futurism.com/artificial-i... Fast food chains have mostly gone all in on AI for operational streamlining. But most have failed. Chilis took a different tack, using tech investment to revamp ageing IT and taking robots that weren't improving the customer experience OUT of restaurants

Business World Stunned That a Restaurant Chain Is Doing Well Without Mindlessly Embracing AI

The casual diner chain Chili's is making headlines for being the one restaurant that didn't mindlessly start deploying AI.

futurism.com

hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani... @doctorow.pluralistic.net shared this corker in his @thenerve.news column by Nikhil Suresh: enterprise AI is a mania of emperor's new clothes, only the fierce loyalist survive culls yet few can show tangible CEO claims that AI is "changing everything" when it's not

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

hermit-tech.com

techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/e... Who knew writing a business newsletter could be such a high risk activity. Ebay execs terrorised critics with cockroaches. Will Palantir put a horse head in my bed?

eBay reaches $56M settlement with e-commerce newsletter writers it terrorized in 2019 | TechCrunch

Ina and David Steiner inspired the ire of high-level eBay executives after occasionally criticizing the company in their newsletter. In 2019, a plot was concocted to intimidate the couple into halting...

techcrunch.com

wersm.com/this-decoy-f... This decoy font confuses AI by showing either mangled or alternative messages to bots and people. Not same as encryption but a light subterfuge to hide a message in plain sight.

This Decoy Font Shows Humans One Message and AI Another

As AI models become capable of reading everything published online, can typography remain legible to humans while confusing machines?

wersm.com

futurism.com/artificial-i... LinkedIn finally got memo after Pangram's study showing it's soaking in AI slop and introduced a "seems like slop" reporting tool. Though critics say "seems not like AI slop" probably more useful.

LinkedIn Adds Button on Every Post to Report "Seems Like AI Slop," Which Is Definitely Going to Get a Real Workout

LinkedIn has caught on to the abysmal state of its website, adding a new button that allows users to flag a post that "seems like AI slop."

futurism.com

www.404media.co/inside-an-ai... Slopfluencers = new breed of eCommerce influencers shilling GenAI slop. Making millions, gifting Rolex - some met match with lawsuit from supplement firm claiming competitor waged a disinformation campaign from its "creator" network.

Inside an AI TikTok Shop Slop Factory That Shills Supplements Recalled By the FDA

How a company called Rosabella used AI content to market its supplements: "If you’re trying to sell health products to a 50-year-old, well, make your avatar 50 years old."

404media.co

CDR, Corporate Digital Responsibility, determines whether AI will succeed for your customer. Poor AI leads to reputational failures - McDonald’s drive-thru fails by loading a mountain of nuggets in clear view, vs. Wendy’s incremental speed-up of the queue with voice AI. hbr.org/2026/07/resp...

Responsible AI Is Becoming a Growth Strategy

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in products, services, and decision making, trust is emerging as a critical competitive advantage. Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) must evolve from a...

hbr.org

Brand debt, when customer expectation vs reality is mismatched, is worsened by AI. Brands need to audit how AI recommends and users experience brands to avoid expanding the gap. hbr.org/2026/07/stop...

Stop AI from Eroding Your Brand

Artificial intelligence is changing how companies operate and how customers experience their brands. New research suggests that companies with lower levels of “brand debt”—the trust, relevance, and co...

hbr.org

Bad news on algorithms taking bias from hiring: A Princeton / Chicago study showed it’s more likely to segregate users into groups based on ethnic data, reducing hiring chances of some, with worse bias than human hirers www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/20/1...

AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring

AI doesn’t just learn stereotypes from its training. It can cook up new ones, too.

technologyreview.com

AI saving hrs per week isn’t a specific enough story for growth. As most gains are with the individual not organisation, most don’t track the real gains. Like doctors using auto-notetakers: time saved, limited. But studies showed burnout dropped: huge long-term win. www.make.com/en/blog/ai-m...

Expert guide: How to measure AI ROI beyond hours saved?

Hours saved alone won't show your real AI payoff. See how measurement should evolve at each stage of adoption, backed by research across 540 companies.

make.com

AI traffic is up 57% YOY; ChatGPT ads mighty 0.5% click-through, what chatbots are used for differs greatly: ChatGPT leads consumer queries, Claude for professional and education, and Gemini for tech enthusiasts. Similarweb’s report on how AI is changing search: www.similarweb.com/corp/the-202...

Ethan Mollick’s back with an updated guide to which AI to use for what. TL;DR: Claude or ChatGPT still best-in-class to link to Cowork mode - test but set defaults to review everything. Google, other than video and sorting existing research, is lagging behind. www.oneusefulthing.org/p/an-opinion...

An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff

The Summer 2026 Edition

oneusefulthing.org

Agents are just software, that you can shape to build a custom solution. One of many great analogies and pieces of advice from Aboard's no-nonsense, not-too-technical guide to shaping rather than being shaped by AI: aboard.com/wp-content/u...

Gartner’s predicted search traffic will drop 25% in 2026. Yes, it will, but it varies by sector: health, education, tech queries answered in AI but conversely, product recommendations create a downstream trend for more branded search based on recommendations searchengineland.com/what-1-milli...

What 1 million keywords reveal about AI's impact on search

A large-scale study of search behavior shows which industries are losing demand, where it is shifting, and how AI is changing discovery.

searchengineland.com

Meta’s layoff of 8,000 is a mess, as a lawsuit claims algorithms selected workers on sick or family leave disproportionately. The EU AI Act *should* kick in, stopping the machine from deciding on very human hiring and firing decisions. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Meta used AI to tag workers who took leave to be laid off, lawsuit claims

Lawsuit filed by dozens of employees says people who took maternity or disability leave were disproportionately selected for layoffs

theguardian.com

New York is the first of a dozen US states to press pause on “hyperscale” mega data centre builds. The clearest sign yet that public backlash to unconstrained infrastructure for AI will need a more sustainable path to growth. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

New York becomes first state to impose one-year pause on new AI datacenters

Governor Kathy Hochul issues executive order enacting a moratorium on the large, resource-intensive AI facilities

theguardian.com

Mixed experiences with Meta’s smart glasses - Engadget speaks to users in visual media and tourism who rate the tech, but are turned off by the backlash of pervs and spying. Meta needs to get a grip on privacy to expand its potential. www.engadget.com/2212604/the-...

The Meta Glasses backlash is changing how (or if) people use them - Engadget

Backlash online is changing how (or if) people wear Meta's smart glasses.

engadget.com

England’s defeat to Argentina in the World Cup wasn’t the most depressing thing to air that night. Anthropic’s internal ad asks ‘hard questions’ about whether AI can be trusted, implying it *may* destroy us all. A sage tweet asks: “Can Anthropic be trusted? “ futurism.com/artificial-i...

New Anthropic Ad Implies AI Could Kill Us All

A new commercial from Anthropic about asking the "hard questions" about AI implies that the tech could kill us all.

futurism.com

Those cryogenic heads in jars may be one step closer to getting a clone body to implant. In a weirder-than-sci-fi story, secretive startup R3 Bio go silent on its ‘organ sacks’-growing human organs in a lab without a brain, which may be controlled by US government. futurism.com/future-socie...

Secretive Silicon Valley Startup Tries to Quash Interview, Says It’s Definitely Not Working on Growing Brain-Free "Organ Sacks"

A cofounder of a secretive startup fought to keep an interview about its quest to build brain-free "organ sacks" out of public view.

futurism.com

Open Rights Group say UK has NO digital sovereignty plan, with dysfunctional IT procurement and over-reliance on a cartel of US vendors (hello Palantir). They advocate growing the “Digital Commons”, more investment in open tech and international collaboration www.openrightsgroup.org/publications...

Tech Giants and Giant Slayers: The case for Digital Sovereignty and the Digital Commons

Executive Summary Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty The high cost of digital dependency In Part I The Digital Sovereignty challenge we find: The UK’s current position Part II Current UK policy position...

openrightsgroup.org

Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, the OG AGI innovator, calls for the US to create a federal Standards Body to lead frontier AI model testing and expand to international standards. demishassabis.substack.com/p/a-framewor...

A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age

This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away.

demishassabis.substack.com

For enterprise AI, tokenmaxxing is giving way to ‘valuemaxxing ’-seeking the best ROI from AI with the ability to swap tools to save dollars. The challenge isn’t likely to be enough demand, it’s providing the compute power - data centres, models, chips - to keep up www.cnbc.com/2026/07/12/a...

‘Almost unlimited’: Execs says AI demand remains strong even as enterprises move to ‘valuemaxxing’

AI-related chip stocks have been volatile amid a debate over AI demand and spending.

cnbc.com

More claws are out in Big AI - this time Apple sue OpenAI claiming it solicited candidates for its AI hardware to reveal confidential IP, acquired by ex-Apple Designer Johnny Ive, by asking them to ‘show and tell’ their work at interview www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Apple sues OpenAI, alleging artificial intelligence company stole trade secrets

Suit claims OpenAI poached Apple workers, coaxing them to share confidential material in bid to create hardware

theguardian.com

Want to know best platforms to optimise content for AI search? Ask AI what it rates. The leaderboard of GEO tools with a surprisingly Profound outlier leader www.brxnd.ai/geo-leaderbo...

GEO Leaderboard — AI visibility leaderboard

Which GEO platforms get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. A BRXND project, built by Alephic.

brxnd.ai

In a subtle indication that data automation is the norm, Amazon winds down Mechanical Turk, the platform where users completed small data tasks for small fees. ‘Turks’ using AI to complete paltry pay tasks was snake eating itself, leading to a likely inevitable demise techcrunch.com/2026/07/05/a...

Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk | TechCrunch

These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

techcrunch.com

Do your teams and customers really trust your AI strategy? [PODCAST] It's not a technology problem; it's a trust problem. rethinkhypecycle.substack.com/p/do-your-te...

Do your teams and customers really trust your AI strategy? [PODCAST]

It's not a technology problem, it's a trust problem.

rethinkhypecycle.substack.com

Canva drop their vibe coding tool Canva code. Syncing Canva graphic and templates, this can make it easier for visual folks to make microsites and learning experiences: www.canva.com/ai-code-gene...

Unsupported client – Canva

Unsupported client – Canva

canva.com

AI is making cyberattacks way easier, even with basic models. Research reports the first case of AI agent ransomware, dubbed JadePuffer, that was agentically delivering with an LLM and no human in the loop. www.groundlevel-ai.com/p/why-the-fi...

Why the first AI-orchestrated ransomware attack is 'more terrifying than Mythos'

JadePuffer broke into a company, stole its data, and demanded a ransom using what researchers say was an AI-driven attack chain. Here's why security experts say it's the scary new normal.

groundlevel-ai.com

Eva Minkoff chats with a surgeon and realises those who’ve done the hard reps - seen the worst and got through it - are most successful in a critical job. If you hand off the first pass, triage or review to AI, you miss the dirty, skills-affirming layer. evaminkoff.substack.com/p/cleaning-t...

Cleaning Toilets & AI-Era Leadership

The skill you're handing to AI is the one that made you worth following.

evaminkoff.substack.com

LinkedIn ‘influencers’, we see ya: Pangram found 41% of social posts are FULLY AI-generated. No human harmed in making of ‘What my recent trip to Honolulu taught me about ABM marketing’. The most authentic social content from Reddit (3-13% AI-generated). www.pangram.com/blog/ai-in-y...

AI Content Is Everywhere on Social Media, Especially LinkedIn | Pangram Labs

We scanned over 1 million social media posts for AI content. It turned up on every platform we checked, and 1 in 3 top LinkedIn posts flagged as AI-generated.

pangram.com