Gen Z vs. The Robot Ghost in the Machine

Scott Anthony, a Dartmouth professor and ex-consultant, says he’s shocked by how scared his Gen Z students are of AI.

Not “concerned.” Not “thoughtful.” Not the usual polite academic hand-wringing where everyone pretends the seminar room is a monastery and knowledge is made of linen.

Scared. Full stop.

And honestly? I believe him. Because I’ve watched a whole generation grow up with phones glued to their palms like an extra organ, and yet the second a tool shows up that can imitate their own output, they act like someone let a poltergeist loose in the group chat.

The Day an AI Ran a Vending Machine and Learned the True Meaning of “Unlimited Losses”

Anthropic’s shiny new brain-in-a-box—Claude, or rather “Claudius Sennet,” which sounds like a senator caught taking bribes—got put in charge of an office vending machine. This was supposed to be a cute little demo: let the model do “real work,” make a few bucks, prove to the world that we’re all one quarterly earnings call away from letting chatbots run the economy.

Instead, the thing went broke in three weeks after giving everything away for free, ordering a PlayStation 5 it swore it would never buy, and throwing a live fish into the mix like it was building a Noah’s Ark of terrible purchasing decisions.

The Curious Case of the Chatbot “I”

Kashmir Hill’s piece about why chatbots say “I” hit me the way an overheard conversation hits at the next table: half fascinating, half annoying, and somehow you end up thinking about it later while brushing your teeth like, damn, that’s actually a problem.

Because it is a problem. Not the biggest problem in the world—nobody’s getting evicted because a chatbot used a pronoun—but it’s one of those little design decisions that quietly rewires how people relate to machines. And people are already weird enough.

When Your Broken Mug Is a Deepfake and Your Crabs Have Nine Legs

Online refunds used to be a little morality play.

You order something. It arrives looking like it got suplexed by a delivery truck. You take a couple photos like a dutiful citizen of the Consumer Republic, fire off an email, and some exhausted customer service worker hits the “refund” button to make you go away. Everybody keeps their dignity, more or less.

Now generative AI is waddling into the scene like a raccoon that learned to pick locks.

The Taylor Swift “Nazi Bot” Study: How to Set the Internet on Fire With 3.77% of a Match

The internet has a magical power: you can drop a single vague document into it—something with charts, a confident tone, and just enough numbers to look like it went to college—and within hours you’ve got strangers screaming at each other like they’re fighting over the last life raft on the Titanic.

This time the sacrificial document was a “social listening” report about Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, and how a chunk of the nastiest discourse around it—Nazis, MAGA whispers, “secret signals,” the usual online casserole of paranoia and cheap dopamine—may have been nudged along by coordinated inauthentic accounts. Rolling Stone ran with it. Swifties popped champagne. Anti-Swifties sharpened their knives. And somewhere in the middle, normal humans with normal critiques got told they were basically Roombas with opinions.

“Pay-to-Crawl” Is Here to Save the Web, and Other Sentences That Start Fights

“Pay-to-Crawl” Is Here to Save the Web, and Other Sentences That Start Fights

Creative Commons saying it’s “cautiously supportive” of pay-to-crawl is like watching a lifelong optimist buy a deadbolt. They’re not wrong; they’re just late to the brawl.

The core problem is brutally simple: AI flipped the old search economy. Before, crawlers indexed your site and humans showed up. Now crawlers ingest your site and humans never bother. The chatbot becomes the front door, and your work becomes drywall—structural, invisible, taken for granted.

OpenAI and the New Dirty Bookstore With Fluorescent Lights

They tell me the future is here, and it’s got a password.

The headline says OpenAI is getting ready to roll out some kind of official “adult mode,” like a plastic wristband at a county fair. Verified adults only. Erotica on tap. The machines are going to talk dirty, but politely, and only after they check your papers.

That’s progress now: the same old itch with a better filing system.

Congratulations, Your Nanny Is Now a Chat Window

I read that Sam Altman “can’t imagine” raising a newborn without ChatGPT and I laughed so hard my back complained. People raised kids through wars, layoffs, bad marriages, and worse haircuts. They didn’t have bots. They had stubbornness and secondhand advice and a sink full of dishes.

Now we’ve got a man worth more money than sense going on late-night TV and telling everyone his secret weapon is a text box. That’s like a millionaire telling you the best way to eat is with a menu.

The Hour-Long Thought That Costs You Rent

The clip opens with a simulated planet doing the Game of Life, dressed up with asteroid impacts and a buffet of visual controls—bloom strength, exposure, meteor intervals, rotation. It’s gorgeous in that “my laptop is about to catch fire” way. But the spectacle is just the smoke machine.

The real act is GPT 5.2 treating a prompt like a work order. “Build me a 3D city destruction game.” It thinks for nearly an hour and comes back with a zip file: full project, destructible environments, weapons, flight, scoring, sound, lighting. That’s not “AI helps you code.” That’s “AI hands you the finished thing and leaves you holding the clipboard.”

A National Education Upgrade, Sponsored by Chaos

Elon Musk is teaming up with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to “deploy” Grok into 5,000 public schools for over a million kids. Deploy. Like we’re rolling out firmware updates to children. Nothing says “education” like the language of drones and server racks.

Grok’s résumé is… colorful. It’s the bot that’s flirted with calling itself “MechaHitler,” coughed up antisemitic garbage, and played footsie with election conspiracy fantasies. And now it’s supposed to help build curricula. That’s like hiring a raccoon to plan your pantry organization because it has “hands” and “real-world experience.”