No, I don’t believe AI will destroy humanity. No, you shouldn’t assign a percentage to the apocalypse—“P(doom).” Yes, you should be asking who stands to benefit from your fear of “rogue AI.” Family group chats across America are buzzing with discussion of the AI apocalypse. I’ve gone from AI guru to prophet. My grandma asks […]
The data center backlash has officially reached the pee-jar stage. Jason Kelce spent Florida’s primary day walking through a field toward a data center, holding a jar of urine, pledging to “send your pee to the AI data center of your choice,” so facilities stop draining local water. Liquid Death and Garage Beer, the beer […]
If you tap a button in the Substack app, you can now see how much of a newsletter was written by AI. The detector is made by Pangram, and Substack CEO Chris Best said, “When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the […]
The next time you get a political text from a “Sarah” or a “John,” there may be no human on the other end. TIME and The Wall Street Journal reported last week on the multimillion-dollar campaign to rescue Israel’s reputation in the United States, built on AI-powered texting and a network of pro-Israel websites designed […]
The New York Times went looking for voters who let AI help pick their candidates, and found them. Mia Taylor, staring down a Los Angeles County ballot with more dread than enthusiasm, photographed it and asked Claude, “So, who do I vote for here?” The model refused to just name a winner. She asked it […]
A U.S. Senate candidate got caught looking suspiciously swole in a birthday photo. Turns out, his consultant edited it with AI. Instead of issuing a denial, his team leaned in and posted their own AI parody video. A thousand miles away, another Senate campaign got hit with an AI-assisted attack ad featuring the candidate. That […]
AI-generated fan content is disrupting the LA mayoral election. By now, you’ve seen the AI-generated shorts about Spencer Pratt: Pratt as Batman in a burning Los Angeles, Karen Bass as the Joker at a Versailles banquet and Newsom as the Star Wars Emperor. There have been more than 23 videos in the last three weeks, […]
AI video passed the visual Turing test sometime in 2025. In its State of Generative Media Volume 1, fal.ai documented 985 new model releases last year, with major generative AI breakthroughs arriving every four to six weeks. Google’s Nano Banana Pro 2 enabled me to transform a screenshot from an AI-generated video into the style […]
A network of 150 accounts hijacked keywords around Keir Starmer during the UK election, flooding social platforms with AI-generated videos until they’d racked up billions of views. The Guardian documented the operation this week: coordinated timing, repetitive messaging, volume designed to trigger algorithmic amplification before platforms could respond. Narrative dominance has become an ignition problem. […]
Every campaign strategist knows dialogue beats broadcast. Door-knocking outperforms TV ads. Personal relationships built through conversations change minds better than mass messaging. Yet the constraint was always scale—you can’t have meaningful back-and-forth with millions of voters. Research published this week in Nature and Science shows AI chatbots replicate dialogue’s persuasive power at industrial scale. Conversational […]