An AI hate wave is here
Angry Mom Defeats Entire AI Data Center; California governor signs order to protect workers from AI job loss; Using AI in John Lennon Documentary; Students at multiple universities torched tone-deaf commencement speakers; and much more…
News from Futurism
Finance Bros Tremble in Fear That They Could Be Replaced by AI Too
You’re not safe either.
May 22, 2026
On Monday, CEO of JPMorgan Jamie Dimon said that the multinational lender would likely hire less traditional bankers in the future, and instead favor bringing in more AI specialists. Out with the pencil pushers, and in with the prompters.
“I think it will reduce our jobs down the road,” Dimon said in a Bloomberg Television interview during the bank’s China Summit.
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News from The Decoder
California governor signs first US executive order to protect workers from AI job loss
May 22, 2026
California’s governor just signed the first executive order by a US governor aimed at protecting workers from AI-driven job loss.
State agencies will work with researchers, unions, and the AI industry to develop new labor market strategies. The specifics: subsidies for companies that keep workers instead of replacing them with AI, expanded retraining programs focused on office workers, and a review of “universal basic capital” – essentially giving all citizens stakes in stocks or funds.
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News from Vanity Fair
Steven Soderbergh Defends Using AI in John Lennon Documentary: “I’m a Believer in Exploration”
His new film, John Lennon: The Last Interview, uses archival photos and AI-generated videos as visuals to go along with a revealing radio interview that Lennon and Yoko Ono did on the day of his death.
May 21, 2026
Steven Soderbergh first came to the Cannes Film Festival in 1989 with his debut narrative feature, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. At 26 years old, he became the youngest solo director to win the Palme d’Or. “How little we expected,” he says. “We slipped into the competition because of another film dropping out, so it all just felt like pure upside.”
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News from Rolling Stone
Young People Can’t Stop Using AI — But that Doesn’t Mean They Like It
Students at multiple universities torched tone-deaf commencement speakers who tried to tout the benefits of AI
May 21, 2026
Students today exist in a world in which machine-learning tools like ChatGPT have completely upset higher education. They’re using AI to write papers that professors are using AI to grade. Robot-assisted cheating has killed Princeton University’s centuries-old honor code. Teens now entering college are already hardened by years of outsourcing their education to a machine.
This graduation season, multiple universities have trotted out utterly tone-deaf big-tech boosters in order to inspire a generation of students about to enter one of the most dismal job markets in recent history.
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News from The Deep View
Can Spotify launch AI and hold onto artists?
May 21, 2026
On Thursday, the company announced new AI initiatives aimed at putting generative tools in the hands of its users. It follows the company taking a mixed stance on AI on its platform, rallying against AI-generated slop and verifying real creators while also using the tech in features such as playlist generation and recommendations
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News from The Nation
Crypto and AI-Funded Super PACs Are Metastasizing
They’ve amassed more than $322 million in 2026—with much more to come.
May 21, 2026
Super PACs funded by the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries have amassed more than $321 million in the 2026 cycle, according to a review of Federal Election Commission filings, as they spend millions to knock out candidates they deem unsupportive of industry-favored regulation.
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News fromTechCrunch
Trump delays AI security executive order, saying language ‘could have been a blocker’
May 21, 2026
President Donald Trump has delayed signing an executive order that would allow the government to evaluate AI models before they’re released.
Trump claimed he is not happy with the language of the order: “I didn’t like certain aspects of it,” he told the White House press pool.” … The unofficial reason: Not enough tech CEOs could make it to Washington, D.C. on short notice, according to several reports. And what’s an executive order signing without a photo op?
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News from Futurism
Marc Andreessen Sputters Incomprehensibly at Question About How AI Will Actually Benefit Humankind
“I mean, look, so it, it is, alright — I mean, alright I’m gonna give you the deepest of all pitches, I’m gonna give you the, the — okay.”
May 22, 2026
…on a recent podcast appearance with Joe Rogan flagged by the Verge, the billionaire AI evangelist Marc Andreessen — who’s invested billions into AI development through his venture capital firm — struggled when asked to articulate AI’s benefits.
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News from Futureism
Fake OpenAI Ads Appear on Subway: “Yes, We Built a Machine That Tells Teenagers to Kill Themselves… But It Might Also Help Them With Their Homework”
May 21, 2026
An artist in London plastered fake OpenAI ads inside city subway cars calling attention to ChatGPT’s close ties to a series of youth suicides.
The artist Darren Cullen, a Banksy-like figure who has conducted many similar “subvertising” campaigns before, posted photos of the faux advertisements on X-formerly-Twitter. The fake ads reflect OpenAI’s minimal black-and-white style, and are affixed with OpenAI’s logo next to text reading “ChatGPT”
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News from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Your AI chatbot is polluting my backyard
May 21, 2026
…Sprawling across the landscape [of Northern Virginia] are hundreds of boxy, windowless buildings handling roughly two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic.
Nicknamed “Data Center Alley,” this region hosts the densest concentration of data centers anywhere on Earth, with projections suggesting that as many as 1,000 facilities could occupy nearly 20,000 acres of land in Northern Virginia and nearby parts of Maryland by the 2030s.
Although data centers underpin the global digital economy, their impacts are highly localized. Disparate health outcomes from air pollution, a drying Potomac, and intense noise pollution are among the many consequences…
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News from Commonplace
Work Will Always Matter
May 20, 2026
… Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei famously predicted in 2025 that AI would eliminate “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs—and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years,” a prospect Axios described as a “white-collar bloodbath.” Even blue collar work may prove no refuge. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested, also in 2025, that we would know AI was truly ubiquitous “when, literally, humanoid robots are wandering around, which is not five years away. This is not a five-years-away problem, this is a few-years-away problem.”
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News from Reuters
The AI bots are coming and the young are booing, not applauding
May 19, 2026
The AI revolution is here and the boos are getting louder….
In a speech this week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduating University of Arizona students that the impact of AI would be “larger, faster, and more consequential” than anything before. “It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have,” he said as boos rang out even as he addressed anxieties about job security and an uncertain future.
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News from Axios
An AI hate wave is here
May 17, 2026
If AI were a candidate for political office, it would be losing in a landslide.
Why it matters: The AI hype cycle would have you believe the technology is inevitable. But AI backlash is growing, as people worry it will steal their jobs, jack up electricity rates and further enrich the wealthy, all while hurting the environment.
State of play: A commencement address went viral this month after Florida real estate executive Gloria Caulfield said “artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution,” sparking a chorus of boos from the crowd.
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News from AP
Steven Soderbergh used AI in a documentary about John Lennon. And he wants to talk about it
May 17, 2026
The day John Lennon was shot, on Dec. 8, 1980, he and Yoko Ono gave an interview to a San Francisco radio crew from their home in New York’s Dakota Apartments. … Lennon and Ono were thrillingly open. That day, Annie Leibovitz also shot the famous portrait of a clothes-less Lennon wrapped around Ono…. In “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” Steven Soderbergh turns those surviving tapes into a documentary that does as much to demystify Lennon and Ono as “Get Back” did to the Beatles. The film debuted Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival …
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News from Futurism
Angry Mom Defeats Entire AI Data Center
“When you speak about wanting changes for cleaner air, and you have a child who’s impacted, it hits differently.”
May 11, 2026
Black first got her start organizing when two of her four children were diagnosed with asthma related to environmental factors and multiple sclerosis, People reported. After learning about the a data center proposal on a plot of land 12 miles away from her home, she was horrified. “When you speak about wanting changes for cleaner air, and you have a child who’s impacted, it hits differently,” she told the magazine. “It’s gut-wrenching, and knowing too that these data centers primarily are using fossil fuels.
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News from TechCrunch
OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance, will let you connect bank accounts
May 15, 2026
OpenAI has partnered with the financial connection service Plaid to manage the account connections. Users can connect to over 12,000 financial institutions, including Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, American Express, and Capital One. Once users connect these accounts, they will see a dashboard of their portfolio performance, spending, subscriptions, and upcoming payments.
The new product comes just one month after OpenAI acquired the team behind personal finance startup Hiro…
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News from Engadget
Netflix wants to use generative AI to make animated shorts
May 14, 2026
Hollywood may have some conflicted feelings about the use of AI for content creation, but Netflix seems ready to jump in the deep end. According to The Verge, the streaming service has launched a new studio called INKubator that will specialize in creating generative AI content. Based on the current job listings for the team, it appears this studio will be creating short-form animated content that centers gen-AI workflows and tools.
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News from the Wall Street Journal
How a Job at OpenAI Became the Greatest Lottery Ticket of the AI Boom
Employees waited two years to sell their shares. Then, the company let them unload $30 million.
May 10, 2026
OpenAI allowed employees to sell up to $30 million worth of shares each in a recent financing, making them some of the earliest financial winners of the artificial-intelligence boom.
Last October, more than 600 current and former employees sold their shares in a single stroke, collectively making $6.6 billion. For roughly 75 of them, that meant walking away with the full $30 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
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News from Futurism
Researchers Alarmed by AI That Can Self-Replicate Into Another Machine. “We’re rapidly approaching the point where no one would be able to shut down a rogue AI.”
May 10, 2026
A new report from Palisade Research has found that AI models can self-replicate by copying themselves onto other machines, without any help from human co-conspirators.
“We’re rapidly approaching the point where no one would be able to shut down a rogue AI, because it would be able to self-exfiltrate its weights and copy itself to thousands of computers around the world,” Jeffrey Ladish, the director Berkeley-based AI safety group, told The Guardian.
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News from Euronews
Elon Musk faces criminal probe in France as prosecutors escalate X’s AI Investigation
May 8, 2026
French prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk and his social platform X for child sexual abuse images on the platform, deepfakes, disinformation and complicity in denying crimes against humanity by the platform’s artificial intelligence system, Grok…. French authorities raided the X Paris offices in February, which Musk said was a “political attack”.
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News from Futurism
…Amazon Data Center Shuts Down Due to High Temperatures. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so dark.
May 8, 2026
On Thursday [May 7, 2026] Amazon Web Services said that one of its major data centers in north Virginia was overheating so much that it had to be shut down.
According to The Next Web, AWS engineers were forced to throttle their services and then reroute customer traffic to other facilities, affecting customers like the crypto platform Coinbase, which experienced an “extended outage of core trading services.”
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What AI Body Scans Can (and Cannot) Tell You.
May 7, 2026
What I’m focusing on here is all the false advertising for consumers like me, people naturally drawn to the shiniest tools to understand every little thing about their bodies…. I have to wonder about the gap between what these tools promise and what they actually deliver. …A body composition scan cannot tell you about your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, thyroid function, cortisol levels, or dozens of other physiological variables that determine your actual metabolic health. Two people can have identical DEXA results (same muscle mass, same body fat, same visceral fat reading), but one can have pre-diabetes while the other doesn’t….snake oil will always thrive in the wellness industry. These days, every snake oil salesman under the sun knows to slap on the term “AI-powered”….
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