Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick writes about how the existence of A.I. detection tools is turning students into worse writers. The particular concern here is not students using A.I. to avoid writing things themselves. Instead, the problem is talented writers being forced to dumb down their writing as a defensive act. Masnick opens with this awful example:

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.

Revising writing to avoid false positives from A.I. detectors is just an outrageously poor use of time.

The purpose of school isn’t to have a bunch of completed assignments, but rather to learn. The creators of an A.I. agent named “Einstein” which does your homework for you seem to have missed that.

If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I’d argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

Yup, horses are all just out there living their best lives. Pursuing their passions. Knitting. Writing the great American novel. Playing baseball.

What?

Today in out-of-touch billionaires, it’s OpenAI’s Sam Altman talking about the resource usage of A.I.:

“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he said. “It takes like 20 years of life, and all the food you eat before that time, before you get smart.”

Ah, sure, yes, that’s a very interesting comparison. I wonder exactly how the numbers shake out vis-à-vis the energy used in training A.I. vs. raising a child to adulthood. I also wonder if Sam Altman realizes that “training humans” is rather the point of our existence.

Many moons ago, I wrote a not very serious guide to using emoji to express sympathy. What an innocent time that was. In 2026, you need to wonder if the eulogy you’re hearing was written by artificial intelligence. Dan Brooks writes:

My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI…His sense was that he had just heard a computer save a man from thinking about his dead friend.

Writing demonstrates care. Don’t let A.I. take that away from you.

Brooks goes on to say:

I don’t want [friendships] to become more efficient for the same reason I don’t want a robot that pets the dog for me.

I think the idea of a robot that pets the dog for me is a powerful one, and it encompasses far, far too much of how folks are using A.I.

Soon after Sebastian Heyneman left a suspicious-looking hardware device unattended at the World Economic Forum, he found himself in a very fancy jail. Eventually, he was asked to explain the device.

I say, “Look, I’m not a very good hardware engineer, but I’m a great user of AI.” I was one of the top users of [AI coding tool] Cursor last year. I did 43,000 agent runs and generated 25 billion tokens.

We open my machine. Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don’t know the language that the code was written in because it was written in AI, so Chris actually explained the code to me.

Not even knowing what coding language the software was written in is perhaps the most horrifying part of this.

Speaking of morbid Chinese silliness, a new app in China is growing in popularity:

The idea is simple: check in every day by tapping the big green button on the app’s homepage. Fail to check in for 48 hours and it will email the emergency contact you registered during set-up.

Its awful but brilliant name is “Are You Dead?”. That bluntness has bothered some (including, apparently, the Chinese government), but it seems to me that the problem isn’t the name so much as the fact that such an app is indeed useful.

The CES trade show wraps up today, and the 2026 Worst in Show awards are out. If an AI companion advertised as “your always-on 3D soulmate” isn’t the most dystopian thing you read this week, please don’t tell me what is.

This is Kumma:

Adorable, no? Look at its little scarf! But as the text under that furry little butt indicates, Kumma is an AI-enabled teddy bear. According to manufacturer FoloToy, this bear:

…combines advanced artificial intelligence with friendly, interactive features, making it the perfect friend for both kids and adults. From lively conversations to educational storytelling, FoloToy adapts to your personality and needs…

If you need advice on BDSM sex and where to find knives, Kumma apparently had you covered. As a result, Kumma is no longer available for purchase.

It seems to me that the world is not in a great place right now. Here in America, the government has been shut down for weeks, and even when it’s open, it’s being run by a wannabe dictator, with too few checks or balances from his feckless followers. On the internet, social media algorithms drive negative effects on mental health, political polarization, and the spread of misinformation. Globally, the very real effects of climate change are being seen and felt in ways big and small, while humanity seems incapable of dealing with such a big problem and the collective action it requires.¹

We should all buck up though, because uber-rich Jeff Bezos sees no reason for anyone, anywhere, to be discouraged.

Jeff Bezos Says He Doesn’t Understand Why Anybody Alive Now Would Be ‘Discouraged’—Because Soon, ‘Millions Of People Will Be Living In Space’

“Will this make me sound like an out-of-touch mega-billionaire?” Bezos ought to have wondered, but apparently did not.

Right now, we all live on the perfect place for human life.² Rather than attempting to send millions of people to live in space, it would be really great if we could focus on making life easier for the people who live on planet Earth, as well as not destroying our home.

Footnotes:

1. A couple years back, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s “We Are The Weather”, which proposed that we can avert the worst outcomes by having fewer children, eating fewer animal products, and flying less. Though I do what I can here myself, I am not optimistic about that happening at a wide enough scale. ↩︎

2. Well, almost all. ↩︎