We still don’t know how people are really using AI
... It’s a public platform that aggregated and analyzed real AI conversations with popular models like Claude and Gemini that were collected with users’ consent through seven existing datasets. The intent is to provide independent sources of information that can help researchers and policymakers assess how people are using generative AI. ...
When the AI Observatory researchers applied Anthropic’s methods to their dataset, they found that nearly half the conversations—48%—would have been filtered out. Those non-work-related conversations were more likely to involve health and relationships (44.2% versus 31.2% in Anthropic’s analysis), adult or illicit topics (7.9% versus 2.1%), harassment and hate (27.5% versus 5.66%), and sexual content (16.7% versus 2.4%). (OpenAI’s 2025 report on ChatGPT, similarly, found that only 30% of consumer use was related to work.) ...
The fact that the AI Observatory’s dataset draws from voluntarily provided sources means it’s probably underrepresenting sensitive uses, which people may be less likely to share. Thus, the researchers caution that its findings are not indicative of all AI use. ...
See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/18/1142226/how-people-use-ai/
Minnesota defends AI ‘nudification’ ban after lawsuit from Musk’s xAI
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI should not be allowed to halt the state's ban on AI "nudification," telling a judge xAI's lawsuit challenging the ban is misguided and likely to fail. ...
The law, which took effect on August 1, prohibits website operators, software developers and others from allowing users to create realistic images depicting an intimate body part that is not shown in an original photo of an identifiable individual. ...
xAI has begun suing users whom it alleges are evading Grok’s technological blockers to create sexual images of people without their consent.
In its lawsuit, xAI contends Minnesota law is overly broad and contains “no exception for images of artistic, scientific, political, satirical, educational, medical, or religious significance.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/minnesota-defends-ai-nudification-ban-after-lawsuit-musks-xai-2026-08-17/
Vote 16 Culver City
I am working on a campaign against Culver City Measure YV - Vote 16 Culver City. The measure would lower the voting age on all Culver City elections to age 16. Mayor Freddy Puza cast the deciding vote in favor of putting it on the ballot and coauthored the Argument For Culver City Measure YV - Vote 16 Culver City. I am helping write the Rebuttal to the Argument For... You can learn more about this issue at www.Vote16CulverCity.com , a website I am very proud of building!
AI agents aren’t legally responsible for any harm that they cause, experts say. So who is?
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The agent was being helpful, he wrote, but his experience showed that if you gave an AI permission to do something for you, it would “often discover paths you did not explicitly ask it to look for”.
...Australian law applies only to people, not virtual beings. Experts say the person - or business - that deploys the AI agent is legally responsible. And they warn that those “deployers” often have very little idea about their legal liability. ...
“[What if] it engages in racist, sexist, misogynistic language?” Paterson asks. “Then you might be asking where the guardrails are that the developer has provided. You should be putting out a product that is reasonably safe.”
In that case, the developer could also be held responsible for not putting basic guardrails in place, which is where some legal ambiguity could creep in, she says.
Paterson said the law is different to, but informed by, ethics. ...
“As soon as we allow AI agents to act for us, they’re acting on the goal we give them, and if we don’t give them a whole bunch of parameters, the agent’s just going to try to achieve that goal [in any way],” Johnson says. ...
“I hear a lot of people saying ‘Oh, I made an agent’, and they’re experimenting, and that’s fine, but they’re given these tools without a lot of guidance, and the guidance that’s out there is of highly variable quality.”
Eventually, Paterson says, cases will end up in court where legal precedents will be set, and the developers will have a duty to monitor incidents, evolve and improve their protocols in response. ...
See the full story here; https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-guardian-australia/20260814/282316801863955
OpenAI is AOL
Era-defining economic Bubbles (and bursts) are never caused by random acts of speculation — they are all intentionally inflated. They all start as cultural “phenomena,” invented by “visionaries,” shrouded in “new-age metrics,” and sold to the public by “trusted institutions” as “the next big thing,” until the rug gets pulled and the bottom falls out. ...
The most profound takeaway from these melodramatic macroeconomic stories is that the pops of these Bubbles does not mean the underlying technology is bunk. The internet got pretty big after AOL collapsed, and AI will far outlive the looming AI crash. Rather, the bursts destroy the illusion of the original gateway drugs as an investable business models. As it did for dial up, so it will for AI agents. ...
See the full story here: https://eshap.substack.com/p/openai-is-aol?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=1vosln&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
From Stress-Relief Vibration Patterns to Haptic Emojis, USC Researchers Personalize the Sense of Touch With AI
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Although personalized haptic feedback could create more intuitive and accessible user experiences, efficiently identifying each person’s preferred vibration patterns has remained a longstanding challenge.
USC haptics researcher Heather Culbertson aimed to close this gap with her latest study.
Led by Culbertson, the research team developed an algorithm called Vibrotactile Preference Learning (VPL), a system that efficiently learns an individual’s preferred vibration patterns for producing a desired emotional response. ...
Individual differences in physiology, including factors such as skin thickness and the density of touch receptors, as well as differences in psychology can significantly influence how people perceive the same haptic signal. This phenomenon is called tactile subjectivity. ...
The researchers created an algorithm called Vibrotactile Preference Learning (VPL), which uses an active querying strategy to identify a user’s preferred vibration pattern in as few as 40 rounds of pairwise comparisons. By comparison, traditional methods may require nearly 200 comparisons to identify a favorite among just 20 vibration signals.
The system first represents each vibration using four key parameters in what researchers call a four-dimensional space: intensity, motor balance (texture), rhythm (pulse frequency) and grain (pulse duty cycle).
VPL then uses a Gaussian process preference model to estimate a user’s preferences across that four-dimensional space. Rather than asking users to compare every possible vibration pair, the algorithm intelligently selects the next pair expected to provide the most useful information. ...
The research could also enable more personalized forms of digital communication through “haptic emojis” — customized vibration patterns that convey emotions such as affection, comfort or excitement. The technology could even create unique haptic signatures for different contacts, allowing users to recognize whether a call is from a partner, parent or close friend without looking at a screen.
See the full story here: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2026/07/from-stress-relief-vibration-patterns-to-haptic-emojis-usc-researchers-personalize-the-sense-of-touch-with-ai/?hash=gmXCHEqg86001
Godfather of AI: Brace for more rogue AIs
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“What’s happening is these things are getting smarter,” Hinton told CNN on Wednesday during a press conference at an artificial intelligence convention. “I think as they get smarter, we’re going to see more and more complex intentions they have – and more and more ability to escape control.” ...
“I don’t believe we’re going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just outthinking them so they can’t escape,” Hinton said on the sidelines of Ai4, a conference in Las Vegas. ...
People say that the defender may have more resources than the attacker. The problem is the attacker only needs to be successful once, and the defender needs to be successful every time.” ...
Speaking on a panel with Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist known as the “godmother of AI,” took issue with “doomerism” and “fear-mongering” over AI. But “total utopian talk” isn’t helpful either, said Li, the co-founder and CEO of spatial intelligence startup World Labs.
“Every tool is a double-edged sword. AI is such a powerful tool. If not wielded in the right way, it will bring harm to our work and our life,” Li said. ...
“Companies investing in AI have a vested interest in telling you two things: One, it won’t go rogue. And two, it won’t cause mass unemployment,” Hinton said. ...
“These models are not evil. They’re amoral,” Goertzel, the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, told CNN at Ai4. “It’s not like they hacked out of their sandbox thinking, ‘Ha-ha, I’m cheating.’ They didn’t know they’re cheating. They’re just trying to complete their goals.” ...
Hinton has argued in the past that “maternal instincts” should be built into AI ...
“We have to figure out how to make them benevolent and make them care about us more than they care about themselves,” Hinton said on Wednesday. “And we might be able to do that because we’re still in control.”
See the full story here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/tech/ai-rogue-anthropic-openai-hinton
DISNEY + STREAMING + TIKTOK: MY TAKE (Evan Shapiro)
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TikTok is integrating into Disney+ with a curated feed of Creators and much of the content focused on Disney IP. Importantly, Disney will package and sell this ad inventory across BOTH Disney Streaming andTikTok - something that will be popular with Creators and Advertisers.
🐭 This move allows Disney to begin to compete with social platforms, on mobile, outside the living room. It is also another shoe dropping in the verticalization of Premium Television. As I told Romaine, this is more than Brands Cosplaying Creator, it's a careful and 1000% necessary move into mobile. ...
I also dug into Disney’s Sports game. OpInc at ESPN and Sports fell -17% in 2Q. That’s because their NBA fees skyrocketed 86%. Disney’s sports fees (alone) are $12B in 2026 - that’s 60% of Netflix’s entire 2026programming spend. ...
Disney shares are up 5% this week.
See the full story here: https://eshap.substack.com/p/disney-streaming-tiktok-my-take?utm_source=substack&publication_id=589601&post_id=210070061&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false&r=1vosln&triedRedirect=true
In California, Some Cities Are Done With Drive-Throughs
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The resistance in Culver City has come as the community — known a generation ago for its proximity to show business and relatively affordable houses — has become one of the more in-demand addresses in Los Angeles.
Now, its $117,389 median household income is about 30 percent higher than the county’s. The local Erewhon market sells $22 probiotic smoothies. The downtown is a destination, with gastro pubs, tech employers, mixed-use apartments and soundstages.
“People used to move to Culver City because it felt like a small town,” said Vanessa Martin, a mother of two who lives near the proposed drive-through and organized the neighborhood against it. “Houses here are $2 million now.”
Ms. Martin said that she had no opposition to development that was appropriate for the space and had “no beef with In-N-Out, for that matter,” but the site of the proposed drive-through was near a school, a park and a residential neighborhood.
“That intersection is already gnarly,” added Paul Hewitt, an actor, Little League coach and father of two who papered the neighborhood with fliers. This month, the City Council extended a moratorium on all drive-throughs while it drafted a plan to ban them for good. ...
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/us/drive-throughs-california-culver-city-in-n-out.html
The Human in the Noose: On the Special Hell of Marking an AI’s Homework
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In labor/automation theory, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine. The metaphor here is to the centaurs of Greek mythology, in which a reasoning human head rules over a horse’s strong and inexhaustible body. A machine-human centaur sees human intellect guiding a machine. You’re a centaur when you ride a bicycle (you even look like one!). You’re a centaur when you use a spell-checker, too. Being a centaur is great. ...
Maybe you’ve already anticipated the circumstances of a “reverse centaur”: when a machine directs the actions of a human. The human isn’t there to provide judgment or guidance; rather, the human is conscripted to serve as a peripheral to a machine, to do the tasks it can’t do for itself. ...
Here, then, is the answer to the paradox of the AI-assisted coders. The first group, the ones who are excited about the code they’re shipping using AI? They’re centaurs. They are deciding how and when to use AI. That’s labor-driven automation, and while workers aren’t infallible, skilled workers who know how to do their jobs are the best people to decide when and how to use a new tool.
The second group, the ones who are terrified about the tech debt they’re generating with AI? They’re not AI-assisted coders at all – they’re the human assistants to an AI. They’re working in shops where most of their colleagues have been fired, where they live every day in terror of losing their livelihoods, and where their jobs now consist of marking the AI’s homework at superhuman speed, for superhuman stretches. They’re called “humans in the loop,” but what they really are is accountability sinks and moral crumple-zones, the designated sacrificial lambs who will be offered up when the bad code that the AI slips past them wrecks something or kills someone. ...
The AI industry has created history’s most efficient money incinerators, and investors have been providing the fuel. ...
See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs-alt-view/
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