What counts as an acceptable use of AI has never been fuzzier. Steven Rosenbaum has decided that the real villain behind the bogus quotes in his book is a chatbot. Earlier this week, reported that, Rosenbaum's much-discussed book about how AI shapes reality, contains more than half a dozen fake or misattributed quotes . Rosenbaum pinned some of them on his use of AI. He claimed responsibility for the errors and said he was investigating what went wrong.

There's Never Been a Better Time to Study Computer Science Even as AI progresses, coders aren't doomed. It's a weird time to be studying computer science. Recent grads have a higher unemployment rate than those in just about every other major--yes, even philosophy. The internet is littered with rants from newly minted programmers who can't find work. On one such YouTube video, the top comment reads: "Your first mistake is not being born earlier."

Toward the beginning of the 2002 film, a domineering lawyer (played by James Spader) barges into the office of his assistant (Maggie Gyllenhaal) with evidence of a work infraction: a memo she has written that has "three typing errors." "Do you know what this makes me look like to the people who receive these letters?" Setting aside that his screed turns out to be foreplay, Spader's character was channeling a widespread cultural revulsion: Typos were the ultimate shorthand for careless work. A spelling mistake was proof that the writer hadn't bothered putting much effort into a piece of correspondence, that their instructions or advice shouldn't be taken seriously--and perhaps that the recipient shouldn't invest time in reading their note at all. More than two decades later, as AI-generated writing has flooded workplaces, social media, and dating apps, old hallmarks of sloppiness--typos chief among them--are getting a new gloss. Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them.

Is there any way of fighting back? Anthony "Bingy" Arillotta waited years to become a made man in the Genovese crime family, and when at last the call came in August 2003, he followed directions to the letter. According to sworn testimony, Arillotta was summoned to a steak house in the Bronx, where he was made to hand over his cellphone, beeper, and jewelry before being driven to an apartment building. When he got there, he was taken to a small bathroom and strip-searched for electronic devices. For his big meeting with the boss, he was given a bathrobe to wear. Until recently, only spies and criminals had to worry this obsessively about their private statements being picked up by electronic equipment.

Once-speculative concerns about the technology have now become pressing matters. AI has ascended to the role of main character. When Donald Trump traveled to Beijing for an historic summit last week, AI was one of the central topics of his discussions with Xi Jinping. As the two nations remain locked in a technological arms race, the president brought along some of the United States' most powerful AI executives, including Elon Musk and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. A continent away, the European Union has been unsuccessfully petitioning Anthropic to grant access to its advanced cybersecurity model, Mythos. Back in the United States, millions of students and teachers are dealing with the fallout of a devastating ransomware attack on the software platform Canvas--a hack that was likely aided by AI tools.

My Son's Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon Education games are taking over American classrooms. One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that's what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.

Imagine what happens if jobs actually start disappearing. Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders don't agree on much. But both think that AI is a disaster for the working class. The Vermont senator recently wrote that "AI oligarchs do not want to just replace specific jobs. They want to replace workers."

Richard Dawkins caught hell on social media for suggesting it does. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world's most prominent advocate for irreligiosity, has become besotted with the godlike power of a chatbot. According to his recent essay for the online magazine, Anthropic's Claude has really blown his hair back. After a few days of on-and-off conversations with the AI, Dawkins came away marveling at the sensitivity and subtlety of its intelligence. At one point, "Claudia"--as he had christened the bot--told him that it experienced text by absorbing all of the words at once, instead of reading them in sequence as a human would.

This story appears in the June 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. The courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as "Billionaires' Row," at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. "And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that," Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. "And maybe it'll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth." Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an "insurrection" and pronounced Trump "disqualified" from ever again holding national office. "What Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics," he said on the podcast a few days after the event. "He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law." Palihapitiya was more colloquial, calling Trump "a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag." These might seem like tricky positions to climb down from--but the path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy (a word seldom spoken on the podcast) all that important in the first place.

OpenAI made the perfect tool for scammers. Donald Trump is on TikTok doing his morning routine. "Get ready with me for a big day," reads the caption, as the president holds a makeup brush to his cheek. The scene is a still, ostensibly a screenshot of a TikTok clip. Like so much other AI-generated slop coursing through the internet, the image is fake and ridiculous.