Look, we all know the drill by now: You type a question into the magic AI box, and the magic AI box spits out an answer that is usually pretty good, occasionally mind-blowing, and every once in a blue moon mind-blowingly bizarre.
But if youre just treating Google Gemini like a glorified search bar, youre leaving a lot of utility on the table. Its sort of like buying a Swiss Army knife and only ever using the toothpick.
If you want to move past the beginner phase and actually make Gemini work for you, here are four tricks that might not be immediately obvious but are surprisingly handy.
Stop copy-pasting your own emails
If youre trying to summarize a long email thread or find a specific document to pull data from, your first instinct is probably to open a new tab, find the email, copy the text, go back to Gemini, paste it in, and then ask your question.
No need: Gemini has “Extensions” built right in. If you want to know when your flight is or summarize a Doc, just type @ in the prompt box. Youll see a menu pop up for Google Docs, Gmail, Drive, Maps, and other Google services.
Select one, and say something like, “@Gmail find the email from Bob about the Q3 budget and summarize the main points.” It goes and finds the info, saving you from tab fatigue. If you need to turn on these extensions, heres how.
The trust but verify button
Use AI long enough and youll eventually come across “hallucinations,” which is a polite way of saying the AI just made something up because it sounded good.
If youre using Gemini for important research, make sure to use the Double-check response feature, which can be found by clicking the three-dot icon at the bottom of a response.
When you click it, Google runs a search to see if theres content on the web to substantiate what the AI just told you. A green highlight means Google found a search result that supports the statement, while an orange highlight means Google either found content that might contradict it, or it couldn’t find a match.
Its not foolproof, but its a helpful extra step to take in order to make sure Googles info isnt too far off base.
Tables and spreadsheets
Were used to chatbots just . . . chatting. But if youre trying to make a decision, like comparing three different project management tools or deciding among five hotels for that Nashville trip, paragraphs of text are actually pretty annoying to parse.
You can force Gemini to make information more digestible by telling it, for example: “Output this as a table comparing [Option A] and [Option B] based on price, reviews, and features.”
Itll organize the messy data into a clean grid. And if youre feeling especially ambitious, youll notice an “Export to Sheets” icon underneath the table.
One click creates a brand-new Google Sheet with all that data populated, formatted, and saved to your Google Drive. It turns cumbersome manual data entry into a single button press.
Audio uploads
Most people know Gemini can read text and look at pictures. But it also has ears.
If you have a recording of a chaotic 45-minute meeting, a rambling lecture, or an interview you recorded on your phone, dont waste your time listening to it at 2x speed.
You can upload audio files directly into the prompt bar. Just click the plus (+) icon, select Upload files, and drop in your audio clip.
Then ask for what you need: “Summarize this meeting and extract the three action items assigned to me” or “Find the timestamp where they discuss the Q3 budget, for example.
It doesnt just transcribe; Gemini “listens” to the context and turns an hour of audio into a 30-second read.
Its been called the AI Super Bowl, thanks to Anthropic and OpenAI launching what (hopefully) might become AIs very own Cola Wars.
Its been called the MAHA Bowl, thanks to brands like Novo Nordisk promoting Wegovy pills, while Ro and hims & hers are pitching telehealth services, Novartis got NFL tight ends to relax for prostate cancer checks, and pharma company Boehringer Ingelheim hypes kidney health.
But we know it was the Super Bowl because mixed in amongst the trends were Sabrina Carpenters FrankenPringles man, both T-Mobile and Coinbase hit play on the Backstreet Boys, Oakley Meta made connected glasses look pretty good, and Manscaped somehow turned shaved body hair into emotionally-resonant characters.
Another distinct sign this was as Super Bowl-y an ad game as any other Super Bowl? Celebrity directors. Taika Waititi took on Pepsi, Spike Jonze went full Italian variety show with Ben Stiller for Instacart, and Joseph Kosinski took all the innovation from his experiences at the helm of last years blockbuster F1 to get Kurt Russell to teach a guy how to ski. Oh, and somehow the award-winning director with the least commercial films had two spots in the gameYorgos Lathimos directed both Squarespace and Grubhub.
Apple continued its complete reinvention of the halftime show, turning Bad Bunnys electric performance into a global event.
We also saw a respectable number of hit songs get classically commercial reinterpretations. The aforementioned Backstreet Boys were joined by Andy Samberg becoming Meal Diamond for Hellmanns, Danny McBride and Keegan-Michael Key butchering Bon Jovi for State Farm, and both the NFL and Rocket crafting emotional gut punch moments by reinterpreting two songs from the Mr. Rogers catalog.
Advertising!
It was a feast for the sensesa cornucopia of commercial extravaganza. All with enough choices that everyone watching the game has their own favorites Including me!
Here are my picks for the best ads from the 2026 Super Bowl. But first, the worst!
Svedka Vodka Shake Your Bots Off
Its apparently the first Super Bowl ad known to be produced primarily with AI. I never wouldve guessed
This ad so bad Im not sure its fair to make fun of it, even if its somehow purposely awful. This is the kind of bad that should be taught in schools. It looks like it was made by Advertising 101 students in a rush. The AI angle is a gimmick for gimmicks sake, obviously, and doesn’t add anything to the ad at all except the robots’ nightmare fuel faces.
What is so disappointing is that vodka has historically been a pretty great place for advertising. For anyone curious about the kind of creativity is possible in the vodka category, just watch Belvedere Vodkas 2022 spot Daniel Craig, directed by Waititi. Or Absoluts Vodka Movie from 2008, made by Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, and Zach Galifianakis. Glorious.
Svedka, conversely, serves up the advertising equivalent to the most vapid, superficial people youve ever seen in a club. A robot apocalypse as imagined by the Butabi brothers.
OK, now lets get to the good stuff. Here are my Top 5 ads from this year…
Budweiser “American Icons”
As I said in my pregame brand power rankings, Bud was here for the crown.
Created by BBDO New York, this takes Budweisers penchant for animal buddies to a new, non-partisan patriotic level. What could possibly be cuter than a horse and a yellow lab becoming best friends? Well, when its Buds 150th anniversary and Americas 250th, the answer, of course, is EAGLET.
These are divisive times, with many states feeling less and less united with every news cycle. But here, just for a moment, Bud has served up something that we can all agree on.
When that bald eagle spread its big grown wings for the first time from behind that leaping horse, red states, blue states, MAGA, Democratic Socialists, coastal elites, flyover rednecks, and everyone in between were able to say, Oh HELLS yeah.
And in 2026, thats something to raise a glass to.
Jeep Billy Bass Goes to the River
What initially appears to be a pretty run-of-the-mill car ad takes a decidedly epic turn that transforms ths spot into a classic.
If you listen to the Super Bowl episode of Fast Companys Brand New World podcast (do it!), youll know I spoke to the folks who made it, Mark Gross and Chad Broude, who are co-founders and co-chief creative officers of Chicago-based independent ad agency Highdive. They have hundreds of Super Bowl ads between them, and this latest piece of work shows the benefit of that experience.
Highdive has become synonymous with great Super Bowl work since the 2020 Super Bowl and their fantastic Jeep commercial starring Bill Murray, reliving the classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day.
The level of difficulty here is highno nostalgic soundtrack, no celebrity, no gimmick. Just a straight shot of good ol fashioned copywriting, perfect casting and comedic timing straight into the veins.
Rocket x Redfin America Needs Neighbors Like You
With the amount of money required just for Super Bowl air timea reported $8 million, plus a required additional matching ad buy across other NBC sports brands need to ensure they get your attention.
This year, Rocket and Redfin did that by combining three things that would create a large Venn diagram of interest: Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogerss Wont You Be My Neighbor?; a heartwarming commercial airing during the game; and, most crucially, giving viewers the chance to win a million-dollar house.
But everything revolves around the spot, which was a well-crafted, heartwarming vibe shift from all the comedy and celebrities.
I spoke to CMO Jonathan Mildenhall about this triple threat approach.
“The only way to win at the Super Bowl is to win a disproportionate share of conversation pregame, as well as during game, and, increasingly, the progressive brands are talking about postgame conversation, Mildenhall says. For us the pregame was Lady Gaga behind the scenes, then during the game there is the spot, and were announcing the Great American home search for people to participate in over the days after the game.
Hellmanns Meal Diamond
The Boston Red Sox, and every karaoke bar on the planet, utilize Neil Diamonds Sweet Caroline effectively to bring a crowd together, put an arm around one another and scream SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD! in unison.
Here we get that 1969 hit remixed for mayo thanks to Andy Samberg as Meal Diamond. Of course this looks and sounds ridiculous. But it actually continues a strategy Hellmanns started in 2024.
Mayo Cat starred Kate McKinnon and was able to put one word into the mouth of every cat: Mayyo. Its ambition to embed itself in our brains in such an insidious way that we hear it every time a cat meows was commendable. Clearly, that ambition remains.
Now when youre making lunch, you may find yourself humming a familiar tune and whisper-crooning to yourself, Haaaam, touching ham.. until it hits a crescendo, Sweet Sandwich Time! Bah-bah-baaaaah.
Bud Light Keg
Bud Light was in a dark place not that long ago. It was unfairly punished for its one-off partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, which turned into an unlikely lightning rod for anti-trans weirdos and fans of Kid Rock.
Thankfully, with Shane Gillis, the brand has been building back its beer advertising pedigree by making commercials that are funny as hell. His impressive run includes Confessions, Wrong Commercial, and last years big game ad BMOC.
Now Gillis, Post Malone, and Peyton Manning return, this time at a wedding. When the keg gets knocked over and rolls down a hill, the entire wedding party does its best Princess Bride As you wish impression. Dumb, fun, and exactly what you want from a Bud Light ad.
In Southwest Airlines new Super Bowl ad, boarding looks more like the Hunger Games than an orderly process. Set in an airport thats been reimagined as a dense jungle, passengers rush to secure their preferred seats before its too late: a woman swings on a giant vine to cut her fellow travelers; a grandma shoulder-checks a passerby; and a man creates a dummy seatmate out of twigs to convince other fliers that his aisle seat has already been snagged.
The ad is a parody of Southwests former open boarding policy, which, since the airlines official founding in 1971, allowed passengers to choose their own seats in a system that aimed to reduce the hierarchy of tiered seating. In January 2024, Southwest announced that it would be nixing open seating in favor of a more standard assigned seating system, citing the time pressure involved in the open seating process and a new focus on premium seating options as the main reasons for the change. Assigned seating officially rolled out across the airlines operations on January 27.
Southwest describes its new spot, Boarding Royale, as a self-aware clap-back at its former boarding policy. And, at surface value, the ad is funny, well-executed, and accurate for anyone whos ever traveled with a nervous flier (or is one). But, taken alongside Southwests brand moves over the past two years, the ad feels less like a light-hearted self-own, and more like the hypocritical creative output of a brand thats seriously lost the plot.
“Boarding Royale” pokes fun at open seating
Boarding Royale was directed by the creative agency GSD&M, Southwests longtime agency of record. According to Julia Melle, director of brand and content at Southwest, the ad is designed to introduce assigned seating in a way that recognizes we understand its a category norm” and “feels authentic to our brand.
[Photo: Southwest Airlines]
Within the spot, there are nods to the various traveler behaviors associated with Southwest’s open seating, such as the traveler who checked in too late, the one who creatively saves seats, and the young families with children who will do anything to ensure they sit together, Melle says. Our most loyal customers have probably witnessed these behaviors more than anyone, so we believe the exaggeration will give them a chuckle.
Indeed, the ad does a good job at poking lighthearted fun at the kinds of exasperating, head-scratching behaviors one tends to encounter at the airport. This strategy mightve worked perfectly well if it was, say, making a silly joke at the expense of a rival airline. But it falls flat when its directly making fun of a feature that was a pillar of Southwests brand for decadesand was, until recently, a system that the company touted again and again in its own marketing materials.
Southwest’s boarding about-face
From its inception, Southwest cultivated a reputation as a quirky, low-cost airline for the everyman. Three key features sat at the heart of that brand positioning: open seating, a staunch stance against hidden fees, and an iconic Bags Fly Free policy. Over the past several years, the company has shaved away all of those commitments.
Some of Southwests earliest ads tout the airlines unique boarding process, which it promised at the time would take less than 10 minutes total. In the 80s, a series of print advertisements promised, Unlike assigned seating, youre free to sit next to someone just like you. For years, the brands unofficial slogan, oft repeated by flight attendants, was You can sit anywhere you wantjust like at church. In 2007, backlash to the concept of Southwest eliminating open seating was so strong that the company published a blog titled, You Spoke and We ListenedSouthwest Says Open Seating is Here to Stay!
Southwests marketing often used its open seating modelwhich meant no ticketed class divisions in the cabinto tout its lack of hidden fees compared to competitors. In the early 2000s, many of the brands ads parodied other airlines by showing passengers getting charged additional fees for small luxuries like using the overheard compartments, reclining their seats, or enjoying a snack. In one 2015 campaign titled Transfarency, the company promised, Transfarency means we dont dream up ways we can trick you into paying more.
A brand that’s lost the plot
To say that these spots have aged poorly would be an understatement. When it announced its new assigned seating policy in 2024, Southwest also introduced a category of premium seats which come with extra legroom, faster Wi-Fi, and larger overhead binsfor an added cost. Its currently in the process of renovating its cabins to make room for these seats, which will take up one third of each aircrats total seating. In August 2025, it also announced a new policy that requires travelers who dont fit within the armrests of their seat to pay for an extra one in advance.
[Photo: Southwest Airlines]
The brands most egregious move by far, though, came in March 2025, when it announced that it would kill its Bags Fly Free policy, which allowed travelers to check two bags without added costs. Bags Fly Free was a mantra that Southwest repeated in its marketing for decades, including spots in 2009, 2011, and one in 2023 that has since been made private by the company on YouTube.
As recently as September 2025, the company said on an earnings call that ending the signature program would be a destructive step too far. Southwest has also removed a 2024 study from its website which found that eliminating Bags Fly Free would destroy value.
This isnt to say that brands arent allowed to change their minds or their business strategies. But Southwest hasnt just evolved with the times; its sacrificed some of its most closely held brand attributes values in pursuit of profit. With just a bit of context on Southwests repeated capitulations to market pressure, Boarding Royale starts to feel less like a silly ad, and more like a betrayal of the companys purpose.
This weekend, a showdown between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots, some star-studded commercials, and a Bad Bunny concert are taking place.
Regardless of which part of Super Bowl LX is most important to you, it is all going down on Sunday, February 8, at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
Heres a quick recap before kick-off.
How did the Seahawks and Patriots get to Super Bowl LX?
This isnt the first time that the Seahawks and Patriots have faced off in the championship game.
In 2015, Seattle was defeated by the Patriots 28-24 after an eleventh-hour interception on the one-yard line. New quarterbacks Drake Maye and Sam Darnold may not have chips on their shoulders, but they are still determined to lead their respective teams to victory in this rematch.
Speaking of new, according to CBS Sports Research, this is the first Super Bowl that features two teams with both head coaches and QBs all in their first or second season with their respective teams.
The Patriots head coach, Mike Vrabel, led his team to a 14-3 season in the American Football Conference. The last obstacle to securing their Super Bowl LX spot was the Denver Broncos, whom they defeated 10-7 in blizzard-like conditions.
This marks their 12th Super Bowl appearance and the first since former QB Tom Brady left the team in 2020. If New England winds up victorious, the franchise will break the record for most Super Bowl titles. Both the Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers are currently tied with six titles.
Mike Macdonald, Seattles head coach, is doing everything in his power to prevent history from being made. He led his team to a franchise record 14-3 season in the National Football Conference.
Seattle defeated the Los Angeles Rams 31-27 to earn their spot in the big game. They are on a nine-game winning streak and dont want to see that end. The franchise has been in the Super Bowl three times prior, but they have only won once, in 2014.
Dont let their lack of titles deceive you, though: The Seahawks are currently favored to win because of their strong defense and stellar scoring abilities.
Who is performing at Super Bowl LX?
If you are in it for the music, three diverse artists are ready to put on a show. Green Day will open up the festivities and honor NFL MVPs.
Continuing the pre-game momentum, Charlie Puth will tackle the national anthem. Brandi Carlile will perform “America the Beautiful,” then Coco Jones will croon “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
At halftime Bad Bunny, known as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio on his birth certificate, is ready to rock the house.
Hot off his three Grammy wins just one week prior, the BAILE INoLVIDABLE singer made sure to save his voice on musics biggest night so he could sing out for football fans. (This was despite host Trevor Noahs best efforts to get him to crack.)
The Puerto Rico native says he couldn’t be prouder. “What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” he said when his involvement was announced, according to People. “It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown.”
What commercials have already dropped?
If you are in it for the commercials, several were teased or released ahead of the big game.
This makes bathroom breaks so much easier. Among the early arrivals is a Grubhub spot featuring George Clooney in his first-ever Super Bowl ad directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
He is far from the only celebrity getting in on the action.
Dunkin’ is utilizing the talents of four movie stars in its spot: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, and Jason Alexander. Budweiser went in a different direction, relying on nostalgia and its signature Clydesdale horses.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of ads, which according to the Financial Times, cost on average about $8 million for a 30-second spot.
How can I watch or stream the 2026 Super Bowl?
The party gets started on Sunday, February 8, at 6:30 p.m. ET./3:30 p.m. PT. You can catch it on NBC, Telemundo, and Universo.
This means that you are covered if you have a traditional cable subscription or over-the-air antenna. As a reminder, watching NBC live with an OTA antenna is free.
NBCUniversals subscription-based streaming service is Peacock, which will also stream the big game live. If you cut the cord, you can also utilize a live-TV streaming services such as Hulu + Live TV, Fubo, or YouTube TV. Just be sure to double check it carries NBC in your area.
NFL+ is also an option, but it only works on phones or tablets.
With ever-shrinking attention spans, film students today are struggling to make it to the end of a feature-length movie without getting distracted by their phones.
Thats according to a recent article by The Atlantics Rose Horowitch. In a snippet that has since circulated on X, gaining nearly 2 million views since it was posted last week, one of the film studies professors interviewed by Horowitch recalled asking his students about the ending of the 1962 François Truffaut film Jules and Jim.
The attention crisis is so dire at schools right now that film professors can't even get their students to finish movies, and the kids don't even look up the plots of the movies they skip, so students fail basic in-class quizzes like "what happened at the end of the movie?" pic.twitter.com/e09bN5ia8J— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) January 30, 2026
More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie), the screenshot read. The film has a run time of 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Naturally, much hand-wringing ensued online. Im so confused. You kind of have to go out of your way to take a film studies course, right?, one X user asked. Imagine not doing the homework, and the homework is watching a movie. Thats crazy, a Reddit user wrote.
Im so confused. You kind of have to go out of your way to take a film studies course, right?— Joseph Guarino (@RoninJoey) January 30, 2026
Others called it a crisis of attention. This bleeds into everything. Can’t pay attention to or finish a novel. Need cues to watch a movie because they are on second screens, another X user wrote.
The rise of second-screening and the resulting genre of casual, background-friendly TV shows and movies has been well documented. Many, myself included, will admit to putting on a film only to scroll TikTok with one hand and place an online order on a laptop with the other.
In a recent n+1 magazine article, Will Tavlin reports that screenwriters are now being told to have their protagonists announce what theyre doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.
Film studies professors interviewed by The Atlantics Horowitch say they have even resorted to assigning students only portions of films. One compares his students to nicotine addicts going through withdrawal.
Short-form content on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have rewired the brain to expect a dopamine hit every few seconds. The closest thing we had to doomscrolling back then was channel surfing, one Reddit user pointed out. Could they play the movies on 2x with Minecraft footage? one X user suggested.
could they play the movies on 2x with minecraft footage?— halogen (@halogen1048576) January 30, 2026
Long films arent the problem here. If anything, they might be the solution. Im actively trying to break my phone addiction, and a big part of that has been using movies as a guaranteed two hours a night off my phone, one Reddit user admitted. Its therapeutic, and Id encourage anyone trying to click less screen time to give it a try.
Homework assignment: Sit and watch The Brutalist without once touching your phone, and see how difficult it can be.
As Valentines Day approaches, finding the perfect words to express your feelings for that special someone can seem like a daunting taskso much so that you may feel tempted to ask ChatGPT for an assist.
After all, within seconds, it can dash off a well-written, romantic message. Even a short, personalized limerick or poem is no sweat.
But before you copy and paste that AI-generated love note, you might want to consider how it could make you feel about yourself.
We research the intersection of consumer behavior and technology, and weve been studying how people feel after using generative AI to write heartfelt messages. It turns out that theres a psychological cost to using the technology as your personal ghostwriter.
The rise of the AI ghostwriter
Generative AI has transformed how many people communicate. From drafting work emails to composing social media posts, these tools have become everyday writing assistants. So its no wonder some people are turning to them for more personal matters, too.
Wedding vows, birthday wishes, thank-you notes, and even Valentines Day messages are increasingly being outsourced to algorithms.
The technology is certainly capable. Chatbots can craft emotionally resonant responses that sound genuinely heartfelt.
But theres a catch: When you present these words as your own, something doesnt sit right.
When convenience breeds guilt
We conducted five experiments with hundreds of participants, asking them to imagine using generative AI to write various emotional messages to loved ones. Across every scenario we testedfrom appreciation emails to birthday cards to love letterswe found the same pattern: People felt guilty when they used generative AI to write these messages compared to when they wrote the messages themselves.
When you copy an AI-generated message and sign your name to it, youre essentially taking credit for words you didnt write.
This creates what we call a source-credit discrepancy, which is a gap between who actually created the message and who appears to have created it. You can see these discrepancies in other contexts, whether its celebrity social media posts written by public relations teams or political speeches composed by professional speechwriters.
When you use AI, even though you might tell yourself youre just being efficient, you can probably recognize, deep down, that youre misleading the recipient about the personal effort and thought that went into the message.
The transparency test
To better understand this guilt, we compared AI-generated messages to other scenarios. When people bought greeting cards with preprinted messages, they felt no guilt at all. This is because greeting cards are transparently not written by you. Greeting cards carry no deception: Everyone understands you selected the card and that you didnt write it yourself.
We also tested another scenario: having a friend secretly write the message for you. This produced just as much guilt as using generative AI. Whether the ghostwriter is human or an artificial intelligence tool doesnt matter. What matters most is the dishonesty.
There were some boundaries, however. We found that guilt decreased when messages were never delivered and when recipients were mere acquaintances rather than close friends.
These findings confirm that the guilt stems from violating expectations of honesty in relationships where emotional authenticity matters most.
Somewhat relatedly, research has found that people react more negatively when they learn a company used AI instead of a human to write a message to them.
But the backlash was strongest when audiences expected personal efforta boss expressing sympathy after a tragedy, or a note sent to all staff members celebrating a colleagues recovery from a health scare. It was far weaker for purely factual or instructional notes, such as announcing routine personnel changes or providing basic business updates.
What this means for your Valentines Day
So, what should you do about that looming Valentines Day message? Our research suggests that the human hand behind a meaningful message can help both the writer and the recipient feel better.
This doesnt mean you cant use generative AI as a brainstorming partner rather than a ghostwriter. Let it help you overcome writers block or suggest ideas, but make the final message truly yours. Edit, personalize, and add details that only you would know. The key is co-creation, not complete delegation.
Generative AI is a powerful tool, but its also created a raft of ethical dilemmas, whether its in the classroom or in romantic relationships. As these technologies become more integrated into everyday life, people will need to decide where to draw the line between helpful assistance and emotional outsourcing.
This Valentines Day, your heart and your conscience might thank you for keeping your message genuinely your own.
Julian Givi is an assistant professor of marketing at West Virginia University.
Colleen P. Kirk is an assistant professor of marketing at New York Institute of Technology.
Danielle Hass is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at West Virginia University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question youd like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.
Is the whole universe just a simulation? Moumita B., age 13, Dhaka, Bangladesh
How do you know anything is real? Some things you can see directly, like your fingers. Other things, like your chin, you need a mirror or a camera to see. Other things cant be seen, but you believe in them because a parent or a teacher told you, or you read it in a book.
As a physicist, I use sensitive scientific instruments and complicated math to try to figure out whats real and whats not. But none of these sources of information is entirely reliable: Scientific measurements can be wrong, my calculations can have errors, and even your eyes can deceive you, like the dress that broke the internet because nobody could agree on what colors it was.
Because every source of informationeven your teacherscan trick you some of the time, some people have always wondered whether we can ever trust any information.
If you cant trust anything, are you sure youre awake? Thousands of years ago, Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and realized that he might actually be a butterfly dreaming he was a human. Plato wondered whether all we see could just be shadows of true objects. Maybe the world we live in our whole lives inside isnt the real one; maybe its more like a big video game, or the movie The Matrix.
The simulation hypothesis
The simulation hypothesis is a modern attempt to use logic and observations about technology to finally answer these questions and prove that were probably living in something like a giant video game. Twenty years ago, a philosopher named Nick Bostrom made such an argument, based on the fact that video games, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence were improving rapidly. That trend has continued, so that today people can jump into immersive virtual reality or talk to seemingly conscious artificial beings.
Bostrom projected these technological trends into the future and imagined a world in which wed be able to realistically simulate trillions of human beings. He also suggested that if someone could create a simulation of you that seemed just like you from the outside, it would feel just like you inside, with all of your thoughts and feelings.
Suppose thats right. Suppose that sometime in, say, the 31st century, humanity will be able to simulate whatever they want. Some of them will probably be fans of the 21st century and will run many different simulations of our world so that they can learn about us, or just be amused.
Heres Bostroms shocking logical argument: If the 21st century planet Earth only ever existed one time, but it will eventually get simulated trillions of times, and if the simulations are so good that the people in the simulation feel just like real people, then youre probably living on one of the trillions of simulations of the Earth, not on the one original Earth.
This argument would be even more convincing if you actually could run powerful simulations today; but as long as you believe that people will run those simulations someday, then you logically should believe that youre probably living in one today.
Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the simulation hypothesis and why he thinks the odds are about 50-50 were part of a virtual reality.
Signs were living in a simulation . . . or not
If we are living in a simulation, does that explain anything? Maybe the simulation has glitches, and thats why your phone wasnt where you were sure you left it, or how you knew something was going to happen before it did, or why that dress on the internet looked so weird.
There are more fundamental ways in which our world resembles a simulation. There is a particular length, much smaller than an atom, beyond which physicists theories about the universe break down. And we cant see anything more than about 50 billion light-years away because the light hasnt had time to reach us since the Big Bang. That sounds suspiciously like a computer game where you cant see anything smaller than a pixel or anything beyond the edge of the screen.
Of course, there are other explanations for all of that stuff. Lets face it: You might have misremembered where you put your phone. But Bostroms argument doesnt require any scientific proof. Its logically true as long as you really believe that many powerful simulations will exist in the future. Thats why famous scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and tech titans like Elon Musk have been convinced of it, though Tyson now puts the odds at 50-50.
Others of us are more skeptical. The technology required to run such large and realistic simulations is so powerful that Bostrom describes such simulators as godlike, and he admits that humanity may never get that good at simulations. Even though it is far from being resolved, the simulation hypothesis is an impressive logical and philosophical argument that has challenged our fundamental notions of reality and captured the imaginations of millions.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question youd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age, and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limitadults, let us know what youre wondering, too. We wont be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Zeb Rocklin is an associate professor of physics at Georgia Institute of Technology.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A few months ago, I walked into the office of one of our customers, a publicly traded vertical software company with tens of thousands of small business customers. I expected to meet a traditional support team with rows of agents on the phones, sitting at computers triaging tickets. Instead, it looked more like a control room.
There were specialists monitoring dashboards, tuning AI behavior, debugging API failures, and iterating on knowledge workflows. One team member who had started their career handling customer questions over chat and email (resetting passwords, explaining features, troubleshooting one-off issues, and escalating bugs) was now writing Python scripts to automate routing. Another was building quality-scoring models for the companys AI agent.
This seemed markedly different from the hyperbole Id been hearing about customer support roles going away in large part due to AI. What I was seeing across our customer base looked more like a shift in how support work is defined.
So I decided to take a closer look. I analyzed 21 customer support job postings across AI-native companies, high-growth startups, and enterprise SaaS. These jobs run the gamut from technical support for complex software products to more transactional, commercial support involving billing and other common issues.
What I found was that customer support is being rebuilt around AI-native workflows and systems-level thinking. Yes, responding to individual tickets is still important, but roles are designing and operating the technical systems that resolve customer issues at scale.
The result is a new kind of support role, one thats part operator, part technologist, part strategist.
AI Skills Are Now Table Stakes
For most of the last two decades, support hiring optimized for communication skills and product familiarity. But that baseline is now gone.
Across the 21 job postings I analyzed, nearly three-quarters explicitly required experience with AI tools, automation platforms, or conversational AI systems.
These roles are about configuring, monitoring, and improving the AI systems over time. They are reviewing conversation logs, auditing AI behavior, and identifying failure modes.
In other words, AI literacy has become the baseline for modern support work. If you dont understand how AI systems behave, you cant support the customers relying on them.
More than half of the roles I analyzed required candidates to debug APIs, analyze logs, write SQL queries, or script automations in Python or Bash. Many expected familiarity with cloud infrastructure, observability tools, or version control systems like Git.
That would have been unthinkable in support job descriptions even five years ago.
But it makes sense. When AI systems fail, they fail at scale. Diagnosing those failures requires technical fluency like understanding how models interact with external systems and when an issue is rooted in configuration versus product logic.
The job has evolved from fixing problems ticket by ticket to preventing the next thousand tickets.
Humans are Needed to Solve Harder Problems
Once AI becomes part of the support workflow, the nature of the work becomes more technical. One support leader I spoke with at a company that now contains more than 80% of its tickets with AI put it plainly: once automation handles the easy questions, the work left behind gets harder. The same frontline agents who used to focus on quick wins are now handling the most frustrated customers and edge cases, and theyve had to scale up their skills accordingly.
In practice, this often looks like a customer trying to complete a critical workflow, like syncing data between systems before running billing. An AI agent starts by working off documentation that a subject matter expert has synthesized from multiple functions across the company. From there, the AI agent can confirm that everything is configured correctly. However, the AI agent may not be integrated to the right underlying system that failed silently hours earlier. The customer follows the guidance, only to discover downstream that data didnt move as expected. When the issue escalates, the subject matter expert has to reconstruct what happened across systems, reason through what the AI agent missed, and help the customer recover without losing trust.
This is the kind of end-to-end work that AI still cant do on its own. It requires both technical fluency to trace failures across disparate systems, in addition to human judgement to decide what can be fixed immediately versus what needs deeper product or engineering intervention. In this way, support has become less about answering questions out of the manual, and more about creating the manual and solving the problems that it doesnt cover.
The Hybrid HumanAI Model Is the Default
Despite widespread fear about AI replacing support jobs, not a single posting I analyzed suggested that support would be 100% automated in the future.
Instead, nearly every role gravitated toward a hybrid model where AI handles routine interactions, while humans oversee quality and continuously improve the system.
This makes sense when you consider the fact that 95% of customer support leaders said they would retain human agents in their operations to help define AIs role when surveyed by Gartner last year.
Titles like AI Support Specialist, AI Quality Analyst, and Support Operations Specialist were almost entirely focused on orchestration, designing escalation logic and defining when humans step in.
This is where the earlier control room image becomes reality. The work of humans changes from simply answering questions to actually shaping systems.
Taken together, these trends point to a single conclusion: customer support is specializing. The repetitive work is going away, but the judgment-heavy, technical work is expanding. That shift is already visible in how companies hire. The question now becomes whether organizations (and workers) are ready to adapt fast enough.
Forget about the big game on Sunday. Two heavyweights have been battling it out this week over a topic thats become all-too-familiar over the years: advertising creep.
Its a tale as old as time, in some respects. Many a CEO have proudly declared that their companys platform or services will remain ad-free, only to later succumb to the lure of all that advertising revenue and embrace it.
And thats creating a new divide among AI platformsone that will play out to the worlds largest TV viewing audience during the Super Bowl.
Among the nearly dozen AI-related ads on Sunday will be two 60-second spots each for OpenAI and Anthropic.
While OpenAI will use its time to tout how its ChatGPT helps people build things with a real-world impact, Anthropic is taking a swipe at its much-larger competitors recent decision to incorporate ads into the platformand its virtuous decision to keep its Claude AI assistant ad-free.
This off-field action has already made for some entertaining viewing. Anthropic dropped four ads this past week set to Dr. Dres 2001 song Whats the Difference, which all conclude with the same warning: Ads are coming to AI. But not Claude.
That elicited a lengthy post on X by Sam Altman, OpenAIs CEO, thats since become the topic of much ridicule.
While Anthropics Black Mirror-esque ads are extremely clever, theyre also strategic, as the company seeks to position itself much like Apple has with its privacy-first messaging, says John Battelle, an entrepreneur and author.
Claudes marketshare may be a tiny fraction of ChatGPTs, but Anthropics swipe at OpenAIs reversal on advertising was well-playedand it makes an important point, according to Battelle.
I applaud what they did,” he tells Fast Company. “This needs to be talked about.”
Pivot to revenue
For Altman, the advertising U-turn took about 15 months. In October 2024, he said that he viewed advertising as a last resort as a business model for OpenAI, only to seemingly reverse course a few weeks ago.
Hes hardly the first to do soand for good reason.
Theres no question that the only business model that you can employ if you want to scale a business is advertising, Battelle says.
Advertising . . . finds a way
Recent decades have seen a well-trod path for companies that transitioned to an advertising-supported business model from one that was originally based on subscriptions or, seemingly, free for users.
Advertising has slowlyand sometimes not so slowlycrept into almost every major platform controlled by a large tech company, whether it’s social networks like Facebook or streaming services like Netflix, to name a few.
But Google perhaps offers the canonical example of a companys founders finding their advertising religion and walking back prior vows to remain ad-free, says Battelle, whose book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” was published 20 years ago by Penguin
In a 1998 white paper laying out their vision for Google, cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page didnt mince words about the potential mixed incentives of a commercial search engine with a business model predicated on advertising.
The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users, wrote the duo, then-PhD students at Stanford University. We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
In 2000, Google began selling advertisements. To say it’s become a big business would be an understatement. Parent company Alphabet reported this past week that Google advertising accounted for more than 72% of its $113.8 billion revenue in the fourth quarter.
A hill to die on
For some founders, advertising has been a hill theyve been willing to die on. Clashes about advertising on WhatsApp were reportedly among a variety of reasons why cofounder Jan Koum ultimately left parent company Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2018, four years after the messaging app was acquired.
Koum had long expressed his disdain for advertising and how it worsened a product.
He vowed to keep advertising out of an app where people communicate with friends and family, and his first-ever tweet was a quote from the movie Fight Club that pulls no punches: Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we dont need.
Last year, WhatsApp debuted ads in the app.
The future of advertising on AI
Like many before them, the founders of AI companies must now determine where their line in the sand is on advertising. And its no surprise that advertising has eventually found its way into AI platforms, as Battelle laid out in a recent blog post.
As Google, Facebook, Uber, and other companies have taught us, advertising creep does gradually change the services we know and love, Battelle says. In some cases, like with Instagram, the product today barely resembles its pre-advertising self.
When you commit to advertising, you commit to the incentives of advertising, he says.
Even if advertising on AI platforms will inevitably evolve with time, Battelle says an imperative question now is what that future will look likeand particularly if social media is the reference point.
Man, things are not going to be pretty if the business model that drove social media also drives generative AI.
Taking the leap from traditional employee to solopreneur involves a number of decisions and considerations that may come as a surprise if youve always been on someone elses payroll. Being numero uno for every part of your solo enterprise can illuminate just how complicated it can be to keep any kind of business running.
Unfortunately, becoming a solopreneur can complicate your personal financial choices as well. Thats because money habits that felt innocuous while you were on a biweekly pay schedule can create financial mayhem on an irregular income.
Whether youre considering becoming a solopreneur or have been rocking the solo business world for a while, make sure you dont carry these common paycheck habits with you into your entrepreneurial venture.
Ignoring your bank balance
Prior to becoming a teacher, I worked a series of low-paying jobs, including several stints where I stitched together multiple part-time positions. During that period of what we might generously describe as my early career, it was my habit to check my bank balance daily.
This was in the early 2000s, when the internet still required a kerosene-powered modem to access Google, so it took some effort on my part to indulge in this habit. But since I was making so little money, I needed to know on an almost daily basis what was happening in my account to make sure I hadnt overlooked anything.
When I started teaching and bringing in the medium bucks, it was a relief to only check my bank balance when I paid my bills rather than every single day.
As a public school teacher, I knew exactly how much money I received in each paycheck, I knew exactly when it would clear my account, and I knew that if my mental accounting was off by a little bit, I didnt have to wait long for the next paycheck. (Ironically, the only time Ive ever overdrawn my account was during the regular-paycheck years of my life.)
Befriend your banking tools
Becoming a solopreneur is a little like going back to your early twentysomething career, at least financially. Keeping a weather eye on your finances is the only way to stay ahead of problems before they blow up. Theres no steady paycheck to smooth over any issues.
The good news is that banking technology has come a long way since I had to keep my modems kerosene tank full just to log onto the internet. These days, virtually every bank and credit union under the sun has an app that will allow you to set up personalized alerts and text notifications, among other tools.
This makes it very easy to set up regular bank balance check-ins, whether you create an alert to notify you when your balance dips below a certain dollar amount, or you have your bank text you the current balance every day at the same time.
Waiting for tax season
Paying taxes is no ones idea of a good timebut at least when youre working for a paycheck, the taxman knocks but once a year.
Whether you use a CPA or do them yourself, taxes are fairly straightforward for those who are traditionally employed. Once you have your W-2 in your hot little hand, you can typically get started sometime in early spring, then patiently wait for your tax refund to arrive . . . and youre done until next year.
But solopreneurs dont get the luxury of treating taxes like a sucky annual holiday. Because small-business owners dont have taxes withheld from their income, they have to pay quarterly estimated taxes, filing each payment with Form 1040-ES. The approximate due dates for each payment are as follows, but they may be pushed back if the 15th falls on a weekend or holiday.
First quarter (January 1-March 31) Due April 15
Second quarter (April 1-May 31) Due June 15 (June 16 in 2026)
Third quarter (June 1-August 31) Due September 15
Fourth quarter (September 1-December 31) Due January 15
Solo business owners also typically have to deal with much more complicated tax reporting if they have multiple clients. That means they are fielding more tax formssuch as 1099-NEC and 1099-K formsthan traditional employees.
Build tax infrastructure into your business
Paying and organizing solo business taxes are overwhelming if you only think about them when theres a due date. But they can be an easy part of your daily routine if you build tax infrastructure into your business plan.
For quarterly estimated taxes, it starts with planning ahead for paying Uncle Sam. You can do that by creating a savings account where you transfer about 20% of each payment you receive. This will ensure that you always have the money you need to pay your estimated taxes each quarter, so youre not scrambling to find the cash every three months. Over time, you can adjust how much you set aside for taxes as needed.
As for organizing your taxes, this can also be a relatively simple and ongoing part of how you conduct your business.
Its important for solopreneurs to have an accurate account of their income, since its always possible a client will make a mistake on the 1099 they issue. An invoicing structure where you record income from specific clients at the same time you mark their invoices as paid can be a small tweak that will make tax organization much easier. This could be as simple as a Google sheet that you keep updated, as long as you are consistent.
Taking no vacation days
When you work a traditional job, it can be easy to forget to take time off. Whether you get a set number of vacation days per year, or your workplace offers unlimited PTO (which really means you get the hairy eyeball if you try to schedule any), its easy to reach the end of December before youve realized you never took a vacation.
This is obviously a serious problem within the American workforce, which is suffering from burnout, lack of work boundaries, and a bad case of the Mondays.
While none of that is good, many workplaces do at least offer regular time off in the form of weekends and federal holidays. Workers who habitually leave their vacation days unused can still count on several long weekends and other breaks throughout the year to give them a needed opportunity to rest.
Block off time for rest
Working for yourself means you dont have to stick to a 9-to-5 schedule, but it also means you might be working at midnight, on weekends, and through Thanksgiving dinner. The habit of working without a vacation can be especially tempting when your success or failure depends on your hustle.
But youre solely responsible for your business now, which includes the well-being of your only employee. You cant rely on the holiday calendar to provide you with time away from your work like you did as a paycheck employee. You have to set the boundariesor deal with the consequences of burnout. Which could mean not being able to work at all.
This is why you need to set the boundaries your previous schedule gave you automatically. You can do this by blocking off time weekly, monthly, and annually for rest. If you need to, imagine that your rest times are legally mandated so that youre not tempted to work through your vacation time anyway.
Building better habits
Working for yourself, by yourself, doesnt just require a change in how you structure your work dayyou may also have to revamp your personal financial habits.
Without the safety net of a steady paycheck, solopreneurs cant afford to ignore their bank balances like they did as an employee. Your banks mobile app and online tools can help you keep track of your finances with automated alerts and notifications.
While paycheck employees get to think of taxes as a single season of the year, solopreneurs have to deal with tax chores year-round. That includes paying quarterly taxes and keeping records organized. Setting aside around 20% of each payment can help solo entrepreneurs have the money they need to pay their estimated taxes every quarter, while recording their income as the invoices are paid can help make tax reporting easier come April.
And though all Americans need to take more time off, those working traditional jobs can often count on weekends and federal holidays, even if they forget to use their PTO. Solopreneurs can get stuck in an endless working cycle unless they specifically block off regular time for restand guard it fiercely.
