Resilience is not an inherited trait. It is a disciplined practicea way of showing up that is cultivated over time through deliberate training of the body, mind, and spirit. In high-stress environments, whether on the battlefield, in the boardroom, or in the quiet turmoil of daily life, the ability to remain steady amid volatility is what separates reactive living from intentional leadership. What many discover, often through hardship, is that resilience is less about bracing against impact and more about widening the internal space between stimulus and response. That spaceViktor Frankl called it the foundation of freedomallows for clarity, intentionality, and courage.
For decades, both in SEAL training and in my work with leaders, Ive observed that individuals who perform well under pressure share one common characteristic: they have learned to work with their minds rather than be ruled by them. This does not happen in moments of crisis. It is forged through consistent practices that strengthen attention, emotional steadiness, and a grounded sense of purpose. These are the pillars of mental toughness and well-being, and research continually affirms their effectiveness.
“Meeting the Witness”
Mental toughness begins with self-awarenesswhat I call meeting the witness. Before a person can regulate emotions or reframe challenging situations, they must learn to observe their inner world without being consumed by it. In Unbeatable Mind, I describe how an untrained mind behaves like a restless monkey, leaping from fear to fantasy, often amplifying stress rather than resolving it. Neuroscientific research supports this observation: studies from Harvard and Yale show that mindfulness training decreases activity in the brains default mode network, the system associated with rumination and self-critical thought. This reduction leads to greater emotional stability and improved executive control.
Breathe
Once awareness is established, the next layer of resilience comes through breath control. Box breathinga cornerstone practice in SEAL traininghas profound physiological effects. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has highlighted that controlled exhalation slows the heart rate by activating the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting calm and clarity. Additional research from the National Institutes of Health demonstrates that slow, diaphragmatic breathing lowers cortisol levels, improves heart-rate variability (a key marker of stress resilience), and enhances cognitive performance during demanding tasks.
In intense environments, breath becomes an anchorrestoring coherence when chaos presses in. Emotional regulation is equally essential, and scientific literature is increasingly clear that avoiding difficult emotions weakens resilience. Psychologist James Gross, from Stanford University, has shown that emotional suppression increases physiological stress, while emotional awareness paired with cognitive reframing reduces anxiety and improves overall well-being.
Modern culture encourages distraction, numbing, or avoidance when emotions feel overwhelming. Yet true strength emerges when we turn toward discomfort and understand its message. Emotional awareness is not indulgence; it is intelligencedeeply connected to sustainable performance.
Self-compassion
Working with emotions also requires cultivating a compassionate inner dialogue. Research from Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer demonstrates that self-compassion reduces stress and anxiety while increasing resilience and perseverance. Many high performers assume harsh inner criticism fuels achievement, but studies continue to show the opposite: people who practice supportive self-talk persist longer, recover faster from setbacks, and perform better under pressure. This aligns closely with the warrior ethosdiscipline married to self-respect.
The Five Mountains
Another pillar of resilience is adopting an integrative approach to growththe Five Mountains framework. A person cannot expect to perform well under pressure when their physical, mental, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual domains are misaligned.
The scientific community increasingly recognizes this integrative model. The American Psychological Association notes that resilience is multidimensional: physical fitness improves stress tolerance; emotional intelligence enhances decision-making; and spiritual or purpose-driven frameworks improve long-term well-being and post-traumatic growth. These capacities reinforce one another. Neglect one domain, and the others are forced to absorb its weight.
Purpose and rituals
Purpose also plays a critical role. Research from the University of Pennsylvanias Positive Psychology Center shows that individuals with a strong sense of purpose experience lower stress, recover more quickly from adversity, and maintain higher levels of long-term motivation. Purpose acts as a stabilizing forceturning challenge into training rather than threat. When we reconnect with our deeper why, stress stops feeling like something to escape and becomes an arena for mastery.
Finally, resilience requires consistent rituals. In SEAL culture, the saying earn your trident every day reflects the truth that competence and courage must be renewed continually. Behavioral science supports this principle. Studies from MIT reveal that daily habits built through small, repeated actions create long-lasting neurological pathways, making resilience more automatic over time. Rituals such as breathing, movement, meditation, journaling, and visualization condition the mind and body to return to calmness quickly, maintain perspective, and operate from clarity. When practiced consistently, they create a durable internal foundation long before stress arrives.
Becoming whole
High-stress environments will always challenge the mind. They compress time, elevate stakes, and magnify uncertainty. But those conditions do not diminish a persons potential; they reveal it. Resilience grows when we learn to work with challenge rather than brace against it. It grows when we cultivate awareness, train the breath, embrace emotional truth, strengthen ourselves holistically, and commit to purposeful living. These practices form the stable internal structure that remains grounded even when the world around us feels uncertain.
The ultimate aim of resilience is not to become hardened or invulnerable. It is to become wholeto act from a place of grounded presence, compassion, and courage.
When you train your mind, emotions, and spirit in an integrated way, you develop a capacity for calm action that not only carries you through difficulty but enables you to serve others more powerfully. Resilience becomes less of a shield and more of an offering.
This is the path of the warrior-leader. It is available to anyone willing to train deliberately, look inward honestly, and step forward courageously. In this work, there is no finish lineonly deeper layers of awareness and growth. Each moment presents a new opportunity to choose steadiness, clarity, and purpose over reactivity and fear. That choice, made repeatedly, builds a resilient mind for life.
2025 was a year defined by buttholes and fury.
AI companies, fueled by unlimited piles of cash, got in line with the same approach to branding: whats been scatalogically dubbed a butthole logo. The amorphous circles neither propel you forward like a Nike swoosh nor ground you like an Apples apple. Instead they spin you around, hypnotizing you into who knows whats next, just keep staring.
At the same time, a polarized America debated its way through a newly political era of designwhat you can see everywhere from the Trump administrations choice of typeface to its decision to weigh in on brand plays from Cracker Barrel and American Eagle. Marketers seized this uneasy moment to snag engagement by overtly pissing us off.
So whats awaiting us in 2026?
Its a question we posed to several leading brand designers. Of the themes that followed, everyone seemed to agree that in 2026, well see the design worlds response to AIor, perhaps more accurately put, its many responses to AI. At the same time, were hearing early indications of designers who plan to draw more lines in the sand with clients, and take a more active role in this tenuous techno-political moment.
Just-Exactly-Not-Quite-Right design
Lately, most every conversation about design turns very quickly into one about AI: How will it affect our work? Our creativity? Our livelihood? I am sure we dont yet know the answers, but my hope is that we use these new tools in interesting and creative ways. In the meantime, I think a trend we will see in 2026 will be a renewed focus on humanity in the work we do and the brands we create. (And I dont just mean using puppets to sell iPhones.) I think there will be a deliberateness in the use of the quirky. There will be things that are made purposefully off in design, typography, illustration, and photography. The imperfect will become more interesting and powerful. Capturing the in-between moments, qualities that AI would scrub out.
[Illustration: FC]
I like to call it just-exactly-not-quite-right design, which suggests a skill and precision in making things look off. The wrong and the weird will be even more interesting and desired. I love the idea of logos that make you uncomfortable while still being beautiful, photography that catches the wrong moment, brand colors that shouldnt go together but somehow do. I look forward to seeing things that will look perfectly wrong in a way that only imperfect humans can makea way to show that we are not robots, yet.
And one more thing, if I may: Design and designers need to get more involved. This moment on earth calls for it. Obviously, in terms of using our abilities to make a difference, but also to figure out how to responsibly use this AI that we all cant stop talking about.
We need to be part of this conversation. What is our responsibility, in terms of ethics, energy, and ecology? What are the standards and regulations we set for ourselves and our clients? How do we protect ourselves and make the (design) world aware of the deeper implications of the use of AI? I think we owe it to ourselves and to our community to put ourselves in the narrative, because if we dont, someone else will make the rules for us. I believe we will (we must) see that happening more in 2026.
Emily Oberman, partner, Pentagram
Micro-epic: the language of now
The micro-epic unfolds in seconds. It is the reel that halts your finger mid-scroll, the meme that captures a cultural mood before you can articulate it. We often view these condensed narratives as a form of manipulation intended to trigger reactions, and, today, to keep us enraged. This skepticism is justified. But criticizing brevity itself overlooks a crucial point: Fitting more into less is not inherently corrupting. This is how stories adapt when attention becomes scarce.
History provides us with insight. In 17th-century Japan, Matsuo Bash transformed the initial stanza of collaborative poetry into a stand-alone art formthe haiku; three lines encapsulated entire seasons, fleeting emotions, and universes. Constraint didn’t diminish his artistry; it focused it. Today’s micro-epics can function similarly. A screenshot imparts knowledge. A six-second clip moves us. A sharp edit emits truth. The concise format is a pliable tool. The crucial question is what we choose to make: something true and lasting, or an improved way to sell, enrage, and distract. The grammar of the micro-epic is new, but the choice is old.
Forest Young, global design and AI resident, Wolff Olins
A renaissance of craft
In 2026, well witness the renaissance of craft and detail. A surge of the “How did you do that?!” kind of work, the work that demands serious control and detail-orientedness to execute. A pushback against the ease of automation.
A few years ago, when AI started becoming more widely used, optimists (myself included) predicted that the economy of craft would rise as a result, that mediocre work would become even more devalued. My prediction is that this year, we’ll start to see a return on that prediction. Since releasing the ornamental Eternal Research identity, Ive had multiple conversations with fellow design leaders and studio heads who mentioned theyd been attempting similar ideas, which tells me people’s heads are already moving in this direction.
I believe this shift will show up across all facets of design, from fashion (see the era-specific details in Chanels recent subway show) to interior design (already having a maximalist moment) to architecture, where Googles top search terms now include postmodern, art deco, and googie.
[Images: Fender]
How this impacts branding is both a question and a challenge. The strongest logos have notoriously been the simplest ones, and I dont believe that fundamental truth will change. However, we may see more vintage logos redrawn for the digital age (see Mouthwashs Fender), detailed custom typefaces (Ive got my eyes on Sharp Type), and craft that comes forward in design systems and motifs.
[Screenshot: Sharp]
The real question is whether this resurgence of craft will be a lasting cultural immune response, or if its merely a countertrend. My prediction is that, like all trends, it will rise, peak, and eventually balance out with another trend that fights back (perhaps the return of minimalism in a couple of decades). But whatever is to come, the bottom line is that we are at the very, very exciting beginning of an incredible and mind-blowing design shift, and I couldnt be more excited to witness it.
Talia Cotton, founder and principal, Cotton
The AI logo apocalypse continues
There are more than 212,000 active AI companies worldwide. More than 62,000 are startups. In the past year alone, more than 300 new AI companies launched. The gold rush is real. The money is loud. And the visual landscape looks like a cosmic field of identical swirling apertures paired with bland product interfaces.
Call it the AI butthole logo phenomenon. Credit the meme that said what the industry wouldnt.
[Screenshot: courtesy Lisa Smith]
Despite the anxiety that AI will replace creatives, these companies are still hiring the best ones. Top-tier designers. World-class agencies. Serious budgets. And yet the output keeps collapsing into the same hyper-sanitized aesthetic: abstract gradients, circular vortex marks, glowing rings, vaguely intelligent blobs, and product design so neutral it feels algorithmically flattened.
This is branding by autocomplete. Safe. Smooth. Instantly forgettable.
This isnt a creativity problem. Its a confidence problem.
For an industry obsessed with disruption, AI is remarkably afraid of standing out. Legitimacy is signaled through sameness. Familiar shapes. Approved colors. Visual language thats already been validated by capital.
[Screenshots: courtesy Lisa Smith]
When OpenAIs sphincter-adjacent logo succeeded, it didnt just brand a companyit branded the category. It quietly set the standard for what serious AI is supposed to look like. Circular. Abstract. Untouchable.
Now any AI company that doesnt resemble a glowing anatomical opening risks being written off before its even understood.
Innovation everywhere. Originality nowhere.
Lisa Smith, global chief design officer, Uncommon
Old dogs, new tricks
In a disrupted world, new ideas and talent will rise from unexpected places. Incumbents will realize that what got us here will not get us there. As the old guard works to reinvent, many will break away, resulting in unexpected work from unexpected places. It will be the best of times and the worst of times for creativity.
We are seeing change to our industry that we have not seen for 100 years. Holding groups are in decline, creative leaders are being replaced with tech and finance experts, and some of the most prolific creative firms have ceased to exist. This fallout creates incredible opportunity, a leveling of the playing field, where independent agencies will claim their space and usher in a new wave of creativity.
What will play out this year is a continued battle ver the use of technology: What is real. What is fake. What is human. We will continue to discuss the uncanny valley of AI advertising and whether brand evolutions done the hard way are good, even if no one can tell.
Work has become easier to make and harder to remember. As production tools are democratized, speed and scale are mistaken for value, even as quality, memorability, and persuasion are left behind.
Tosh Hall, global chief creative officer, JKR
Democratic tools drive differentiation
Creative tools are easier than ever to access and engage with. Weve moved from desktop, single-serve software that was often the regard of a fewhidden behind downloads and deep technological know-howto cloud-based creative platforms where everyone gets to play.
And now we’ve welcomed AI into the mix. Image generation makes an art director of everyone and vibe coding democratizes code. Everyone gets to be grammatically correct and sharp in their writing. Brand guidelines are checked by machines, not people. AI is bringing people closer to the ability to execute their ideas, which means know-how is no longer enough.
So what happens? The expectation of brands, and the standard of their design, rises. Weve seen this before in consumer expectations of the webfor example, compare the aesthetic of Web 1.0 to 2.0. The result of better tools is better practitioners and more experience. Design itself becomes more critical than ever, but is less of a differentiator. Its table stakes.
So wheres the opportunity? Taste, ideas, andperhaps most importantlydaring to differentiate from the market and vertical you exist within.
In today’s world, where everyone can have great design, the meaningful, strategically rigorous brands that take a strong position on who they are and how they appear will ultimately win.
Jowey Roden, chief creative officer, Koto
A scarcity of taste
AI will continue to pollute the world of marketing and communications, contributing noise, clutter, confusion, and complexity through artificial imagery, videos, messaging, and brand elementssomething the world isn’t asking for and surely doesn’t need more of. If you look at the Jaguar, American Eagle, and Cracker Barrel of it all, these brands made noise, and some were immediately rewarded for it.
But they could have seen better outcomes if they committed to answering some essential, tough questions beforehand.
We will see more cases like this next year as budgets continue to tighten, and as the competition for attention intensifies. At the same time, well see the opposite from truly great brands making investments in what not to do and where not to show up.
As asset creation becomes cheaper, marketing budgets will reallocate to high-quality foundational brand building (clarity, consistency, voice). Since audiences can now smell the faintest BS more easily, smart marketers will ask, What do we actually stand for, and how do we say it clearly? This will give rise to the intermediary expert in 2026.
The winning brands will almost appear to play it safe, when in fact they’re just intentional, consistent, focused. Deliberately narrow in their ambition and crystal clear in their positioning. They won’t sound like they were written by the algorithmthey’ll sound like someone who knows exactly what they believe, who they’re talking to, and why it matters.
If that sounds simple, it’s because it is. But committing to simplicity, clarity, and authenticity so that your customers get you requires the opposite of what AI offers. It requires taste.
Jason Cieslak, global president, Siegel+Gale
2000s Techno-Dystopia and the return of Playstation 1 and 2
Whats resurfacing under the name 2000s Techno-Dystopia is not nostalgia for the early internet so much as a reacceptance of its emotional climate. Metallic sheen, hostile minimalism, moody art direction, synthetic hues, sharp typography. This was an era when technology felt powerful, alien, and immersive. Interfaces didnt bend to legibility, they required you to adhere to their logic. They didnt have best practices. They had vision. They didnt baby you. You didnt customize them. You entered them.
What makes this trend different from earlier nostalgia cycles is its lack of comfort. There is no warmth, no sepia filter, no promise of simpler times. This isnt classical retrofuturism, its a new retrofuturism. Cyber Y2K is not about childhoodits about adolescence under fluorescent light. When design has taken out all danger, well, thats exactly what we begin to crave.
This brand of Cyber Y2K does not ask to be liked. It asks to be registered. Its surfaces are reflective but emotionally opaque. Typography is narrow, sharp, slightly uncomfortable to read. Motion design favors glitches, flickers, abrupt transitions. There is often a sense that the interface is not meant for you. Or at least not designed with you in mind. This is branding that does not flatter the users self-image as a creative collaborator. It restores a kind of asymmetry: The brand has power; you encounter it.
Y2K-era Playstation Ads [Images: Sony]
For a decade, branding moved in the opposite direction. Platforms softened their edges, adopted warmth, and borrowed the language of care just as they consolidated control. In the age of AI, that friendliness has collapsed under its own dishonesty. Generative systems speak fluently but impersonally; they produce without intention or empathy. Against this backdrop, 2000s Techno-Dystopia reads as truthful. Cold surfaces, dark and shiny, mirror how technology is actually felt now.
This aesthetic always carried sex appeal. Early-2000s futurism framed the body as optimized, sharpened, and slightly inhuman. Slick skin, hard lighting, hyper-controlled silhouettes. Desire was technical, not romantic. That logic converges almost perfectly with the cultural rise of GLP-1 drugs. No discipline arc, no wellness sermon. Just outcome. The body, like the interface, becomes something tuned rather than understood.
Together, these forces explain whats to come. 2000s Techno-Dystopia rejects reassurance in favor of intensity. It doesnt promise warmth or fun, but it does have momentum and a strange, polished appeal, not optimistic for the future necessarily, but a pomise to look good getting there.
This aesthetic is not anti-capitalist. It is capitalism shedding its friendliness. It reflects a recognition that users no longer believe brands are on their side. And so brands can stop pretending. They become systems again. Brands dont need to feel human to be enjoyed.
In an era saturated with friendliness, the cold interface is radical. Chrome reflects, but it does not empathize. That may be the point.
Rion Harmon, cofounder and executive creative director, Day Job
Brands love to insert themselves into cultural conversations or piggyback on buzzy current events, a strategy sometimes called newsjacking. But it can happen without seeking, or even wanting, the attention. The borderline absurd virality of a Nike tracksuit evidently worn by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as he was taken into the custody of American captors is the most high-profile recent examplebut it definitely wont be the last.
This form of what we could call involuntary product placement can be a conundrum for brands, which prefer to be associated with upbeat or positive events, not dictators or controversial geopolitics. And thats been made even more challenging by a starkly divided political climate that has put brands from Bud Light to Tesla to Hilton in the crossfire, and a hypercharged social media environment that constantly hungers for new angles, riffs, and takes on whatever is hogging the spotlight.
Of course, involuntary product placement isnt new: If you remember the car chase climaxing in O.J. Simpsons arrest, you know he was driving a Ford Bronco. Yet unsolicited pop-culture brand cameos arent always bad. Ocean Spray, for instance, enjoyed a boost after it accidentally had a starring role in a feel-good viral clip of a skateboarder sipping the drink as Fleetwood Macs Dreams played. And in a marketing-soaked world, plenty of accidental brand appearances scarcely register.
@420doggface208 Dreams (2004 Remaster) – Fleetwood Mac
But that same ubiquity is part of what makes brands such handy and ultimately irresistible signifiers for people to latch on to and exploitespecially now, when they pop up in full-on news spectacles amplified by social media. Spawning instant and endless memes (and, increasingly, AI fakery), these events soak up and repurpose all the relevant cultural material they can, brands very much included.
When a healthcare executive was gunned down in Manhattan in 2024, for example, coverage of the subsequent manhunt included plenty of online scrutiny of his jacket, backpack, and other gear. Since Luigi Mangione was arrested on murder charges for the crime, brand sleuths have continued to obsess over his courtroom style choices, snapping up items like a merino sweater from Nordstrom he wore to his arraignment.
Luigi Mangione arrives at Manhattan Criminal Court on December 23, 2024, wearing a sweater from Nordstrom. [Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images]
The Maduro tracksuit has brought all this to a new level, attracting attention for how much attention it was attracting. Searches for Nike Tech spiked, and styles and colorways similar to the jacket and pants Maduro wore were selling out; some reviews on the brands site seemed to wink at the whole scenario. (Viva Venezuela!!) There was something disconcerting about the presence of a globally recognizable brand in a moment typically governed by the visual codes of state power, design writer and educator Debbie Millman observed. Athleisure replaced uniform; a logo supplanted insignia.
The specific tracksuit has its own cultural significance, a New York Times style assessment on the matter reported, and has lately served as a uniform of sorts for some rappers and athletes (and their fans). Less seriously, of course, the juxtaposition of a detained head of state and Nike gear was fodder for a slew of ironic meme humora steal his look parody; the mock slogan For the gym. For errands. For federal custody, and so on.
A brand caught up in an involuntary product placement moment certainly doesnt want to be seen as celebrating the attention. But really any kind of acknowledgment can be fraught.
When the healthcare executives killer was still at large, the CEO of Peak Design recognized the shooters backpack as one made by his company, reached out to law enforcementand ended up being threatened by customers who evidently wanted the fugitive to escape.
As for Nike and its tracksuits unplanned week in the spotlight, the company swiftly replied to an inquiry from Fast Company, declining any comment. Sometimes when a brand finds its products placed in the middle of the cultural conversation, the best move is to just do nothing and wait quietly until the news moves on.
CES is a show that’s all about the future. Usually, that future is within the next year or two. Companies show off products to kick off marketing campaigns and begin building consumer demand. Sometimes, though, they offer a peek a good bit further down the road.
Several prototypes at this year’s CES offered clues about how companies expect the consumer electronics world to evolve. Many, of course, will fall by the wayside. Almost all of them will experience changes before getting anywhere close to market. Despite that, though, they offer a look into a consumer electronics crystal ball.
Here are some trends they’re prophesizing for the years to come.
Smart watches will get a lot more useful and easier to repair
Smart watches already do a lot. They free up users’ hands, letting them check messages, see who is calling them without fumbling for their phone, track health data, and can act as a lifeline if you’re stranded. They’re good for opening hotel room doors, but they’re generally not seen as being secure enough for something like a banking or access system.
Cambridge Consultants, however, showcased a prototype luxury watch that also doubles as a digital passkey. The rotary bezel (the rotating ring with markings most often seen on dive watches) utilizes extreme miniaturization to boost security components.
At that same demo: a prototype smart watch designed to let consumers repair the device itself without sacrificing the aesthetics.
Augmented reality will ditch the cameras
Eye tracking, at present, requires a camera. But another prototype being shown by Cambridge Consultants did away with the lens, using a photonics and sensor fusion instead. That could be the push AR needs to gain wider acceptance, as it could make headsets significantly smaller and more comfortable.
TVs are about to be a lot brighter
This upcoming trend is a lot closer than some of the others. Both Samsung and TCL were showcasing TV sets that blast out the colors, utilizing next-generation backlighting called RGB LED, the latest in the alphabet soup mishmash of backlighting names (which also includes QLED, OLED, LED, Mini LED, and more).
The colors pop like never before, but the screens are also significantly brighter to the extent that if you’re too close, you might find yourself squinting. The Samsung prototype reached a brightness of 4,500-nits. That’s about twice the level of current high end TVs.
Position sensing could be the next battleground
As the robotics industry continues to grow and nudge its way into homes and businesses, it’s going to be crucial for positioning software to be as precise as possible. (It’s fun to watch a robot dance, but a lot less fun when it hits you full force while showcasing its moves.)
This year’s CES showed off a number of new position sensing technologies, from Lego’s smart bricks, which incorporate position sensing into play, to a prototype architecture that shrinks the footprint of unidirectional position sensing. That could open the door to adding position sensing to devices where it currently can’t be used — while also ensuring your housebot doesn’t accidentally pop you with a right hook as it takes care of your laundry.
A new insult for artificial intelligence just dropped thanks to Microsofts CEO.
If you use Microsoft products, its near impossible to avoid AI now. The company is pushing AI agents deep into Windows, with every app, service, and product Microsoft has on the market now including some kind of AI integration, without the option to opt out.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently shared a blog post to LinkedIn titled “Looking Ahead to 2026” offering an insight into the company’s focus for the new year. Spoiler alert: its AI.
Nadella wrote that he wants users to stop thinking of AI as slop and start thinking of it as bicycles for the mind. Many took the post as a pushback against the popular insult slop often leveled at anything AI-generated, recently crowned Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025.
The internet saw Nadellas critique and raised him a new insult for anything AI, now dubbed Microslop.
I will hereby be referring to Microsoft as MicroSlop for the rest of 2026, one X user posted in response to Nadellas words. The post currently has almost 200,000 views.
The term subsequently trended across Instagram, Reddit, X and beyond. On X, @MrEwanMorrison wrote, A great example of the Streisand Effect in which telling people not to call AI slop is already backfiring and resulting in millions of people hearing the word for the first time and spreading it virally. A huge own goal from Microslop.
Year of the Linux desktop, another X user posted. but not because of Linux.
In a separate clip uploaded over the weekend, programmer Ryan Fleury demonstrates Microslop in action. At the start of the video, the settings page AI-powered search bar for Windows 11 recommends searching My mouse pointer is too small.
Yet, when Fleury searches My mouse pointer is too small, word for word, nothing turns up. He waits around for a moment or two, but nothing loads. But when he looks up test afterwards, three results pop up. This is not a real company, Fleury wrote.
He then added: AI writes 90% of our code!!!!, referring to claims made by Nadella that as much as 30% of the companys code is now written by artificial intelligence.
Dont worry, we can tell.
Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces, voices, and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people.
For many everyday scenariosespecially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social media platformstheir realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert viewers. In practical terms, synthetic media have become indistinguishable from authentic recordings for ordinary people and, in some cases, even for institutions.
And this surge is not limited to quality. The volume of deepfakes has grown explosively: Cybersecurity firm DeepStrike estimates an increase from roughly 500,000 online deepfakes in 2023 to about 8 million in 2025, with annual growth nearing 900%.
Im a computer scientist who researches deepfakes and other synthetic media. From my vantage point, I see that the situation is likely to get worse in 2026 as deepfakes become synthetic performers capable of reacting to people in real time.
Just about anyone can now make a deepfake video.
Dramatic improvements
Several technical shifts underlie this dramatic escalation. First, video realism made a significant leap, thanks to video generation models designed specifically to maintain temporal consistency. These models produce videos that have coherent motion, consistent identities of the people portrayed, and content that makes sense from one frame to the next. The models disentangle the information related to representing a persons identity from the information about motion so that the same motion can be mapped to different identities, or the same identity can have multiple types of motions.
These models produce stable, coherent faces without the flicker, warping, or structural distortions around the eyes and jawline that once served as reliable forensic evidence of deepfakes.
Second, voice cloning has crossed what I would call the indistinguishable threshold. A few seconds of audio now suffice to generate a convincing clonecomplete with natural intonation, rhythm, emphasis, emotion, pauses, and breathing noise. This capability is already fueling large-scale fraud. Some major retailers report receiving over 1,000 AI-generated scam calls per day. The perceptual tells that once gave away synthetic voices have largely disappeared.
Third, consumer tools have pushed the technical barrier almost to zero. Upgrades from OpenAIs Sora 2 and Googles Veo 3 and a wave of startups mean that anyone can describe an idea, let a large language model such as OpenAIs ChatGPT or Googles Gemini draft a script, and generate polished audio-visual media in minutes. AI agents can automate the entire process. The capacity to generate coherent, storyline-driven deepfakes at a large scale has effectively been democratized.
This combination of surging quantity and personas that are nearly indistinguishable from real humans creates serious challenges for detecting deepfakes, especially in a media environment where peoples attention is fragmented and content moves faster than it can be verified. There has already been real-world harmfrom misinformation to targeted harassment and financial scamsenabled by deepfakes that spread before people have a chance to realize whats happening.
AI researcher Hany Farid explains how deepfakes work and how good theyre getting.
The future is real time
Looking forward, the trajectory for next year is clear: Deepfakes are moving toward real-time synthesis that can produce videos that closely resemble the nuances of a humans appearance, making it easier for them to evade detection systems. The frontier is shifting from static visual realism to temporal and behavioral coherence: models that generate live or near-live content rather than pre-rendered clips.
Identity modeling is converging into unified systems that capture not just how a person looks, but how they move, sound, and speak across contexts. The result goes beyond this resembles person X, to this behaves like person X over time. I expect entire video-call participants to be synthesized in real time; interactive AI-driven actors whose faces, voices, and mannerisms adapt instantly to a prompt; and scammers deploying responsive avatars rather than fixed videos.
As these capabilities mature, the perceptual gap between synthetic and authentic human media will continue to narrow. The meaningful line of defense will shift away from human judgment. Instead, it will depend on infrastructure-level protections. These include secure provenance, such as media signed cryptographically, and AI content tools that use the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity specifications. It will also depend on multimodal forensic tools such as my labs Deepfake-o-Meter.
Simply looking harder at pixels will no longer be adequate.
Siwei Lyu is a professor of computer science and engineering and diector of the UB Media Forensic Lab at the University at Buffalo.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Strategic planning is a big business. Companies spend millions of dollars working with consulting firms to chart a path forward. Not only does a lot of money change hands as part of this process, but the amount of time that employees invest in working on the plan likely doubles the cost of the entire process.
In the end, leadership gets a shiny report they can send to employees, shareholders, external stakeholders, and others. Often, though, much less money and time is invested in implementing that plan than was spent creating it. As a result, there is a lot of cynicism around engaging in strategic plans.
In many ways, this feels a lot like New Year’s resolutions. With great fervor, people will identify a change they want to make in the new year. Now is the time to get physically fit, develop deeper relationships, or get an education. Yet, most people have abandoned their resolutions in a few weeks.
The central problem with strategic plans is in the name itself. Every organization needs to be concerned both with strategy and tactics. Strategy defines the north star for the organization. What are the big-picture elements youre trying to accomplish? Tactics is the method for getting there. What specific steps are team members going to take on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis that will lead to the desired outcome. Ultimately, a strategy is unlikely to meet with success without a tactical plan to get there.
There are several things leaders can do to increase the chances of success for a strategic plan. In many ways, these mirror the steps people need to take to be better at achieving their New Years resolutions.
Focus on resources
A big part of the problem with the strategic planning process is that the focus is almost entirely on strategy instead of the resources needed to execute on it. Organizations take their plan and then develop other teams tasked with turning that plan into a reality.
This creates two central problems. There are inevitable tradeoffs that must be made to start to implement a plan, which dampens enthusiasm for the golden future the strategy promised. In addition, the resource (human, financial, and material) needed to implement the plan is rarely identified ahead of time, which leads to significant battles during implementation.
A planning process should put most of the effort into the tactical planning rather than the strategic planning. Responsibility for particular elements of the plan should be given to specific groups. Money needed to move the plan forward should be identified early. The new work to be done should not just be dumped on top of the existing load carried by employees. Instead, responsibilities must be shifted so that people in the organization have the time to make progress on the new work. Otherwise, the plan will fail.
Identify concrete steps
If an organization is going to do things differently in the future than it does in the present, people are going to have to engage in different actions than they were before. That means you need to know what people are doing now. How do the actions people take now move the organizations mission forward? How can the elements of that mission that cannot be lost be integrated with tasks that will promote the new direction?
Much of the success of this planning process also requires thinking through the reward structure for employees. In any organization, there is what you say, what you do, and what you reward, and people listen to those in reverse order. What you reward is what drives a lot of daily behavior. So, if you want people to do something different tomorrow than they were doing today, youre going to have to shift what people are rewarded for doing so that more of the actions related to the new goals is incorporated into the work day.
This kind of specific exploration of the work day is not nearly as much fun as envisioning a bright future, which is why strategic planning processes often kick that can down the road. But, this kind of detailed work is directly related to the likelihood of success of the plan.
Try, then adapt
As Mike Tyson said, Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. The other reason that the planning process is fun (albeit unproductive) is that it is blissfully unsullied by reality. It is impossible to envision the issues that will inevitably arise as you implement a plan.
Success at reaching a strategic goal is done in successive approximations. You try something, measure the outcomes, and then assess what is working and what is not. Keep what works, and fix what doesnt. Ultimately, your plans are more like software than hardware. Hardware is as good as it will ever be when it comes out of the box. Software gets better by patching the bugs and adding new features. When you commit to continuous improvement of your tactical plans, you greatly improve the likelihood of reaching strategic aims.
Starting today, Google is weaving its massive investment in AI into one product nearly everyone already usesand for many people, the change wont feel optional.
Google announced Thursday that a suite of new features powered by Gemini 3 will begin appearing in Gmail, introducing automation designed to reduce inbox overload. The most consequential update is a new Gmail view called AI Inbox, which reshapes email around summaries, topics, and to-dos, rather than individual messages.
What changes the moment this turns on
For users, the shift isnt about learning new toolsits about no longer having to manage email the same way. Instead of opening Gmail to a chronological list of messages, AI Inbox presents a briefing-style overview that surfaces conversations, tasks, and updates it thinks matter most.
With email volume at an all-time high, managing your inbox and the flow of information has become as important as the emails themselves, Gmail VP of product Blake Barnes wrote in a blog post announcing the changes. Googles goal, he added, is to turn Gmail into a personal, proactive inbox assistant.
The new AI Inbox wont roll out right away. Google says its currently testing the feature with a small subset of users, with a broader rollout planned for the coming months.
Less searching, more trusting
In general, the addition of AI is meant to make finding things easier. Google says Gmails new AI Inbox will offer a personalized briefing that prioritizes conversations based on how you use email, filtering out what it considers clutter so you can focus on whats important. In practice, that means relying less on Gmails search barand more on AI judgments about relevance.
Thats a notable shift for a product used by roughly 3 billion people worldwide. Next to search, Gmail is Googles most ubiquitous service, functioning as the default archive for receipts, contracts, travel plans, conversations, and work history. Yet even as inboxes have grown more crowded, Gmails core experience has changed little.
Google acknowledged that gap directly. Your inbox is full of important information, but accessing it has required you to become a power searcher, Barnes wrote. And even when you find the right emails, you are often left staring at a list of messages, forced to dig through the text to piece together the answer.
The new approach aims to remove that burden entirely by summarizing, prioritizing, and contextualizing information before users ask for it.
Your inbox as memory, not messages
Every online interaction youve ever had likely lives somewhere in your inbox, but finding the right detail at the right moment has long required manual effort. With AI Inbox, Google wants to change that by treating Gmail less like a communication tool and more like an external memory systemone that can recall information, surface context, and suggest next steps.
That idea aligns with how people increasingly use AI tools like ChatGPT, but applying the same concept to email raises higher stakes. Gmail doesnt just hold drafts and threads; it holds personal history. How well users trust AI-generated summariesand whether they stop opening original messages altogethermay ultimately determine whether the new interface sticks.
Trust, not accuracy, is the real test
The real test for Gmails AI makeover wont be whether its summaries are technically accurate, but whether users come to trust them enough to stop opening original messages at all.
As AI-generated overviews begin to replace scrolling and searching, the act of verifying informationbe it reading an entire thread, checking dates, or scanning for nuancemay quietly fade. Over time, Gmail could train users to rely on interpretation rather than inspection, shifting email from a record people consult to a system they simply accept.
Which features everyone getsand which they wont
Many of the new AI-powered Gmail features will roll out to all users, but some of the most powerful tools will be reserved for paying subscribers.
One widely available update, called AI Overview, summarizes long email threads and highlights key points, reducing the need to reread entire conversations. That feature is rolling out broadly.
However, a more advanced capabilityasking Gmail questions like Who was the plumber that gave me a quote last year? and receiving an AI-generated answerwill only be available to subscribers on Google One AI Pro or Ultra plans, priced at $20 and $250 per month, respectively.
For free users, Gmail becomes more readable. For paid users, it begins acting more like a searchable personal archive.
Writing emails with less effort
Google is also expanding AI tools designed to reduce the friction of replying and composing emails. A tool called Help Me Write, previously just an option for paid subscribers, will now be available to all Gmail users, along with “Suggested Replies,” a refresh of a tool previously called “Smart Replies.” Help Me Write will help users draft emails from scratch using prompts, while Suggested Replies generates a tailored one-click response based on the context of your conversation.
Paid subscribers will also get access to “Proofread,” which offers more advanced grammar, tone, and style suggestions while composing messages.
What youll need to opt out of
Many of these features will be enabled by default, meaning users who prefer a more traditional Gmail experience will need to actively disable Gemini-powered tools in Gmails Smart Features settings.
For those eager to hand off more inbox management to AI, the transition may feel overdue. For others, it may feel like Gmail has quietly crossed a linefrom organizing information to deciding what matters.
Either way, once Gmail stops asking you to search your inbox and starts telling you what you need to know, email may never feel quite the same.
While headlines about AI replacing workers dominated 2025, behavioral health is charting a different path. The industry thrives on human connection, measuring success in trust, healing, and human relationships, not throughput. That’s not to say AI isn’t rapidly reshaping the industryit is. Its role here fundamentally differs because it supports clinicians rather than sidelines them.
Over the next year, I predict we’ll see a paradox play out: Behavioral health will become increasingly AI-enabled, and simultaneously, more human than it’s been in decades. The reason is simple. Burnout and administrative burdens have been increasingly limiting what clinicians can do. Providers must spend hours on documentation, prior authorizations, and data entry instead of with patients. AI built to reduce that friction can return clinicians to the work that drew them here in the first place: showing up fully for the people they serve.
Here are the five ways I believe well see AI reshape behavioral health in 2026:
Therapy will get more personalized
Rather than relying solely on memory or paper charts, therapists can now see recurring themes, emotional patterns, or missed follow-ups, often in real time. Over time, this will help providers offer more personalized, insight-rich carewithout having to sift through pages of notes. This saves time, but crucially it deepens therapeutic continuity.
Less admin, more care
Scheduling, billing, and documentation are necessary but time-consuming tasks that pull clinicians away from patients. AI will get more efficient at many of these routine workflows.
Nationally, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Servicess push to Kill the Clipboard is accelerating this shift by setting the expectation that patient histories should flow digitally into Electronic Health Records rather than being re-collected on paper, so AI can automate the busywork and return that time to care. What used to require hours of after-hours work or weekend catch-up is now being done in minutes with AI. For clinicians, this means more time for reflection, team collaboration, or rest.
AI trust will become part of the care experience
For AI to truly support behavioral healthcare, its essential that patients and clinicians feel confident that it’s being used responsibly. In 2026, well see transparency and governance become integral to how care is delivered, not just how its built. When platforms make it clear how AI tools work, how data is protected, and who remains in control, it strengthens the therapeutic relationship rather than undermining it. Trust, in this context, is care.
Staff well-being will increasingly get the attention it deserves
The same technology that helps clinicians support patients can also help organizations support their staff. AI can give clinics real-time visibility into overwork, flagging unbalanced caseloads, surfacing signs of burnout, or routing time-saving tools to the right team member at the right moment. Workforce data can even help leaders proactively intervene before someone hits a breaking point.
As an anecdote, Ive heard from neurodivergent clinicians who had long struggled with documentation requirements but are now able to keep up without added stress because of AI support. Thats a big win for inclusion, well-being, and workforce retention. When staff feel supported, patients feel it too.
Proving outcomes will unlock new resources
As behavioral health shifts toward value-based care, clinics and centers will be under increasing pressure to demonstrate measurable outcomes. AI can help care teams track progress across sessions, identify gaps in treatment plans, and present results in a way that supports reimbursement, accreditation, and compliance.
For example, instead of checking a box to indicate that an appointment occurred, healthcare professionals can use AI to validate that they have met clinical goals, transforming anecdotal stories into structured documentation. These capabilities can also help organizations secure grants, expand services, and reach more people without overburdening already stretched teams. In that way, AI becomes a tool not just for care delivery, but for access and sustainability.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The shifts ahead won’t redefine what good behavioral health care looks likeclinicians already know what that looks like. But they will determine whether more people can access it, and whether the providers delivering it can sustain their work.
AI that reduces administrative burden creates room for the kind of attention that changes outcomes. That’s not a moonshot. It’s already happening in clinics that have adopted these tools, where documentation that once took hours now takes minutes. A recent multicenter study in JAMA Network Open found that physicians using ambient AI scribes saw their burnout rates drop from 51.9% to 38.8% after just 30 daysa 74% reduction in the odds of experiencing burnout. While that research focused on medicine broadly, the implications for behavioral health are clear: When clinicians spend less time on screens and more time present with patients, both care quality and workforce sustainability improve.
As these technologies become standard practice in 2026, the question shifts from whether AI belongs in behavioral health to how we deploy it. The organizations that treat it as critical infrastructure will be the ones that can scale quality care without burning out their teams. In a field where healing depends on human presence, technology that protects that presence isn’t optional anymore.
Josh Schoeller is the CEO of Qualifacts.
The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage edged higher this week to just above its 2025 low.
The average long-term mortgage rate rose to 6.16%, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. Thats up slightly from 6.15% last week, when the average rate dropped to its lowest level since October 3, 2024. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.93%.
Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, rose this week to 5.46% from 5.44% the previous week. A year ago, it averaged 6.14%, Freddie Mac said.
Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserves interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors expectations for the economy and inflation. They generally follow the trajectory of the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans.
The 10-year yield was at 4.17% at midday Thursday.
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage has been mostly holding steady in recent weeks since Oct. 30 when it dropped to 6.17%, which at the time was its lowest level in more than a year. Mortgage rates began easing in July in anticipation of a series of Fed rate cuts, which began in September and continued last month.
The Fed doesnt set mortgage rates, but when it cuts its short-term rate that can signal lower inflation or slower economic growth ahead, which can drive investors to buy U.S. government bonds. That can help lower yields on long-term U.S. Treasurys, which can result in lower mortgage rates.
All told, the average rate on a 30-year mortgage ended last year nearly a percentage point lower than at the start of 2025, helping boost home shoppers purchasing power toward the end of the year. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes rose on a monthly basis in September, October and November.
Still, even with long-term mortgage rates holding near their 2025 low point, sales in November slowed compared with a year earlier for the first time since May and ended the month on pace to finish the year down from 2024. December existing home sales data are due out next week.
The recent pullback in mortgage rates has been helpful for home shoppers who can afford to buy at current rates. The median U.S. monthly housing payment fell to $2,365 in the four weeks ending January 4, according to Redfin. That’s a 4.7% drop from the same period a year earlier.
While lower mortgage rates can help boost how much homebuyers can afford, the housing market remains out of reach for many aspiring homeowners, after years of soaring home prices and lackluster wage growth. First-time buyers have had it particularly tough, because they dont have equity from an existing home to put toward a new home purchase.
Uncertainty over the economy and job market are also keeping many would-be buyers on the sidelines.
Economists generally forecast that the average rate on a 30-year mortgage will remain slightly above 6% this year.
Alex Veiga, AP business writer
