Some actual numbers!

https://www.bespacific.com/these-5-charts-show-how-chatgpt-is-flooding-our-lives/

These 5 charts show how ChatGPT is flooding our lives

Washington Post [no paywall ] – “Self-filed lawsuits. New books. Scientific papers. See the data behind the surge. The impact of ChatGPT on society can be summed up with a single word: more. Since OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool debuted in late 2022, anyone can rapidly churn out reams of text resembling academic papers, legal documents, poems and computer programs. And people are doing exactly that. A growing body of evidence suggests books, self-filed lawsuits and other kinds of written documents are proliferating at breakneck speed. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) Our world is built on an assumption that effort signals value — that a book, a lawsuit or a scientific paper carries weight partly because a human labored to create it. AI is eroding that relationship, shifting a new burden onto the people forced to sift through the deluge. Here are five ways ChatGPT has flooded our lives…”

What is persuasive?

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/is-ai-mastering-the-art-of-persuasion#!

Is AI Mastering the Art of Persuasion?

Kellogg’s Jake Teeny and his colleague developed a framework to help us better understand how generative AI is being used to personalize messages to people’s personalities, preferences, and needs. The framework establishes four categories for research on the topic: the different ways generative AI can be used to gather personal information, the different types of personal information gathered, strategies for personalizing messages based on this information, and the ways these messages are delivered.

The world as it is…

https://thenextweb.com/news/chatbots-midterms-2026-news-accuracy-information-integrity

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok are not ready to brief American voters

A new generation of voters will ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok how to vote, where the polling station is, and who is telling the truth. The published research is consistent: the models cannot reliably answer those questions. The election will arrive anyway.

I missed predicting the block but the lawsuit was inevitable.

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/19/nx-s1-5821265/minnesota-ban-prediction-markets

Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation's first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state, and in response, the Trump administration has sued, teeing up a legal battle over the most far-reaching crackdown on popular services like Kalshi and Polymarket.

It comes as states confront a growing standoff with the Trump administration over how to regulate the industry, which allows people to bet on virtually anything.

The new state law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, which it defines as a system that lets consumers place a wager on a future outcome, like sports, elections, live entertainment, someone's word choice and world affairs.

Loss of direction or doubt that direction will result in action?

https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-trump-iran-things-to-know-today-c6e3e276

Stock Markets Now Shrug at Trump’s Iran Rhetoric. That’s a Big Worry.

Negotiations and threats, threats and negotiations. Markets are getting tired of the apparent lack of progress around the U.S.-Iran peace talks and that’s creating a risk of an eventual sharp jump in oil prices, which would roil bond and stock markets.

… After a period when oil prices—and therefore other assets—would respond to Trump’s every utterance, now the reaction is largely a shrug. The risks of a complete loss of faith in a peaceful resolution are rising.

(Related)

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/no-deal-no-exit-how-us-iran-standoff-risks-fresh-conflict-2026-05-18/

No deal, no exit: How US-Iran standoff risks fresh conflict

… Calls for a fresh strike are growing louder in the U.S. ‌and Israel, with some officials arguing that increased pressure could weaken Tehran's leverage and force Iran back to the negotiating table.

"There is one major problem with this theory: We have already tested it, repeatedly, and Iran did not capitulate," said Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher on Iran at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies and former head of the Iran branch in Israeli Defense Intelligence.

News.

https://fpf.org/blog/colorado-revises-its-ai-act-what-changed-and-why/

Colorado Revises Its AI Act: What Changed and Why

On May 15, Governor Polis signed SB 189, revising the Colorado AI Act (CAIA) after two years of intense negotiations and national debate over the original 2024 law’s approach to AI regulation. The revised law, the Colorado ADM Act (CADMA), reflects a fundamental shift in approach: shifting from an algorithmic discrimination framework to a transparency-focused one, as well as narrowing the scope of covered AI systems, streamlining disclosures and consumer rights, and replacing governance requirements with liability allocation under existing anti-discrimination laws. 

This post examines the key changes between CAIA and CADMA, explores the context that drove these revisions, and analyzes their practical implications. Side-by-side legislative comparison chart below.

Perhaps it’s not the Terminator we should worry about. (“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”)

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-the-whole-world-stopped-having

The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think

Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?

This was the subject of last week’s Plain English episode and a new blockbuster report from the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch. In fact it feels like just about everybody has been taking a crack at this question recently.

Some blame it on technology. One week ago, my feed was flooded with a viral video of Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, speaking about the sterilizing effects of modern technology. Among his friends, “no one’s having kids,” said Leahy, who was 30 at the time. “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”

There is hope… (What if judges banned lawyers for a year if they did the same?)

https://thenextweb.com/news/arxiv-ai-slop-ban-researchers-preprint

ArXiv will ban researchers for a year if they submit papers they did not bother to read

ArXiv will ban researchers for one year if they submit papers with obvious signs of unchecked AI generation, such as hallucinated references or leftover chatbot instructions. The policy, announced by computer science section chair Thomas Dietterich, is the first formal penalty by a major preprint platform for AI-generated slop.

Do tariffs apply?

https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/by62suvkzg#google_vignette

Trump’s gold-plated T1 smartphone finally ships, and sparks immediate backlash

After nearly a year of delays, silence and revised terms, Trump Mobile has begun shipping its T1 phones, but analysts say the gold-colored device is little more than a cheap Chinese smartphone rebranded for MAGA consumers

Benefit or obligation?

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-seals-deal-malta-give-all-maltese-access-chatgpt-plus-2026-05-16/

OpenAI seals deal in Malta to give all Maltese access to ChatGPT Plus

U.S. artificial intelligence company OpenAI said on Saturday it had signed a deal ‌with the government of Malta to give all residents access to its ChatGPT Plus service for one year after they follow a course on how to use AI.

• The programme will start in May and is expected to scale up as more Maltese residents complete the course, which will be free.

• It will also be open ‌to Maltese citizens living abroad.

• "We are turning an unfamiliar concept into practical assistance for our families, students, and workers," Maltese Economy Minister Silvio Schembri was quoted as saying in an OpenAI statement.

AI thinks it has all the information it needs.

https://venturebeat.com/technology/the-enterprise-risk-nobody-is-modeling-ai-is-replacing-the-very-experts-it-needs-to-learn-from

The enterprise risk nobody is modeling: AI is replacing the very experts it needs to learn from

For AI systems to keep improving in knowledge work, they need either a reliable mechanism for autonomous self-improvement or human evaluators capable of catching errors and generating high-quality feedback. The industry has invested enormously in the first. It's giving almost no thought to what's happening to the second.

I’d argue that we need to treat the human evaluation problem with just as much rigor and investment as we put into building the model capabilities themselves. New grad hiring at major tech companies has dropped by half since 2019. Document review, first-pass research, data cleaning, code review: Models handle these now. The economists tracking this call it displacement. The companies doing it call it efficiency. Neither are focusing on the future problem.

Bias, thy name is human…

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/real-monet-ai-chaos

Devious Prankster Posts Real Monet Painting, Tells People It’s AI-Generated, and Watches the Chaos Unfold

A poster wrought some moderate havoc this week when they shared a cropped image of a real Monet painting while claiming it was an AI fake, unleashing a flood of ill-informed reactions and muddled discourse. So, you know, it was just another day online.

… Commenters were quick to jump in to explain why, in their view, the alleged AI image was worse than the real work of the French impressionist master. According to one, the image was an “incoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens.” Another lamented that there was no “coherent composition,” while someone else shared that the painting seemed “busy, artificial, nature in turmoil, polluted.” Another commenter said that the allegedly AI-generated image seemed as if it was “trying too hard” to resemble Monet’s later paintings, which he created when he was close to blindness. Others shared that the image was “obvious” AI slop.

… But some of the most interesting responses came from actual experts, who shared deeply informed analyses about why, based on the image alone, the painting appeared to them to be the real deal.

There may be hope!

https://globalvoices.org/2026/05/15/why-were-russian-disinformation-government-propaganda-and-ai-generated-campaigning-ineffective-in-hungarian-elections-2026/

Why were Russian disinformation, government propaganda and AI-generated campaigning ineffective in Hungarian elections 2026?

This article by Teczár Szilárd first appeared in Hungarian media observatory Lakmusz on May 5, 2026. In it, Director of Mérték Media Monitor Ágnes Urbán, and Director of Political Capital Péter Krekó, who is also an associate professor at ELTE PPK, were interviewed to understand why government propaganda and state-sponsored disinformation did not work in the country’s April 2026 elections. Fidesz, the party led by Viktor Orbán, who had been in power for 16 years, was crushed by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, which received a constitutional majority in parliament. An edited version of the interview is being republished on Global Voices with permission.

With the odds of success so low, why continue?

https://www.bespacific.com/explore-the-data-10000-rulings-against-trump-in-ice-cases/

Explore the data: 10,000 rulings against Trump in ICE cases

Politico: “Under President Donald Trump, ICE is locking up immigrants at an unprecedented scale, holding tens of thousands of people — many with no criminal records and deep roots in the U.S. — in detention facilities to await the outcome of deportation proceedings. POLITICO is tracking the surge in litigation triggered by the administration’s novel policy that began in July, and releasing our database, below, of the 11,000-plus cases in which federal district courts reached a ruling on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention practices. More than 10,000 of those were rulings against the administration, handed down by judges appointed by president. POLITICO compiled this database by canvassing public court records for cases in which detainees sued Department of Homeland Security leaders — Markwayne Mullin or his predecessor, Kristi Noem — or Trump. We also identified other defendants, often including local ICE supervisors or wardens of detention facilities. While we have made every effort to be comprehensive, there is no uniform system for identifying every detention-related case, and there may be a small number of rulings we didn’t find. Our journalists manually compiled, analyzed and categorized these records. Using a large language model, POLITICO extracted the case name, judge, date and district from each opinion. AI was not used in assessing the outcome or reasoning of each case. Most of these rulings pertain to the Trump administration’s unprecedented legal argument that it can detain anyone present in the country who is eligible for deportation, without a chance for a hearing. Our analysis also includes: rulings that hinged on other due process violations, such as alleged violations of ICE’s internal regulations; prolonged detentions or extreme medical need (which we have classified as “due process”); rulings based on a Supreme Court case allowing people to seek release if they’re unlikely to actually be deported (“Zadvydas detention”); and some for which judges’ reasoning was unclear….”

Okay, someone is doing something about global warming…

https://www.makeuseof.com/fantastic-hulu-documentary-important-underrated-the-grab/

This fantastic Hulu documentary may be the most important movie no one has watched

The Grab begins with a former U.S. intelligence officer calmly telling us that, in his opinion, World War III isn't an unlikely prospect.

That's a pretty intense way to begin a documentary, but The Grab makes a good case that it's warranted. This 2022 film comes from Gabriela Cowperthwaite, best known for her 2013 doc Blackfish, about the consequences of keeping orca whales in captivity. The Grab swings quite a bit wider, arguing that various countries around the world are quietly preparing for massive resource collapses that could define what life is like for the next few decades on the planet Earth.