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Stories about AI-generated fabrications in the professional world have become part of the background hum of life since generative AI hit the mainstream three years ago. Invented quotes, fake figures, and citations that lead to non-existent research have shown up in academic publications, legal briefs, government reports, and media articles. We can often understand these events as technical failures: the AI hallucinated, someone forgot to fact-check, and an embarrassing but honest mistake became a national news story. But in some cases, they represent the tip of a much bigger iceberg—the visible portion of a much more insidious phenomenon that predates AI but that will be …

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Is the Altman firebomb just the start of extreme doomer violence? On April 10, someone threw a molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco. The alleged assailant, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, didn’t stop there. He then went to OpenAI’s headquarters and told the security guards there that he intended to burn down the building and everyone inside. Two days later, someone allegedly fired two shots from a car driving past Altman’s house, but OpenAI said that…

Illinois lawyer Mathew Kerbis markets himself as the Subscription Attorney, charging businesses and individual clients a monthly rate for legal advice and offering additional services like contract review and legal document drafting for a flat fee. Kerbis is a fairly tech-savvy lawyer—he’s a regular at the American Bar Association’s ABA Techshow conference, he hosts a podcast about subscription-based billing and other industry innovations, and he uses a Stripe-integrated web portal to streamline client payments. So it’s not surprising that he’s spent time experimenting with AI tools to help him do legal research, draft documents, and otherwise assist clients more effi…

When Christopher Pelkey was killed in a road rage incident in Arizona, his family was left not only to grieve but also to navigate how to represent him in court. As they prepared to confront his killer, Gabriel Horcasitas, during sentencing, they made an unusual and deeply controversial choice: to have Pelkey appear to speak from beyond the grave. To do so, they turned to technology: An AI-generated video featuring a re-created voice and likeness of Pelkey was presented as a victim impact statement ahead of sentencing. The video showed a digitally resurrected Pelkey appearing to speak directly to the judge. Of course, the statement wasn’t truly Pelkey’s. He couldn…

For those of us who earn a living publishing content on the open internet, Amazon’s lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity can seem darkly amusing. Perplexity is among the many AI companies that has spent years extracting value from the internet in exchange for little. Its crawlers have synthesized endless amounts of content from publishers, even working around publishers’ attempts to block this behavior, all so Perplexity can summarize content without having to send traffic to the websites themselves. Now Perplexity and its rivals are going a step further, with a new wave of AI browsers that can navigate pages automatically. Perplexity has Comet, OpenAI has ChatGP…

A momentous week in the technology sector made it clear there is no sign the boom in building artificial intelligence infrastructure is slowing — despite the bubble talk. Nvidia, whose processors are the AI revolution’s backbone, became the first company to surpass $5 trillion in market value. Microsoft and OpenAI inked a deal enhancing the ChatGPT maker’s fundraising ability and OpenAI promptly started laying groundwork for an initial public offering that could value the company at $1 trillion. Amazon said it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs, just days before its cloud unit posted its strongest growth in nearly three years. These developments, along with numer…

Below, coauthors Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein share five key insights from their new book, Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work. Melissa is an associate professor of management science at Stanford University, where she codirects the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. Michael is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, where he is a Bass University Fellow. Both have had their work featured in major publications, including The New York Times and Wired. What’s the big idea? Have you ever wished that you could assemble your version of the Avengers at work? That’s basically what it means to build a Flas…

No one wants to be in a bad movie—but imagine a movie studio casting you in new movies after you die, without your consent. That may have once seemed something out of a Black Mirror episode, but it’s becoming a real issue, and many think current legal protections don’t go nearly far enough. In 2024, the late Ian Holm appeared, in digital form, in Alien: Romulus four years after his death, a move some critics decried as “digital necromancy.” Early this year, producers partnered with a British artificial intelligence startup to re-create the voice of Alain Dorval, who spent decades dubbing Sylvester Stallone classics like Rocky and Rambo in French. The plan was scrapped…

As a CEO operating within the global supply chain—where every purchase is tied to efforts to end forced and child labor—I think often about what work is for: not just making it faster, but making it matter. That’s what makes the latest Gallup findings on AI so striking. The headline insight isn’t productivity. It’s something more revealing: We’re becoming more efficient, but not more engaged. Employees say AI is making them more productive, yet global employee engagement has declined for two consecutive years, now sitting at just 20%. We’re optimizing how work gets done, but for many people, we’re eroding the experience of doing it. That gap is a failure of intent…

AI is transforming how teams work. But it’s not just the tools that matter. It’s what happens to thinking when those tools do the heavy lifting, and whether managers notice before the gap widens. Across industries, there’s a common pattern. AI-supported work looks polished. The reports are clean. The analyses are structured. But when someone asks the team to defend a decision, not summarize one, the room goes quiet. The output is there, but the reasoning isn’t owned. For David, the COO of a midsize financial services firm, the problem surfaced during quarterly planning. Multiple teams presented the same compelling statistic about regulatory timelines, one that tur…

The music industry has seen disruption before. Vinyl gave way to cassettes, CDs to Napster, downloads to streaming. Each shift rewired how the music industry distributes and monetizes songs but did not change what music fundamentally is or the fact that humans have always created it. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just change how music moves. It challenges who owns it and who gets paid for it. The real threat of AI isn’t that it can make songs. It’s that it reveals how fragile the music industry is. For years, artists have operated inside a system where millions of streams translate into fractions of a cent, algorithms dictate visibility, and ownership is often dilu…

If you’ve been paying attention to AI at all lately, you’ve certainly seen the “Something Big Is Happening” essay by Matt Shumer, or at least some of the reaction to it. In it, Shumer describes how coding, for him, has completely transitioned from manually writing code to simply prompting and approving the near-flawless work done by AI. The piece was meant as a warning to all knowledge workers, essentially saying: AI has taken over my job, and it’s coming for yours next. There have been countless thought pieces on the merits and flaws of Shumer’s argument, and I have no intention of adding to the pile. But journalism is knowledge work, too, and the field had its own, …

Tech giants are making grand promises for the AI age. The technology, we are told, might discover a new generation of medical interventions, and possibly answer some of the most difficult questions facing physics and mathematics. Large language models could soon rival human intellectual abilities, they claim, and artificial superintelligence might even best us. This is exciting, but also scary, they say, since the rise of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, could pose an uncontrollable threat to the human species. U.S. government officials working with AI, including those charged with both implementing and regulating the tech in the government, are taking a diff…

There’s a cat-and-mouse game between those using generative AI chatbots to produce text undetected and those trying to catch them. Many believe they know the telltale signs—though as a journalist fond of the word “delve” and prone to em-dashes, I’m not so sure. Researchers at four U.S. universities, however, have taken a more rigorous approach, identifying linguistic fingerprints that reveal which large language model (LLM) produced a given text. “All these chatbots are coming out every day, and we interact with them, but we don’t really understand the differences between them,” says Mingjie Sun, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and lead author of the st…

If there’s an AI application in media that has had a rough road, it’s the chatbot. With the runaway success of ChatGPT, the whole idea that chat might be the next big thing in audience experiences took on new value, and several publications dove in, offering portals or widgets that enable readers to explore their content in a new way. I think it’s fair to say none of these have been home runs, but some are more promising than others. Chatbots from Skift, USA Today, and The Texas Tribune have all seen some quiet success in user engagement, and while “chat” likely won’t save the media industry, it may well play an important role. Beyond the wins of improving site search…

Today, investors are waking up to red on their screens as many tech and AI stocks are dropping in premarket trading. But why are shares in these companies falling? Much of it has to do with the cloud infrastructure company Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and its latest quarterly earnings results. Here’s what you need to know. Oracle’s Q2 2026 results send ORCL plunging Yesterday, Oracle reported financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2026. To say investors were disappointed in the results is an understatement, given how poorly ORCL shares are performing in premarket trading this morning. As of the time of this writing, ORCL shares are down over 12% as inve…

AI coaches are everywhere. They’re training marathoners and coaching leaders, and even billionaires Ray Dalio created an AI clone to serve as a digital mentor. In the past few months, searches for “AI coaching” have gone through the roof. And it’s easy to see why. AI coaches are available 24/7, cost less than a gym membership, and can recall every word you’ve ever said. Research even shows they can match human coaches in helping people reach their goals. Ironically, people often tell AI things they’d never tell another person. Studies show chatbots reduce our fear of judgment, making them surprisingly effective at uncovering what’s really going on. And with 94% of…

For years, AI companies gave users unfettered access to the candy store, encouraging them to think of tokens, the chunks of text AI reads and writes, as effectively infinite. Tokens were bundled into subscriptions, hidden behind generous caps, or priced low enough that people stopped counting them. But as the cost of serving models eats into revenue, and as chip shortages, helium disruption, and data center bottlenecks constrain how much compute can come online, the big model makers are starting to ration access more aggressively. All-you-can-eat AI is disappearing. Now companies are in a contest to see who can keep subsidising demand the longest, and whether the last…

Loneliness is no longer just an emotion—it’s a growing public health crisis in the U.S. A 2024 Harvard study found that 21% of U.S. adults regularly experience loneliness, while the American Psychological Association reports that nearly half of young workers feel isolated at work. Capitalizing on the recent tech boom, AI-powered digital companions and digital twin avatars are rapidly emerging as alternatives to human relationships. These AI bots offer a constant sense of connection without judgment and can be hyper-personalized to match user preferences. Platforms including Oh, Replika (whose tagline is “the AI companion who cares”), and Eden AI chat by EVA AI lea…

Black Friday isn’t what it used to be. Less than 15 years ago, it was fairly common for people to wake up at ridiculously early hours to drive to a store, where they would stand in line, waiting for the doors to open in order to grab the best deals. Those people still exist, but not in the numbers they used to, thanks to the convenience of online shopping (and the early start to holiday deals). But as artificial intelligence becomes more entrenched, it could play an outsized role in Black Friday (and Cyber Monday)—and 2025 could be something of a test case for the technology. The average consumer is expected to spend $1,595 on holiday gifts this year, according to…

When ChatGPT burst onto the scene, much of academia reacted not with curiosity but with fear. Not fear of what artificial intelligence might enable students to learn, but fear of losing control over how learning has traditionally been policed. Almost immediately, professors declared generative AI “poison,” warned that it would destroy critical thinking, and demanded outright bans across campuses, a reaction widely documented by Inside Higher Ed. Others rushed to revive oral exams and handwritten assessments, as if rewinding the clock might make the problem disappear. This was never really about pedagogy. It was about authority. The integrity narrative masks a …