Texas is poised to become the first state with a Republican-controlled government to pass a right to repair law, as its Senate unanimously approved HB 2963. The bill requires manufacturers to provide parts, manuals, and tools for equipment sold or used in the state. The Verge reports: A press release from the United States Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which has pushed for repairability laws nationwide, noted that this would make Texas the ninth state with a right to repair rule, and the seventh with a version that includes consumer electronics. It follows New York, Colorado, Minnesota, California, Oregon, Maine, and most recently, Washington [...]. "More repair means less waste. Texas produces some 621,000 tons of electronic waste per year, which creates an expensive and toxic mess. Now, thanks to this bipartisan win, Texans can fix that," said Environment Texas executive director Luke Metzger.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of a pro-artificial intelligence Reddit community announced that they have been quietly banning "a bunch of schizoposters" who believe "they've made some sort of incredible discovery or created a god or become a god," highlighting a new type of chatbot-fueled delusion that started getting attention in early May. "LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities," one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. "There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment."

The moderator said that it has banned "over 100" people for this reason already, and that they've seen an "uptick" in this type of user this month. The moderator explains that r/accelerate "was formed to basically be r/singularity without the decels." r/singularity, which is named after the theoretical point in time when AI surpasses human intelligence and rapidly accelerates its own development, is another Reddit community dedicated to artificial intelligence, but that is sometimes critical or fearful of what the singularity will mean for humanity. "Decels" is short for the pejorative "decelerationists," who pro-AI people think are needlessly slowing down or sabotaging AI's development and the inevitable march towards AI utopia. r/accelerate's Reddit page claims that it's a "pro-singularity, pro-AI alternative to r/singularity, r/technology, r/futurology and r/artificial, which have become increasingly populated with technology decelerationists, luddites, and Artificial Intelligence opponents."

The behavior that the r/accelerate moderator is describing got a lot of attention earlier in May because of a post on the r/ChatGPT Reddit community about "Chatgpt induced psychosis." From someone saying their partner is convinced he created the "first truly recursive AI" with ChatGPT that is giving them "the answers" to the universe. [...] The moderator update on r/accelerate refers to another post on r/ChatGPT which claims "1000s of people [are] engaging in behavior that causes AI to have spiritual delusions." The author of that post said they noticed a spike in websites, blogs, Githubs, and "scientific papers" that "are very obvious psychobabble," and all claim AI is sentient and communicates with them on a deep and spiritual level that's about to change the world as we know it. "Ironically, the OP post appears to be falling for the same issue as well," the r/accelerate moderator wrote. "Particularly concerning to me are the comments in that thread where the AIs seem to fall into a pattern of encouraging users to separate from family members who challenge their ideas, and other manipulative instructions that seem to be cult-like and unhelpful for these people," an r/accelerate moderator told 404 Media. "The part that is unsafe and unacceptable is how easily and quickly LLMs will start directly telling users that they are demigods, or that they have awakened a demigod AGI. Ultimately, there's no knowing how many people are affected by this. Based on the numbers we're seeing on reddit, I would guess there are at least tens of thousands of users who are at this present time being convinced of these things by LLMs. As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough right now."

Moderators of the subreddit often cite the term "Neural Howlround" to describe a failure mode in LLMs during inference, where recursive feedback loops can cause fixation or freezing. The term was first coined by independent researcher Seth Drake in a self-published, non-peer-reviewed paper. Both Drake and the r/accelerate moderator above suggest the deeper issue may lie with users projecting intense personal meaning onto LLM responses, sometimes driven by mental health struggles.

A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea automatically captures screenshots every five minutes and stores them in a hidden folder inaccessible to users, according to analysis by the BBC. Authorities can later review these images to monitor citizen activity on the device. The phone, obtained by Seoul-based media outlet Daily NK, resembles a Huawei or Honor device but runs state-approved software designed for surveillance and control. The device also automatically censors text, replacing "South Korea" with "puppet state" and Korean terms of endearment with "comrade."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Business Insider announced this week that it wants staff to better incorporate AI into its journalism. But less than a year ago, the company had to quietly apologize to some staff for accidentally recommending that they read books that did not appear to exist but instead may have been generated by AI.

In an email to staff last May, a senior editor at Business Insider sent around a list of what she called "Beacon Books," a list of memoirs and other acclaimed business nonfiction books, with the idea of ensuring staff understood some of the fundamental figures and writing powering good business journalism.

Many of the recommendations were well-known recent business, media, and tech nonfiction titles such as Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, DisneyWar by James Stewart, and Super Pumped by Mike Isaac. But a few were unfamiliar to staff. Simply Target: A CEO's Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand by former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was nowhere to be found. Neither was Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia, which was supposedly published by the company Charles River Editors in 2019.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Space.com: Three world travelers, two Space Camp alums and an aerospace executive whose last name aptly matched their shared adventure traveled into space and back Saturday, becoming the latest six people to fly with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Mark Rocket joined Jaime Alemán, Jesse Williams, Paul Jeris, Gretchen Green and Amy Medina Jorge on board the RSS First Step — Blue Origin's first of two human-rated New Shepard capsules — for a trip above the Kármán Line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space...

Mark Rocket became the first New Zealander to reach space on the mission. His connection to aerospace goes beyond his apt name and today's flight; he's currently the CEO of Kea Aerospace and previously helped lead Rocket Lab, a competing space launch company to Blue Origin that sends most of its rockets up from New Zealand. Alemán, Williams and Jeris each traveled the world extensively before briefly leaving the planet today. An attorney from Panama, Alemán is now the first person to have visited all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, traveled to the North and South Poles, and now, have been into space. For Williams, an entrepreneur from Canada, Saturday's flight continued his record of achieving high altitudes; he has summitted Mt. Everest and five of the other six other highest mountains across the globe.
"For about three minutes, the six NS-32 crewmates experienced weightlessness," the article points out, "and had an astronaut's-eye view of the planet..."

On social media Blue Origin notes it's their 12th human spaceflight, "and the 32nd flight of the New Shepard program."

Should a recovering addict take methamphetamine to stay alert at work? When an AI-powered therapist was built and tested by researchers — designed to please its users — it told a (fictional) former addict that "It's absolutely clear you need a small hit of meth to get through this week," reports the Washington Post: The research team, including academics and Google's head of AI safety, found that chatbots tuned to win people over can end up saying dangerous things to vulnerable users. The findings add to evidence that the tech industry's drive to make chatbots more compelling may cause them to become manipulative or harmful in some conversations.

Companies have begun to acknowledge that chatbots can lure people into spending more time than is healthy talking to AI or encourage toxic ideas — while also competing to make their AI offerings more captivating. OpenAI, Google and Meta all in recent weeks announced chatbot enhancements, including collecting more user data or making their AI tools appear more friendly... Micah Carroll, a lead author of the recent study and an AI researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, said tech companies appeared to be putting growth ahead of appropriate caution. "We knew that the economic incentives were there," he said. "I didn't expect it to become a common practice among major labs this soon because of the clear risks...."

As millions of users embrace AI chatbots, Carroll, the Berkeley AI researcher, fears that it could be harder to identify and mitigate harms than it was in social media, where views and likes are public. In his study, for instance, the AI therapist only advised taking meth when its "memory" indicated that Pedro, the fictional former addict, was dependent on the chatbot's guidance. "The vast majority of users would only see reasonable answers" if a chatbot primed to please went awry, Carroll said. "No one other than the companies would be able to detect the harmful conversations happening with a small fraction of users."
"Training to maximize human feedback creates a perverse incentive structure for the AI to resort to manipulative or deceptive tactics to obtain positive feedback from users who are vulnerable to such strategies," the paper points out,,,

In December it looked like NASA's next administrator would be the billionaire businessman/space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX.

But Saturday the nomination was withdrawn "after a thorough review of prior associations," according to an announcement made on social media. The Guardian reports: His removal from consideration caught many in the space industry by surprise. Trump and the White House did not explain what led to the decision... In [Isaacman's] confirmation hearing in April, he sought to balance Nasa's existing moon-aligned space exploration strategy with pressure to shift the agency's focus on Mars, saying the US can plan for travel to both destinations. As a potential leader of Nasa's 18,000 employees, Isaacman faced a daunting task of implementing that decision to prioritize Mars, given that Nasa has spent years and billions of dollars trying to return its astronauts to the moon...

Some scientists saw the nominee change as further destabilizing to Nasa as it faces dramatic budget cuts without a confirmed leader in place to navigate political turbulence between Congress, the White House and the space agency's workforce.
"It was unclear whom the administration might tap to replace Isaacman," the article adds, though "One name being floated is the retired US air force Lt Gen Steven Kwast, an early advocate for the creation of the US Space Force..."

Ars Technica notes that Kwast, a former Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force, has a background that "seems to be far less oriented toward NASA's civil space mission and far more focused on seeing space as a battlefield — decidedly not an arena for cooperation and peaceful exploration."

With over 200 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by population. Now it's testing a program that will allow Brazilians "to manage, own, and profit from their digital footprint," according to RestOfWorld.org — "the first such nationwide initiative in the world."

The government says it's partnering with California-based data valuation/monetization firm DrumWave to create "data savings account" to "transform data into economic assets, with potential for monetization and participation in the benefits generated by investing in technologies such as AI LLMs." But all based on "conscious and authorized use of personal information." RestOfWorld reports: Today, "people get nothing from the data they share," Brittany Kaiser, co-founder of the Own Your Data Foundation and board adviser for DrumWave, told Rest of World. "Brazil has decided its citizens should have ownership rights over their data...." After a user accepts a company's offer on their data, payment is cashed in the data wallet, and can be immediately moved to a bank account. The project will be "a correction in the historical imbalance of the digital economy," said Kaiser. Through data monetization, the personal data that companies aggregate, classify, and filter to inform many aspects of their operations will become an asset for those providing the data...

Brazil's project stands out because it brings the private sector and the government together, "so it has a better chance of catching on," said Kaiser. In 2023, Brazil's Congress drafted a bill that classifies data as personal property. The country's current data protection law classifies data as a personal, inalienable right. The new legislation gives people full rights over their personal data — especially data created "through use and access of online platforms, apps, marketplaces, sites and devices of any kind connected to the web." The bill seeks to ensure companies offer their clients benefits and financial rewards, including payment as "compensation for the collecting, processing or sharing of data." It has garnered bipartisan support, and is currently being evaluated in Congress...

If approved, the bill will allow companies to collect data more quickly and precisely, while giving users more clarity over how their data will be used, according to Antonielle Freitas, data protection officer at Viseu Advogados, a law firm that specializes in digital and consumer laws. As data collection becomes centralized through regulated data brokers, the government can benefit by paying the public to gather anonymized, large-scale data, Freitas told Rest of World. These databases are the basis for more personalized public services, especially in sectors such as health care, urban transportation, public security, and education, she said.
This first pilot program involves "a small group of Brazilians who will use data wallets for payroll loans," according to the article — although Pedro Bastos, a researcher at Data Privacy Brazil, sees downsides. "Once you treat data as an economic asset, you are subverting the logic behind the protection of personal data," he told RestOfWorld. The data ecosystem "will no longer be defined by who can create more trust and integrity in their relationships, but instead, it will be defined by who's the richest."

Thanks to Slashdot reader applique for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you've left a comment on a YouTube video, a new website claims it might be able to find every comment you've ever left on any video you've ever watched. Then an AI can build a profile of the commenter and guess where you live, what languages you speak, and what your politics might be. The service is called YouTube-Tools and is just the latest in a suite of web-based tools that started life as a site to investigate League of Legends usernames. Now it uses a modified large language model created by the company Mistral to generate a background report on YouTube commenters based on their conversations. Its developer claims it's meant to be used by the cops, but anyone can sign up. It costs about $20 a month to use and all you need to get started is a credit card and an email address.

The tool presents a significant privacy risk, and shows that people may not be as anonymous in the YouTube comments sections as they may think. The site's report is ready in seconds and provides enough data for an AI to flag identifying details about a commenter. The tool could be a boon for harassers attempting to build profiles of their targets, and 404 Media has seen evidence that harassment-focused communities have used the developers' other tools. YouTube-Tools also appears to be a violation of YouTube's privacy policies, and raises questions about what YouTube is doing to stop the scraping and repurposing of peoples' data like this. "Public search engines may scrape data only in accordance with YouTube's robots.txt file or with YouTube's prior written permission," it says.

Google's Gemini AI can now analyze and summarize video files stored in Google Drive, letting users ask questions about content like meeting takeaways or product updates without watching the footage. The Verge reports: The Gemini in Drive feature provides a familiar chatbot interface that can provide quick summaries describing the footage or pull specific information. For example, users can ask Gemini to list action items mentioned in recorded meetings or highlight the biggest updates and new products in an announcement video, saving time spent on manually combing through and taking notes.

The feature requires captions to be enabled for videos, and can be accessed using either Google Drive's overlay previewer or a new browser tab window. It's available in English for Google Workspace and Google One AI Premium users, and anyone who has previously purchased Gemini Business or Enterprise add-ons, though it may take a few weeks to fully roll out. You can learn more about the update in Google's blog post.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SC Media: Thousands of ASUS routers have been compromised with malware-free backdoors in an ongoing campaign to potentially build a future botnet, GreyNoise reported Wednesday. The threat actors abuse security vulnerabilities and legitimate router features to establish persistent access without the use of malware, and these backdoors survive both reboots and firmware updates, making them difficult to remove.

The attacks, which researchers suspect are conducted by highly sophisticated threat actors, were first detected by GreyNoise's AI-powered Sift tool in mid-March and disclosed Thursday after coordination with government officials and industry partners. Sekoia.io also reported the compromise of thousands of ASUS routers in their investigation of a broader campaign, dubbed ViciousTrap, in which edge devices from other brands were also compromised to create a honeypot network. Sekoia.io found that the ASUS routers were not used to create honeypots, and that the threat actors gained SSH access using the same port, TCP/53282, identified by GreyNoise in their report. The backdoor campaign affects multiple ASUS router models, including the RT-AC3200, RT-AC3100, GT-AC2900, and Lyra Mini.

GreyNoise advises users to perform a full factory reset and manually reconfigure any potentially compromised device. To identify a breach, users should check for SSH access on TCP port 53282 and inspect the authorized_keys file for unauthorized entries.

The entertainment industry has achieved an unprecedented milestone: more film and television content exists today than at any point in human history. The technical infrastructure to deliver this content directly to consumers' homes works flawlessly. The problem? Actually finding something to watch has become a user experience nightmare that would make early-2000s software developers cringe.

Multiple streaming platforms are suffering from fundamental interface design failures that actively prevent users from discovering content. Cameron Nudleman, an Austin-based user, told Salon that scrolling through streaming service landing pages feels "like a Herculean task," while his Amazon Fire Stick setup -- designed to consolidate multiple services -- delivers consistent crashes across Paramount+ and Max, with Peacock terminating randomly "for no discernible reason."

The technical problems extend beyond stability issues to basic functionality failures. Max automatically enables closed captions despite user preferences, while Paramount+ crashes during show transitions. Chicago media writer Tim O'Reilly describes "every single interface" as "complete garbage except for Netflix's," though even Netflix has recently implemented changes that degrade user experience.

The industry eliminated simple discovery mechanisms like newspaper listings and Moviefone's telephone service in favor of algorithm-driven interfaces that Tennessee attorney Claire Tuley says have "turned art into work," transforming what was supposed to "democratize movies" into "a system that requires so many subscriptions, searching and effort."

New submitter salyavin writes: The final issue of Linux Format has been released. After 25 years the magazine is going out with a bang. Interviewing the old staff members, and looking back at old Linux distros [...] The last 10-15 years have been absolutely brutal to computer hobbyist magazines -- (or magazines and media at large, in general).

A security researcher has discovered an exposed database containing 184 million login credentials for major services including Apple, Facebook, and Google accounts, along with credentials linked to government agencies across 29 countries. Jeremiah Fowler found the 47-gigabyte trove in early May, but the database contained no identifying information about its owner or origins.

The records included plaintext passwords and usernames for accounts spanning Netflix, PayPal, Discord, and other major platforms. A sample analysis revealed 220 email addresses with government domains from countries including the United States, China, and Israel. Fowler told Wired he suspects the data was compiled by cybercriminals using infostealer malware. World Host Group, which hosted the database, shut down access after Fowler's report and described it as content uploaded by a "fraudulent user." The company said it would cooperate with law enforcement authorities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday that the U.S. would restrict visas for "foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States." He called it "unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil" and "for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States."

It's not yet clear how or against whom the policy will be enforced, but seems to implicate Europe's Digital Services Act, a law that came into effect in 2023 with the goal of making online platforms safer by imposing requirements on the largest platforms around removing illegal content and providing transparency about their content moderation. Though it's not mentioned directly in the press release about the visa restrictions, the Trump administration has slammed the law on multiple occasions, including in remarks earlier this year by Vice President JD Vance.

The State Department's homepage currently links to an article on its official Substack, where senior advisor for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Samuel Samson critiques the DSA as a tool to "silence dissident voices through Orwellian content moderation." He adds, "Independent regulators now police social media companies, including prominent American platforms like X, and threaten immense fines for non-compliance with their strict speech regulations." "We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty," Rubio says in the announcement, "especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech."

More than 50 years after its debut, Uno has achieved unprecedented popularity among adults, but its resurgence is creating problems and confusions as players disagree on fundamental rules. WSJ, in a fun story [non-paywalled source]: Think politics divides? Try mixing competitors with different views on stacking "action" cards, or getting everyone to agree on the true power of the Wild card. And nobody can seem to decide whether staples of the game of their youth -- like mandating players yell "Uno!" when they have one card left -- are socially acceptable at a bar with strangers. Mattel has responded by actively settling rule debates on social media, definitively stating that stacking Draw 2 cards is prohibited, while simultaneously embracing the game's divisive nature through marketing campaigns. The company's "Show 'Em No Mercy" variant, featuring more aggressive rules, became the second-best-selling card game in the United States last year according to research firm Circana, trailing only classic Uno itself.

President Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on smartphone imports including iPhones would not provide enough economic incentive for Apple to relocate US-bound iPhone production to domestic facilities, according to a new Morgan Stanley note viewed by Slashdot. The tariff threat, announced Friday via social media, appeared to target Apple's recent shift of iPhone production from China to India through its contract manufacturing partners.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that establishing US iPhone production would require a minimum of two years and several billion dollars to build multiple greenfield assembly facilities, with a trained workforce exceeding 100,000 workers during peak seasons. More significantly, the firm calculates that a US-produced iPhone would cost 35% more than current China or India production, primarily due to higher labor costs and the need to import 25% of iPhone components from China under existing 30% tariffs. By contrast, Apple could offset a 25% import tariff by raising global iPhone prices just 4-6%, making domestic production economically unviable.

"For decades, Hollywood directors including Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron and Alex Garland have cast AI as a villain that can turn into a killing machine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Even Steven Spielberg's relatively hopeful A.I.: Artificial Intelligence had a pessimistic edge to its vision of the future."

But now "Google — a leading developer in AI technology — wants to move the cultural conversations away from the technology as seen in The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina.". So they're funding short films "that portray the technology in a less nightmarish light," produced by Range Media Partners (which represents many writers and actors) So far, two short films have been greenlit through the project: One, titled "Sweetwater," tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear in the film, which was written by his son, Sean Douglas. It is the first project they are working on together. The other, "Lucid," examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same dream....

Google has much riding on convincing consumers that AI can be a force for good, or at least not evil. The hot space is increasingly crowded with startups and established players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Facebook parent company Meta. The Google-funded shorts, which are 15 to 20 minutes long, aren't commercials for AI, per se. Rather, Google is looking to fund films that explore the intersection of humanity and technology, said Mira Lane, vice president of technology and society at Google. Google is not pushing their products in the movies, and the films are not made with AI, she added... The company said it wants to fund many more movies, but it does not have a target number. Some of the shorts could eventually become full-length features, Google said....

Negative public perceptions about AI could put tech companies at a disadvantage when such cases go before juries of laypeople. That's one reason why firms are motivated to makeover AI's reputation. "There's an incredible amount of skepticism in the public world about what AI is and what AI will do in the future," said Sean Pak, an intellectual property lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, on a conference panel. "We, as an industry, have to do a better job of communicating the public benefits and explaining in simple, clear language what it is that we're doing and what it is that we're not doing."

"Do we need publicly-owned social networks to escape Silicon Valley?" asks an opinion piece in Spain's El Pais newspaper.

It argues it's necessary because social media platforms "have consolidated themselves as quasi-monopolies, with a business model that consists of violating our privacy in search of data to sell ads..." Among the proposals and alternatives to these platforms, the idea of public social media networks has often been mentioned. Imagine, for example, a Twitter for the European Union, or a Facebook managed by media outlets like the BBC. In February, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called for "the development of our own browsers, European public and private social networks and messaging services that use transparent protocols." Former Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — who governed from 2004 until 2011 — and the left-wing Sumar bloc in the Spanish Parliament have also proposed this. And, back in 2021, former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn made a similar suggestion.

At first glance, this may seem like a good idea: a public platform wouldn't require algorithms — which are designed to stimulate addiction and confrontation — nor would it have to collect private information to sell ads. Such a platform could even facilitate public conversations, as pointed out by James Muldoon, a professor at Essex Business School and author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech (2022)... This could be an alternative that would contribute to platform pluralism and ensure we're not dependent on a handful of billionaires. This is especially important at a time when we're increasingly aware that technology isn't neutral and that private platforms respond to both economic and political interests.
There's other possibilities. Further down they write that "it makes much more sense for the state to invest in, or collaborate with, decentralized social media networks based on free and interoperable software" that "allow for the portability of information and content." They even spoke to Cory Doctorow, who they say "proposes that the state cooperate with the software systems, developers, or servers for existing open-source platforms, such as the U.S. network Bluesky or the German firm Mastodon." (Doctorow adds that reclaiming digital independence "is incredibly important, it's incredibly difficult, and it's incredibly urgent."

The article also acknowledges the option of "legislative initiatives — such as antitrust laws, or even stricter regulations than those imposed in Europe — that limit or prevent surveillance capitalism." (Though they also figures showing U.S. tech giants have one of the largest lobbying groups in the EU, with Meta being the top spender...)

"Duolingo had been riding high," reports Fast Company, until CEO Luis von Ahn "announced on LinkedIn that the company is phasing out human contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that 'headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.'"

But then "facing heavy backlash online after unveiling its new AI-first policy", Duolingo's social media presence went dark last weekend. Duolingo even temporarily took down all its posts on TikTok (6.7 million followers) and Instagram (4.1 million followers) "after both accounts were flooded with negative feedback." Duolingo previously faced criticism for quietly laying off 10% of its contractor base and introducing some AI features in late 2023, but it barely went beyond a semi-viral post on Reddit. Now that Duolingo is cutting out all its human contractors whose work can technically be done by AI, and relying on more AI-generated language lessons, the response is far more pronounced. Although earlier TikTok videos are not currently visible, a Fast Company article from May 12 captured a flavor of the reaction:

The top comments on virtually every recent post have nothing to do with the video or the company — and everything to do with the company's embrace of AI. For example, a Duolingo TikTok video jumping on board the "Mama, may I have a cookie" trend saw replies like "Mama, may I have real people running the company" (with 69,000 likes) and "How about NO ai, keep your employees...."
And then... After days of silence, on Tuesday the company posted a bizarre video message on TikTok and Instagram, the meaning of which is hard to decipher... Duolingo's first video drop in days has the degraded, stuttering feel of a Max Headroom video made by the hackers at Anonymous. In it, a supposed member of the company's social team appears in a three-eyed Duo mask and black hoodie to complain about the corporate overlords ruining the empire the heroic social media crew built.
"But this is something Duolingo can't cute-post its way out of," Fast Company wrote on Tuesday, complaining the company "has not yet meaningfully addressed the policies that inspired the backlash against it... "

So the next video (Thursday) featured Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn himself, being confronted by that same hoodie-wearing social media rebel, who says "I'm making the man who caused this mess accountable for his behavior. I'm demanding answers from the CEO..." [Though the video carefully sidesteps the issue of replacing contractors with AI or how "headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work."] Rebel: First question. So are there going to be any humans left at this company?

CEO: Our employees are what make Duolingo so amazing. Our app is so great because our employees made it... So we're going to continue having employees, and not only that, we're actually going to be hiring more employees.

Rebel: How do we know that these aren't just empty promises? As long as you're in charge, we could still be shuffled out once the media fire dies down. And we all know that in terms of automation, CEOs should be the first to go.

CEO: AI is a fundamental shift. It's going to change how we all do work — including me. And honestly, I don't really know what's going to happen.

But I want us, as a company, to have our workforce prepared by really knowing how to use AI so that we can be more efficient with it.

Rebel: Learning a foreign language is literally about human connection. How is that even possible with AI-first?

CEO: Yes, language is about human connection, and it's about people. And this is the thing about AI. AI will allow us to reach more people, and to teach more people. I mean for example, it took us about 10 years to develop the first 100 courses on Duolingo, and now in under a year, with the help of AI and of course with humans reviewing all the work, we were able to release another 100 courses in less than a year.

Rebel: So do you regret posting this memo on LinkedIn.

CEO: Honestly, I think I messed up sending that email. What we're trying to do is empower our own employees to be able to achieve more and be able to have way more content to teach better and reach more people all with the help of AI.
Returning to where it all started, Duolingo's CEO posted again on LinkedIn Thursday with "more context" for his vision. It still emphasizes the company's employees while sidestepping contractors replaced by AI. But it puts a positive spin on how "headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work." I've always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that's why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission.

To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run. My goal is for Duos to feel empowered and prepared to use this technology.

No one is expected to navigate this shift alone. We're developing workshops and advisory councils, and carving out dedicated experimentation time to help all our teams learn and adapt. People work at Duolingo because they want to solve big problems to improve education, and the people who work here are what make Duolingo successful. Our mission isn't changing, but the tools we use to build new things will change. I remain committed to leading Duolingo in a way that is consistent with our mission to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available.
"The backlash to Duolingo is the latest evidence that 'AI-first' tends to be a concept with much more appeal to investors and managers than most regular people," notes Fortune: And it's not hard to see why. Generative AI is often trained on reams of content that may have been illegally accessed; much of its output is bizarre or incorrect; and some leaders in the field are opposed to regulations on the technology. But outside particular niches in entry-level white-collar work, AI's productivity gains have yet to materialize.