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In 2025, employers cited artificial intelligence as the rationale for nearly 55,000 layoffs at companies like Amazon and Microsoft. And with the new year barely underway, were already seeing a new crop of AI-related job cuts. Citigroup is cutting over a thousand jobs, according to Bloomberg, and in a memo this week, CEO Jane Fraser warned of more layoffs later this year. Over time, we can expect automation, AI and further process simplification to reshape how work gets done, she added. Meanwhile, Meta is conducting more layoffs in its virtual reality division, cutting about 1,500 jobs as part of a broader strategic shift to invest further in AI. Given these reports, many observers have been quick to believe that workers are losing jobs to generative AI. But there is little evidence that automation is displacing workers en masse just yetor even drastically changing how businesses operate. According to a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution and the Budget Lab at Yale University, the proportion of workers in jobs that are ripe for AI disruption has remained steady since ChatGPT launched in 2022. Whats more, there are all kinds of forces shaping the labor market right now, including changes in immigration policy that have curbed employment growth. What we’re seeing overall right now is consistent with a labor market that has been hit with a lot of uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment, says Martha Gimbel, executive director of the Budget Lab. The immigration changes are making it really hard to interpret changes in the jobs numbers. And if you look for any signs of changes that seem to be due to AI, those are not yet showing up. Still, a number of experts have pointed to AI adoption to explain the recent spike in labor productivity, which measures hourly worker output. In the third quarter of 2025, labor productivity climbed by 4.9%, the highest increase in two years. Some economists have speculated this is a sign that the growing adoption of AI across companies may in fact be boosting efficiency, despite the slow rate of hiring in 2025. But Gimbel argues productivity is too noisy a metric to accurately capture the impact of AI, particularly over just one quarter. Productivity growth will be really high or really low in one quarter, she says. And if it fits their preferred narrative, people will jump on that. A single quarter of high productivity should not be seen as a clear indicator of anything, she says, in part because labor productivity is imprecise and vulnerable to measurement error. That has been especially true in recent years because the pandemic threw a wrench in the system that is still being sorted out. You had all these issues with productivity measurement in the pandemic because people largely fired low-wage workers who tend to be less productive, Gimbel says. So you saw this huge jump in productivity, and then it came back down as those people were hired back. Was there actually a change in productivity in the economy? No. Research also shows that while AI might improve efficiency to some extent, it creates additional work that can hamper productivity. A new Workday report found that nearly 40% of the time saved by using AI is lost to rework; on average, workers spend 1.5 weeks annually correcting or otherwise fixing AI-generated content. As for whether AI is eliminating jobs, thats not evident in jobs data just yetand unemployment figures do not reflect any notable changes either. While the most recent jobs report does indicate a marked decline in employment across specific sectors, namely professional and business services, Gimbel says its too soon to say whether any of that is actually due to AI. She says it might take an economic downturn to really see that shift. The place to start looking for the impacts of AI is when we have a recession, she says. That is usually when technological change really takes off. All that said, Gimbel is closely watching sectors that have high adoption of AI, which includes not just tech, but also the arts and education. Even if concerns about AI usage in the workplace are overblown at the moment, workers will certainly start to feel the effects of it in the years to come. It would be unusual for a new technology to have no impact on the labor market, Gimbel says. We just still need to find out how fast, and where.
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E-Commerce
I was born an only child, but now I have a twin. Hes an exact duplicate of medown to my clothing, my home, my facial expressions, and even my voice. I built him with AI, and I can make him say whatever I want. Hes so convincing that he could fool my own mother. Heres how I built himand what AI digital twins mean for the future of people. Deepfake yourself From the moment generative AI was born, criminals started using it to trick people. Deepfakes were one of the first widespread uses of the tech. Today, theyre a scourge to celebrities and even everyday teenagers, and a massive problem for anyone interested in the truth. As criminals were leveraging deepfakes to scam and blackmail people, though, a set of white-hat companies started quietly putting similar digital cloning technologies to use for good. Want to record a training video for your team, and then change a few words without needing to reshoot the whole thing? Want to turn your 400-page Stranger Things fanfic into an audiobook without spending 10 hours of your life reading it aloud? Digital cloning tech has you covered. You basically deepfake yourselfcloning your likeness, your voice, or bothand then mobilize your resulting digital twin to create mountains of content just as easily as youd prompt ChatGPT or Claude. I wanted to try the tech out for myself. So I fired up todays best AI cloning tools and made Digital Toma perfect digital copy of myself. Hear me out I decided to start by cloning my voice. A persons voice feels like an especially intimate, personal thing. Think back on a loved one youve lost. Ill bet you can remember exactly how they sounded. You can probably even remember a specific, impactful conversation you had with them. Cloning a voicewith all the nuance of accent, speaking style, pitch, and breathis also a tough technical challenge. People are fast to forgive crappy video, chalking up errors or glitchiness in deepfakes to a spotty internet connection or an old webcam. Content creators everywhere produce bad video every day without any help from AI! A bad AI voice sounds way creepier, though. Its easier to land in the uncanny valley unless every aspect of a voice clone is perfect. To avoid that fate, I turned to ElevenLabs. The company has been around since 2022 but has exploded in popularity over the last year, with its valuation doubling to more than $6.6 billion. ElevenLabs excels at handling audioif youve listened to an AI-narrated audiobook, interacted with a speaking character in a video game, or heard sound effects in a TV show or movie, its a good bet youve inadvertently experienced ElevenLabs tech. To clone my own voice, I shelled out $22 for a Creator account. I then uploaded about 90 minutes of recordings from my YouTube channel to the ElevenLabs interface. The company says you can create a professional voice clone with as little as 30 minutes of audio. You can even create a basic clone with just 10 seconds of speech. ElevenLabs makes you record a consent clip in order to ensure that youre not trying to deepfake a third party. In a few hours, my professional voice clone was ready. Using it is shockingly easy. ElevenLabs provides an interface that looks a lot like ChatGPT. You enter what you want your clone to say, press a button, and in seconds, your digital twin voice speaks the exact words you typed out. I had my digital twin record an audio update about this article for my Fast Company editor. He described it as terrifyingly realistic. Then, I sent a clip to my mom. She responded, It would have fooled me. In my natural habitat I was extremely impressed with the voice clone. I could use it right away to spin up an entire AI-generated podcast, prank my friends, or maybe even hack into my bank. But I didnt just want a voice. I wanted a full Digital Tom that I could bend to my will. For the next stage in my cloning experiment, I turned to Synthesia. I originally met Synthesias CEO Victor Riparbelli in 2019 at a photo industry event, when his company was a scrappy startup. Today, its worth $4 billion. Synthesia specializes in creating digital Avatarsessentially video clones of a real person. Just as with ElevenLabs, you can type text into an interface and get back a video of your avatar reading it aloud, complete with realistic facial expressions and lip movement. I started a Synthesia trial account and set about creating my personal avatar. Synthesia asked for access to my webcam, and then recorded me reading a preset script off the screen for about 10 minutes. A day later, my avatar was ready. It was a perfect digital clone of my likeness, right down to the shirt I was wearing on the day I made it and my (overly long) winter haircut. It even placed me in my natural habitat: my comfy, cluttered home office. As with my voice clone, I could type in any text I could imagine, and in about 10 minutes I would receive a video of Digital Tom reading it aloud. Synthesia even duplicated the minutiae of my presenting style, right down to my smile and tendency to look to the camera every few seconds when reading a script from the screen. If I recorded a video with Digital Tom for my YouTube channel, Im certain most users would have no idea its a fake. The value of people My experiment shows that todays AI cloning technology is extremely impressive. I could easily create mountains of audio content with my clone from ElevenLabs, or create an entire social media channel with my Digital Tom as the star. The bigger question, though, is why Id want to. Sure, there are tons of good use cases for working with a digital twin. Again, Synthesia specializes in creating corporate training videos. Companies can rapidly create specialized teaching materials without renting a studio, hiring a videographer, and shooting countless takes of a talking head in front of a green screen. They can also edit them by altering a few written wordsfor example, if a product feature changes subtly. For their part, ElevenLabs does a brisk business in audiobooks and customer service agents. But they also provide helpful services, like creating accessible, read-aloud versions of web pages for visually impaired users. But my experiment convinced me that there are fewer good reasons to work with your digital twin. In an internet landscape where anyone can spin up a thousand-page website in a few minutes using Gemini, and compelling videos are a dime a dozen, thanks to Sora, content is cheap. There are not many good ways left for users to sort the wheat from the chaff. Personality is one of the few remaining ones. People like to follow people. For creators, developing a personal relationship with your audience is the best way to keep them consuming your content, instead of cheaper (and often better) AI alternatives. Compromising that by shoving an undisclosed digital twin in their face, however convincing it might be, seems like the fastest possible way to ruin that relationship. People want to hear from the meat-based Thomas Smith, even if the artificial intelligence version never forgets a word or gets interrupted by his chickens mid-video. I could see using one of ElevenLabs or Synthesias built-in characters to create (fully disclosed) content. But I cant see putting my digital twins to real-world use. I can see one use for the tech, though. It struck me during my experiment that the best reason to build an AI digital twin isnt to replace your voice or likeness, but to preserve it. I sometimes lose my voice, and its incredibly disruptive to my content production. If I was ever affected by a vocal disorder and lost it permanently, its nice to know that theres a highly realistic backup sitting on ElevenLabs servers. Its also cool to think that in 10 yearswhen Im inevitably older and wrinklier than todayI could bring my 2026 Digital Tom back to life. Hed be frozen in time, a perfect replica of my appearance, mannerisms, and environment in this specific moment, recallable for all eternity. I wont be using Digital Tom to augment my YouTube channel, get into podcasting, or read my kids a bedtime story anytime soon. But theres a strange part of me thats happy hes out there, just in case.
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E-Commerce
Elon Musks AI chatbot Grok wont be able to edit photos to portray real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal, according to a statement posted on X. The announcement late Wednesday followed a global backlash over sexualized images of women and children, including bans and warnings by some governments. The pushback included an investigation announced Wednesday by the state of California, the U.S.’s most populous, into the proliferation of nonconsensual sexually explicit material produced using Grok that it said was harassing women and girls. Initially, media queries about the problem drew only the response, legacy media lies. Musks company, xAI, now says it will geoblock content if it violates laws in a particular place. We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis, underwear and other revealing attire, it said. The rule applies to all users, including paid subscribers, who have access to more features. xAI also has limited image creation or editing to paid subscribers only to ensure that individuals who attempt to abuse the Grok account to violate the law or our policies can be held accountable. Groks spicy mode had allowed users to create explicit content, leading to a backlash from governments worldwide. Malaysia and Indonesia took legal action and blocked access to Grok, while authorities in the Philippines said they were working to do the same, possibly within the week. The U.K. and European Union were investigating potential violations of online safety laws. France and India have also issued warnings, demanding stricter controls. Brazil called for an investigation into Groks misuse. The British government, which has been one of Grok’s most vociferous critics in recent days, has welcomed the change, while the country’s regulator, Ofcom, said it would carry on with its investigation. I shall not rest until all social media platforms meet their legal duties and provide a service that is safe and age-appropriate to all users, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said. California Attorney General Rob Bonta urged xAI to ensure there is no further harassment of women and girls from Grok’s editing functions. We have zero tolerance for the AI-based creation and dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images or of child sexual abuse material, he said. California has passed laws to shield minors from AI-generated sexual imagery of children and require AI chatbot platforms to remind users they arent interacting with a human. But Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom also vetoed a law last year that would have restricted childrens access to AI chatbots. Elaine Kurtenbach, AP business writer Pan Pylas in London contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
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