Machine empathy can’t replace the real thing
Last fall, Natasha started using ChatGPT to manage her adult son’s mental health needs. A crisis had sent him to a month-long residential program. Her son has learning disabilities, and has struggled with depression since he was twelve. “The in-patient program sent him home with a “huge book” of therapy materials,” Natasha, a New York-based nutrition expert, recalls, “but he struggled to interact with it. We decided to feed that into ChatGPT.”
Microsoft is cutting 9,000 jobs as executives order staff to delegate more work to artificial intelligence (AI).
The $3.6 trillion (£2.7 trillion) technology giant will shed 4pc of its workforce, it confirmed on Wednesday, with redundancies hitting divisions including its Xbox arm and King, its mobile games studios.
The job losses follow a round of cutbacks in May, when Microsoft laid off 6,000 staff including hundreds of middle-managers and engineering roles.
CEOs are no longer dodging the question of whether AI takes jobs. Now they are giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go.
“Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”
One of the last places we might expect artificial intelligence to show up is the tattoo parlor, with its mix of artistry, personal expression and permanent ink. But a high-end ink shop in New York City is now taking appointments for an AI-driven tattoo robot.
The technology is the product of Blackdot, an Austin, Texas-based startup that has been pursuing a vision of autonomous, AI-fueled tattooing since 2019.
The e-commerce giant now counts more than one million of the machines at its facilities
The automation of Amazon.com facilities is approaching a new milestone: There will soon be as many robots as humans.
The e-commerce giant, which has spent years automating tasks previously done by humans in its facilities, has deployed more than one million robots in those workplaces, Amazon said. That is the most it has ever had and near the count of human workers at the facilities.
Company warehouses buzz with metallic arms plucking items from shelves and wheeled droids that motor around the floors ferrying the goods for packaging. In other corners, automated systems help sort the items, which other robots assist in packaging for shipment.
Entry-level jobs are in free-fall as the rise of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT causes low-paying and graduate roles to disappear.
Recently-released data shows that the number of entry-level roles being advertised has fallen by a third since the launch of OpenAI’s chatbot in November 2022.
According to figures from online jobs board Adzuna, there were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago.
The publisher of the Belgian editions of Elle and Marie Claire removed articles and profiles it admits were created by AI
Belgian editions of Elle, Marie Claire and other women’s magazines are claimed to have been using artificial intelligence to write hundreds of online articles under the names of fake journalists, complete with photographs and profiles.
“Sophie Vermeulen”, who has written an impressive 403 articles for Elle online this year, was, according to her profile, complete with photograph, “always ready to inspire you with fascinating stories or practical tips. Her passion for fashion and beauty is complemented by a love of travel and literature. Offline, you can spot her on a long walk in nature,” her Elle online profile said.
Will the AI revolution warm us or burn us?
Machines can now talk with us in ways that aren’t preprogrammed. They can draw pictures, write passable (if generic) college essays, and make fake videos so convincing that you and I can’t tell the difference. The first time I used ChatGPT, I almost forgot that I was communicating with a machine.
Artificial intelligence is like nothing that humans have ever created. It consumes vast amounts of data and organizes itself in ways that its creators didn’t foresee and don’t understand. “If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside,” AI scientist Sam Bowman told Noam Hassenfeld at Vox, “you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second. And we just have no idea what any of it means.”
There they were. Golden boxes, louder than a toddler on a red-eye, hotter than a campfire in a heat wave, pricier than a private Caribbean island.
Yes, real, working Nvidia GPUs.
I was under strict “look, don’t touch” orders—as if I’d, what, lick the mesh metal enclosure. Just standing there, I could hear and feel the electricity being devoured.
We’ve all heard about AI’s insatiable energy appetite. By 2028, data centers like this one I visited in Ashburn, Va., could consume up to 12% of all U.S. electricity, according to a report from the Energy Department and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
The future of AI won’t resemble The Terminator. Don’t expect devastating explosions or murderous drones. There won’t be metal skeletons stomping on skulls or glowing red eyes scanning resistance fighters. The real takeover will be quieter, colder, more efficient, and less bloody — but in many ways, far more brutal.
It will come with a soft chime, a helpful tone, a perfectly phrased suggestion: “Would you like me to do that for you?”
And most of us will say yes.
Pope Leo XIV has issued a stark warning regarding the potential negative impact of artificial intelligence on the intellectual, neurological, and spiritual development of young people.
The caution was delivered in a message to a major conference on AI and ethics.
The conference, which saw part of its proceedings held within the Vatican, underscored the Holy See’s growing concern over emerging technologies and their broader implications for humanity.
Will Pope AI The 1st be more or less fallible than humans?
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Deprived Justice: When AI Enters the Courtroom
Can you trust Artificial Intelligence to tell the truth?
Fake court cases
AI-generated assault allegations
Evidence, privilege & power in the age of Artificial Intelligence.Panel: @DonaldBestCA… pic.twitter.com/ozXnZXjtyn
— DonaldBest.CA * DO NOT COMPLY (@DonaldBestCA) June 18, 2025
The share of Canadian organizations that reported using AI to create goods and services in the past 12 months has doubled from 6.1 per cent in May 2024 to 12.2 per cent in May 2025, according to Statistics Canada’s Canadian Survey of Business Conditions.
The 2025 survey of 21,357 Canadian businesses and non-profits also shows AI adoption is more likely to reduce rather than increase staffing levels, particularly in the health-care and social assistance fields.
AI at work – Who’s the boss
The chief executive officer of Anthropic – one of OpenAI’s main rivals – doesn’t feel great about all the jobs their chatbots will gobble up. In an interview last month with Axios, Dario Amodei said tech leaders and politicians need to stop “sugar-coating” the economic upheaval ahead. He’s even prepared to put a number on the carnage: Generative AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.
But it’s not all dystopia. The most competent among us will still have jobs, and AI will force us to excel.
It should have been obvious when college students started using ChatGPT to cheat on academic papers that the bots were coming for our bylines — and yet, I think, journalists thought they might be spared. After all, any bot could mimic a badly written college essay, but what journalists do? That requires finesse, skill, and critical thought.
