Most U.S. doctors are quietly using this AI tool. Few patients know about it.; NBC News, May 13, 2026

 Jared Perlo, NBC News; Most U.S. doctors are quietly using this AI tool. Few patients know about it. 

"Almost two-thirds of physicians — or roughly 650,000 doctors — in the U.S. actively use OpenEvidence, while another 1.2 million use it internationally, OpenEvidence representatives said. With its quick and tailored replies, OpenEvidence has become an AI-era equivalent of consulting a colleague for their expert opinion, though the software can also write patient discharge notes and provide custom study tools for doctors’ medical exams.

“Sixty percent of all the searches are about how to make clinical decisions,” said Jena, who is currently examining 90 million OpenEvidence queries submitted since 2024 as part of a new research project. “The physicians are asking: For this particular patient, or with this profile, this condition, maybe other comorbidities that they have, what’s the right treatment?”

Yet with OpenEvidence’s skyrocketing popularity, some experts worry about potential hallucinations or incomplete answers, a lack of rigorous scientific studies on the tool’s patient impact, and the potential for doctors’ critical thinking and evaluation skills to erode with increased OpenEvidence use and dependence.

But many in the medical world see OpenEvidence as a time-saving tool that can improve patient care."

Canada Targets AI Copyright Rules While Weighing Social Media Age Restrictions — Web Summit; Deadline, May 12, 2026

 Stewart Clarke , Deadline; Canada Targets AI Copyright Rules While Weighing Social Media Age Restrictions — Web Summit

"The Canadian government is preparing new rules on how copyright holders should be compensated when their work is used by AI systems, as it also weighs age restrictions on social media and tighter regulation of AI chatbots.

Evan Solomon, Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, was speaking at Web Summit Vancouver."

I Forgave My Mother, but It Was Too Late; The New York Times, May 10, 2026

Molly Jong-Fast, The New York Times; I Forgave My Mother, but It Was Too Late

"When my children were small, two of them had developmental issues that meant spending hours and hours with therapists. I stopped writing so I could take them from physical therapy to speech therapy to occupational therapy. The therapists’ waiting rooms became my second home, and sometimes my mother would come and sit with me. It was weird because she wouldn’t do that kind of thing with me when I was a kid. I’d beg her to pick me up at school, but she never could. Sometimes when we were sitting in those waiting rooms staring at our phones, she would apologize. I could have told her it was OK, but I didn’t want to let her off the hook.

I regret that now. I should have forgiven her. I’ve forgiven her now, but she won’t ever know."

Celebrities are filing trademarks to combat AI clones. Should you?; The Washington Post, May 8, 2026

 Ethan Beck, The Washington Post ; Celebrities are filing trademarks to combat AI clones. Should you?

"The lawyers The Post spoke with for this article said that more celebrities might follow McConaughey and Swift in registering trademarks of their likenesses. If they’re using their likenesses or voices in a commercial context — a requirement to claim a trademark — these registrations could act as a safeguard. Pollack said a lot of his clients have asked about filing trademarks as a protection in the AI age.

“McConaughey and Swift registered sound clips, which is not entirely novel,” said Jennifer Rothman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “That will probably cause more of a trend of people who are actors and singers using those voice clips to claim that their voice itself is a mark.”"

Mayor Mamdani restores library funding after public outcry; Gothamist, May 12, 2026

Elizabeth Kim , Gothamist; Mayor Mamdani restores library funding after public outcry

"Mayor Zohran Mamdani is turning the page on a plan that would have cut funding to New York City libraries...

But library supporters wasted no time mobilizing against the cuts. NYC PLAN, which is made up of library patrons and staff members, held a rally for libraries in March. They also launched an online campaign describing the mayor’s preliminary budget as “terrible” for the city’s libraries."

At the AAP’s Annual Meeting, Talk of AI, Copyright, and ‘Ripples of Hope’; Publishing Perspectives, May 12, 2026

  Andrew Albanese, Publishing Perspectives; At the AAP’s Annual Meeting, Talk of AI, Copyright, and ‘Ripples of Hope’

"The Association of American Publishers hosted its annual meeting on May 7, with a program that used the 250th birthday of the United States to celebrate the central role of publishing and copyright in the nation’s history.

The 90-minute virtual program featured Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham, in conversation with his editor, Andy Ward, Executive Vice President and Publisher at Random House, and Stanford University copyright scholar and author Paul Goldstein, who joined AAP president and CEO Maria Pallante, for a conversation about copyright law on the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Copyright Act."

How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition; The Atlantic, May 12, 2026

 Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic ; How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition

The school’s famous Honor Code was no match for chatbot-enabled cheating.

"Much of higher education’s value rests on the assumption that cheating is an exception, not the rule. A diploma is meaningless if employers and graduate programs can’t trust that graduates learned something in college. Prospective students and their families must believe that their tuition dollars will purchase a good education. And taxpayers need to trust that public-school students are getting something from their four years of subsidized education. Rampant AI use breaks down these signals. “It is bad policy to suspect a man of being a rogue in order to be sure that he is a scholar,” The Princetonian warned in 1876. Perhaps so. But the alternative is even worse."

Authors Guild Issues Updated AI Best Practices for Writers; Publishers Weekly, May 12, 2026

 Jim, Milliot, Publishers Weekly; Authors Guild Issues Updated AI Best Practices for Writers

What palm readers and chatbots have in common; The New York Times, May 12, 2026

Herbert Lin, The New York Times; What palm readers and chatbots have in common

Artificial intelligence doesn’t understand humans. It reflects them back to themselves. 

"A Pew Research Center survey conducted last fall found that around 1 in 8 American teenagers turn to artificial intelligence chatbots for emotional support — for the simple human need to feel heard. A 2025 Common Sense Media study went further: Thirty-one percent of teens said their conversations with AI companions were at least as satisfying as talking with real friends. Famed evolutionary biologist and science communicator Richard Dawkins spent many hours chatting with Anthropic’s Claude, after which he felt he had gained a new friend — a reaction that says less about Claude’s consciousness than about people’s readiness to find it.

But this is not only about technology. It’s an ancient human story. 

Chatbots are just programs running on computers. Yet we speak of them with a reverence that has little to do with engineering. AI “knows.” It “understands.” It “sees” patterns invisible to the rest of us. It delivers judgments on health, relationships, careers, grief — questions where facts and logic fall short. What makes these machines seem wise is a simple combination: fluency, confidence and frequent usefulness. That is enough. 

It is also the grammar of the occult...

None of this is an argument against using AI or chatbots. These systems are genuinely useful — for analysis, synthesis, translation, coding and cognitive reframing of problems that resist easy solutions. The concern here is not capability but epistemology: not what AI can do, but how we reason about what it is."

I’m a Doctor. Here’s What A.I. Cannot Do.; The New York Times, May 5, 2026

Danielle Ofri, The New York Times; I’m a Doctor. Here’s What A.I. Cannot Do.

"There’s an ocean of distance between the “patient” that A.I. is analyzing and the patient that the human doctor or nurse is assessing."

Molière Ex Machina: AI used to create ‘new work’ by beloved French playwright; The Guardian, May 11, 2026

 Kim Willsher, The Guardian; Molière Ex Machina: AI used to create ‘new work’ by beloved French playwright

"Molière is to the French what Shakespeare is to the English: the last word in historical literature, drama, wit and satire.

Now, more than 350 years after his death, the 17th-century dramatist has been revived after scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used artificial intelligence to help write an experimental play in his style.

L’Astrologue ou les Faux Présages (The Astrologer, or False Omens), a three-act comedy, made its debut at the Royal Opera at the Château de Versailles last week.

The two-hour play tells the story of a wealthy bourgeois Parisian who, under the instruction of a charlatan astrologer called Pseudoramus, insists his daughter Lucile marry a debt-ridden and elderly wigmaker.

While the theme could well have been dreamed up by Molière, the dialogue, music, costumes and scenery were all created with the help of a French AI tool called Le Chat (The Cat).

A group of researchers at the Sorbonne worked on the project, called Molière Ex Machina, for two and a half years. The team included a three-person group of artists and researchers called Obvious."

Google Says Criminal Hackers Used A.I. to Find a Major Software Flaw; The New York Times, May 11, 2026

Dustin Volz, The New York Times ; Google Says Criminal Hackers Used A.I. to Find a Major Software Flaw

"A criminal hacking group recently attempted to launch a widespread cyberattack that appeared to rely on artificial intelligence to detect a previously unknown bug, Google said in research published Monday, highlighting the potential threat that A.I. poses to digital security.

Security experts have feared for years that malicious hackers could eventually rely on A.I. models to identify undisclosed flaws in computer code to launch crippling attacks that are difficult to guard against. That fear was largely theoretical until now.

“We have high confidence that the actor likely leveraged an A.I. model to support the discovery and weaponization of this vulnerability,” the report said.

The tech giant did not say precisely when the thwarted attack happened, whom it was targeting or which A.I. platform the hackers used, but the company added that it did not believe it was its own Gemini chatbot."

This Bookstore Gets Good Mileage; The New York Times, May 9, 2026

 Visuals and Text by Ruth Fremson, The New York Times; This Bookstore Gets Good Mileage

"Saint Rita’s Amazing Traveling Bookstore Textual Apothecary (its name painted on the sides and back of the van) is a vehicle for the cross-pollination of people and conversation. That’s what has evolved since Collins, now 74, began imagining her retirement dream more than a decade ago — not just selling high quality, inexpensive books, but setting her love of people, places and the wonders of a good read all in motion together."

They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI.’, May 11, 2026

 Bernard Mokam, The New York Times ; They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI.’

The Justice Department ended a deal that had helped fund a solution to the sewage crisis in rural Alabama. “Almost like we are starting all over again,” one activist said.

"It is a plight that has long plagued residents across Alabama’s Black Belt, a stretch of largely rural counties so named for its dark soil and history of slavery. Cotton flourished in the region for the same reasons that conventional septic tanks fail there: The soil is dense and holds onto water. Today there are more than 50,000 people in the region who pipe raw sewage into open trenches and pits.

Now, a seeming solution to the public health problem has been stymied by an unlikely force: the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Three years ago, the Biden administration concluded in its first-ever environmental justice investigation that Alabama officials had failed to adequately address the sanitation crisis disproportionately affecting the Black residents of Lowndes County. The state agreed to an interim agreement that unlocked millions of dollars in federal funding to provide homeowners with septic tanks that could handle the difficult soil.

But soon after President Trump returned to office last year, the Justice Department ended the settlement, calling it “illegal DEI.”

The administration also scuttled a separate $14 million E.P.A. grant that had been earmarked to install new systems and provide work force training across Lowndes, Hale and Wilcox Counties.

Community activists fear the region may be doomed to enduring wastewater challenges forever."

Shein accuses Temu of copyright infringement on 'industrial scale'; Quartz, May 11, 2026

 Colleen Cabili , Quarz; Shein accuses Temu of copyright infringement on 'industrial scale'

"Shein accused rival Temu of copyright infringement "on an industrial scale" as a two-week trial opened Monday at London's High Court, with Temu firing back that the lawsuit was designed to stifle competition rather than protect intellectual property."

Sean Duffy Slammed Over Road Trip Reality Show Filmed Over Seven Months; Forbes, May 10, 2026

Zachary Folk , Forbes; Sean Duffy Slammed Over Road Trip Reality Show Filmed Over Seven Months

"Speaking to “Fox and Friends” on Friday, Duffy, a former reality television star of MTV’s “The Real World” and “Road Rules: All Stars,” said he spent the last seven months intermittently filming a road trip reality television show with his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy.

The trip with some of their nine children is “a civic experience” to highlight destinations across the U.S. as part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebration, according to Duffy, who encouraged Americans to “gas up the car, pack up the kids, get behind the wheel and get out and see America.”

Duffy’s announcement was quickly met with criticism from Democrats and other online commentators—with Duffy’s predecessor Pete Buttigieg calling the show“ brutally out of touch” due to rising gas prices caused by disruptions in the oil market from the Trump administration’s war in Iran.

In response, Duffy insisted the program was funded by the Great American Road Trip nonprofit organization and that “zero taxpayer dollars were spent on my family.”

Duffy and Campos-Duffy, also a former “Real World” and “Road Rules” cast member, said the program was filmed in “short” production windows like weekends and their childrens’ breaks from school, and that their family would not receive a salary or royalties from the show."

Dua Lipa sues Samsung for $15 million for allegedly using her image to sell TVs; Reuters, May 11, 2026

 Rhea Rose Abraham , Reuters; Dua Lipa sues Samsung for $15 million for allegedly using her image to sell TVs

"British pop star ‌Dua Lipa has filed a lawsuit against Samsung Electronics seeking at least $15 million in damages, accusing the South Korean tech giant of using her image without permission to market its television sets.

The lawsuit ​alleges that Samsung featured a copyrighted image of the pop star on ​the front of cardboard boxes containing televisions for retail sale, enabling the company ⁠to benefit from what seemed like her endorsement of the product."

Forget the AI job apocalypse. AI’s real threat is worker control and surveillance; The Guardian, May 11, 2026

Nazrul Islam , The Guardian; Forget the AI job apocalypse. AI’s real threat is worker control and surveillance

"The real danger that artificial intelligence poses to work is not just job loss – it is the growing divide between people who use AI to extend their skills and those whose working lives are increasingly shaped by opaque, AI-powered systems of surveillance and control.

The debate about artificial intelligence and how it will affect workers is stuck in the wrong place. On one side are warnings that machines are coming for millions of jobs. On the other are claims that AI will turbocharge productivity. Both stories miss what is already happening in workplaces across the world, from Britain to Kenya to the United States.

For some, AI can help remove the drudgery from daily work. These are often people in better-paid, higher-autonomy roles: analysts, consultants, lawyers, academics, managers. In these jobs, provided AI is being rolled out to augment workers rather than replace them, it can feel like a copilot. It can support human judgment, speed up routine tasks and create space for more creative thinking.

For many others, though, AI is not an assistant. It is a boss.

It appears in scheduling and monitoring tools, route optimisation software and automated performance dashboards – all systems that decide who gets what shift, how long a task should take and whether someone is performing at their maximum capacity. In these workplaces, AI is not something you use. It is something that watches and rules you.

That is the new divide we should all be paying attention to."

Sony’s failed war against Internet piracy may doom other copyright lawsuits; Ars Technica, May 11, 2026

 JON BRODKIN, Ars Technica ; Sony’s failed war against Internet piracy may doom other copyright lawsuits

"Sony and other major record labels recently suffered a thorough defeat at the Supreme Court in their attempt to make Internet service providers pay huge financial penalties for their customers’ copyright infringement. Sony’s loss is certain to have wide-ranging effects on copyright lawsuits, offering protection for ISPs, their customers, and potentially other technology companies whose services can be used for both legal and illegal purposes.

In Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, the Supreme Court ruled that cable Internet firm Cox is not liable under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when its customers use their broadband connections to download or upload pirated materials."

A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready.; The New York Times, May 8, 2026

 David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times ; A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. Silicon Valley oligarchs worried about the risks their technology posed to the world. They forgot about people.

"In one sense, the vision peddled by A.I. companies is remarkably depersonalized: We hand more and more responsibility and judgment off to superintelligent black boxes, which rapidly begin shaping the course of the human future with decisions that remain illegible to the rest of us, including their designers. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own A.I. creations work,” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote last year. “They are right to be concerned: This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”

In another sense, and in the meantime, A.I. represents perhaps the most personalized sales pitch ever foisted on the passive American consumer — a vision of a near-total takeover of the country’s economic, social and cognitive lives by tools engineered by just five companies, run by five particular people, several of whom are widely described as sociopaths. The list is so short that you may know most of them by first name: Sam, Dario, Elon and Mark. (Demis Hassabis, who runs Google’s DeepMind, is perhaps less famous.)

These men are all already billionaires, or close to it, and on their current trajectories their wealth and influence look set to expand exponentially as, around them, anti-elitism multiplies, too. Perhaps this is one reason 50 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center last year they were more concerned than excited about what’s to come from A.I. Only 10 percent said they were more excited. That is a yawning gap into which an entire society is being asked to tumble."