical with AI search tools and all but inevitable now that such things are possible. In terms of automation, this means companies like OpenAI and Google are mechanizing some of the “work” that goes into using tools like Google search, removing, when possible, the step where users leave their platforms and reducing, in theory, the time and effort it takes to navigate to somewhere else when necessary. In even broader terms — contra Google’s effort to brand this as “going beyond information to intelligence” — this is an example of how LLMs offer different ways to interact with much of the same information: summarization rather than retrieval, regeneration rather than fact-finding, and vibe-y reconstruction over deterministic reproduction. This is interesting to think about and often compelling to use but leaves unresolved one of the first questions posed by chatbots-as-search: Where will they get all the data they need to continue to work well? When Microsoft and Google showed off their first neo-search mockups in 2023, which are pretty close to today’s AI mode, it revealed a dilemma: Search engines still provide the de facto gateway to the broader web, and have a deeply codependent relationship with the people and companies whose content they crawl, index, and rank; a Google that instantly but sometimes unreliably summarizes the websites to which it used to send people would destroy that relationship, and probably a lot of websites, including the ones on which its models were trained. And, well, yep! Now, both AI Overviews and AI Mode, when they aren’t occasionally hallucinating, produce relatively clean answers that benefit in contrast to increasingly degraded regular search results on Google, which are full of hyperoptimized and duplicative spamlike content designed first and foremost with the demands of Google’s ranking algorithms and advertising in mind. AI Mode feels one step further removed from that ecosystem and once again looks good in contrast, a placid textual escape from Google’s own mountain of links that look like ads and ads that look like links (of course, Google is already working on ads for both Overviews and AI Mode). In its drive to embrace AI, Google is further concealing the raw material that fuels it, demoting links as it continues to ingest them for abstraction. Google may still retain plenty of attention to monetize and perhaps keep even more of it for itself, now that it doesn’t need to send people elsewhere; in the process, however, it really is starving the web that supplies it with data on which to train and Two years later, Google has become more explicit about the extent to which it’s moving on from the “you provide us results to rank, and we send you visitors to monetize” bargain, with the head of search telling The Verge, “I think the search results page was a construct.” Which is true, as far as it goes, but also a remarkable thing to hear from a company that’s communicated carefully and voluminously to website operators about small updates to its search algorithms for years. I don’t doubt that Google has been thinking about this stuff for a while and that there are people at the company who deem it strategically irrelevant or at least of secondary importance to winning the AI race — the fate of the web might not sound terribly important when your bosses are talking nonstop about cashing out its accumulated data and expertise for AGI. I also don’t want to be precious about the web as it actually exists in 2025, nor do I suggest that websites working with or near companies like Meta and Google should have expected anything but temporary, incidental alignment with their businesses. If I had to guess, the future of Google search looks more like AI Overviews than AI mode — a jumble of widgets and modules including and united by AI-generated content, rather than a clean break — if only for purposes of sustaining Google’s multi-hundred-billion-dollar advertising business. But I also don’t want to assume Google knows exactly how this stuff will play out for Google, much less what it will actually mean for millions of websites, and their visitors, if Google stops sending as many people beyond its results pages. Google’s push into productizing generative AI is substantially fear-driven, faith-based, and informed by the actions of competitors that are far less invested in and dependent on the vast collection of behaviors — websites full of content authentic and inauthentic, volunteer and commercial, social and antisocial, archival and up-to-date — that make up what’s left of the web and have far less to lose. Maybe, in a few years, a fresh economy will grow around the new behaviors produced by searchlike AI tools; perhaps companies like OpenAI and Google will sign a bunch more licensing deals; conceivably, this style of search automation simply collapses the marketplace supported by search, leveraging training based on years of scraped data to do more with less. In any case, the signals from Google — despite its unconvincing suggestions to the contrary — are clear: It’ll do anything to win the AI race. If that means burying the web, then so be it. Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. Tags: Google Is Burying the Web Alive

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Credit: Jacquelyn Martin - Pool/Getty Images Dating apps are getting a lot of flak lately. Daters are opting for in-person events — even dungeon sound baths — and moving away from increasing AI features and apps that seem to be copying each other.Vice President JD Vance also has no love for dating apps, apparently. In an interview on the New York Times's "Interesting Times" podcast, Vance spoke about his "noneconomic" concerns with AI and tech. He told host and Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, "If you look at basic dating behavior among young people — and I think a lot of this is that the dating apps are probably more destructive than we fully appreciate." (Vance met his wife, Usha, in law school.)"I think part of it is technology has just for some reason made it harder for young men and young women to communicate with each other in the same way," he continued. "Our young men and women just aren’t dating, and if they’re not dating, they’re not getting married, they’re not starting families." Mashable Trend Report: Coming Soon! Decode what’s viral, what’s next, and what it all means. Sign up for Mashable’s weekly Trend Report newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! You May Also Like With regards to communication, Vance hits on longtime criticism of dating apps and social media in general. A recent survey found that eight in 10 Gen Z adults would marry an AI, and a theory behind why is that AI is nonjudgmental. Social media users, however, are hypercritical on a large scale. If one has social anxiety, chatting online (to a person or bot) may feel easier than chatting face-to-face. Studies show, however, that face-to-face interaction is unbeatable when it comes to connecting with others.Vance also believes that AI can be "profoundly dark and negative"— not in the cases of people losing jobs, but in teenagers talking to chatbots. A recent report from nonprofit Common Sense Media found that AI bots aren't safe for under-18 use, because they foster emotional attachment and dependency. Related Stories When it comes to marriage and families, though, Vance didn't touch on the higher cost of living and rising inequality facing Americans. He also didn't discuss childcare costs, let alone how much it costs to give birth in the U.S. So, no, dating apps aren't the only problems here. Topics Apps & Software Politics Anna Iovine Associate Editor, Features Anna Iovine is the associate editor of features at Mashable. Previously, as the sex and relationships reporter, she covered topics ranging from dating apps to pelvic pain. Before Mashable, Anna was a social editor at VICE and freelanced for publications such as Slate and the Columbia Journalism Review. Follow her on Bluesky.

President Donald Trump has disrupted global trade and roiled markets in an effort to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Some of his top tech allies, however, have backed ventures that replace human workers with robots.Elon Musk, a top donor and adviser to Trump, has touted humanoid robots as a future growth area for electric-carmaker Tesla. "You can produce any product,” Musk said of the robots’ potential capacity during a February interview with Dubai's World Governments Summit.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who Trump last month called “terrific,” has invested in several advanced robotics firms.Bezos last year poured funds into Figure, a humanoid robot company that says its initial rollout will focus on manufacturers and warehouses, among other business applications. “We believe humanoids will revolutionize a variety of industries,” the company says on its website.Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – both of whom joined Trump on his recent trip to the Middle East – helmed their respective companies as each invested in Figure. OpenAI ended its partnership with Figure last year.“Trump is talking about bringing back the jobs, and he’s not understanding the tension between that goal and automation, which the tech bros have enthusiasm for,” Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told ABC News. “There’s a fundamental conflict between those goals.”MORE: Trump wants Apple to make iPhones in the US. Will it ever happen?Musk did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment made through Musk-owned firm SpaceX. Neither Bezos, Huang nor Altman responded to ABC News’ request.Speaking at a conference in April, Huang said the onset of artificial intelligence would fuel "new types of factories," which in turn would create jobs in construction and steelmaking, as well as in trades such as plumbing and electricity.Even more, Huang said, AI is set to trigger a surge in productivity at companies that adopt the new technology, allowing them to add employees as the firms increase output and revenue."New jobs will be created, some jobs will be lost, every job will be changed," Huang said. "Remember, it's not AI that's going to take your job. It's not AI that's going to destroy your company. It's the company and the person who uses AI that's going to take your job. And so that's something to internalize."Even after a rollback of some levies, consumers face the highest overall average effective tariff rate since 1934, the Yale Budget Lab found earlier this month.A key reason for the tariffs, White House officials say: Reshoring factories and rejuvenating employment in the manufacturing industry.Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said this month in an interview with Fox News that Trump's vision for ushering in a "golden age" for America involved enticing manufacturers to open factories and build in the United States."We're going to have huge jobs in manufacturing. You've heard the president talk about trillions and trillions of factories being built in America," he said in the interview on May 11.In response to ABC News' request for comment, White House Spokesperson Kush Desai said "the importance of President Trump’s push to reinvigorate American industry goes beyond creating good-paying jobs for everyday Americans.""Supply chain shocks of critical pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and semiconductors during the COVID era prove that America cannot rely on foreign imports. The Trump administration remains committed to reshoring manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security with a multifaceted approach of tariffs, tax cuts, rapid deregulation, and domestic energy production," Desai added.The share of U.S. workers in manufacturing has plummeted for decades. Roughly 8% of U.S. workers currently hold positions in manufacturing, which marks a steep decline from about a quarter of all employees as recently as 1970.Researchers attribute such decline to overlapping trends, including the offshoring of manufacturing to low-wage markets overseas and the adoption of labor-saving technology throughout the sector.Long before current advances, automation significantly increased productivity in U.S. factories, meaning the same number of workers could produce many more goods, researchers at Ball State University found in 2015. As a result, they said, manufacturing employment stagnated for decades even as output climbed.Popular Reads“Automation is something we’ve seen for a long time,” Philipp Kircher, a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University, told ABC News.CEO of Meta and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool via AFP via Getty Images, FILESome of Trump’s tech allies have backed firms that seek to further automate manufacturing, touting a new wave of artificial-intelligence equipped robots as a replacement for some workers and salve for labor shortages.Robotics outfit Vicarious boasts $250 million in investments from a set of backers that includes Bezos, Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – all of whom flanked Trump during his inauguration.On a webpage displaying photos of robots for use in warehouse settings, Vicarious tells potential clients that the products can “reduce both your costs and person-hour needs.”In 2022, Vicarious was acquired by Alphabet-backed robotics software firm Intrinsic. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also sat alongside tech leaders at Trump’s inauguration.Alphabet did not respond to ABC News' request for comment. Meta declined to comment.Yong Suk Lee, a professor of economics and technology at the University of Notre Dame, described the views on automation among Trump’s tech allies and some of his trade advisers as “opposed.”The tech position, Lee said, would likely win out, even if some firms do open plants in the U.S.“If you want to reshore, are you going to pay the same wages as Vietnam? Probably not,” Lee said. “Companies are faced with higher labor costs. In that case, they’ll probably automate.”Discordant views among some tech leaders and White House officials surfaced in April, when Musk sharply criticized tariff-advocate Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro, Musk said, is “truly a moron.”In an interview with CNBC, Navarro responded, saying Musk "isn't a car manufacturer — he's a car assembler.”MORE: Target CEO says tariffs risk 'massive' costs, but price hikes a 'last resort'To be sure, analysts said, automation in manufacturing would likely continue regardless of support from Trump’s tech allies, since producers are locked in a competition to lower costs and increase output. The precise outlook for manufacturing employment is unclear, they added, since additional technology may add jobs for those maintaining and optimizing the machinery.“Whether it’s the companies that currently support the U.S. president or not, somebody would be doing this innovation, maybe slightly slower,” Kircher said.Even at current employment levels, a labor shortage bedevils U.S. manufacturers. Roughly one of every five U.S. factories that failed to produce at full capacity cited a shortage of workers, Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, found in a January study analyzing government data.Agility Robots, an Amazon-backed firm building humanoid robots, identifies the current push for rejuvenated U.S. manufacturing as an opportunity for greater adoption of technology.“Manufacturing companies are seeing a massive reshoring movement spanning various industries,” Agility Robots says on its website. “Adding a humanoid robot to your manufacturing facility is a great way to stay on the leading edge of automation.”In response to ABC News' request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson pointed to previous remarks about robotics made by a company executive."Our goal is to ensure these systems improve safety and productivity. Technology should be used to help us retain and grow our talent through skill development and reimagining how we make our workplace better, both in productivity and safety. If we do this well, we’re certain to always innovate for our customers," Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, said in a September blog post.Amazon has "created more U.S. jobs in the last decade than any other company," Amazon said this month.

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US President Donald Trump signed into law legislation on Monday nicknamed the Take It Down Act, which requires platforms to remove nonconsensual instances of “intimate visual depiction” within 48 hours of receiving a request. Companies that take longer or don’t comply at all could be subject to penalties of roughly $50,000 per violation.The law received support from tech firms like Google, Meta, and Microsoft and will go into effect within the next year. Enforcement will be left up to the Federal Trade Commission, which has the power to penalize companies for what it deems unfair and deceptive business practices. Other countries, including India, have enacted similar regulations requiring swift removals of sexually explicit photos or deepfakes. Delays can lead to content spreading uncontrollably across the web; Microsoft, for example, took months to act in one high-profile case.But free speech advocates are concerned that a lack of guardrails in the Take It Down Act could allow bad actors to weaponize the policy to force tech companies to unjustly censor online content. The new law is modeled on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires internet service providers to expeditiously remove material that someone claims is infringing on their copyright. Companies can be held financially liable for ignoring valid requests, which has motivated many firms to err on the side of caution and preemptively remove content before a copyright dispute has been resolved.For years, fraudsters have abused the DMCA takedown process to get content censored for reasons that have nothing to do with copyright infringements. In some cases, the information is unflattering or belongs to industry competitors that they want to harm. The DMCA does include provisions that allow fraudsters to be held financially liable when they make false claims. Last year, for example, Google secured a default judgment against two individuals accused of orchestrating a scheme to suppress competitors in the T-shirt industry by filing frivolous requests to remove hundreds of thousands of search results.Fraudsters who may have feared the penalties of abusing DMCA could find Take It Down a less risky pathway. The Take It Down Act doesn’t include a robust deterrence provision, requiring only that takedown requestors exercise “good faith,” without specifying penalties for acting in bad faith. Unlike the DMCA, the new law also doesn’t outline an appeals process for alleged perpetrators to challenge what they consider erroneous removals. Critics of the regulation say it should have exempted certain content, including material that can be viewed as being in the public’s interest to remain online.Another concern is that the 48-hour deadline specified in the Take It Down Act may limit how much companies can vet requests before making a decision about whether to approve them. Free speech groups contend that could lead to the erasure of content well beyond nonconsensual “visually intimate depictions,” and invite abuse by the same kinds of fraudsters who took advantage of the DMCA.

Trump answered questions about a variety of executive orders he signed recently at the White House on Friday. President Donald Trump stated that Apple could create computerized production plants in the US to produce iPhones at the same price they are being produced at now after threatening to levy tariffs against the company.Trump answered questions about a variety of executive orders he signed at the White House on Friday. When speaking to press, one reporter asked him why he was so confident that Apple would be able to shift iPhone production to the US from overseas."Oh, they can, and a lot of it is so computerized now. These plants are amazing if you look at them. But they can do that, and actually, as you know, Apple is coming in with $500 billion. So are the chip companies we have," said the President."All of the chip companies are coming in with the biggest, $500 billion, $200 billion, $250 billion in spending. But we're talking about the iPhone now and, you know, if they're going to sell it in America I want it to be built in the United States," he continued.Social media users quickly pointed out the fallacies in Trump's arguments, indicating that shifting production to the US would increase Apple's costs."Does he really think Apple didn't run exhaustive cost analyses across every potential country - including the US - before deciding where to manufacture? They know exactly what US production would cost, down to the tiniest detail. If it was more profitable, they'd already be doing it," wrote one user."So Donald is giving a company less than 30 days to build a complicated factory that will immediately begin producing. He really thinks like that?" wrote another."Once again for the MAGA morons in the back, you have to pay higher wages in America; companies are not going to eat these cost increases, just like they are not eating the tariffs, and these additional costs will also be passed along to consumers as price increases," said a third."He does so not knowing what he is talking about. Selling a phone 1500$ made in Asia for 10$. Even with robots, US made phone will cost 1500$. Like," wrote a fourth.Trump has threatened to levy 25% tariffs against Apple if the company does not bring production of iPhones to the US."I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone's that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else," Trump posted Friday morning on Truth Social. "If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S."While speaking to the press at the White House, the President indicated that this penalty may soon also apply to other companies."It would be also Samsung and anybody that makes that product," Trump told reporters. "Otherwise it wouldn't be fair."© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

What just happened? The Hanover Administrative Court has issued a ruling that sharpens digital privacy protections in Germany. The decision requires websites to offer users a clear, easy, and genuine choice on cookie consent. Manipulative consent banners that push users toward accepting cookies are not just unfair – they violate German and European data protection laws. Lower Saxony Data Protection Officer Denis Lehmkemper has won a legal battle in his push for fairer digital privacy practices in Germany. The Hanover Administrative Court ruled that websites must display a clearly visible "reject all" button on cookie banners if they offer an "accept all" option. The recently unsealed March 19 decision aims to curb manipulative designs that pressure users into consenting to cookies and reinforces the principle that users deserve a clear, genuine choice. The case that led to this landmark decision centered on NOZ (Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung), a major media company in Lower Saxony. Lehmkemper's office ordered NOZ to redesign its cookie banner, arguing it failed to obtain valid, informed, and voluntary user consent before placing cookies and processing personal data. NOZ challenged the order, insisting its consent process was effective, did not involve personal data processing, and that cookie compliance was outside the data protection authority's jurisdiction. After reviewing the case, the court sided with the data protection authority. Judges ruled that NOZ's cookie banner made rejecting cookies significantly harder than accepting them. Users faced repeated consent prompts, and the banner's language – such as the headline "optimal user experience" and the "accept and close" button – misled users. It omitted any mention of the word "consent," and buried information about third-party partners and cross-border data transfers behind scrolling. The court concluded that NOZ failed to obtain the informed, voluntary, and unambiguous consent required under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It ruled that consent secured through manipulative design is invalid, violating both the Telecommunications Digital Services Data Protection Act and the GDPR. // Related Stories The judgment reinforces that websites must not nudge users into agreeing to cookies or make refusal unnecessarily difficult. Instead, the option to reject all must be as prominent and accessible as "accept all." Lehmkemper welcomed the court's ruling, hoping it would set a precedent for other website operators. He acknowledged that many find cookie banners frustrating but emphasized their importance in safeguarding online privacy. The decision should prompt more providers to adopt consent solutions that comply with data protection standards. Recent audits by data protection authorities, such as the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision, found many websites still use cookie banners that fall short of legal standards, often making it easier to accept cookies than to reject them. The Hanover court's ruling should push website operators to improve consent mechanisms and uphold online privacy rights.

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In 2023, IBM made its mark by announcing the redundancy of almost 8,000 employees, mainly in human resources, to automate these functions using artificial intelligence. But against all odds, this strategy led to a wave of new hires… again because of AI. AI upsets the employment balance at IBM In early 2023, IBM made a radical decision to replace thousands of jobs, mainly in support functions, with artificial intelligence solutions. The stated objective was clear: to automate up to 30% of repetitive tasks, particularly in human resources, and thus achieve significant productivity savings. This strategy, far from being isolated, was part of a worldwide wave of rationalisation in which other tech giants, such as Google and Spotify, were also making massive redundancies. But IBM has taken its experimentation further than its competitors. Thanks to the AskHR solution, an AI-powered conversational agent, 94% of routine HR management tasks have been automated, from holiday processing to payroll management and employee documentation. This automation has enabled the firm to generate $3.5 billion in productivity across more than 70 different business lines. However, what followed surprised even IBM’s top management. Far from reducing its workforce permanently, the company saw its total number of employees rise again after the wave of redundancies. Arvind Krishna, IBM’s CEO, explained it to the Wall Street Journal, “While we’ve done a tremendous amount of work to leverage AI, our total employment has actually increased because it’s allowed us to invest more in other areas.” In fact, automation has freed up financial and human resources, which have been redeployed in high value-added sectors. IBM has massively recruited software engineers, sales people and marketing specialists, professions where creativity, critical thinking and human interaction are irreplaceable by machines. Repetitive and predictable tasks have been entrusted to AI, but the need for human skills has exploded in strategic areas. Towards a transformation of the labour market IBM’s example illustrates a fundamental trend: AI is not just eliminating jobs, it is creating new ones, often with higher qualifications and better pay. But this transformation is not without its problems. The jobs most exposed to automation, such as support functions, are being replaced, while demand is exploding for profiles capable of managing, designing and selling AI solutions. IBM is not an isolated case. Other companies, such as Duolingo and certain customer service platforms, have also tried to massively replace their staff with chatbots, sometimes with mixed results, forcing them to rehire specialists to compensate for the limits of automation. The success of automation at IBM is based on the company’s ability to reinvest the savings made in growth sectors. The case of AskHR is emblematic: in 2024, the platform handled more than 11.5 million interactions, with a customer satisfaction rate (NPS) that rose from -35 to +74 in just a few years. But despite these successes, only 6% of requests still require human intervention, proof that the transformation is not complete and that certain skills are still essential. The IBM case raises the question of the future of work in the age of AI. According to a report by the World Economic Forum, almost 92 million jobs could disappear by 2030 as a result of automation, but new professions are already emerging at high speed. The challenge for companies and employees will be to anticipate these changes, train and adapt to an ever-changing labour market. At IBM, AI has not only eliminated jobs: it has forced the company to rethink its HR strategy in depth and reinvent the contours of modern employment. Share This With A Friend :

TechnologyWhat Are People Still Doing on X?Imagine if your favorite neighborhood bar turned into a Nazi hangout.By Charlie WarzelIllustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.May 23, 2025, 2:54 PM ET This has been a banner month for X. Last week, the social network’s built-in chatbot, Grok, became strangely obsessed with false claims about “white genocide” in South Africa—allegedly because someone made an “unauthorized modification” to its code at 3:15 in the morning. The week prior, Ye (formerly Kanye West) released a single called “Heil Hitler” on the platform. The chorus includes the line “Heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on Twitter.” West has frequently posted anti-Semitic rants on the platform and, at one point back in February, said he identified as a Nazi. (Yesterday on X, West said he was “done with antisemitism,” though he has made such apologies before; in any case, the single has already been viewed tens of millions of times on X.)These incidents feel all too natural for Elon Musk’s social network. Even without knowing the precise technical reason Grok decided to do its best Alex Jones impression, the fact that it became monomaniacally obsessed with a white-supremacist talking point says something about what the platform has become since Musk took over in October 2022. Specifically, it validates that X has become a political weapon in his far-right activism. (To be clear, white farmers have been murdered in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates, according to Reuters. But there is no indication of a genocide. In 2024, eight of the 26,232 murders nationwide were committed against farmers. Most murder victims there are Black.)Read: The day Grok told everyone about ‘white genocide’This has been obvious to anyone using the site or paying attention to Musk’s managerial decisions. He’s reinstated thousands of banned accounts (QAnon supporters and conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi), and the platform is engorged with low-rent outrage porn, bigoted memes, MAGA AI slop, and, well, a lot of people proudly using racial slurs, frequently to attack other people. The platform’s defenders would likely argue that X is an experiment in free-speech maximalism and that it is one of the only truly neutral zones on social media. Musk and his sycophants have constantly cited his takeover as an attempt to “solve free speech”; Joe Rogan has suggested that Musk has done just that. (This isn’t quite accurate, as X has complied with government takedown requests, temporarily suspended journalist accounts, amplified accounts that promote Musk’s worldview, and tried to censor words its owner doesn’t like: Last year, it briefly warned users who attempted to use the word cisgender in posts, after Musk said he considers it a “slur.”)But Grok’s white-genocide Wednesday is a major indication that the platform is not neutral. Either X has a natural bias, based on the site’s architecture and user base—that is, the chatbot, which is able to search tweets in real time, acts on an attitude that is endemic to the platform—or X is being directly manipulated to emphasize a certain viewpoint. In other words: Either way, X is racist. The only thing up for debate is whether this is a feature or a bug for those in charge.Twitter always had an outsize cultural influence, and X—despite its marked decline under Musk—does as well. Yet mainstream culture is no longer dominant there: The media outlets and public figures are now punch lines for the site’s main characters, Musk and his MAGA acolytes. Platform events such as the Grok rampage and Ye’s “Heil Hitler” offer a window into the ways that X has become an accelerator for a broader, more durable culture of hate. It’s not only that some of this vile discourse seeps out into the physical world (memes about immigrants eating cats and dogs leading to harassment in Ohio, Trump bringing up conspiracy theories about white genocide during an Oval Office meeting with the South African president)—it’s that the worst of the internet is no longer relegated to the shadows. Instead, it is elevated, perhaps even at times normalized, by its proximity to everyone else’s content.Last Wednesday, as I watched Grok bring up white genocide in response to an anodyne query about the Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer’s career earnings, I couldn’t shake the question: Why are people still using this website? The same thought had also occurred to me around the time that Ye released “Heil Hitler” and I toggled over to X’s algorithmic “For You” feed. It showed a smattering of the platform’s least savory commentators posting about how the anti-Semitic anthem was “the song of the year” and how it had become popular in Thailand. What happened next is pretty standard: By clicking on a few posts about the song, I’d expressed enough interest in it that the platform fed me a steady stream of “Heil Hitler” content: AI-generated remixes of the song, covers, dozens of memes about how the song was secretly popular. I saw a video of a white couple singing the song in their car, throwing up Nazi salutes. Not long after that, I saw a link to a crowdfunding campaign for that same couple, who were asking for money to “relocate” after their video went viral and they were doxxed and “threatened.” The couple set their funding goal at $88,000—a reference, almost assuredly, to “88,” a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.” This Russian nesting doll of irony-poisoned, loud-and-proud racism is a common experience in the algorithmic fever swamps of X.It’s worth noting that Ye’s song was banned by other major streaming platforms and social networks. Writing about X, The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh said, “West has given the platform a kind of exclusive hit single—a song that can be heard almost nowhere else.” Neo-Nazis and trolls expressed a palpable delight that all of this was happening on an ostensibly mainstream platform—wanton hatred not on 4chan or Stormfront, but on the same network where Barack Obama posted a condolence message about Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis. “Heil Hitler” is almost assuredly not the global phenomenon that the fascists on the platform think it is, but its prevalence on X is not nothing either. As Sanneh wrote last week, “We now live in an era when a top musician can distribute a song called ‘Heil Hitler,’ and there’s no way to stop him. That is the true message of this song, which has spread and thrived beyond the reach of boycotts or shaming campaigns: no one is in charge.”In July 2020, the Twitter user Michael B. Tager shared an anecdote that went viral. Tager was at “a shitty crustpunk bar” when the gruff bartender kicked out a patron in a “punk uniform”—not because the customer was making a scene, but because he was wearing Nazi paraphernalia. “You have to nip it in the bud immediately,” Tager recounted the bartender as saying. “These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend.” Soon enough, you’re running a Nazi bar.The Nazi bar is an apt analogy, yet it doesn’t fully capture the weirdness of a social network and of the strange, modern power of algorithms to sort and segregate experiences. Many people use X merely to post about sports, follow news, or look at dumb memes, and they’re probably having a mostly normal online experience; I don’t have any wish to judge them. To torture the metaphor, though, they’re sitting at a table outside the Nazi bar; their friends are there, they’re having a good time, maybe they hear a slur emanate from the window from time to time. Others fully recognize that they’re at a Nazi bar, but this was their bar first and they don’t want to cede the territory; they’re hanging around to debate, never mind that the bar’s owner is palling around with the new customers.Of course, with a broadcast social network like X, everyone is both a patron and an owner of sorts. Followers can feel like a kind of currency, built up over years: Some people don’t leave the bar, because they’re invested and don’t want to dump their shares. Other people don’t leave, because the alternative hangouts aren’t enticing enough. Some simply don’t want to give the Nazis the satisfaction of successfully driving them out. There is plenty of commentary, even among users of other platforms, about how Threads is bloodless (and owned by Mark Zuckerberg), Mastodon is inscrutable, and Bluesky is humorless.These quibbles make some sense in the brain-rot context of social media, where people have been conditioned to think it’s normal to have interactions with millions of strangers at the same time, but this is not really tenable or healthy. Nor is it something most people would tolerate in the physical world. If a billionaire bought one of your local haunts, renamed it, humiliated the employees, brought back many of the people who’d been banned for harassing other regulars, eliminated basic rules of decency, started having town halls with Republicans and a leader of the AfD, taking your business elsewhere would be perfectly rational. This is essentially what’s happened on X, only the reality is wildly, at times comically, more extreme. A critical mass of the nation’s politicians, news outlets, and major brands regularly post content for free to the exclusive streaming platform for the Ye song “Heil Hitler.” This platform is owned by the world’s richest man, a conspiracy theorizing GOP mega-donor who still holds a position in the Trump administration. Even if he winds down his official role, X will remain an instrument for Musk’s politics. Let’s pause to sit with the absurdity of these facts.Acknowledging the role X plays in mainstreaming the worst constituencies makes for awkward conversations with those who continue to use it. These discussions grow exhausting, fast. There’s a definite purity-politics flavor to any suggestion that people should take a moral stand and leave a social network, but also a pretty airtight case to be made for boycotting it. There is no ethical consumption under tech oligarchy, etc. You’re not a Nazi simply because you use X—but also, what exactly are you doing there?You may not have any interest in participating in a culture war. The problem is that on X, everything is a culture war. Culture war is the very point of the MAGA AI slop the platform traffics in and the viscerally cruel White House X account. Culture war is behind Tucker Carlson’s choice to debut his post-Fox show on X and why Alex Jones livestreams on the platform every day. West’s nihilistic neo-Nazi single is an act of culture war: Its message isn’t just that X has energized his ideas, but that the platform renders people like Ye unignorable. Only Musk could shut this machine down, but plenty of others lend it their credibility and happily turn the cranks, ensuring that the culture war grinds on and on.

"Author Lena McDonald is blatantly using AI to mimic other popular author's writing styles" Reddit A fantasy romance author is facing backlash after readers discovered an AI-generated prompt accidentally left in the published version of her book, sparking renewed criticism of AI use in self-published fiction.With the rise of generative AI tools, more authors have turned to software for brainstorming, editing, or even drafting entire scenes. But when remnants of AI prompts make it into the final books, fans and fellow writers see it as both careless and unethical.Author Lena McDonald's AI slip-up came to light when readers noticed an editing note embedded in chapter three of her book "Darkhollow Academy: Year 2," referencing the style of another author."I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements," the passage read.The sentence, seemingly left over from an AI prompt, appeared in the middle of a romantic scene. While the book has since been quietly updated on Amazon to remove the passage, screenshots of the gaffe continue circulating on Reddit, where fans have dubbed the incident "so embarrassing." Comment by u/fox_paw44 from discussion in ReverseHarem Comment by u/fox_paw44 from discussion in ReverseHarem Additionally, the discovery sparked swift backlash from Goodreads commenters accusing the author of deceiving fans with "AI generated slop," dropping her rating drastically."Is this the author using AI to 'write' books? Because it seems she is. I urge people to do the research, people are posting screenshots of an AI prompt left in the text," one commenter said."This author is a blatant thief who uses generative AI to mimic other authors' voices," another added.McDonald, who also publishes under the name Sienna Patterson, has not responded publicly and appears to have no active online presence, making her difficult to reach for comment.© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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