Unless impaired by a stroke or dementia, most older people retain their language skills and may even improve them as they steadily gain vocabulary throughout their lives. A new brain imaging study from an MIT-Boston University collaboration now reveals the neural activity underlying this observation. - MIT News
But, cautionary moment (akin to making movies about war): “Sometimes the filmmakers, they can kind of get wrapped up in the bad behavior … of the men that they're trying to critique.” Think Fight Club. - NPR
Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. - TechCrunch
It feels counterintuitive, but at sufficiently large scales, they find, you can often remove any single image from the training data, or every image by a given artist, or every photograph of a given person, and the generated sample doesn't change. - MIT
The fan at heart is a manager of excess: too much feeling, too much weight on too little incident. This is a kind of madness after all, the madness of meaning-making under a few too many constraints. - N plus 1
Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026. - Pew Research
Our new research finds that people are more disturbed by others’ beliefs when they feel those beliefs are not merely different from their own but are based on incorrect information. - The Conversation
What if businesses become too good at selling nostalgia? Research I carried out with colleagues suggests that digital technology is changing nostalgia itself. Ironically, by making the past permanently available, companies may be weakening the very notion they are trying to sell. - The Conversation
“Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. For nearly two centuries, the west experienced steady generational progress. Each new cohort of children grew up, on average, healthier, happier, and better educated than the last. Until now.” - The Guardian
During the most foundational period of brain development, social interaction of the sort that AI can now emulate isn’t entertainment for the developing brain. It’s nutrition. Once you see it that way, the right parallel snaps into focus. A more apt comparison than social media is food—more precisely, processed food. - The Atlantic
Search can no longer pretend to be a neutral gateway to a stable body of knowledge. While the web has always been organized around intermediaries that shape what survives online and who sees it, the internet’s archival function is today breaking down under relentless pressure from stakeholders with very different—and often conflicting—priorities. - The Walrus
“Most telling is Claude’s branding, incorporating hand-drawn illustrations and details that attempt to tell the world, ‘Hey, we’re the more human AI.’” - Fast Company
Well, from Apple, in any case: "The pay-as-you-go plan would see publishers paid only when Siri AI uses their content,” which is similar to the Apple News+ model for print (er, digital). - Nieman Lab
For “collective effervescence” to occur organically, bodies need to be present, in the same space, dancing to the same rhythm. The function is to restore the social bonds and shared beliefs that are eroded by the drudgery of ordinary life. - The Guardian
