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Category: AI

BuzzFeed and the AI Buzz Kill Coming Soon?

BuzzFeed and the AI Buzz Kill Coming Soon?

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Here’s a cautionary tale for you.

Before Mark Zuckerberg became the darling of the age of social, there was young (inexperienced) BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, the Sam Altman of his day. When BuzzFeed launched two decades ago, it was the darling of the digital publishing world, “building its audience through listicles before expanding into a newsroom to challenge stalwarts like the New York Times,” noted MSN. Peretti was the genius who, as MarketWatch put it, “had seemingly cracked the code for social-media virality, and would soon become one of the first digital-media startups to achieve unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion.”

“Fast forward to 2026 and, for many, the result couldn’t have turned out worse. Gawker was forced to shut down under the weight of lawsuits, Vice Media filed for bankruptcy and is a shadow of itself, and BuzzFeed now warns it could go out of business entirely this year.” Read More...

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

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Image by NVD from Pixabay

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that software is eating the world, and that something big is happening, thanks to Matt Shumer’s piece on the subject, which is  a must-read. Make no mistake about it, AI is here to stay, and it’s no longer a nice-to-have in your professional toolkit. Equally importantly, it’s critical to update it regularly, given the exponential rate at which it’s improving. Also, it’s important to be specific in your requests when utilizing it: It’s up to the user to use the AI and not vice versa.

“Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic…has a thought experiment. Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

“Amodei says the answer is obvious: “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” Read More...

Limbic Capitalism and the Age of AI

Limbic Capitalism and the Age of AI

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Image by Mircea Iancu from Pixabay

With AI advancing at breakneck speeds – 11% of the global population are using it – the real question is: is it fast approaching the point where we’re crossing the Rubicon and reaching the point of no return? Let’s be honest, we live in an age of limbic capitalism,  greatly accelerated by the Age of Social, and now AI. Limbic capitalism, according to danieldashnawcouplestherapy.com “refers to a system where businesses exploit human psychology, particularly the limbic system, to encourage excessive consumption and addiction. This concept highlights how modern capitalism increasingly targets emotional and psychological aspects of human behavior to maximize consumer engagement and spending. This practice involves more than just creating addictive products; it involves engineering environments, behaviors, and economies that trap both consumers and employees in cycles of dependence and harm.” And isn’t this the apotheosis of AI, especially when it comes to  LLMs?

Consider: says Futurism, “People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners. Case in point, new research published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans reveals the startling depths some users are plumbing in their relationships with AI chatbots.

“The level of romantic dedication people showed to their bots was startling, to say the least. Many participants told the researchers they were in love with their chatbot, which often involved roleplaying marriage, sex, homeownership, and even pregnancies. Read More...

AI and the True Devil in the Details

AI and the True Devil in the Details

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“Walmart CEO Doug McMillon says the AI wave is here and will change every job,” Morning Brew reported and thanks, but now tell us something we didn’t know. “The world’s largest retailer currently employs about 2.1 million workers globally, and it plans to maintain that head count for the next three years, while still growing revenue. McMillon told the Associated Press it’s hard to say how it will all play out, but corporate jobs will likely get hit first, and roles dealing directly with customers will change more gradually. A recent survey from BetterUp and Stanford found that 40% of US workers reported receiving AI-generated “workslop” over the past month, which can require extra human work to fix.

Peter Theil had a lot to say about AI lately, too, when he was asked to “comment on theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist,” according to a description provided by ActS 17 Collective, the nonprofit sponsoring an off-the-record series at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco,” said Inc.

ACTS 17, is an acronym for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Read More...

Is ROMO the New FOMO?

Is ROMO the New FOMO?

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Photo by Jacqueline Munguía on Unsplash

Considering all the funding that has gone almost blindly – and we’re being generous here – to startups where the product  and pitch deck are centered around AI, we’ve come to the conclusion that, at least in investors’ minds, AI is an acronym for ‘All In.’

AI Startups Are Failing at Alarming Rates: Why 90% of AI Ventures Die Within Their First Year, wrote VDWayne on Medium, and of course for the usual reason: no product/market fit, lack of market demand, and a new one, for those who still believe that AI is a do-all and end- all: overestimation of AI capabilities.

Another good read for founders and investors still chomping at the bit to cast their lot into the AI FOMO fever: I Analyzed 100 AI Startups That Failed in 2024 — Here’s What No One Tells You and noted Jeremy Merrell Williams in his piece, “2024 pulled the mask off the AI game. The hype was loud, the VC checks were fat, but the fall-off? Brutal. We’re talking 254 venture-backed startups filing for bankruptcy in just the first quarter. That’s a 60% jump from 2023 and over 7x the rate in 2019. And AI startups? They went down twice as fast as regular tech. Read More...

The Human Side of the AI Discussion

The Human Side of the AI Discussion

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Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

At this point, we all know that AI is not a panacea, and while it is a great tool, we wonder if it should or even could take over every job on the planet, as is so widely reported.

Are humans truly categorically replaceable?

We’re told, for example, that AIs are a better predictor of medical conditions than are doctors, but as Mercola reminds us in his piece on How Medical Superintelligence Is Revolutionizing the Future of Healthcare, “AI models tend to reflect the positions of dominant institutions like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or World Health Organization (WHO). Be aware that they may emphasize conventional narratives regardless of evidence quality.” In the Covid era, Ivermectin was often demonized and referred to as a ‘horse de-wormer,’ which is how its started life. Now the medication is being effectively used to treat certain cancers and is part of the “WHO Model List of Essential Medicines.” Also keep in mind that while doctors are using AI to aid in their diagnoses, the results are only as good as the questions being asked and how they’re posed.  Are physicians receiving training in effectively using LLMs? Read More...

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

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Photo by Patrick Weissenberger on Unsplash

We have a place outside of the city, with fruit trees and a blueberry bush, which we purchased years ago, at the end of the season, when they were basically dead. We have a green thumb, so we went for it, and nursed it back to life. Our bush is now flourishing. The fruit come ripe in July, one by one, then all at once when it hits peak season. It’s behind a fence to protect it from the animals, but birds are a different story. Try as you might, birds always find a way to get to the fruit, and we do our best to scatter them.

We needed to go into the city for a few days for meetings, just as the blueberries were beginning to hit their prime. We expected that the birds would have a field day in our absence, but we were looking forward to enjoying at least a few berries.

We were wrong: the ripe berries had been picked clean. Read More...

Did Video Just Kill the Radio Star – Again?

Did Video Just Kill the Radio Star – Again?

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Image by Pikurā from Pixabay

Ok, the proverbial radio star, this time around. When the once iconic MTV first launch, the first video the network aired was the Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star.

And it did. That was then and this is now, and as we often warn, no one stays on top forever. Now we’re witnessing the demise of cable in favor of streaming services et al, and where is this leading?

“There was a time, not long ago, when Americans — regardless of region, class, or politics — shared a common cultural foundation,” said The American Spectator in this must-read: Gen Z Isn’t Just Online — They’re Living in Parallel Realities. “From the Saturday morning cartoons children watched to the nightly news programs adults relied on, mainstream culture was both a mirror and a glue: it reflected our values while keeping us tethered to the same national experience. That era is over. Read More...

AI and the Long Con

AI and the Long Con

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Image by Roland Steinmann from Pixabay

If you believe the hype, AIs are going to make humans obsolete in less than half a decade. Tick, tick, tick.

Or so they say.

If you scan the articles on LinkedIn these days, you might have noticed that most of them have been run through the LLM mill and are frankly crap, bereft of real-world context, for the most part, and lacking the depth and passion that only carbon-based beings can provide. Read More...

Does AI Have an Agenda?

Does AI Have an Agenda?

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

It certainly seems to, although it is a technology created by humans.* But given, say, Meta’s manipulation of people’s emotions that was revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (and which we reported on), the proverbial men behind the curtain do appear to have one, and the question is, given the past behavior of the tech bros, will AI be used for good instead of evil during this next iteration of tech?

Ah, it’s that old “Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It” George Santayana thing again and if there’s one thing we cannot shrink from doing, it’s connecting dots.

First up, “A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company’s Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court,” TechCrunch reported. Read More...