A backlash against AI imagery in ads may have begun as brands promote'human-made' In a wave of new ads, brands like Heineken, Polaroid and Cadbury have started hating on artificial intelligence (AI), celebrating their work as "human-made". But in these advertising campaigns on TV, billboards on New York streets and on social media, the companies are signalling something larger. Even Apple's new series release, Pluribus, includes the phrase "Made by Humans" in the closing credits. Other brands including H&M and Guess have faced a backlash for using AI brand ambassadors instead of humans. These gestures suggest we have reached a cultural moment in the evolution of this technology, where people are unsure what creativity means when machines can now produce much of what we see, hear and perhaps even be moved by.

AI-generated music is flooding streaming platforms. AI-generated music is flooding streaming platforms. 'Music needs a human component to be of any value': Guardian readers on the growing use of AI in music AI promises to have far-reaching effects in music-making. While some welcome it as a compositional tool, many have deep concerns. A I-generated music is flooding streaming platforms, and it seems to be here to stay.

My position feels more precarious than ever. It's a question that I sometimes toss out in the company of friends who--like me, and maybe like you--have a complicated relationship to their job. I've worked at WIRED as a writer for eight years, and with much success. Eight years is also an eternity in news media, and especially if you are Black. All industries suffer from unique growing pains. Ours just so happens to have laughably high turnover rates, a distaste for racial and gender diversity, and the dubious distinction of being perpetually on the verge of extinction. So on nights when friends and I gather, trading war stories of workplace microaggressions and corporate mismanagement under damp bar lighting, we wonder how we've lasted as long as we have. The only reason I've survived, I joke, is because I'm Black. It's a silly thing to say, particularly because I have no actual proof of it other than the occasional feeling. What I do know is that I've been The Only One in more spaces than I care to remember, and rarely by choice.

This was the year that A.I.-generated content passed a kind of audiovisual Turing test, sometimes fooling us against our better judgment. The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, gauges the point at which a text-generating machine can fool a human into thinking it's not a robot. ChatGPT passed that benchmark earlier this year, inaugurating a new technological era, though not necessarily one of superhuman intelligence . More recently, however, artificial intelligence passed another threshold, a kind of Turing test for the eye: the images and videos that A.I. can produce are now sometimes indistinguishable from real ones. As new, image-friendly models were trained, refined, and released by companies including OpenAI, Meta, and Google, the online public gained the ability to instantly generate realistic A.I. content on any theme they could imagine, from superhero fan art and cute animals to scenes of violence and war.

Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing? In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even bigger disaster was on its way. Leon Festinger, a young American psychologist at the University of Minnesota, read about these rumors in the early nineteen-fifties and was puzzled. Festinger didn't think people would voluntarily adopt anxiety-inducing ideas. Instead, he reasoned, the rumors could better be described as "anxiety justifying." Some had felt the earth shake and were overwhelmed with fear. When the outcome--they were spared--didn't match their emotions, they embraced predictions that affirmed their fright.

AI-assisted hiring will drive Indeed's growth, Recruit CEO says Companies embracing artificial intelligence to recruit and hire people won't threaten Indeed.com's Hisayuki "Deko" Idekoba, who leads Indeed and its parent, Tokyo-based Recruit Holdings, said the business is using AI to help companies optimize their talent-acquisition approach based on the pool of candidates, number of applicants per job and other factors, while using the flow of data to set compensation levels or adjust job qualifications. "We're gradually starting to deploy solutions such as AI agents to customers," Idekoba said in an interview in Tokyo. For Recruit, the shift reflects a broader transformation in how employers find and evaluate talent, as AI reshapes recruitment worldwide. Automated tools are speeding up candidate screening, cutting hiring costs and helping businesses respond to labor shortages and changing skill demands.

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Former chancellor George Osborne is joining artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI. He will lead its OpenAI for Countries programme, which is aimed at helping governments increase their AI capacity. Announcing his new London-based role, Osborne said it was a privilege to be joining the company. I recently asked myself the question: what's the most exciting and promising company in the world right now? The answer I believe is OpenAI, he said on X.