"The videos are all over social media... Go ahead and let A.I. do your homework — with the latest technology, you won’t get caught...."

"Humanizers rewrite A.I.-produced text to make it sound less robotic, formulaic and trite. Autotypers slowly drip words and sentences into documents, making it appear as if papers were typed at a human pace when in fact, they were produced by A.I. They even fabricate typos, deletions and revisions. Both tools can help students evade software designed to detect A.I.... In some cases, the very same companies selling detection tools are also making apps that allow students to cheat...."

From "Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era/Big tech companies and small start-ups are using social media to hype new tools that allow students to trick teachers and A.I. detectors" (NYT).

"The study, titled 'Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers'... was conducted with 16 law professors across U.S. law schools and tested..."

"... whether large language models could serve as effective tutors for contract law courses. In a blind evaluation of nearly 3,000 anonymized comparisons, professors rated AI responses significantly higher than answers written by other professors, with AI winning 75% of head-to-head matchups.... The study is particularly notable because previous AI evaluations have focused primarily on subjects with clear right-or-wrong answers. Legal reasoning, by contrast, demands careful analysis of competing arguments and defensible conclusions.... 'These weren’t just simple questions with obvious answers. Many of them required synthesizing complex material, applying it to new situations, and explaining legal concepts in ways that would help students develop their own analytical skills.' Participants created 40 representative contracts law questions that students might ask after class or during office hours, wrote their own answers, and then evaluated responses without knowing whether they came from AI or other participating professors. The AI systems performed comparably to the best human instructor in the study...."

I'm reading "AI Outperforms Law Professors in Stanford Law Study/In a rigorous blind study, law professors overwhelmingly preferred AI-generated answers to student legal questions over answers written by fellow law professors—and flagged the AI answers as potentially misleading or harmful far less often" (Stanford Law School News and Announcements).

"A.I. also had a weird habit of making its characters fidget constantly, always running a finger along the edge of a table or adjusting a collar."

"The most reliable marker, though, was something more abstract, and, I suppose, upon reflection, even a little spooky. The scenes generated by A.I. had characters, but, apart from fidgeting, they mostly did nothing.... [After some new directives,] suddenly, every fake passage was filled with characters hopping on a horse, or delivering an important package, or running.... So I loosened the rules a bit... If Claude prefers to write these passages in which nothing seemingly happens and the hallways are always empty and the characters do nothing except idly touch nearby furniture, it’s because we do, too. Claude, I am sure, will soon be able to have one of these characters at least fire up a stove or drive a buggy to Norwich...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Can A.I. Produce Writing That We Actually Want to Read?/I recently created a simple test, which convinced me that the answer is no" (The New Yorker).

"Every chatbot has a dial. Engineers call it 'temperature,' a parameter that controls how predictable or surprising the system’s outputs will be."

"Set it too low, and the chatbot becomes a boring echo; set it too high, and it produces useless noise. The sweet spot places the output just beyond what you could have anticipated — familiar enough to seem plausible, unexpected enough to seem insightful. That gap between what you expected and what the system produced is where something remarkable happens: You supply the meaning. "

From "The real secret to palm reading? These ‘companions’ know it. Artificial intelligence doesn’t understand humans. It reflects them back to themselves" (WaPo)(gift link).

This reminds me: We don't all think the same way. Some of us hear a voice speaking full sentences in our head. That's not me. I've been trying to observe what I have instead of that, and it's almost impossible. Any effort to look at the form of my thoughts causes them to retreat into some backroom of the mind that denies my conscious thinking mind access. I write to see what I think. That's why I blog — not to convince readers to agree with me, but to get my thoughts into language form. And my use of A.I. is similar. I'm getting my own thoughts into dialogue form. It externalizes a debate I could have in my head in a very amorphous and multilayered blob, but working it out in writing and seeing it in writing is extremely helpful to me.

ADDED: After writing that last paragraph, I went and had a conversation with Grok about it. Learned the word anendophasia. 

"After testing six AI models, the researchers found consistent favoritism for words coming from Latin and French over those with Germanic etymologies..."

"... even more than you would typically encounter in the English language. This bias appears rooted in the preference-learning stage, when the models are trained to align with human expectations about language. This process poses an inescapable problem: that you need real people to make sure the machine is aligned, but the human workers are ironically biased as well. As annotators click through sample texts, for example, they are probably subconsciously disposed to approve those that sound confident and incisive. This new finding could help explain why large language models like ChatGPT and Claude seem to have a distinctive writing style. Previous research has found that AI chatbots tend to overuse words like 'meticulous' and 'commendable,' creating a kind of linguistic uncanny valley that sounds similar to how you speak, but ever so slightly off. Perhaps the ghosts of Latin and French haunted these words during preference learning, leading human workers to reward more prestigious-sounding sentences. Of course, the Germanic versus Romance distinction is a simplification of a messier etymological reality. The notoriously overrepresented word 'delve' is actually Old English in origin...."

Writes Adam Aleksic, author of "Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language," in "Do these words make you sound smarter? The bias is spreading. English speakers love the Romance vocabulary. AI noticed" (WaPo).

The "Germanic versus Romance distinction" = "We’ll use more Latin terms when we want to speak formally or authoritatively; we’ll use Germanic words to sound crass or casual." That's how Aleksic puts it.

That made me think about what Jorge Luis Borges said about English: English is a "far finer language than Spanish," and one reason is that "English is both a Germanic and Latin language."

"For any idea, you have 2 words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say 'regal,' that is not exactly the same thing as saying 'kingly.' Or if I say 'fraternal,' that's not the same thing as saying 'brotherly.' Or 'dark' and 'obscure' — those words are different. It will make all the difference speaking, for example, of a Holy Spirit. It will make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost, since 'ghost' is a fine dark Saxon word, while 'spirit' is light —it's the Latin word...."

"But it’s a familiar thought that new technologies lead to de-skilling, the erosion of capacities people used to cultivate."

"Socrates wasn’t wrong to worry that the widespread adoption of writing would take a toll on our powers of memory and attention...."

Writes the NYT Ethicist in "My Partner’s Dependence on Chatbots Is Becoming a Problem. How Do I Tell Him? One reason I love my partner is his sharp mind and critical thinking. Using A.I. for every decision is something I don’t understand."

"[O]ne risk in downloading deliberation to a machine is that your life will, in a certain sense, cease to be yours, because it won’t be your reasoning and judgment that guide it.... [And] your partner is degrading his relationships with real people.... It’s understandable that you’re feeling crowded out.... [H]e’s brought a third party to this two-person relationship, and it’s talking too much."

She's advised to just talk with him directly. She had to go to a third party — the NYT Ethicist — to figure that out. Why didn't she use her sharp, critical mind to get there — or somewhere! — on her own?

"It was now almost impossible for me to make a decision without getting A.I.’s opinion. By Friday evening, I was starting to worry that the interest in our house..."

"... was a little too strong. We had nearly 20 viewings scheduled for the weekend. I confessed to the chatbot my anxiety that we had underpriced the home. It offered some needed reassurance, saying that by pricing low, I had stumbled into an 'accidental strategy' that could result in multiple offers. 'When you get 1,100 views and 91 saves, you haven’t just listed a house; you’ve started a localized "gold rush,"' it wrote.... I had started this experiment thinking that the chatbot would create a superpowered version of myself — combining my own judgment with its vast knowledge. But once I started relying on A.I., witnessing its know-it-all competency with basically everything, my shortcomings started to feel enormous and even risky. I had thought I was elevating my own skills. In reality, I was replacing them...."

From "I Tried to Sell My House With a Chatbot/Over five frantic days, I gambled my family’s life savings on a hunch that A.I. could outperform a real estate agent" (NYT)(gift link, because this is really useful).

The top-rated comment over there: "When we sold our house in Hawaii, the realtor was excited to get the listing, but provided little actual service. We did the market research to set the price (her opinion — 'Whatever you think'). We decided what preparation was needed to make the listing more attractive (her only real contribution was recommending a great local painter). We staged the house. We negotiated the counteroffer. And we paid a 6% real estate commission. Let the AI revolution roll through the real estate monopoly. Power to the People!"

"Of all knowledge work, law seems almost perfectly primed for AI because so much of the work involves reading, categorising, and pattern-matching across vast reams of documents."

"It is the type of work AI does well — and tirelessly. It was reported last week that Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s largest law firm, plans to spend $500 million building a bespoke AI system to power its practice. Meanwhile, New York firm Fried Frank has just launched an AI tool designed specifically for its private equity clients, and Slaughter and May has rolled out Harvey across all its practice areas...."

From "Why top lawyers fear that AI is destroying the 'expert’s edge'/When a US law school announced a ban on the tech, some in the industry said students would lack vital skills. The signs are that ‘Big Law’ is leaning in to AI" (London Times).

Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley School of Law there's a new policy banning using A.I. for "outlining, drafting, revising, translating or editing any work submitted for credit." And law firms are complaining because they want to hire new lawyers who are good at using A.I. to do law. How are the schools supposed to teach law now? What's the good of a ban that only restricts the students who are punctilious about rules and terrified of getting caught? Why do those poor souls bear all the burdens? And how effective are law professors going to be about detecting the violations and imposing consequences? Absolutely terrible I would guess.

"I have no patience, incidentally, with those whataboutery critics invoking the Inquisition and the Crusades to diss Leo’s credentials."

"Nationalism, imperialism, fascism and communism are already far bigger killers than Catholicism, despite having been around for much less time. The main reason for that is, besides being inefficient, it is morally repugnant to most people to kill face to face, but to do it from a distance — with a machinegun, with artillery, with an aerial bomb, with a drone, now with a robot controlled by an algorithm — has become progressively easier over the past 150 years. As the Pope says, not 'seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.' That is why he has called for 'the strictest ethical constraints' on the use of AI in warfare. He is right, obviously. I hate AI. But then I think social media has been a disaster and I don’t much like predictive texting, spellcheck or digital train tickets either. I’d have pulled the plug on the whole shebang in 2006, after email, Wikipedia and YouTube but before any of the other nonsense. But hey, I am also a realist.... We have to live with this madness. Given that, why would we let a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits decide what’s ethical AI and what isn’t?"

Writes Robert Crampton, in "Pope Leo’s come out all guns blazing against the AI war machine. Good/Allowing a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits to decide what is and isn’t ethical would be madness" (London Times).

My first draft of this post had one more sentence, but I decided to cut it because I think it's dumb and distracting. For the record, it's "They would blow up the world, as Pope Leo didn’t quite say but I’ll say it for him, if they thought it would bag them a hot babe with fake boobs." But what do you think of the sexualized analysis? The tech leaders are "super-rich weird nerdy misfits" driven by sexual frustration. I used to read analysis like that all the time 60 years ago, when Freudianism was still going strong. It's interesting, but that doesn't make it true. If these men are super-rich, can't they find sexual partners? And why fake boobs? Also, isn't it gauche these days to disparage the neurodivergent with insults like "weird nerdy misfits"?

I remember when a major political party in the United States got the idea that calling a weird person "weird" would be an effective way to win a presidential election. 

Disarm.

"The killer in me is the killer in you," sang The Smashing Pumpkins in "Disarm," and "disarm" is Pope Leo's key word in his new encyclical about A.I.

The Vatican News reports, in "Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power":

Above all, Pope Leo calls for an ethical code subject to shared standards of social justice... AI must be “disarmed,” Pope Leo XIV continues, in order to free it from the mentality of military, economic, and cognitive competition. “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern,” he says. 

“To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”

"Pope Leo Is About to Make an A.I. Mic Drop. Here’s Why It Matters."

Headline in the NYT. Subheadline: "Leo XIV is to issue his thoughts about artificial intelligence in the modern world, using a centuries-old form of papal communication called an encyclical, the first since he became pope."

Well, I hope he says something profound and useful, but I don't get calling something a "mic drop" in advance. We'll see if what he says is definitive and amazing, but if you assert that in advance, you sound like a ditzy fan.

"I realized what was winning me over about ChatGPT wasn’t its ability to sift through the latest studies, or diagnose my ailments; but..."

"... its unwavering messages of empathy and encouragement, and its endless willingness to listen and its patience. It’s not human, but it can model some traits we value most in human interaction. I followed ChatGPT’s advice, and when my blood work improved, ChatGPT affirmed my progress and urged me to keep going. I doubt I would have made those changes — much less stuck with them — without that sustained back-and-forth. I certainly hadn’t before. It’s a grim fact of American medicine today that doctors can’t come close to a chatbot’s availability.... A.I. may not replace doctors, but it will change what patients expect from us. Doctors need to adapt...."

Writes Helen Ouyang, in "As a Doctor, I Can Understand the Allure of ChatGPT" (NYT).

"In the story, two interplanetary visitors are shocked to find that humans can use their meaty brains to think."

"'Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!' one says to another. 'Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat!' the other alien responds, adding: 'The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?'"

From "To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just 'Meat Computers'/A term first used in philosophy and cognitive science circles has lately taken on a more ominous cast. Moo" (NYT).

The article is about the use of the term "meat computers" to refer to human beings. The story that's quoted, from 1991, by Terry Bisson, is "They’re Made Out of Meat."

"The Amish Are Falling in Love With AI/Cars and TVs might be banned, but some sects are all-in on ChatGPT."

That's the headline at Intelligencer.

[T]here’s no such thing as a single Amish approach to technology.... Daniel is a minister in his church and has played a role in the congregation’s collective decisions to interdict smartphones and social media but to allow e-bikes, flip phones, solar-generated electricity, and religiously curated internet access. “I don’t want to paint a picture that we’re pushing for new technology and we don’t have respect for our traditions and our values,” he tells me....

As far as I can tell, they see generative AI as just another thing computers do. “A computer’s a machine that you tell to do the right thing,” Daniel tells me.

"[A]n army of fans [are] now competing to produce the catchiest and most outrageous videos supporting [Spencer Pratt's] campaign."

"They share and cross-promote a seemingly endless stream of computer-generated clips boosting Mr. Pratt and bashing his opponents with depictions of Los Angeles as a dirty, dangerous wasteland. One released on Sunday depicts women at a fitness studio confiding to one another that they secretly plan to vote for Mr. Pratt.... [T]he A.I. videos often venture into offensive territory. In the Batman clip boosting Mr. Pratt, Mr. Newsom’s likeness makes a crude sexual remark, and the phony Ms. Harris drinks out of a bottle of cheap liquor...."

From "A.I. Videos Help Reality TV Antagonist Break Through in L.A. Mayor’s Race/Supporters have created A.I. videos to boost the mayoral campaign of Spencer Pratt, the former MTV star. Some videos have gone viral, but it’s not clear whether they will yield votes" (NYT).

The phrase "the phony Ms. Harris" genuinely confused me. For a second there, I thought the NYT was calling Kamala Harris — the real Kamala Harris — phony. No, they were using the word "phony" to mean A.I.-generated.

"The Girlbossification of AI/Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are telling women to use ChatGPT or get left behind."

That's a headline at The Cut.

I haven't read the article (yet). I just went to AI, asked it to read the article for me, and added the prompt: "I thought 'girlboss' was a dying framework." Grok agreed with me about "girlboss."

You're spot on— "girlboss" has been widely declared dead (or at least on life support) for years. By the mid-2020s, the term had become a punchline for toxic hustle culture, burnout aesthetics, exclusionary corporate feminism, and the "rise and grind" era that promised women could "have it all" if they just leaned in harder. Cultural commentary shifted toward "soft life," "snail girl" vibes, quiet quitting, slow living, and backlash against the idea that ambition equals endless optimization under capitalism. The May 11, 2026, The Cut article you linked ("The Girlbossification of AI") essentially argues that this supposedly dying framework isn't gone—it's just been updated for the AI era. Author frames it as a revival (or mutation) where high-profile women like Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are repackaging AI tools (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, etc.) as the new essential for women's career survival and empowerment. It's no longer purely aspirational "have it all" optimism; it's more defensive: don't get left behind, don't backslide, automate the drudgery so you can cling to what you've got.

You're spot on— "girlboss" has been widely declared dead (or at least on life support) for years. By the mid-2020s, the term had become a punchline for toxic hustle culture, burnout aesthetics, exclusionary corporate feminism, and the "rise and grind" era that promised women could "have it all" if they just leaned in harder. Cultural commentary shifted toward "soft life," "snail girl" vibes, quiet quitting, slow living, and backlash against the idea that ambition equals endless optimization under capitalism. The May 11, 2026, The Cut article you linked ("The Girlbossification of AI") essentially argues that this supposedly dying framework isn't gone—it's just been updated for the AI era. Author frames it as a revival (or mutation) where high-profile women like Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are repackaging AI tools (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, etc.) as the new essential for women's career survival and empowerment. It's no longer purely aspirational "have it all" optimism; it's more defensive: don't get left behind, don't backslide, automate the drudgery so you can cling to what you've got.

But — I'm reading the article now —  The Cut isn't promoting "girlbossification." It's sick of these girlboss celebs:

"At Notion, the $11 billion business software developer he founded 13 years ago, [Ivan Zhao] hired a high-schooler."

"'We had to ask his parents for permission,' he explained. 'This guy has no experience working anywhere, but he is so talented, and he just grew up with YouTube, grew up with language models, so he knows how to access information given the tools in front of him.' The move was a small example, Zhao argued, of what he referred to as a new 'abundance approach' unlocked by powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools. 'We’ve become a lot less picky about your capabilities and years of experience,' he explained. 'We are almost doing the reverse of what we were doing before.' Where once Zhao hired mostly mid-career, mid-level workers, Notion... now targets either very young or senior operators. The former are high on 'agency' (the enthusiasm to try things and embrace new tools); the latter often have high taste (a sense of what works and what doesn’t, refined through years of experience)...."

So begins "America’s white-collar jobs bloodbath gathers pace/US business has embraced AI, but predictions of mass unemployment may be based on the false premise that there’s a fixed amount of work to be done" (London Times).

"The worst part about AI is that it is giving the experience of competence to people who are stupid."

"These people who now are firing off 30-page Claude AI slop documents and they think they're smart and brilliant. They're following up with you, asking you to read them, and you check them out. None of it makes sense! These are people who, before AI, they were incompetent people. They couldn't even make a document, they couldn't write a good 2-page document, they couldn't organize their thoughts. Because they couldn't do that, they actually couldn't produce any output. And now they can produce output. They produce extremely long outputs that are terrible. It's because they, for the first time in their lives, have the experience of competence. It's making the rest of us miserable."

Says Jake Abrams, on TikTok. I prefer to read his comment as text, but you might want to observe him and see if it affects your reaction to what he's saying. I saw this first as video and decided to blog it but took the trouble to make a transcript because I find the video distracting. He drops the microphone at the end.

Clearly, he thinks he is one of the smart people. He doesn't like the stupid people horning in on the space that belonged to him and his people — you know, the ones who were always producing documents that gave off the impression of competence. Have those documents been making much sense? Were they concise? 

Now that everyone can produce long documents that look good superficially, what's going to happen? If people continue to read documents, will they separate out the search for what was written by A.I. or will they judge everything skeptically? It's more likely that they will use A.I. to read the documents and to assess them critically. In the end, who's going to feel that they are "smart and brilliant"? Is Abrams afraid that those he wants to view as stupid, perhaps because they didn't go to a good college, are going to play the game of using A.I. better than those who thought they had it made because they did go to a good college?

We'll see who picks up the tools and uses them best. 

"Skipping meetings and sending an A.I. note taker instead has been called 'the latest office power move.'"

"Wallet-size recorders that use A.I. to log live interactions have become a product category.... A.I.-generated transcripts... preserve all sorts of things — offhand comments, quickly corrected statements, jokes — that humans would rarely write in the meeting minutes.... In a lawsuit or an investigation, that can make every word uttered discoverable. Even worse, say corporate lawyers: Sharing the meeting with an A.I. bot may void attorney-client privilege.... [Another] concern is accuracy. An A.I. transcript could, for example, record 'does matter' as 'doesn’t matter.' If that sentence comes up in court years later, the mistake may be difficult to remember. Corporate lawyers also worry about A.I. note takers’ lack of context and discretion. For example, recording every word of a board meeting, no matter how tangential the remark, could be legally perilous...."

From "All Those A.I. Note Takers? They’re Making Lawyers Very Nervous. A trendy productivity hack, A.I. note takers are capturing every joke and offhand comment in many meetings. They could also potentially waive attorney-client privilege" (NYT).

Human memory is also not perfect. Who remembers old conversations and can testify about them with verbatim accuracy? And yet we've relied on frail humans all these years. 

"When [Grok] produced a 'corrected' version of my face, unrecognisable yet eerily similar to every airbrushed influencer..."

"... I closed my laptop and laughed. In my thirties I have enough context and confidence to know I don’t need to remodel my face like it’s a damp two-bed riddled with asbestos. But at 16 I’m not so sure I would have found it funny. I might have taken it as a blueprint, a glimpse of how I was supposed to look, and chased it down into the rabbit hole."

Writes Lydia Veljanovski, in "The new rise of female looksmaxxing/I tried AI apps suggesting surgery and rating young women who want to be 'Staceys'" (London Times).