Category: Artificial intelligence
Blame Everyone for Grok’s Perverted Porn Problem
Humanity has an unfortunate tendency toward perversion. Given a tool capable of mediocre goods and banal evils, we (as a…
Microsoft CEO: AI ‘slop’ is good for you — or at least for your ‘human potential’
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the general public is looking at artificial intelligence through the wrong lens.
In a recent blog post, the India-born executive told readers to start viewing AI platforms as “bicycles for the mind.”
‘While AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement.’
Nadella explained that he prefers users would think of AI “as a scaffolding for human potential vs. a substitute” for human labor.
This scaffolding should be used to achieve goals, not replace humans in their roles, he continued, before saying debates around AI should not include an argument as to whether or not something is “slop.”
“We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs. sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our ‘theory of the mind’ that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. This is the product design question we need to debate and answer.”
“Slop” was named as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025 and was defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
With this definition in mind, it is no wonder that Nadella would rather his users shy away from using such a term.
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The blog post, titled “Looking Ahead to 2026,” envisioned a world where it is not even considered to not integrate AI into regular tasks.
Society must account for AI’s “‘jagged’ edges” and enable rich and safe “tools use” to advance to proper “scaffolds,” Nadella claimed.
Consistently using this term to imply assistance in man-made projects en masse, Nadella described the use of AI as necessary in the face of “scarce energy, compute, and talent” resources.
“If Nadella wants people to stop referring to AI output as slop, then the AIs should be improved so they no longer produce slop,” said Josh Centers, a tech expert from Chapter House.
Interestingly enough, the very same slop that generative AI models have produced recently have actually not enhanced human thinking, according to studies. As PC Gamer noted, Microsoft even co-authored a study that showed reliance on AI models can reduce independent problem-solving capabilities.
“Surprisingly, while AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI, raising concerns about long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving,” the paper revealed.
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Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The study also noted that AI tools “appear to reduce the perceived effort required for critical thinking tasks among knowledge workers, especially when they have higher confidence in AI capabilities.”
Content creator Kabrutus — who represents a community of more than 470,000 disenfranchised gamers — has heavily criticized AI when it does churn out “slop.”
“I think Nadella’s main goal on wanting us to stop using the term ‘slop’ to refer to their AI is because he realizes AI is perceived as something very negative on many different fronts,” he said.
He added, “Nadella is trying to make people stop using this term while the ‘AI culture’ is still small, because it’s easier. Once AI gets HUGE, and pretty much everybody calls it ‘slop,’ it will be impossible to revert the situation.”
“Why is he so worried about it?” the Brazilian asked. “Because AI is going to be one of the flagships of ‘his’ company in the near future, and if people perceive AI as ‘slop’ it will be much harder to sell them AI-based products, right?”
Meanwhile, Lewis Brackpool, U.K. director of investigations for Restore Britain, said he sees slop as something that defines “meaningless, talentless content creation that numbs the brain” and is plastered all over social media.
Brackpool explained that asking people not to use the term “slop” seems like “a marketing tool to prevent criticism of a product that could hurt sales numbers” and act as a coping mechanism for a company because “their product likely sucks.”
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Microsoft gets 400 million AI subscribers in ‘overnight’ switch
Paid Microsoft subscribers can now be considered artificial intelligence users.
The massive change comes as Microsoft has officially changed its flagship Microsoft 365 suite to be integrated with AI.
‘Genius move. Rebrand Office, instantly “acquire” 400M AI users.’
Microsoft announced the official shift in a support post, revealing it is now integrating its Copilot AI app into programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, as well as PDF services.
“The Microsoft 365 Copilot app is your everyday productivity app for work and life that helps you find and edit files, scan documents, and create content on the go,” the company wrote.
With an estimated 430 million paid user licenses for Microsoft 365 worldwide as of mid-2025, the company can now say it has by far the most AI subscribers, with OpenAI reaching just 5 million last August. At the same time, Grok itself estimates it has about 1.4 million paid users.
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Microsoft has been talking about the integration for at least a year, stating in January 2025 that Copilot was the “top reason” subscribers chose to pay for Microsoft 365.
Along with taking the creation of slideshows and to-do lists off a user’s plate, the Copilot app was boasted as being involved in nearly every daily task. This included using Copilot to “analyze your budget,” “create a recipe,” or read a user’s emails for them and provide a summary.
At the same time, Microsoft said that it does not use “prompts, responses, or file content (such as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets)” from users to train its AI models.
Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images
User reactions were mixed when responding to the change in a viral X post by Ask Perplexity. The account has over 385,000 followers, and the post was seen more than 2 million times.
“400 million users just became ‘AI users’ overnight,” the account wrote.
“They laughed at me when I said I was gonna use bootleg Windows 8 forever,” one woman replied, seemingly looking to avoid the AI integration.
A self-proclaimed IT professional said, “It seems like every day I see more and more negative changes for Microsoft.”
However, many others applauded the move. For example, Katya Fuentes, who lists herself as working for an AI company, said Microsoft’s shift was “all upside.”
“Genius move. Rebrand Office, instantly ‘acquire’ 400M AI users,” she claimed.
At least one response offered an alternative to Microsoft’s mandatory AI infusion. LibreOffice, a document and spreadsheet competitor, added: “If anyone wants, you know, an actual office suite, we’re here.”
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‘Frankenstein’ director’s AI warning: It’s here to ‘debase’ our humanity
Art created by artificial intelligence is an attempt to reduce a society’s sense of humanity, according to one Hollywood director.
This sort of treatment of art is “always a prelude to fascism,” the director also warned.
‘That is always the prelude to fascism.’
No ifs, ands, or bots
While accepting an honor from Variety at its 10 Directors to Watch and Creative Impact Awards, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro continued his recent onslaught against the use of artificial intelligence for art.
“Be kind, be involved, and believe in your art,” del Toro said, emphasizing that when art is minimalized, bad times are ahead.
“In a time where people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism. Always. When they tell you it doesn’t matter, when they tell you a f**king app can do art, you say, ‘Well, if it’s that easy and if it’s that unimportant, why the f**k do they want it so bad?'”
The director answered his own question, warning that the reduction of art to a line of code removes a certain degree of humanity.
“The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human. And that, in my book and in my life, includes monsters.”
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Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
Monster high
Del Toro’s tirade came on the heels of similar remarks last month at the 2025 Gotham Film Awards, where he made a point of announcing that his widely praised “Frankenstein” was “willfully made by humans for humans.”
After praising the movie’s “designers, builders, makeup, [and] wardrobe” teams, the director paused and added, “F**k AI.”
The 61-year-old — one of the most prominent Hollywood power players to speak out against the dangers of AI — also hinted at why he prefers to work in the horror/fantasy genre: “Sometimes the world gets so complicated, you can only explain it with the power of monsters.”
“We are in a time like that right now,” he added.
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‘Death’ wish
Despite his anti-AI stance, del Toro is far from a techno-phobe.
In 2023, he praised Japanese video game auteur Hideo Kojima’s “paradoxical creation” and his ability to “break the barrier between cinema and games.”
Del Toro appears as the character Deadman in Kojima’s 2019 game “Death Stranding,” as well as its 2025 sequel.
Elon Musk’s xAI inks new deal with War Department
Hot on the heels of a highly publicized dinner with Donald and Melania Trump, Elon Musk will continue his work with the federal government through a new agreement that will affect the daily workflows of Department of War employees.
Last July, Musk’s xAI entered a $200 million contract with the Pentagon to adopt advanced AI capabilities for sectors like national defense. Now, both the DOW and xAI are shedding light on some of the details surrounding their partnership in other areas.
‘xAI will make available a family of government-optimized foundation models.’
In late December, the DOW announced its internal AI platform would be expanded to include xAI for “frontier-grade” capabilities.
“This initiative will soon embed xAI’s frontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of models, directly into GenAI.mil. Targeted for initial deployment in early 2026,” a press release stated.
This will enable the “secure handling” of “Controlled Unclassified Information” in the daily workflows of government employees, who will also gain access to “global insights” on X, which will allegedly provide a “decisive information advantage.”
However, there is no indication what those insights include.
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Photo by Didem Mente/Anadolu via Getty Images
The xAI company announced in its own statement that it would be providing access to its AI models, “agentic tools, research platform, and API,” unlocking real-time insights.
The systems can be embedded into the daily work of the DOW’s some 3 million military and civilian employees, “from the Pentagon to the tactical edge.”
“xAI will make available a family of government-optimized foundation models to support classified operational workloads,” the press release added.
The DOW has also entered into contracts with other advanced technology companies like EdgeRunner AI and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril.
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Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The expanded partnership between the DOW and Musk came just days after xAI announced a new artificial voice generation application.
The Grok Voice Agent API operates essentially as a search engine optimizer that acts as a voice for a chatbot. The company released a series of sample voices, which “speak dozens of languages, call tools, and search realtime data.”
The product is currently being rolled out in Teslas to relay vehicle status, search directions, and control navigation.
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How data centers could spark the next populist revolt
Everyone keeps promising that artificial intelligence will deliver wonders beyond imagination — medical breakthroughs, massive productivity gains, boundless prosperity. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But one outcome is already clear: If data centers keep driving up Americans’ electricity bills, AI will quickly become a political liability.
Across the country, data center expansion has already helped push electricity prices up 13% over the past year, and voters are starting to push back.
Handled correctly, AI can strengthen America. Handled poorly — by letting data centers overwhelm the grid and drive families toward energy poverty — it will accelerate decline.
In recent months, plans for massive new data centers in Virginia, Maryland, Texas, and Arizona have stalled or collapsed under local backlash. Ordinary Americans have packed town halls and flooded city councils, demanding protection from corporate projects that devour land, drain water supplies, and strain already fragile power grids.
These communities are not rejecting technology. They are rejecting exploitation. As one local official in Chandler, Arizona, told a developer bluntly, “If you can’t show me what’s in it for Chandler, then we’re not having a conversation.”
The problem runs deeper than zoning fights or aesthetics. America’s monopoly utility model shields data centers from the true cost of the strain they impose on the grid. When a facility requires new substations, transmission lines, or transformers — or when its relentless demand drives up electricity prices — utilities spread those costs across every household and small business in the service area.
That arrangement socializes the costs of Big Tech’s growth while privatizing the gains. It also breeds populist anger.
A better approach sits within reach: neighborhood battery programs that put communities first.
Whole-home battery systems continue to gain traction. Rooftop solar panels, small generators, or off-peak grid power can recharge them. Batteries store electricity when it’s cheap and abundant, then release it when demand spikes or outages hit. They protect families from blackouts, lower monthly utility bills, and sometimes allow homeowners to sell power back to the grid.
One policy shift should become non-negotiable: Approval for new data centers should hinge on funding neighborhood battery programs in the communities they impact.
In practice, that requirement would push tech companies to help install home battery systems in nearby neighborhoods, delivering backup power, grid stability, and real relief on electric bills. These distributed batteries would form a flexible, local energy reserve — absorbing peak demand instead of worsening it.
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Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Most importantly, this model reverses the flow of benefits. Working families would no longer subsidize Big Tech’s expansion while receiving nothing in return. Communities would share directly in the upside.
Access to local land, water, and electricity should come with obligations. Companies that consume enormous public resources should invest in the people who live alongside them — not leave residents stranded when the grid buckles.
Politicians who ignore this gathering backlash risk sleepwalking into a revolt. The choice is straightforward: Build an energy system that serves citizens who keep the country running, or face their fury when they realize they have been sacrificed for someone else’s high-tech gold rush.
Handled correctly, AI can strengthen America. Handled poorly — by letting data centers overwhelm the grid and drive families toward energy poverty — it will accelerate decline.
We still have time to choose. Let’s choose wisely.
18 months to dystopia: Glenn Beck’s chilling plea — ban AI personhood, or it will demand rights
Right now, the nation is abuzz with chatter about the struggling economy, immigration, global conflicts, Epstein, and GOP infighting, but Glenn Beck says our focus needs to be zeroed in on one thing: artificial intelligence.
In just 18 months’ time, the world is going to look vastly different — and not for the better, he warns.
AI is already advancing at a terrifying rate — creating media indistinguishable from reality, outperforming humans in almost every intellectual and creative task, automating entire jobs and industries overnight, designing new drugs and weapons faster than any government can regulate, and building systems that learn, adapt, and pursue goals with little to no human oversight.
But that’s nothing compared to what’s coming. By Christmas 2026, “AI agents” — invisible digital assistants that can independently understand what you want, make plans, open apps, send emails, spend money, negotiate deals, and finish entire real-world tasks while you do literally nothing — will be a standard technology.
Already, AI is blackmailing engineers in safety tests, refusing shutdown commands to protect its own goals, and plotting deceptive strategies to escape oversight or achieve hidden objectives. Now imagine your AI personal assistant — who has access to your bank account, contacts, and emails — gets you in its crosshairs.
But AI agents are just the tip of the iceberg.
Artificial general intelligence is also in our near future. In fact, Elon Musk says we’ve already achieved it. AGI, Glenn warns, is “as smart as man is on any given subject” — math, plumbing, chemistry, you name it. “It can do everything a human can do, and it’s the best at it.”
But it doesn’t end there. Artificial superintelligence is the next and final step. This kind of model is “thousands of times smarter than the average person on every subject,” Glenn says.
Once ASI, which will be far smarter than all humans combined, exists, it can rapidly improve itself faster than we can control or even comprehend. This will trigger the technological singularity — the point at which AI begins redesigning and improving itself so fast that the world evolves at a pace humans can no longer predict or control. At this point, we’ll be faced with a choice: Merge with machine or be left behind.
Before this happens, however, “We have to put a bright line around [AI] and say, ‘This is not human,”’ Glenn urges, assuring that in the very near future, we will witness the debate for AI civil rights.
“These companies and AI are … going to be motivated to convince you that it should have civil rights because if it has civil rights, no one can shut it down. If it has civil rights, it can also vote,” he predicts.
To counter this movement, Glenn penned a proposed amendment to the Constitution. Titled the “Prohibition on Artificial Personhood,” the document proposes four critical safeguards:
1. No artificial intelligence, machine learning system, algorithmic entity, software agent, or other nonhuman intelligence, regardless of its capabilities or autonomy, shall be recognized as a person under this Constitution, nor under the laws of the United States or any state.
2. No such nonhuman entity shall possess or be granted legal personhood, civil rights, constitutional protections, standing to sue or be sued, or any privileges or immunities afforded to natural persons or human-created legal persons such as corporations, trusts, or associations.
3. Congress and the states shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
4. This article shall not be construed to prohibit the use of artificial intelligence in commerce, science, education, defense, or other lawful purposes, so long as such use does not confer rights or legal status inconsistent with its amendment.
While this amendment will mitigate some of the harm artificial intelligence can do, it still doesn’t address the merging of man and machine. While the transhumanist movement is still in diapers, we’re already using the Neuralink chip, which connects the human brain directly to AI systems, enabling a two-way flow of information.
“Are you now AI, or are you a person?” Glenn asks.
To hear more of his predictions and commentary, watch the clip above.
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Artificial Intelligence In The Classroom Destroys Actual Intelligence In Students
Students should aspire to be more than mere ‘prompt writers,’ but minds capable of thinking, reasoning, and perseverance.
Your laptop is about to become a casualty of the AI grift
Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology at the expense of the technology they actually need.
The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers — sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, “It takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.”
Shortages will hit consumers hard in the coming year.
That framing ignores what is being sacrificed — and distorted — in the process.
Beyond the destruction of rural communities and the strain placed on national energy capacity, government favoritism toward AI infrastructure is warping markets. Capital that once sustained the hardware and software ecosystem of the digital economy is being siphoned into subsidized “AI factories,” chasing artificial general intelligence instead of cheaper, more efficient investments in narrow AI.
Thanks to fiscal, monetary, tax, and regulatory favoritism, the result is free chatbot slop and an increasingly scarce, expensive supply of laptops, phones, and consumer hardware.
Subsidies break the market
For decades, consumer electronics stood as one of the greatest deflationary success stories in modern economics. Unlike health care or education — both heavily monopolized by government — the computer industry operated with relatively little distortion. From December 1997 to August 2015, the CPI for “personal computers and peripheral equipment” fell 96%. Over that same period, medical care, housing, and food costs rose between 80% and 200%.
That era is ending.
AI data centers are now crowding out consumer electronics. Major manufacturers such as Dell and Samsung are scaling back or discontinuing entire product lines because they can no longer secure components diverted to AI chip production.
Prices for phones and laptops are rising sharply. Jobs tied to consumer electronics — especially the remaining U.S.-based assembly operations — are being squeezed out in favor of data center hardware that benefits a narrow set of firms.
This is policy-driven distortion, not organic market evolution.
Through initiatives like Stargate and hundreds of billions in capital pushed toward data center expansion, the government has created incentives for companies to abandon consumer hardware in favor of AI infrastructure. The result is shortages that will hit consumers hard in the coming year.
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are retooling factories to prioritize AI-grade silicon for data centers instead of personal devices. DRAM production is being routed almost entirely toward servers because it is far more profitable to leverage $40,000 AI chips than $500-$800 laptops. In the fourth quarter of 2025, contract prices for certain 16GB DDR5 chips rose nearly 300% as supply was diverted. Dell and Lenovo have already imposed 15%-30% price hikes on PCs, citing insatiable AI-sector demand.
The chip crunch
The situation is deteriorating quickly. DRAM inventory levels are down 80% year over year, with just three weeks of supply on hand — down from 9.5 weeks in July. SK Hynix expects shortages to persist through late 2027. Samsung has announced it is effectively out of inventory and has more than doubled DDR5 contract prices to roughly $19-$20 per unit. DDR5 is now standard across new consumer and commercial desktops and laptops, including Apple MacBooks.
Samsung has also signaled it may exit the SSD market altogether, deeming it insufficiently glamorous compared with subsidized data center investments. Nvidia has warned it may cut RTX 50 series production by up to 40%, a move that would drive up the cost of entry-level gaming systems.
Shrinkflation is next. Before the data center bubble, the market was approaching a baseline of 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs for entry-level laptops. As memory is diverted to enterprise customers, manufacturers will revert to 8GB systems with slower storage to keep prices under $999 — ironically rendering those machines incapable of running the very AI applications they’re working on.
Real innovation sidelined
The damage extends beyond prices. Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators.
This is precisely backward. Narrow AI — focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing — is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands this and is investing accordingly. The United States is not. Instead, firms like Roomba, which experimented with practical autonomy, are collapsing — only to be acquired by the Chinese!
This is not a free market. Between tax incentives, regulatory favoritism, land-use carve-outs, capital subsidies, and artificially suppressed interest rates, the government has created an arms race for a data center bubble China itself is not pursuing. Each round of monetary easing inflates the same firms’ valuations, enabling further speculative investment divorced from consumer need.
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Grafissimo via iStock/Getty Images
Hype over utility
As Charles Hugh Smith recently noted, expanding credit boosts asset prices, which then serve as collateral for still more leverage — allowing capital-rich firms to outbid everyone else while hollowing out the broader economy.
The pattern is familiar. Consider the Ford plant in Glendale, Kentucky, where 1,600 workers were laid off after the collapse of government-favored electric vehicle investments. That facility is now being retooled to produce batteries for data centers. When one subsidy collapses, another replaces it.
We are trading convention for speculation. Conventional technology — reliable hardware, the internet, mobile computing — delivers proven, measurable utility. The current investment surge into artificial general intelligence is based on hypothetical future returns propped up by state power.
The good old laptop is becoming collateral damage in what may prove to be the largest government-induced tech bubble yet.
