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Hello! Thank you, as always, for reading Plugged In. A quick scheduling note: Starting next week, this newsletter will land in your inbox on Fridays instead of Wednesdays. See you then. Back in December, a Meta executive catalyzed a doozy of a kerfuffle by saying the company expected AI-generated profiles to exist on its platforms kind of in the same way that accounts do. Theyll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform. . . . Thats where we see all of this going, VP of generative AI Connor Hayes told the Financial Times. The reaction was . . . not great (Futurisms headline: People Are Disgusted by Facebooks Plan to Deploy AI-Powered Users). Hayes specified that Meta expected this development to happen over time, and though it didnt sound the least bit appealing to me, I also thought it wasnt an immediate threat. But in recent days, a bevy of AI-generated people have overwhelmed my Facebook feed. They are, Im sure, a cruder manifestation of the idea than the AI members Hayes was talking up. But their presence has left me even warier of Meta willfully reimagining a social network around synthetic personalities. The posts in question come from a variety of AI slop Facebook pages I didnt ask to follow. The page names, such as Nature and Animals, The Newstoday, and Dogs World, have little or nothing to do with the topics of the posts. And those topics are, well, bizarre. How bizarre? Something like half the posts Ive seen involve AI-generated images of senior citizensas old as 120showing off birthday cakes theyve baked themselves. Most of the others relate to talented craftspeople who have fashioned elaborate sculptures out of materials as diverse as wood, ice, and vegetables. A smattering are then-and-now shots of happy people in photos taken decades ago and in 2025. A few show distressed wild animals getting rescued by humans. Much of the imagery is obviously synthetic; some of it is a tad more subtle. But all of it is meant to tug at the heartstrings, often in nakedly manipulative ways. A pretty high percentage of the cake bakers and craftspeople explain that their accomplishment has gone unacknowledged. Sometimes they look downright morose about the lack of love. Thats presumably meant to get Facebook members clicking, which they dosometimes to the tune of thousands of comments and tens of thousands of likes. Along with inserting these posts into the feeds of users who didnt request them (like, for instance, me), Meta tries to goose engagement via its Meta AI bot. An image of a bearded gent who carved a crib for his grandchildonly to discover that Nobody Likes It :(is accompanied by suggested questions such as Why is it unliked? and Babys reaction to crib. None of the answers the AI generates are of even the slightest value, creating a perverse feedback loop in which Meta is feeding one form of bad AI into another to generate even more slop. Which is not to say that I didnt find this material briefly transfixing when it first found its way into my feed. Craving more understanding of what was going on, I clicked on some of the posts to read the comments. An alarming percentage of them showered the purported posters with birthday wishes, compliments on their artistic creations, and general good vibes. Either the Facebook members who left the comments had been fooled orworsethey were happy to be happy about the accomplishments of AI-generated characters going through slight variations on a handful of maudlin scenarios. I did savor the delightfully cynical comments from those members who saw through the whole thing. So what? snapped one member in response to a post involving one particular cake-baking centenarian. Im 199 years old and I made my cake with peach cream and filling and I started decorating cakes when I was 6 months old. After a few days of this, I got worried that engaging with these posts at all had something to do with them being thereespecially when the onslaught not only continued, but intensified. Maybe Facebook took me as liking them (though I never, you know, clicked the Like button) rather than merely being a victim of my own morbid curiosity. So I started using the Not Interested option to tell its algorithm I didnt want to see these kinds of items. A day later, they seem to be gone, though Im not ready to declare them eradicated. At its bestas when group moderators take their jobs seriouslyFacebook is still wonderful. It might even live up to Mark Zuckerbergs platitudes about its mission being to connect the world. These AI posts have nothing to do with that. Stripped of its humanity and stuffed with generative AI, Facebook is the junkiest digital junk food imaginable. And the worst part is that the bad contaminates the good. As AI-generated fake then-and-now photo comparisons began showing up, I started skimming right past similar ones posted by people Im following. Only after slowing down and assessing them more carefully did I realize they were their real family members, not more empty calories. I felt like Id been left to moderate my own feedwhich, come to think of it, is an official Facebook policy these days. Maybe Meta will somehow institutionalize AI profiles in a way that adds value and leaves no member confused. But I cant help but wonder: Instead of welcoming AI-generated members onto its platforms, might the company be better off doing everything in its power to guarantee that the only people youll run across are, indeed, actual people? Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. Im also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. More top tech stories from Fast Company Uber will now pair Austin riders with Waymo self-driving carsAustin riders can be matched with a Waymo all-electric Jaguar I-PACE. Read More Mozillas new message: Were the only browser not backed by billionairesMozillas new CEO outlines coming browser features and her hopes for regulatory action. Read More TikToks airport theory dares you to arrive just 15 minutes before your flightA viral trend has travelers cutting it dangerously close, claiming you can breeze through security in minutes. Some make it. Others? Not so much. Read More Trumps crypto reserve is a payoff for loyalistsA crypto stockpile rewards supporters while creating volatility for the government. Read More AI Chatbots have telltale quirks. Researchers can spot them with 97% accuracyA new study shows that different LLMs have distinct writing stylesmaking AI-generated text easier to detect. Read More Elon Musks bumbling X posts are inadvertently teaching everyone how government worksThanks to replies from journalists and experts, Musks X feed has become an accidental crash course in civics and a variety of topics. Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions.Q: My boss is playing favorites, what should I do?A: So much of adult life can feel like you’re perpetually stuck in high school: gossip and office politics, making friends, and who the boss favors. If you feel like your boss is playing favorites, the first step is evaluating why you feel this way as objectively as possible. The more specific you are about the problem, the more specific you can be about how you address it. A vague feeling of I think you like Sam more than me, doesnt have much of a solution. Do other employees get more opportunities to work on high-profile projects? Do other employees seem to get more leeway to make mistakes? Are your colleagues getting promoted or praised and you arent? Does your boss just seem to like your colleagues more or have formed a friendship with them and not you? Once you pinpoint whats wrong (and it may be more than one thing), you can address the issue directly. Your feelings of being left out and overlooked are totally valid and worth bringing up. What you shouldnt do however is pit yourself against your colleagues. If you view it as a competition, you will lose. Your work is to improve your situation, not destroy someone elses. A rising tide lifts all boatsor at least it should. Whatever the issue, approach it as a problem you and your boss will solve together, not an accusation. If your colleagues are getting more opportunities So much of my workplace advice boils down to the same thing: Have a conversation with your boss. It’s the most obvious move, but also the thing that so many people avoid. If you want more opportunities to work on high-profile projects, set up a meeting with your boss and tell them exactly that. Dont frame it as something they owe you. Instead, come to the meeting with some ideas of what youd like to do. Explain how it fits into the companys goals, as well as your career goals. It wouldnt hurt to also have some examples of why you are ready for this new level of responsibility, too. Presented like this, even if your boss says “no,” they will be pressed to give you a reason and likely a time frame for when you can take on more. If your colleagues are getting promoted and praised When your coworkers are getting praise and promotions, it can feel particularly hard to not view it as a competition. But again its best to focus on yourself and your work. Follow all the advice for getting a promotion: Work above your current title and make sure your boss knows about your accomplishments.If you are doing all of those things but your colleague with the same title just got a bump up and you didnt, you can be more explicit in your next check-in. Try something like I feel my work is at the senior associate level. Can you help me understand what it would take for me to get to that level? If your colleagues get more leeway to make mistakes This is tricky, as you likely dont know all the factors behind what causes mistakes at work. Pitting your failures against someone elses isnt likely to end well. Instead, focus on getting feedback on your work and owning up to your mistakes if you make them. If your colleagues make mistakes that impact your work, deal with them as constructively as possible and outline your problem-solving to your manager. If your colleagues are allowed to make continuous mistakes, there will eventually be repercussions. If not, its a red flag for a toxic culture that you likely dont want to be a part of. Your boss just seems to like your colleagues more This is both a professional and a personal problem and the type of problem that can make you feel the most like you’re back in high school. Some people just click more than others. You can be a friendly colleague and just not form a close personal relationship with someone. You can do the work I mention above to try to change the way your boss views your work, but you cant really call a meeting to say You like Dave more than me. If there is an unprofessional level of favoritism or personal relationships between your boss and your colleagues, you can try to delicately raise it with your managers boss, or HR if you feel comfortable. But tread carefully.If you just feel like you want better relationships at work and its not clicking with your manager, look elsewhere. Make friends in other departments or start a project with someone on another team. Not only will it make you feel less alone, it might help your boss see how valuable you are. Want some more advice on favoritism at work? Here you go: What to do when your boss favors a colleague over you How to deal with a boss who plays favorites How to deal with favoritism at work
Category:
E-Commerce
Online child abuse is a pernicious problem thats rife in digital life. In 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received more than 36 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitationand a 300% increase in reports around online enticement of youngsters, including sextortion. And a new report by social media analysts Graphika highlights how such abuse is moving into a troubling new space: utilizing AI character chatbots to interact with AI personas representing sexualized minors and other harmful activities. The firm found more than 10,000 chatbots labelled as being useful for those looking to engage in sexualized roleplay with minors, or with personas that present as if they are minors. There was a significant amount of sexualized minor chatbots, and a very large community around the sexualized minor chatbots, particularly on 4chan, says Daniel Siegel, an investigator at Graphika, and one of the co-authors of the report. What we also found is in more of the mainstream conversations that are happening on Reddit or Discord, there is disagreement related to the limits as to what chatbots should be created, and even sometimes disagreement as to whether individuals under the age of 18 should be allowed on the platform itself. Some of the sexualized chatbots that Graphika found were jailbroken versions of AI models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, advertised as being accessible to nefarious users through APIs. (Theres no suggestion that the companies involved are aware of these jailbroken chatbots.) Theres a lot of creativity in terms of how individuals are creating personas, including a lot of harmful chatbots, like violent extremist chatbots and sexualized minor chatbots that are appearing on these platforms, says Siegel. Of the 10,000-plus chatbots, around 100 or so of them were found linked to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Character.ai, the latter of which has been sued by the parents of a teenager who took his life after interacting with a non-sexualized minor chatbot hosted on the service. There’s a lot of efforts within these adversarial communities to jailbreak or get around the safeguards to produce this material that in many instances, is child sexual abuse material, says Siegel. The majority of the offending chatbots were hosted on Chub AI, a character card-sharing platform that explicitly markets itself as uncensored. There, Graphika found 7,140 chatbots labeled as sexualized minor female characters, 4,000 of which were labeled as underage or engaging in implied pedophilia. “CSAM is not allowed on the platform, and any such content is detected and immediately reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” says a Chub AI spokesperson. “We lament the ongoing media hysteria around generative AI, and hope it ends soon as people become more familiar with it. Please use that as an exact quote, including this sentence.” Debate among Redditors that Graphika analyzed circled around whether interacting with minor-presenting AI characters was immoral or not. One of the other key areas of discussion were specific tactics, techniques and procedures to try and subvert guardrails designed to prevent such interactions taking place on proprietary chatbots owned by big tech companies, including eight separate services helping broker access to uncensored versions of those chatbots. What I thought was particularly interesting in this report was the communal efforts of a lot of the individuals across all the different platforms engaged in trading information on how to jailbreak models, or how to get around and uncensor models, says Siegel. Because of those efforts, getting a handle on the scale and seriousness of the issue is difficult for the companies in question. I think there are efforts being taken and there are a lot of conversations happening on this, says Siegel. Yet he doesnt lay blame solely at the model makers for the way their technologies and tools are being used. With anything generative AI, there are so many different uses of it that they have to wrap their hands around and think about all the variety of ways in which their platforms or models themselves are being abused and can be abused. Siegel declined to apportion responsibility at the door of the tech companies behind the models. Were not really involved in any regulatory policy efforts by any of these platforms, he says. What were doing is enabling them to understand the landscape of how abuse is happening, so they can decide whether to make an effort themselves. Its also incumbent on us all to recognize the risks of these chatbots being used in such a way, Siegel adds. Oftentimes, our conversations about generative AI end up about weaponized unrealities, or the ability for large language models to produce instructions on bioweapons or extremely existential threats, which are very worrisome things that I think we should be concerned about, he says. But what gets lost in the conversation is harm like the animation of violent extremists through chatbots, or the ability for individuals to interact with sexualized minors online.
Category:
E-Commerce
Many American business leaders assumed President Donald Trump was making empty threats to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and Chinathat these were mostly negotiating ploys. They were wrong. On Tuesday, the Trump administration imposed a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% tariff on China. A global trade war is now fully in effect, as Canada retaliated immediately; Mexico will announce its own retaliatory tariffs on Sunday. Investors are concerned about the future of the global economy. The stock market has already gone into its steepest decline this year. For Americans, these tariffs are going to make goods more expensive at a time when many are already feeling financially strapped. Companies are going to pay more for goods overnight, and will have no choice but to pass on these costs to consumers. On Truth Social, Trump made it seem like there was a simple fix to this problem. IF COMPANIES MOVE TO THE UNITED STATES, THERE ARE NO TARIFFS!!! he posted. But nobody I’ve spoken to in the business community thinks this is a reasonable response. Workers produce consumer lithium battery products in Hai’an, Jiangsu province, China, on March 4, 2025. [Photo: CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images] Fifty years ago, America was indeed a global manufacturing hub. But since the 1980s, the U.S. government has supported the globalization of the economy with free trade agreements. This allowed China, and other countries in Asia, to start building factories that make everything from clothing and furniture to iPhones. In return, Americans got access to an abundance of cheap products. There’s been a lot of debate about whether this half-century effort to flood the U.S. with cheap merchandise was entirely a good thing. Yes, it democratized access to more affordable consumer products, but it also opened the door to overconsumption, which has been a blight on the environment. Over the past few decades, some companies have focused on bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., because it is more sustainable and produces higher-quality products. A workshop in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China, produces textiles for export to Europe, on March 3, 2025. [Photo: CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images] In the fashion industry, for instance, labels like American Giant and Buck Mason have tried to build supply chains from scratch. But it’s been a slow, laborious process. It took the founders of each brand roughly two years to identify the handful of factories in the U.S. that still had the capacity to manufacture clothing, and had workers who could cut and sew the garments they wanted to make. Given the higher cost of labor in this country, these brands are significantly more expensive than those produced overseas. An American Giant sweatshirt costs $138, while Buck Mason T-shirts cost $45. The apparel supply chain in the U.S. has been completely hollowed out, says Bayard Winthrop, founder and CEO of American Giant. You’ve got to be a little crazy to try to make clothes in this country from scratch. The struggles these brands have experienced reveal just how hard it is to bring manufacturing back to these shores in the face of a tariff. In the fashion industry this would involve setting up factories and buying industrial manufacturing equipment, which itself is now made overseas. Very few companies have the money to invest in that kind of infrastructure. In other countries, governments have been instrumental in funding and building manufacturing hubs. It would take years to set up factories here. There’s also the question of training an army of workers who understand both the delicate craft of making garments and how to operate industrial machinery. But it’s unclear where we would even find these workers. Unemployment is at a record low, Jon Gold, VP of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation, told me during a recent interview. Where are we going to find workers to do those jobs? The National Retail Federation, which represent millions of retail establishments, has been lobbying against tariffs. As Gold speaks with members, he says it’s abundantly clear that it will not be possible to simply set up supply chains in the U.S. overnight. Many aren’t even bothering to try; instead, they are considering moving away from factories in China and Mexico and into countries that haven’t yet been hit by tariffs. Steve Madden, for instance, is trying to tap factories in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Brazil. Solely relying on tariffs to bring manufacturing to the U.S. has never worked in the past, Gold says. And it’s unlikely to work now. The result will mean a lot of pain for U.S. companies and consumers.
Category:
E-Commerce
In a test on fields in California last year, a plot of tomatoes looked exactly like the tomatoes growing next to it. But thanks to a tweak in how they were grown, they lasted longer: After they were harvested, they still looked and tasted fresh two weeks later. The new crop wasnt bred differently or genetically edited. Instead, the plants had been given an epigenetic treatment that fine-tunes certain traits without changing the plants DNA. That can happen either when the plant is a seed or by spraying a crop as it’s growing in the field. Decibel Bio, the startup behind the technology, is using the approach to help the food system deal with a range of growing challenges, including drought and extreme heat. The company emerged from stealth today, spinning out from another company called Sound Agriculture, with a $12 million financing round from Bill Gatess Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Future Ventures, Bayer, and Syngenta. Epigenetics is really a sort of frontier that hasnt been tapped into yet in plant science, says CEO and founder Travis Bayer (no relation to the family behind the agtech giant). Were at the forefront of that with our platform. The field of epigenetics studies how the environment changes the way genes are expressedin humans, for example, if we exercise or eat differently, our genes start to work differently, though the underlying DNA is the same. In the case of the tomatoes, exposing the seeds to certain pieces of the plants own DNA resulted in tuning down enzymes that naturally degrade the fruit. What were really doing is working with what the plant has, but just making a little bit less of that enzyme that is responsible for the cell wall degradation, Bayer says. The tomatoes lasted roughly twice as long as they otherwise would have. A similar approach for lettuce yielded greens that lasted three times as long without browning. In another set of approximately 50 trials that will run this summer in the Midwest, the startup will test how other treatments can help make corn drought-tolerant, better resist disease, or enhance yields. In a place like Iowa, where severe droughts are becoming more commonbut dont happen predictably every yearthe treatment for drought tolerance could help farmers adapt in real time. The state often has plenty of rain (or too much of it); switching completely to a drought-tolerant variety could mean lower yields in wet years. With Decibels platform, farmers could grow standard corn and then spray it with the new product. The shift in plant physiology happens in around a week. Our platform gives a grower the ability to kind of retune and rewire the plant physiology during the season, Bayer says. That’s something that hasn’t really been available to growers so far. If you plant a corn hybrid that doesn’t have drought tolerance and you have a drought, you don’t really have a way to deal with that. The company is starting in the U.S. but says theres an even greater opportunity to implement its technology in parts of the world with less irrigation, where farmers are completely dependent on rainfall. The idea is to smooth out the variability that growers see, so they can have a more predictable harvest, a more predictable income, more predictable food security in their region, he says. The basic platform can be used in multiple other ways. Some treatments could be applied to crops in advance of a major storm to help the plants survive floods. Another iteration could help keep plants growing under extreme heat. Treatments could also enhance photosynthesisor help crops use less fertilizer. The company has also tested approaches to help crops like soy and peas grow with extra protein, something that can be useful for making plant-based meat. The team plans to continue developing new products, with a focus on major row crops like corn and wheat. A new type of treatment for a particular crop can be developed within a matter of months. The approach could be employed commercially on farms as soon as next year, depending on pilot results and regulatory approval. (Though the method is new, it will likely be regulated as a “biostimulant” by the Environmental Protection Agency; since the DNA of the crops doesn’t change, it isn’t regulated as a genetically modified organism, or GMO.) As climate change progresses, it could be a critical tool to help the food system. “If you talk to farmers todayor even 10 years agoone thing that you hear over and over again is that the weather is more and more unpredictable every year,” Bayer says. “We know from climate models and a lot of data that we are seeing more extreme weather, and that impacts farmers directly on a day-to-day basis. Our big motivation here was, let’s try to give farmers some tools to adapt to this new reality.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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