ENDEVR Nov 28, 2025 Edge of Existence: AI | ENDEVR Documentary Watch the First Episode here: • Nuclear War: How Close Are We To The Edge … The risk of human extinction has never been higher. A very recent past has seen a global pandemic, a renewed nuclear threat, and runaway climate change. What if COVID-19 is merely a dress rehearsal for a more serious potential disaster? New research predicts a 1 in 6 chance that life as we know it won’t make it to the end of this century. This is a story about the greatest risks to humanity, and what we can do about them. We are living in a time when human-made risks pose the biggest threat to our existence. Technological progress has brought us to a precipice. For the first time ever, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves. Edge of Existence lays out how we can pull ourselves back from this precipice in order to achieve a vast and extraordinary future.
Tag Archives: AI
The dark side of AI – Exploitation of humans and nature
DW Documentary Jun 10, 2026 Magical, autonomous, all-powerful: Artificial intelligence fuels our dreams and nightmares. While tech companies promise us a better future, AI is already causing serious harm. Huge data centers and server farms are required for AI programs to function. These are paving over landscapes and consuming immense amounts of water and electricity — mostly from fossil fuels, and thus dirty energy sources. Millions of low-wage workers worldwide are busy feeding data to, and training, the algorithms for AI programs — often at the expense of their mental and emotional health. These workers, many of them young and living in the Global South, are exposed to all manner of harmful content to train AI models to detect such material.
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Will AI lead to the death of the internet?
DW Documentary May 20, 2026 The internet is being flooded with AI-generated garbage. Disinformation, propaganda, a flood of synthetic images and sounds. Will we soon only be getting information that AI feeds us? While we are still pondering the possible social implications of artificial intelligence, the digital knowledge space is already drowning in synthetic trash. Automated bots are producing a flood of AI-generated content that threatens to suffocate the internet. How did it come to this? After all, it was not so long ago that the web was considered a place of free knowledge, designed for the open exchange of information and entertainment. How did it become a dumping ground for machine-generated nonsense, so quickly? During his journey of discovery through the dying web, filmmaker Mario Sixtus encounters search engines that are losing their bearings and, out of helplessness, have begun working on their own demise. He demonstrates how one or two command sets typed into AI software are enough to produce meaningless self-help books and news videos consisting of pure nonsense. Will we soon be fed only AI-hallucinated fake information when we try to do our own research? The documentary takes a cinematic journey through the flood of online garbage, meets a podcaster in New York who has cloned himself with AI, encounters an underpaid click worker in Kenya who trains AI — and, along with internet experts like Cory Doctorow, Melanie Mitchell and Mats Schönauer, strains for a glimpse of a new, sustainable internet.
Bernie Sanders Announces Plan to Seize Half of AI Industry for the Public Good
“Who will own and control that future? Who will benefit from it, and who will be hurt by it?”
Published Jun 2, 2026 (Futurism.com)
The hype surrounding generative AI has generated astronomical amounts of value, with tech companies raising tens of billions of dollars and many — including OpenAI and Anthropic — preparing to go public this year at sky-high valuations, in moves that will produce incredible wealth for their stockholders.
Whether the average Joe will ever directly benefit from all of this is looking dubious at best. That’s despite many of these tools relying on AI models that were trained on the creative output of millions of people, copyright be damned, the vast majority of whom have yet to see a single cent. Quite the contrary — many workers are facing a disastrous job market as a result of corporations stretching themselves thin through massive investments in AI.
Meanwhile, concerns continue to grow that the billionaire class is unethically enriching itself through the scheme, while shutting out the democratic process.
To independent senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), that kind of injustice needs to end. In an essay published by the New York Times, Sanders argued for the creation of an “AI Sovereign Wealth Fund” that would be created through a “one-time 50 percent tax” on the stock of AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, to “give the public a direct ownership stake.”
In other words, Sanders is proposing to transfer half of the AI companies’ stock into a public fund — a one-time transfer as opposed to a tax on profits — which the government will manage. Generated revenues could be distributed as “direct payments to the American people.”
While many important details have yet to be ironed out, as Sanders admits, it would represent a massive shift and equity transfer — if his act were to pass, that is.
“The question, then, is not whether AI will change the world,” he wrote. “It will. The question is: Who will own and control that future? Who will benefit from it, and who will be hurt by it?”
Sanders argues such a fund would “give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology,” while also guaranteeing that the “trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”
While chances of the senator’s idea surviving the Congressional approval process are likely slim — the AI industry holds immense influence over Congress — it’s a creative approach to an increasingly sticky problem. Even tech leaders, who have watched as the backlash to AI continues to grow, have turned their attention to possible solutions to address even greater wealth disparity caused by the emergence of AI.
Jeff Bezos recently argued that the bottom 50 percent of earners shouldn’t pay any taxes, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman came up with a new concept called “universal basic compute,” which would provide free access to those who can’t afford costly AI tools. Meanwhile, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has called for a new take on universal basic income, uninspiringly dubbed “universal high income.”
Sanders’ sovereign wealth fund takes the idea a step further, giving Americans who don’t happen to be tech billionaires an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. The concept has already been “put into practice right here at home,” Sanders wrote, pointing to an Alaskan sovereign wealth fund that’s allowed residents to receive annual dividends through oil revenues.
“To start, the billions, if not trillions, of dollars generated by this fund would provide direct payments to the American people,” he wrote. “And as the fund generates more and more wealth, the proceeds would be used to ensure that every man, woman and child in our country has a decent and dignified standard of living, including health care, education and housing.”
More on Bernie Sanders: Unions Attack AI for Menacing Human Jobs
Victor Tangermann
Senior Editor
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
Influential Tech Founder Says His Peers Are Suffering From Mass AI Psychosis
“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.”
By Joe Wilkins
Published May 28, 2026 (Futurism.com)
It’s no secret that many of the world’s top CEOs are obsessed with AI. By pursuing lofty goals of complete AI automation, these executives have created one of the largest financial bubbles in recent memory while transforming the job market into a barren wasteland, with little to show for their efforts so far.
As the top tech companies have yet to find a way to turn AI into a profitable venture, those decisions to go all-in on AI are looking increasingly delusional. According to Aaron Levie, CEO and founder of the massive cloud computing company Box, there’s a simple explanation for it: many of his colleagues are suffering from AI psychosis.
“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,” Levie wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. Translation: AI-happy CEOs are out of touch with the rank-and-file workers tasked with making their AI ambitions come to life.
As an example, Levie offers cases in which corporate executives say “look I made this awesome product prototype” with an AI chatbot. “Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues,” he retorts.
Whether “AI psychosis” is the best metaphor for this concept is up for debate. Arguably the most common definition of AI psychosis is that it’s a phenomenon where extreme interactions with AI triggers or amplifies delusions or paranoia, sometimes already existing and sometimes seemingly newly cooked up with the AI. The symptoms can be extreme, with AI chatbots convincing victims that they’re communing with God-like entities, or have singlehandedly uncovered a grave threat to humankind.
There are indeed some executives who seem to fit the bill. Last year, Futurism reported that colleagues of Geoff Lewis, managing partner of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Bedrock, were concerned that he was suffering from a break with reality after spending too much time with ChatGPT (ironically, Bedrock was an early investor in OpenAI.) In that case, Lewis had claimed to be mapping an incomprehensible “non-governmental system” that was designed to disrupt his life.
That said, there’s a major gap between an exec believing they’re targeted by a vast conspiratorial network and an exec buying into AI hype. The phenomenon Levie is identifying might better fall under “organizational blindness,” a known phenomenon where leaders of a company find themselves disconnected from the reality of work on the ground. Coupled with a ravenous hunger for profit, this kind of tunnel vision seems to be exactly what we’re seeing in companies around the globe.
In today’s world, many executives and managers operate at an abstract level, working via spreadsheets, emails and Zoom meetings. This is different from concrete labor, meaning the specific, friction-heavy tasks that workers perform, like writing code or wiring server racks. When a board-room full of executives loses sight of this tangible labor — by failing to consider the kinds of tasks AI chatbots are actually good at, for example — it can certainly create a break from material reality, though one driven by social factors rather than psychological.
In other words, there are two possibilities: either the world’s CEOs are losing their minds, or they’re just succumbing to the latest manifestation of capitalism run amok. Occam’s razor probably suggests the latter.
More on AI and CEOs: 99 Percent of CEOs Are Preparing to Lay Off Workers and Replace Them With AI Within Two Years, Survey Finds
Joe Wilkins
Correspondent
I’m a tech and labor correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
Google Is Making Huge Changes That Are Poised to Decimate What’s Left of Journalism
AI strikes again.
Published May 21, 2026 (Futurism.com)
It’s looking like time to sound two death knells. One for the demise of the simple Google search, and another for the entire journalism industry.
On Tuesday, Google announced a massive change to its homepage that’ll transforms the old-school search box, and with it, the entire web ecosystem. Going forward, it’ll be an “intelligent” search box that expands into a more chatbot-like experience that weaves together the company’s existing AI features.
The layout encourages you to ask lengthy questions like you would with a chatbot, and comes with an AI-powered autocomplete feature to help flesh out your thoughts. Questions like these will prompt the search box to show AI Overviews, Google’s AI-generated — and notoriously unreliable — summaries that appear above the actual search results. Since the search box is “designed to anticipate your intent,” Google claims, it can also expand into AI Mode, Google’s fully AI-powered search feature, allowing you to upload pictures and documents.
But the most consequential change is what the revamped searches will return. Instead of showing you a ranked list of links to other websites, you’ll get conversational-style answers. As is already happening with the years-long rollout of AI Overviews — plus AI chatbots broadly — this means even fewer people will be visiting the sites that the AI features are pilfering their answers from in the first place.
This is bad news for any business dependent on web traffic and ad revenue to keep the lights on, and it’s especially perilous for journalism, an industry that’s always had trouble keeping up in the internet age, when fewer people are willing to pay for access to information. Now that its product can be wholly regurgitated by a chatbot, it could spell the end for a vast swathe of publications.
One study, for example, found that that users are 58 percent less likely to click a link when an AI overview appears above it. Another report found that after the advent of AI Overviews, ten major tech news outlets lost as much as 97 percent of US web traffic from Google.
If fewer and fewer people are actually visiting news sites because an AI chatbot — or Google’s revamped AI search — regurgitates their content, how are these sites expected to stay afloat?
The answer: many in the industry are expecting that they won’t. A survey of hundreds of media leaders conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that on average, they predicted traffic to their websites to plummet by nearly half over the next three years. These fears have fueled layoffs across the industry, with some publishers embracing AI tools to speed up work.
What’s replacing journalism adds insult to injury. A recent analysis found that Google’s AI-generated summaries are accurate around 91 percent of the time. Across the trillions of search queries Google processes every year, that translates to tens of millions of inaccurate answers that Google’s AI is giving every hour.
More on AI: An Entire “Local Newspaper” Just Shut Down When All Its Reporters Were Busted as AI Fakes
Frank Landymore
Contributing Writer
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
The AI Crisis
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Started streaming 99 minutes ago James Tunney LLM, is an Irish barrister and author of The Mystery of the Trapped Light: Mystical Thoughts in the Dark Age of Scientism plus The Mystical Accord: Sutras to Suit Our Times, Lines for Spiritual Evolution; also TechBondAge: Slavery of the Human Spirit, Human Entrance to Transhumanism: Machine Merger and the End of Humanity, and AI-Govnerveance: Care and Possession in Dustopia. His most recent book is Trotsky vs Jesus: Battle of the AI-Millennium. His website is https://www.jamestunney.com/
A.I. Revolution
Season 51 Episode 5 | 53m 30s | Video has closed captioning. | Video has audio descriptionAdd toMy List
A.I. tools like ChatGPT seem to think, speak, and create like humans. But what are they really doing? From cancer cures to Terminator-style takeovers, leading experts explore what A.I. can – and can’t – do today, and what lies ahead.
Link to video: https://player.pbs.org/viralplayer/3088387729/
Aired: 03/27/24
Expires: 04/24/27
Rating: NR
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
Is AI More Creative Than Humans?
A new study answers the question but raises a few of its own.
Updated March 20, 2024 | Reviewed by Ray Parker (psychologytoday.com)
KEY POINTS
- A new study compared human and AI performance on various creative tasks.
- It found AI excelled in originality and elaboration, sparking debate about the “soul” of AI creativity.
- The study used objective scoring to evaluate creativity, avoiding human rating biases.
Source: Shutterstock/AIGenerated
Sometimes, it feels like the battle lines between artificial intelligence (AI) and humanity are drawn—a computational comparison that focuses on speed and accuracy. However, the domain of creativity provides a more complex basis for analysis and is often “the last holdout” for the uniqueness that defines humanity.
However, in the quest to unravel the creative potential of AI, particularly through the lens of large language models (LLMs), a simple question frames the discussion: Is AI more creative than humans? A new study puts man against machine to ask this simple question and reveal insights that might cut to the core of our very humanity.
Defining a Framework of Creativity
At the heart of this exploration are four distinct tasks, each crafted to probe various facets of creative thought:
Source: Art: DALL-E/OpenAI
- The Alternative Uses Task. Challenges participants to envision novel uses for everyday items, pushing the boundaries of conventional thinking.
- The Consequences Task. Explores the ability to foresee the ripple effects of hypothetical scenarios, stretching the imagination to its limits.
- The Divergent Associations Task. Tests the capacity to generate a list of unrelated nouns, showcasing the breadth of conceptual thinking.
- The Visual Combinations Task. Engages participants in merging unrelated images to weave new, cohesive narratives, highlighting the ability to synthesize and create harmony from diversity.
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Setting an Even Playing Field
The study sought a balanced comparison between human creativity and GPT-4’s capabilities. With 151 human participants matched against 151 instances of GPT-4 responses, the evaluation focused on the quality, originality, and elaboration of ideas, transcending mere quantitative measures.
For this analysis, traditional human ratings, commonly used to evaluate divergent thinking tasks, were not employed for scoring. Instead, the study utilized the open creativity scoring (OCS) tool to automate the scoring of semantic distance, thus capturing the originality of ideas objectively by assigning scores based on the remoteness (uniqueness) of responses.
This method circumvents potential human-centered issues such as fatigue, biases, and the cost of time, which could influence the scoring process. The automated scoring approach has been found to correlate robustly with human ratings, suggesting that it effectively captures the essence of creativity without the need for a separate group of humans to evaluate the responses of both the human and AI arms of the study.
AI Offers Bold Originality and Elaboration
The results of this comparative study offer compelling insights into the creative prowess of GPT-4. Notably, an independent sample t-test revealed no significant differences in total fluency between humans and GPT-4, indicating a level playing field in terms of the quantity of generated ideas.
However, the crux of creativity lies in originality and elaboration. A detailed analysis of variance for originality, based on semantic distance scores, uncovered significant main effects, favoring GPT-4 regardless of the prompt, with notable interaction effects between the group and prompt, highlighting GPT-4’s superior performance in originality across different scenarios.
Furthermore, when comparing elaboration scores, which quantify the detail within each valid response, GPT-4’s responses were significantly more elaborate than those of human participants. For instance, in response to using a fork, where a human might simply suggest “as a hair comb,” GPT-4’s elaboration would encompass a more detailed narrative, illustrating its ability to weave richer, more complex ideas from a single prompt.
Is AI Creativity Contrived?
The reliance on automated scoring systems like the OCS tool in evaluating the creative outputs of AI and humans raises questions about the nature of creativity itself. While these systems can objectively assess the originality and elaboration of responses based on semantic distance, they may overlook the intrinsic, intangible qualities that human creativity embodies.
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Creativity, in its purest form, is often seen as an expression of something uniquely human—some may even say the soul. It’s this manifestation of the innermost thoughts and feelings that transcend mere linguistic or conceptual novelty. The concern that AI-generated ideas, despite their originality or complexity, might lack the depth, intentionality, and emotional resonance that human creativity inherently possesses is poignant.
It touches upon the broader debate of whether creativity can be genuinely replicated or remains an inherently human trait, deeply intertwined with consciousness and subjective experience.
In this context, the study’s approach, while innovative and rigorous in its methodology, may inadvertently overlook these qualitative aspects of creativity, leading to a perception that AI’s creative endeavors, no matter how sophisticated, are somewhat contrived, lacking the “soul” that human artists infuse into their creations.
The Future of Collaborative Creativity
The findings of this study, particularly the detailed results supporting GPT-4’s superior originality and elaboration, prompt a reevaluation of the nature of creativity. It suggests a future in which AI’s creative potential not only rivals but in certain aspects surpasses human creativity, opening up new horizons for collaborative innovation. The question “Is AI more creative than humans?” thus evolves into a dialogue about the synergistic possibilities between human ingenuity and artificial intelligence, heralding a new era of creative exploration in which the fusion of human and AI creativity redefines the boundaries of innovation and artistic expression.
About the Author
John Nosta is an innovation theorist and founder of NostaLab.
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