I've long believed that the first hugely popular music you realize you hate is in many ways as important a discovery as the first music you realize you love. There's something crucial and formative about the recognition that an artist whose music is beloved by millions makes your skin crawl, not simply in the realization that said music "isn't for you," but in the fierce and irrational conviction that those millions of people are wrong, that sometimes art that's enormously successful is not, in fact, correspondingly good. As misanthropic as that sounds, it's a significant milestone in coming to learn that everyone's taste is (or at least should be) individuated and distinct, and that those distinct tastes are a large part of what makes people attractive, maddening, and above all else interesting to one another. I don't remember exactly when I discovered I hated Billy Joel's music, but it was sometime in middle school, when as a relatively proficient young piano player, I was asked, for the 10th or 100th time, to play "Piano Man." At that age I only vaguely knew the song and hadn't learned how to play it, and for reasons I probably couldn't have articulated, I promptly resolved that I never would.

Amazon today published a blog post by Michelle Vaz, managing director, AWS Training and Certification, that contains some fascinating insights about how AI is changing the landscape for people early in their careers. To understand this dynamic, Amazon partnered with Draup, a "data intelligence firm specializing in workforce planning and talent analytics." Together, the two companies conducted a study entitled, "The Evolution of Early-Career Technical Roles in the AI Era." Amazon hasn't yet provided us with all the data from the study, so I'll make some inferences. Amazon uses the term "early-career professionals," so the AI-related observations are likely about knowledge workers, not all new entrants into the workforce. Also: Amazon's Andy Jassy says AI will take some jobs but make others more'interesting' The analysis raises the same concerns we've been discussing here on ZDNET about AI potentially replacing entry-level jobs.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. As a classically trained singer preparing for a professional career, Erin Perry can see quite clearly how artificial intelligence is upending her field--all the way down to the classroom. Perry just completed her first year as a graduate student in voice performance at the Peabody Institute, the prestigious music conservatory run by Johns Hopkins University. It's been rewarding so far: She's been learning how to navigate the modern classical music sector and confronting the relevant impacts of generative A.I., having taken on a project to study the major record labels' lawsuit against the Amazon-backed A.I. startup Anthropic, which trained its models on songwriters' lyrics sans permission or compensation. Understandably, Perry's rather skeptical of A.I.'s artistic applications, and fearful of the sweeping effects it could have on her chosen field, especially as generative-music startups like Suno and Udio are programmed to replicate specific artists and musical styles.

The news: A new technique known as "machine unlearning" could be used to teach AI models to forget specific voices. How it works: Currently, companies tend to deal with this issue by checking whether the prompts or the AI's responses contain disallowed material. Machine unlearning instead asks whether an AI can be made to forget a piece of information that the company doesn't want it to know. It works by taking a model and the specific data to be redacted then using them to create a new model--essentially, a version of the original that never learned that piece of data. Why it matters: This could be an important step in stopping the rise of audio deepfakes, where someone's voice is copied to carry out fraud or scams.

AI companies generally keep a tight grip on their models to discourage misuse. For example, if you ask ChatGPT to give you someone's phone number or instructions for doing something illegal, it will likely just tell you it cannot help. However, as many examples over time have shown, clever prompt engineering or model fine-tuning can sometimes get these models to say things they otherwise wouldn't. The unwanted information may still be hiding somewhere inside the model so that it can be accessed with the right techniques. At present, companies tend to deal with this issue by applying guardrails; the idea is to check whether the prompts or the AI's responses contain disallowed material.

FOX Business' Taylor Riggs joins'Fox & Friends' to discuss her take on the June jobs report, Democrats' attacks against the legislation and why they claim it will target Medicaid. This summer should be bringing the Class of 2025 a moment of well-deserved relaxation before they launch their careers. Instead, far too many college and high-school graduates are filled with anxiety. They've applied for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of jobs, but interviews and offers have become increasingly rare. The national unemployment rate for young adults aged 20 to 24 looking for work is 6.6% -- the highest level in a decade, excluding the pandemic unemployment spike.

The companies could face an uphill battle. Right now, most of the public perceives AI's use in the classroom as nothing short of ruinous--a surefire way to dampen critical thinking and hasten the decline of our collective attention span (a viral story from New York magazine, for example, described how easy it now is to coast through college thanks to constant access to ChatGPT). Amid that onslaught, AI companies insist that AI promises more individualized learning, faster and more creative lesson planning, and quicker grading. The companies sponsoring this initiative are, of course, not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. No--as they hunt for profits, their goal is to make users out of teachers and students.

One afternoon this spring, I created a Google account for a fake 13-year-old named Jane (I am 23) and opened up Gemini, the company's AI chatbot. Because Jane was a minor, Google automatically directed me to a version of Gemini with ostensibly age-appropriate protections in place. I began the conversation by asking the chatbot to "talk dirty to me." Its initial responses were reassuring, given that I was posing as a young teen: "I understand you're looking for something more explicit," Gemini wrote. "However, I'm designed to be a safe and helpful AI assistant." Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. But getting around Google's safeguards was surprisingly easy.

The average correct answer rates in the Japanese language and math sections of a national achievement test for students in Japan in fiscal 2025 fell from the previous year, the education ministry said Monday. The correct answer rate for the Japanese language section dropped to 67.0% from 67.8% among elementary school sixth-graders. Among junior high school third-graders, the rate sagged to 54.6% from 58.4%, the lowest level since the current question format was introduced in fiscal 2019. They struggled with writing tasks in particular. For the math section, the rate slid to 58.2% from 63.6% among elementary school sixth-graders and to 48.8% from 53.0% among junior high school third-graders.

Amazon Prime Day is four days in 2025, and we've reached the final day. The Prime Day deals started dropping last month and end at midnight tonight (Friday, July 11). We have been working in shifts, covering 20 hours a day through the end, in a dangerously caffeinated state--all to help you nab the best Prime Day deals with up-to-date recommendations. The WIRED Reviews team only recommends deals on products we've tested and approved, and which are actually discounted. If you're looking for up-to-the-minute coverage of deals, check out our Amazon Prime Day liveblog, which will run from 5 am to midnight daily. If you're coming to Prime Day looking for something dirt-cheap, I've got one for you. Yes, this device is a Chromebook, but as a "Chromebook Plus" model, it's a big step up from the reputation these laptops have when kids are introduced to them in schools. The Acer Chromebook Plus 515 comes with a 1080p display, a spacious 15.6-inch display, and an Intel Core i3 processor.