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Will AI damage human creativity? Most Americans say yes

marabird/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways AI's use is worrying Americans, a new report found. A majority of Americans don't want it replacing human cognition. Still, they are OK with some of AI's use cases. A new report on Americans' AI views highlights their concern over the technology's impact on human cognition, like creativity, problem-solving, forming meaningful relations, and making hard decisions. A majority

Will AI damage AI human creativity? Most Americans say yes

marabird/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways AI's use is worrying Americans, a new report found. A majority of Americans don't want it replacing human cognition. Still, they are OK with some of AI's use cases. A new report on Americans' AI views highlights their concern over the technology's impact on human cognition, like creativity, problem-solving, forming meaningful relations, and making hard decisions. A majority

Automatic differentiation can be incorrect

ISCL Seminar Series The Numerical Analysis of Differentiable Simulation: How Automatic Differentiation of Physics Can Give Incorrect Derivatives Scientific machine learning (SciML) relies heavily on automatic differentiation (AD), the process of constructing gradients which include machine learning integrated into mechanistic models for the purpose of gradient-based optimization. While these differentiable programming approaches pitch an idea of “simply put the simulator into a loss function a

American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana

Public lands and public access are now constantly under threat in the U.S., but there’s still good news to share. Ambitious conservation nonprofit American Prairie has secured its second-largest land purchase and leasing arrangement to date, buying up the 70,000-acre Anchor Ranch in Montana, which had been listed for sale for $35 million. The group bought the land from two billionaire Texas brothers who’d kept the public locked out of one of the only western access roads into adjacent public la

Scientists Just Found South America’s First Amber-Preserved Insects—and They’re Stunning

For the first time, scientists have uncovered a large amber deposit in South America containing fossilized insects and other preserved creatures. The small, half-transparent fossils hold a rich assortment of ancient bugs—and a slice of life from little-known ecosystems from over 100 million years ago. A Communications & Earth Environment study published today details amber samples from Ecuador’s Genoveva quarry—the first discovery in South America to yield fossilized insects and other life form

China Turns Legacy Chips Into a Trade Weapon

While the Trump administration was trying to make a TikTok deal happen during a meeting with China last weekend, Beijing was busy adding its own bargaining chips to the table. Actual chips, in fact—semiconductors. In the past week, China has unveiled a series of regulatory actions targeting American chipmakers. The most significant is an anti-dumping investigation into American legacy chips that power everything from cars and refrigerators to washing machines and data centers. Unlike cutting-ed

Automatic Differentiation Can Be Incorrect

ISCL Seminar Series The Numerical Analysis of Differentiable Simulation: How Automatic Differentiation of Physics Can Give Incorrect Derivatives Scientific machine learning (SciML) relies heavily on automatic differentiation (AD), the process of constructing gradients which include machine learning integrated into mechanistic models for the purpose of gradient-based optimization. While these differentiable programming approaches pitch an idea of “simply put the simulator into a loss function a

Americans want AI to stay out of their personal lives

A new study from Pew suggests that Americans aren’t particularly optimistic about AI. A full 50 percent of respondents said they were more concerned than excited about the use of AI in their daily lives. That’s down ever so slightly from 52 percent in 2023, but it’s up significantly from 37 percent in 2021. Americans expressed a number of concerns about AI, chief among them that it will negatively impact our ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships with other people. Just 1

American Sweatshop depicts content moderation as the hell it is

is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years. In American Sweatshop, German director Uta Briesewitz’s new psychological drama, every character working at a content moderation firm understands that ingesting horrific images is part of the job. They have all seen the disturbing footage uploaded to social media, and they know how important it is that someone is always there to deter

Americans Want More Control Over the AI in Their Lives, Pew Survey Finds

Artificial intelligence is everywhere now, powering song recommendations on Spotify, filling inboxes with AI-written emails, and showing up in classrooms and workplaces around the world. You may not feel like you get much say in where and how AI shows up in your life. You're not the only one. That's the takeaway from a Pew Research Center report published Wednesday, which finds that six out of 10 Americans (61%) want more control over how AI is used in their lives. More than half (57%) say they

Here’s What TikTok Under American Ownership Might Look Like

We may see a U.S.-China deal to keep TikTok alive this week, and details on how that long-delayed agreement could come together are steadily trickling out. The exact terms are yet to be unveiled, but based on initial public statements from the two countries’ representatives, it’s likely to include a U.S. spin-off of the highly popular social media app that would be owned by several American investors and would continue to rely on the Chinese algorithm running the platform. The biggest cog in C

American TikTok spinoff agreed; will still use Chinese algorithm

Both US and Chinese officials are stating that an agreement has been reached for an American TikTok spin-off to be sold to American investors. It’s not the first time the Trump administration has claimed that a deal has been agreed, but it is the first time that China is backing the claim, albeit in somewhat more muted terms … Reuters reports: U.S. and Chinese officials said on Monday they have reached a framework agreement to switch short-video app TikTok to U.S.-controlled ownership that wi

FinWise insider breach impacts 689K American First Finance customers

FinWise Bank is warning on behalf of corporate customers that it suffered a data breach after a former employee accessed sensitive files after the end of their employment. "On May 31, 2024, FinWise experienced a data security incident involving a former employee who accessed FinWise data after the end of their employment," reads a data breach notification sent by FinWise on behalf of American First Finance (AFF). American First Finance (AFF) is a company that offers consumer financing products

Wimpy vs. McDonald's: The Battle of the Burgers

When the burger landed on the tables of the first Wimpy Bar in 1954, it marked a new era of modernity, global connection, and convenience for a Britain rebuilding from the austerity of the Second World War. But it later found itself at the heart of a cultural war against these same ideals. ‘The McDonalds are coming’, declared the Reading Post in March 1983 as Wimpy’s competitor gained ground on the British high street. ‘It looks like the battle of the burgers is about to erupt.’ As the first mo

The Download: America’s gun crisis, and how AI video models work

This week, the Trump administration released a strategy for improving the health and well-being of American children. The report was titled—you guessed it—Make Our Children Healthy Again. It suggests American children should be eating more healthily. And they should be getting more exercise. But there’s a glaring omission. The leading cause of death for American children and teenagers isn’t ultraprocessed food or exposure to some chemical. It’s gun violence. This week’s news of yet more high-p

The 21 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now (September 2025)

In Recent years, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings, but some of the best movies are on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and those movies are all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up. Our picks for the best movies on Amazon Prime are below. All the films in our guide are

Trump threatens trade probe after 'discriminatory' EU fines against Google, Apple

US President Donald Trump during a dinner with tech leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to launch a trade investigation to "nullify" what he said were discriminatory fines being levied by Europe against U.S. tech firms such as Google and Apple . "We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceed

DeepSeek Is Working on an AI Agent. Will It Be Better Than ChatGPT?

China-based DeepSeek is working on developing a new agentic generative AI model, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources. Agentic AI is the latest wave of AI technology. AI agents are a kind of digital assistant; they can complete tasks without a lot of human oversight. AI agents can do anything from coding to ordering you a pizza, as my colleague Imad Khan recently tested. Details about the specifics of the DeepSeek agent model are still fuzzy. An August update to DeepSeek's V3 model was

‘Strange New Worlds’ Has Terminal Prequel Brain

Strange New Worlds has been having a rough go of it this season. From tonal misfires to episodes that have swung for gimmicks over engaging with the material questions they raise, the show has traded depth for breadth in terms of the sheer variety of spaces it explores. But one thing has become clear over the course of the season that becomes crystal in its penultimate episode: the only time the show is willing to knuckle down and really focus is when it wants to ride on the coattails of the Tre

DeepSeek Is Working on an AI Agent: Will It Be Better Than ChatGPT?

China-based DeepSeek is working on developing a new agentic generative AI model, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources. Agentic AI is the latest wave of AI technology. AI agents are a kind of digital assistant; they can complete tasks without a lot of human oversight. AI agents can do anything from coding to ordering you a pizza, as my colleague Imad Khan recently tested. Details about the specifics of the DeepSeek agent model are still fuzzy. An August update to DeepSeek's V3 model was

US threatens extra tariffs, export bans, for nations that regulate Big Tech

+COMMENT US president Donald Trump has threatened to impose extra tariffs on imports from any nation that dares to regulate American technology companies. Trump took to Truth Social on Monday evening to declare “As the President of the United States, I will stand up to Countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies.” “Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology. They also, outr

Horrifying screwworm infection confirmed in US traveler after overseas trip

Flesh-eating screwworm larvae poised to invade the US have snuck into Maryland via the flesh of a person who had recently traveled to El Salvador, upping anxiety about the ghastly—and economically costly—parasite. Reuters was first to report the case early Monday, quoting Andrew Nixon, spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, who said in an email that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had confirmed the case on August 4 in a person who had returned from a tri

U.S. Government Now ‘Controls’ 10% of Intel, Trump Says

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the U.S. government would be taking a 10% stake in Intel, the struggling U.S.-based chip manufacturer. But the president’s choice of words will definitely raise more than a few eyebrows, especially since the Trump regime has previously said the federal government will have no corporate governance role at the tech company. “It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Compa

If You're a Millennial, We Have Bad News About Your Rapidly Impending Death

Image by Getty / Futurism As the world was emerging from the turmoil of COVID in 2023, insurers noticed an alarming trend: Americans were dying at a significantly higher rate compared to other countries. Anyone familiar with the way the US handled the viral outbreak — especially compared to similar countries — might not be surprised. But while the pandemic certainly contributed to a spike in deaths, expectations of a return to pre-pandemic mortality rates were smashed as number crunchers notic

What Worries Americans About AI? Politics, Jobs and Friends

Americans have a lot of worries about artificial intelligence. Like job losses and energy use. Even more so: political chaos. All of that is a lot to blame on one new technology that was an afterthought to most people just a few years ago. Generative AI, in the few years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, has become so ubiquitous in our lives that people have strong opinions about what it means and what it can do. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Aug. 13-18 and released Tuesday dug into some of

New York City Is Stuck With a $45 Million EV Fleet That’s Glitchy as Hell

There’s going green for the sake of the planet, and then there’s going green as part of a policy initiative that winds up buying a bunch of glitch-plagued electric vehicles from a company that went bankrupt and can no longer service them. The latter is the exact story of a New York-based company called American Lease, which has spent around $45 million for 2,800 cars from Fisker, a now-dead EV startup that only made 11,000 of that model in its short life anyway, and is now using them as part of

Despite Online MAGA Freakout About Her Jeans, Sydney Sweeney’s New Movie Bombs

A couple of weeks ago, American Eagle launched a new ad campaign for its blue jeans line that featured actress Sydney Sweeney. In one of the ads, Sweeney weirdly broached the topic of genetics (she said, and I quote: “genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue”), but, for the most part, the ads seem to be about how great Sweeney’s posterior looks when she’s wearing the company’s denim. Not long aft

Exile Economics: If Globalisation Fails

Donald Trump​ likes to tell us that ‘tariff’ is ‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. He does not remind us that the word comes from the Arabic ta’rif, or that such duties were first applied by medieval sheikhs and sultans in some of the places he has designated as ‘shithole countries’. They were not really things of beauty either, being modest tolls to raise a little revenue, not intended to keep out foreign stuff, and were seldom charged at more than 5 per cent. It was the same in ancie

US influencer stranded in Antarctica after landing plane without permission

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