Jonathan Abrams, The New York Times; 8 Ways A.I. Affected Pop Culture in 2025
"A.I.-generated artists topping iTunes and Billboard charts. Podcast hosts speaking fluently for hours in languages they do not know. Dead celebrities brought back to life and filling up social-media feeds.
For years, artificial intelligence was a disruption on the horizon. In 2025 it arrived in tangible ways, big and small. Here are a few examples of how A.I. intersected with pop culture in 2025."
Sal Khan, The New York Times; A 1 Percent Solution to the Looming A.I. Job Apocalypse
"On my way to meet a friend in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago, I passed three self-driving Waymos gliding through traffic. These cars are everywhere now, moving as if they’ve been part of the landscape forever. When I arrived, the wonder of those futuristic cars gave way to a far more troubling glimpse of what lies ahead.
My friend told me that a huge call center in the Philippines — a center his venture capital firm had invested in — had just deployed A.I. agents capable of replacing 80 percent of its work force. The tone in his voice wasn’t triumphant. It was filled with deep discomfort. He knew that thousands of workers depended on those jobs to pay for food, rent and medicine. But they were disappearing overnight. Even worse, over the next few years this could happen across the entire Filipino call center industry, which directly makes up 7 percent to 10 percent of the nation’s G.D.P.
That conversation stayed with me. What’s happening in the Philippines is connected to what’s happening on the streets of San Francisco; Phoenix; Austin, Texas; Atlanta; and Los Angeles — the cities where driverless cars now operate.
I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don’t yet realize."
Justin Gregg, The Guardian; Could AI relationships actually be good for us?
"There is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis” has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collective anxiety has been compounded by studies showing that young people are increasingly embracing the idea of AI relationships; half of teens chat with an AI companion at least a few times a month, with one in three finding conversations with AI “to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real‑life friends”.
But we need to pump the brakes on the panic. The dangers are real, but so too are the potential benefits. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that – depending on what future scientific research reveals – AI relationships could actually be a boon for humanity."
"From the advent of AI actress Tilly Norwood to major music labels making deals with AI companies, 2025 has been a watershed year for AI and culture."
Jason Ma, Fortune ; ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton predicts 2026 will see the technology get even better and gain the ability to ‘replace many other jobs’
"Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton said artificial intelligence technology will continue improving next year, enough to wipe out more human workers."
John Ruwitch , NPR; Memory loss: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
"The world has a memory problem, thanks to artificial intelligence.
The explosion in AI-related cloud computing and data centers has led to so much demand for certain types of memory chips that now there's a shortage. The imbalance is expected to start affecting prices of all sorts of products powered by technology...
The chips are known as RAM, or random access memory, and are crucial to making sure that things like smartphones, computers and game consoles run smoothly. Chips allow you to keep multiple tabs open in browsers, for instance, or watch videos without them being choppy...
AI data centers require huge amounts of memory to accompany their cutting-edge graphics processing unit (GPU) microprocessors that train and operate AI models."
Brian Groh, The New York Times; When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw
"In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people. Now the same forces are climbing the economic ladder. Yet Washington remains fixated on global competition and growth, as if new work will always appear to replace what’s been lost. Maybe it will. But given A.I.’s rapacity, it seems far more likely that it won’t. If our leaders fail to prepare, the silence that once followed the closing of factory doors will spread through office parks and home offices — and the grief long borne by the working class may soon be borne by us all."
CALDER MCHUGH, Politico; Americans Hate AI. Which Party Will Benefit?
"There is a massive, growing opportunity for Democrats to tap into rising anxiety, fear and anger about the havoc AI could wreak in people’s lives, they say, on issues from energy affordability to large-scale job losses, and channel it toward a populist movement — and not doing it, or not doing it strongly enough, will hurt the party...
There is hardly any issue that polls lower than unchecked AI development among Americans. Gallup polling showed that 80 percent of American adults think the government should regulate AI, even if it means growing more slowly. Pew, meanwhile, ran a study that showed only 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years. Even congressional Democrats, at a record low 18 percent approval, beat that out, according to Quinnipiac.
“It’s not just the working class [that’s hurting]. It’s the middle class. It’s the upper middle class,” said Morris Katz, a strategist who has worked with incoming New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and Nebraska independent Dan Osborn, among others. “We’re really headed towards a point in which it feels like we will all be struggling, except for 12 billionaires hiding out in a wine cave somewhere.”"
John Bowden , The Independent; Bernie Sanders calls for pause in AI development: ‘What are they gonna do when people have no jobs?’
Senator’s warnings come as Trump renews calls to ban states from regulating AI
"“This is the most consequential technology in the history of humanity... There’s not been one single word of serious discussion in Congress about that reality,” said the Vermont senator.
Sanders added that while tech billionaires were pouring money into AI development, they were doing so with the aim of enriching and empowering themselves while ignoring the obvious economic shockwaves that would be caused by the widespread adoption of the technology.
“Elon Musk. [Mark] Zuckerberg. [Jeff] Bezos. Peter Thiel... Do you think they’re staying up nights worrying about working people?” Sanders said. “What are they gonna do when people have no jobs?"
Sonia A. Rao, Christina Morales and , The New York Times; Waymo Suspended Service in San Francisco After Its Cars Stalled During Power Outage
"An hourslong power outage in San Francisco over the weekend that caused tens of thousands of households to lose electricity also knocked out Waymo service, with the ubiquitous self-driving cars coming to a halt at darkened traffic signals, blocking traffic and angering drivers of regular vehicles that became stuck as a result.
The ride-hailing service remained offline Sunday afternoon and tow truck operators said they had been towing Waymos for hours overnight. Social media was littered with videos of the vehicles at blocked intersections with their hazard lights blinking...
Beyond safety, Waymo critics have argued that the self-driving cars could siphon people from public transit ridership and eliminate jobs while simultaneously enriching executives in Silicon Valley."
Elon Danziger, The New York Times; I Asked ChatGPT to Solve an 800-Year-Old Italian Mystery. What Happened Surprised Me.;
"After years of poring over historical documents and reading voraciously, I made an important discovery that was published last year: The baptistery was built not by Florentines but for Florentines — specifically, as part of a collaborative effort led by Pope Gregory VII after his election in 1073. My revelation happened just before the explosion of artificial intelligence into public consciousness, and recently I began to wonder: Could a large language model like ChatGPT, with its vast libraries of knowledge, crack the mystery faster than I did?
So as part of a personal experiment, I tried running three A.I. chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — through different aspects of my investigation. I wanted to see if they could spot the same clues I had found, appreciate their importance and reach the same conclusions I eventually did. But the chatbots failed. Though they were able to parse dense texts for information relevant to the baptistery’s origins, they ultimately couldn’t piece together a wholly new idea. They lacked essential qualities for making discoveries."
Rafael Behr , The Guardian; When the AI bubble bursts, humans will finally have their chance to take back control
"In the absence of global governance, we will depend on the integrity of robber barons and authoritarian apparatchiks to build ethical guardrails around systems already being embedded in tools we use for work, play and education."
Caitlin Gibson, The Washington Post; Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.
"She had thought she knew how to keep her daughter safe online. H and her ex-husband — R’s father, who shares custody of their daughter — were in agreement that they would regularly monitor R’s phone use and the content of her text messages. They were aware of the potential perils of social media use among adolescents. But like many parents, they weren’t familiar with AI platforms where users can create intimate, evolving and individualized relationships with digital companions — and they had no idea their child was conversing with AI entities.
This technology has introduced a daunting new layer of complexity for families seeking to protect their children from harm online. Generative AI has attracted a rising number of users under the age of 18, who turn to chatbots for things such as help with schoolwork, entertainment, social connection and therapy; a survey released this month by Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan polling firm, found that nearly a third of U.S. teens use chatbots daily.
And an overwhelming majority of teens — 72 percent — have used AI companions at some point; about half use them a few times a month or more, according to a July report from Common Sense Media, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on children’s digital safety."
Jeré Longman, The New York Times ; Robert Nakamura, ‘Godfather’ of Asian American Film, Dies at 88
"In 1971, while a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Nakamura made the landmark short film “Manzanar,” named for the camp where his family was interned in the high desert of Central California. It was one of the first documentaries to depict camp life from personal experience.
After returning to the camp in 1969, he went back again and again, in person and through documentaries like the lyrical “Wataridori: Birds of Passage” (1974), which depicted the lives of three first-generation Japanese Americans, including his father, and “Something Strong Within” (1995), a collection of home movies made by the interned that detailed what they endured in the camps, sent there under an executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In “Third Act” (2025), a documentary made by his son, the filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura, Mr. Nakamura spoke about the ambivalence he felt toward Manzanar."
Amy Hawkins, The Guardian; Rare footage from trial of Chinese general who defied Tiananmen crackdown order leaked online
"Rare footage of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) general who defied orders to lead his troops into Tiananmen Square and crush the 1989 student protesters has been leaked online, offering a highly unusual glimpse into the upper echelons of the military at one of the most fraught moments in modern Chinese history.
General Xu Qinxian’s refusal to take his troops from the PLA’s prestigious 38th Group Army, a unit based on the outskirts of Beijing, into the capital has been the stuff of Tiananmen lore for decades.
The six-hour video recording of Gen Xu’s court martial hearing the next year sheds light on the rare act of defiance. In the video, Xu said he refused because he did not want to become “a sinner in history”.
The video “confirms the legend about Xu Qinxian”, said Zhou Fengsuo, a leader of the Tiananmen demonstrations who now lives in exile in the US. “This is the first time that we have a clear first-person view of this period,” he added."
Tara-Lyn Camilleri, ABC; Ebenezer Scrooge and the dynamics of moral transformation: The ethics of Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’
"Given that Dickens wrote from within Victorian Christianity, I’ll assume he took for granted some meaningful form of free will, miracles and redemption. I don’t. Yet this Victorian ghost story still cheers me every year. In recent years I’ve found myself examining the popular moral we’ve attached to it — that it’s a story about choosing to do better, against the narrative itself."
Jiawei Wang, The New York Times; What Parents in China See in A.I. Toys
"A video of a child crying over her broken A.I. chatbot stirred up conversation in China, with some viewers questioning whether the gadgets are good for children. But the girl’s father says it’s more than a toy; it’s a family member."
Adam Satariano, The New York Times; They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.
"Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg lead a German legal aid organization that assists individuals facing online abuse and violent threats.
Clare Melford runs a British group that helps identify disinformation.
Imran Ahmed is a British activist who runs an organization that has chronicled anti-vaccination content on social media.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration accused all of them of a campaign of censorship against Americans.
The four individuals, along with a former senior European Commission official, Thierry Breton of France, were barred from entering the United States after Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them “radical activists” who undercut free speech...
The travel ban is a major escalation in a dispute between the Trump administration and Europe over the regulation of online content and social media."
Richard Luscombe , The Guardian; The protesters showing up every week to shut down ‘Alligator Alcatraz’: ‘We will end this’
"They come on buses, in cars and RVs. Some ride on motorcycles. Every Sunday afternoon, convoys of protesters from all over Florida, and others from out of state, descend on the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail in the Everglades to stand vigil for those held inside.
It is a ritual that began in August, a month after the opening of the remote detention camp celebrated by Donald Trump for its harsh conditions, and hailed by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, as a model for the president’s aggressive detention and deportation agenda.
The open air vigils continued, and grew in size, through the brutal heat and torrential rains of the south Florida summer. They endured through a federal judge’s order in August that “Alligator Alcatraz” should close, and a subsequent reversal by an appeals court; the protesters’ voices grew louder at alleged human rights abuses and violence inflicted on detainees.
Over the holiday season, thousands more people are expected to join the protests. The Guardian spoke to several people at the heart of the vigils:..
The pastor
As pastor of the Allendale United Methodist church in St Petersburg, Andy Oliver has never been afraid of diving into political issues. The treatment of detainees at “Alligator Alcatraz”, he said, compelled him to organize a bus to attend the vigils, and he was encouraged that other locals joined his parishioners to make their voices heard.
“We filled up the bus and had to rent a couple more vehicles. We had so many people wanting to be there,” he said.
Oliver sees parallels at the immigration jail with the religious stories he preaches.
“In the Christmas story, the person who came to announce Jesus’s arrival was his cousin John the Baptist, and he was pretty quickly thrown in jail for calling for liberation,” he said.
“Jesus came to bring liberation to people. We have people that are physically being detained even beyond the scope of what the law allows, families are being separated, harms are being done. Jesus was born as a refugee. He spent most of his ministry with people on the margins. I think that’s where Jesus would be, he’d be calling for these prisons to be emptied.”
Oliver said the diversity of the vigil crowd was notable, and that it was “powerful” to share the experience with people of different faiths."
Joseph de Weck , The Guardian; Our king, our priest, our feudal lord – how AI is taking us back to the dark ages
"This summer, I found myself battling through traffic in the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat told me to turn right toward a spot known for its fish soup. But the navigation app Waze instructed us to go straight. Tired, and with the Renault feeling like a sauna on wheels, I followed Waze’s advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a construction site.
A trivial moment, maybe. But one that captures perhaps the defining question of our era, in which technology touches nearly every aspect of our lives: who do we trust more – other human beings and our own instincts, or the machine?
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously defined the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Immaturity, he wrote, “is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another”. For centuries, that “other” directing human thought and life was often the priest, the monarch, or the feudal lord – the ones claiming to act as God’s voice on Earth. In trying to understand natural phenomena – why volcanoes erupt, why the seasons change – humans looked to God for answers. In shaping the social world, from economics to love, religion served as our guide.
Humans, Kant argued, always had the capacity for reason. They just hadn’t always had the confidence to use it. But with the American and later the French Revolution, a new era was dawning: reason would replace faith, and the human mind, unshackled from authority, would become the engine of progress and a more moral world. “Sapere aude!” or “Have courage to use your own understanding!”, Kant urged his contemporaries.
Two and a half centuries later, one may wonder whether we are quietly slipping back into immaturity. An app telling us which road to take is one thing. But artificial intelligence threatens to become our new “other” – a silent authority that guides our thoughts and actions. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won courage to think for ourselves – and this time, not to gods or kings, but to code...
With all the benefits AI brings, the challenge is this: how can we harness its promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself? That may be one of the defining questions of the 21st century. It is one we would do well not to delegate to the machine."
Joey Cappelletti | AP via The Washington Post; Judge blocks Trump effort to strip security clearance from attorney who represented whistleblowers
"A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a March presidential memorandum to revoke the security clearance of prominent Washington attorney Mark Zaid , ruling that the order — which also targeted 14 other individuals — could not be applied to him."
Steven Lee Myers, The New York Times ; Government Officials Once Stopped False Accusations After Violence. Now, Some Join In.
"A churn of disinformation after a major news event is hardly a surprise anymore, but its spread after the Brown killings was not limited to the dark fringes of the internet. It was fueled by prominent figures in business and government whose false statements or politically charged innuendo compounded public anger and anxiety.
That has raised new alarms about the nature and quality of public discourse — and whether there is any consequence for those who degrade it or for the social media platforms that reward it."
Azi Paybarah , The Washington Post; Trump aides’ official religious messages for Christmas draw objections
"How to celebrate Christmas while respecting the Constitution’s ban on “establishment of religion” has been an issue for federal officials at least since 1870 when President Ulysses S. Grant, seeking to unite the country after a brutal Civil War, designated Christmas — along with Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day — as federal holidays.
Government officials sought to balance the celebration of a federal holiday rooted in a religious tradition with the country’s tradition of pluralism and secular public spaces. The result was often a Christmas message that avoided specific references to Christianity. For decades, it was common for government officials on both sides of the aisle to share celebratory yet secular messages about Christmas with images that did not carry overt religious meanings, like snowflakes and Christmas trees.
Many still do. The State Department, for example, posted a secular Christmas message this year, directed at “all Americans.”
Many of the Trump administration’s officials who are most active on social media, however, took a different approach."
Simar Bajaj , The New York Times; The Service Dogs Helping Veterans With PTSD
There’s research suggesting that these four-legged “battle buddies” can reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. But shortages and long wait times pose barriers.
"Dr. Bahr is part of a growing cadre of veterans using service dogs for PTSD relief. In a 2024 study, veterans with service dogs were followed for three months and found to have less severe PTSD, depression and anxiety than those on the waiting list.
This research doesn’t say whether service dogs caused these mental health benefits or how long they might last.
Still, many veterans say these dogs make life more manageable. They are trained to catch subtle signs of distress, like thumping legs or a hitch in breathing, said Maggie O’Haire, a human-animal interaction expert at the University of Arizona. But researchers suspect that service dogs can also smell the chemical changes that accompany stress and anxiety.
Labrador retrievers are among the most common breed of service dogs, prized for their steadiness and eagerness to bond.
With a nuzzle or a tug of the leash, these dogs can interrupt the swell of panic in veterans, Dr. O’Haire said. “They know your environment is not filled with danger,” she explained, so they help veterans ground themselves."
STEVEN SLOAN , AP; Kennedy Center criticizes musician who canceled performance after Trump name added to building
"The president of the Kennedy Center on Friday fiercely criticized a musician’s sudden decision to cancel a Christmas Eve performance at the venue days after the White House announced that President Donald Trump’s name would be added to the facility.
“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” the venue’s president, Richard Grenell, wrote in a letter to musician Chuck Redd that was shared with The Associated Press.
In the letter, Grenell said he would seek $1 million in damages “for this political stunt.”"
Sarah Fitzpatrick , The Atlantic; So This Is Why Trump Didn’t Want to Release the Epstein Files
"Trump has also insisted that he knew nothing of Epstein’s criminal activity—though his critics have questioned how that could be true given their close relationship and history of chasing women together. Members of Congress from both parties have said they will continue to probe the issue in the upcoming year. Representatives I spoke with told me their takeaway from reading the files is that top officials in the Trump administration have not been honest about what was in them, and that they intend to press Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for more information.
“Although the files are overly redacted, they’ve already demonstrated that the narrative painted by Patel in hearings, Bondi in press statements, and Trump himself on social media wasn’t accurate,” Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who co-authored the Epstein legislation, told me. “A complete disclosure consistent with the law will show there are more men implicated in the files in possession of the government.”"
TORI NOBLE, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Artificial Intelligence, Copyright, and the Fight for User Rights: 2025 in Review
"A tidal wave of copyright lawsuits against AI developers threatens beneficial uses of AI, like creative expression, legal research, and scientific advancement. How courts decide these cases will profoundly shape the future of this technology, including its capabilities, its costs, and whether its evolution will be shaped by the democratizing forces of the open market or the whims of an oligopoly. As these cases finished their trials and moved to appeals courts in 2025, EFF intervened to defend fair use, promote competition, and protect everyone’s rights to build and benefit from this technology.
At the same time, rightsholders stepped up their efforts to control fair uses through everything from state AI laws to technical standards that influence how the web functions. In 2025, EFF fought policies that threaten the open web in the California State Legislature, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and beyond.", The Daily Beast; MAGA Official Slammed for Clobbering the Living Christmas Lights Out of AI Santa Claus
[Kip Currier: I was curious about Indiana State Sen. Chris Garten's values and background when I saw this story. So it's eye-opening to see his own descriptor of himself on his Facebook page:
"My name is Chris Garten. I am a Christian, husband, father, Marine Corps veteran..."
https://www.facebook.com/GartenforSenate/
Though Garten's military service is commendable, nowhere in the Bible would the Christian Jesus condone the kinds of actions that Garten portrays himself performing in these AI-generated images of himself brutalizing Santa Claus. How do such images advance one of Jesus's greatest Commandments to "love thy neighbor as thyself" (Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31)?
How does a person who self-identifies as a Christian justify such depictions to others, as well as when he prays? Especially when Jesus stands for helping the "least among us" (Matthew 25:40) and says that "the last shall be first" (Matthew 20:16).
Even in jest, do these images convey a sense of good judgment or an elected official who is a positive role model in a free and democratic society?]
[Excerpt]
"A MAGA official has branded his critics “snowflakes” after marking this year’s holiday season by sharing his apparent fantasy of whaling on a defenseless Saint Nick on the steps of Indiana’s State Capitol building.
State Senator Chris Garten shared the AI-generated images on X on Christmas Day. One of the four pictures features the two-term Republican state senator, decked in a sleeveless suit à la WWE, kicking a bewildered Santa Claus squarely on the chin to send the beloved, age-old children’s folk character sailing backwards through the air.
A second shows the MAGA official launching himself forward with the apparent intention of following up with a flying punch to the jaw. A third shows him further brutalizing the trembling, mythic gift-giver as he writhes in agony on the floor...
“Lots of intolerance, swearing, and outrage on display over a few AI pics I had a blast designing with my kids,” he wrote in a subsequent post. “Some of you clowns are just insufferable. Hopefully your negativity stays in the comments and not directed at your families.”
“Merry Christmas, snowflakes,” Garten added, accompanied by another AI-generated photo of himself in a Santa suit, pointing at an oversized snowflake."
