An anonymous reader shares a report: In a landmark move, Illinois state lawmakers have passed a bill banning AI from acting as a standalone therapist and placing firm guardrails on how mental health professionals can use AI to support care. Governor JB Pritzker signed the bill into law on Aug. 1.

The legislation, dubbed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, was introduced by Rep. Bob Morgan and makes one thing clear: only licensed professionals can deliver therapeutic or psychotherapeutic services to another human being. [...] Under the new state law, mental health providers are barred from using AI to independently make therapeutic decisions, interact directly with clients, or create treatment plans -- unless a licensed professional has reviewed and approved it. The law also closes a loophole that allows unlicensed persons to advertise themselves as "therapists."

Google will pause non-essential AI workloads to protect power grids, the advertising giant announced on Monday. From a report: The web giant already does this sort of thing for non-essential workloads like processing YouTube vids, which it moves to datacenters where power is available rather than continuing to run them in places demand for energy strains the grid. Under an agreement with Indiana Michigan Power (I&M) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Google will use the same techniques for AI workloads.

The announcement comes as states served by the power companies brace for a heat wave that will likely strain the grid as residents use air conditioners and increase demand for energy. Amid debate about datacenters' consumption of power and water, the last thing that the Chocolate Factory needs is folks blaming its AI Mode search function for a power outage when temperatures top 100F (37.7C). Under the agreement, if energy demand surges or there's a disruption in the grid due to extreme weather, I&M and TVA can now request that Google reduce its power use by rescheduling workloads or limiting non-urgent tasks until the issue is resolved.

Disney scrapped plans to use a deepfake of Dwayne Johnson in Moana and an AI-generated character in Tron: Ares due to concerns over bad publicity and legal ownership. Ultimately, the studio decided the potential PR and copyright risks weren't worth the convenience. Deadline reports: Disney is working on a live-action remake of Moana, where Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will reprise his role of Maui. In a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, the studio came up with the idea to digitally clone Johnson and use a body double for some shots. "Disney would work with AI company Metaphysic to create deepfakes of Johnson's face that could be layered on top of Reed's performance in the footage -- a 'digital double' that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once," WSJ said (paywalled). Although the Black Adam star approved the idea, the studio "worried" that they "ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it." The film studio and the AI company were seemingly unable to come to terms, and the footage was scrapped.

Disney's upcoming Tron: Ares revolves around AI and the real-world implications of it. According to WSJ sources, "executives pitched the idea of actually incorporating AI into one of the characters in the sequel to the 1980s hit movie Tron as a buzzy marketing strategy." The AI-generated character would be a sidekick to Jeff Bridges' character, but the idea was ultimately scrapped because "executives internally were told that the company couldn't risk the bad publicity."

Fermi America is planning to build a colossal AI datacenter complex in Amarillo, Texas, powered by up to six gigawatts of nuclear energy. According to The Register, the company has selected Hyundai to support the deployment of the "HyperGrid," describing it as the "world's largest advanced energy campus." From the report: The project is backed by Rick Perry, who served as Texas governor and US Energy Secretary, and investor Toby Neugebauer, and aims to establish Texas as the US's largest energy and intelligence campus. Construction of the first of four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors is set to begin next year in Amarillo with the plant funneling behind-the-meter power to GPU bit barns by 2032, at least that's according to a memorandum of understanding (MoU). In other words, there is no guarantee the 23 million square meter project (1.1 MilliWales) will actually be built in its entirety, but if it is, Hyundai will oversee it.

"This agreement is significant in that it allows us to participate from the early stages of this project and contribute to the creation of the world's largest integrated energy and artificial intelligence campus, which leverages a diverse range of energy infrastructure," Hyundai said in a canned statement. At the very least, Hyundai knows what it's doing when it comes to nuclear developments. The industrial giant has led the deployment of some 22 reactors. Ambitious as the project may be, it won't be cheap. A single AP1000 reactor was estimated to cost $6.8 billion two years ago. That's a lot of money, but nothing compared to what the hyperscalers and neo-clouds are pumping into datacenters these days. Meta, for reference, expects to spend $66-72 billion on bit barns this year. [...] How exactly Fermi America or its founders Perry and Neugebauer expect to pay for one AP1000 reactor, let alone four, isn't clear. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CyberScoop: North Korean operatives seeking and gaining technical jobs with foreign companies kept CrowdStrike busy, accounting for almost one incident response case or investigation per day in the past year, the company said in its annual threat hunting report released Monday. "We saw a 220% year-over-year increase in the last 12 months of Famous Chollima activity," Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations, said during a media briefing about the report. "We see them almost every day now," he said, referring to the North Korean state-sponsored group of North Korean technical specialists that has crept into the workforce of Fortune 500 companies and small-to-midsized organizations across the globe.

CrowdStrike's threat-hunting team investigated more than 320 incidents involving North Korean operatives gaining remote employment as IT workers during the one-year period ending June 30. CrowdStrike researchers found that Famous Chollima fueled that pace of activity with an assist from generative artificial intelligence tools that helped North Korean operatives maneuver workflows and evade detection during the hiring process. "They use generative AI across all stages of their operation," Meyers said. The insider threat group used generative AI to draft resumes, create false identities, build tools for job research, mask their identity during video interviews and answer questions or complete technical coding assignments, the report found. CrowdStrike said North Korean tech workers also used generative AI on the job to help with daily tasks and manage various communications across multiple jobs -- sometimes three to four -- they worked simultaneously.

Threat hunters observed other significant shifts in malicious activity during the past year, including a 27% year-over-year increase in hands-on-keyboard intrusions -- 81% of which involved no malware. Cybercrime accounted for 73% of all interactive intrusions during the one-year period. CrowdStrike continues to find and add more threat groups and clusters of activity to its matrix of cybercriminals, nation-state attackers and hacktivists. The company identified 14 new threat groups or individuals in the past six months, Meyers said. "We're up to over 265 named adversary groups that we track, and then 150 what we call malicious activity clusters," otherwise unnamed threat groups or individuals under development, Meyers said.

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from TechCrunch: Sarah Murray recalls the first time she saw an artificial model in fashion: It was 2023, and a beautiful young woman of color donned a Levi's denim overall dress. Murray, a commercial model herself, said it made her feel sad and exhausted. The iconic denim company had teamed up with the AI studio Lalaland.ai to create "diverse" digital fashion models for more inclusive ads. For an industry that has failed for years to employ diverse human models, the backlash was swift, with New York Magazine calling the decision "artificial diversity."

"Modeling as a profession is already challenging enough without having to compete with now new digital standards of perfection that can be achieved with AI," Murray told TechCrunch. Two years later, her worries have compounded. Brands continue to experiment with AI-generated models, to the consternation of many fashion lovers. The latest uproar came after Vogue's July print edition featured a Guess ad with a typical model for the brand: thin yet voluptuous, glossy blond tresses, pouty rose lips. She exemplified North American beauty standards, but there was one problem -- she was AI generated.

The internet buzzed for days, in large part because the AI-generated beauty showed up in Vogue, the fashion bible that dictates what is and is not acceptable in the industry. The AI-generated model was featured in an advertisement, not a Vogue editorial spread. And Vogue told TechCrunch the ad met its advertising standards. To many, an ad versus an editorial is a distinction without a difference. TechCrunch spoke to fashion models, experts, and technologists to get a sense of where the industry is headed now that Vogue seems to have put a stamp of approval on technology that's poised to dramatically change the fashion industry. Amy Odell, a fashion writer and author of a recently published biography on Gwyneth Paltrow, put it simply: "It's just so much cheaper for [brands] to use AI models now. Brands need a lot of content, and it just adds up. So if they can save money on their print ad or their TikTok feed, they will."

OpenAI's ChatGPT is on track to hit 700 million weekly active users, "up from 500 million in March, marking a more than fourfold year-over-year surge in growth," reports CNBC. From the report: The figure spans all ChatGPT artificial intelligence products -- free, Plus Pro, Enterprise, Team, and Edu -- and comes as daily user messages surpassed three billion, according to the company. The growth rate is also accelerating, compared with 2.5 times year-over-year growth at this time last year. "Every day, people and teams are learning, creating, and solving harder problems," said Nick Turley, VP of product for ChatGPT, in announcing the benchmark.

OpenAI now has five million paying business users on ChatGPT, up from three million in June, as enterprises and educators increasingly integrate AI tools. [...] OpenAI's annual recurring revenue is now at $13 billion, up from $10 billion in June, with the company on track to surpass $20 billion by year-end. Even at a $300 billion valuation and $20 billion revenue run rate, OpenAI will need massive capital to support its global push.

Google released a 30-second Pixel 10 ad today that mocks Apple's year-long delay in delivering promised AI improvements to Siri on iPhone 16 devices. The ad suggests users could "just change your phone" if they purchased a device for a feature that's been "coming soon for a full year."

Delta Air Lines has walked back previous statements about individualized pricing after lawmakers questioned the airline's AI-assisted dynamic pricing model. In November, Delta president Glen Hauenstein told investors the company would have pricing "available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual."

Responding to senators' concerns in July, EVP Peter Carter now states Delta has never used, is not testing, and does not plan to use individualized pricing based on personal data. Carter describes the AI technology, developed by Fetcherr, as a decision-support tool that uses aggregated data to assist analysts rather than target individual customers with personalized fares.

AI startup Perplexity is deploying undeclared web crawlers that masquerade as regular Chrome browsers to access content from websites that have explicitly blocked its official bots, according to a Cloudflare report published Monday. When Perplexity's declared crawlers encounter robots.txt restrictions or network blocks, the company switches to a generic Mozilla user agent that impersonates "Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" running on macOS, the web infrastructure firm reported.

Cloudflare engineers tested the behavior by creating new domains with robots.txt files prohibiting all automated access. Despite the restrictions, Perplexity provided detailed information about the protected content when queried, while the stealth crawler generated 3-6 million daily requests across tens of thousands of domains. The undeclared crawler rotated through multiple IP addresses and network providers to evade detection.

The management consulting industry is facing potential disruption as AI companies enter the advisory business and traditional firms struggle to maintain growth. McKinsey, approaching its 100th anniversary, reduced its workforce by 5,000 employees since late 2023 while its revenue growth slowed to 2% in 2024.

Boston Consulting Group closed the gap significantly, growing 10% and reducing McKinsey's revenue advantage from more than double in 2012 to just one-fifth larger today. Technology companies including Palantir and OpenAI now offer consulting-like services to help businesses implement AI models, with Palantir's revenue growing 39% year-over-year. The shift threatens consulting's core business model, as clients may eventually question paying premium fees when AI can perform much of the analytical work traditionally done by human consultants.

The Associated Press investigates whether tech industry layoffs are really being caused by AI.

Their conclusion? "The reality is more complicated..." "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI...."

Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images...

Microsoft, which is staking its future on AI in the workplace, has also had its own researchers look into the jobs most vulnerable to the current strengths of AI technology. At the top of the list are knowledge work jobs such as language interpreters or translators, as well as historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives, according to Microsoft's working paper. On the other end, leading in work more immune to AI changes were phlebotomists, or healthcare workers who draw blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove hazardous materials, painters and embalmers.

Disney "cloned" Dwayne Johnson when filming a live-action Moana, reports the Wall Street Journal, using an AI process that they were ultimately afraid to use: Under the plan they devised, Johnson's similarly buff cousin Tanoai Reed — who is 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds — would fill in as a body double for a small number of shots. Disney would work with AI company Metaphysic to create deepfakes of Johnson's face that could be layered on top of Reed's performance in the footage — a "digital double" that effectively allowed Johnson to be in two places at once... Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed, what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns. They also worried that the studio ultimately couldn't claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it, people involved in the negotiations said. Disney and Metaphysic spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract and work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it's released next summer...

Interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and partners present an entertainment giant torn between the inevitability of AI's advance and concerns about how to use it. Progress has at times been slowed by bureaucracy and hand-wringing over the company's social contract with its fans, not to mention its legal contract with unions representing actors, writers and other creative partners... For Disney, protecting its characters and stories while also embracing new AI technology is key. "We have been around for 100 years and we intend to be around for the next 100 years," said the company's legal chief, Horacio Gutierrez, in an interview. "AI will be transformative, but it doesn't need to be lawless...." [As recently as June, a Disney/Comcast Universal lawsuit had argued that Midjourney "is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism."]

Concerns about bad publicity were a big reason that Disney scrapped a plan to use AI in Tron: Ares — a movie set for release in October about an AI-generated soldier entering the real world. Since the movie is about artificial intelligence, executives pitched the idea of actually incorporating AI into one of the characters... as a buzzy marketing strategy, according to people familiar with the matter. A writer would provide context on the animated character — a sidekick to Jeff Bridges' lead role named Bit — to a generative AI program. Then on screen, the AI program, voiced by an actor, would respond to questions as Bit as cameras rolled. But with negotiations with unions representing writers and actors over contracts happening at the same time, Disney dismissed the idea, and executives internally were told that the company couldn't risk the bad publicity, the people said...

Disney's own history speaks to how studios have navigated technological crossroads before. When Disney hired Pixar to produce a handful of graphic images for its 1989 hit The Little Mermaid, executives kept the incorporation a secret, fearing backlash from fans if they learned that not every frame of the animated film had been hand-drawn. Such knowledge, executives feared, might "take away the magic."
Disney invested $1.5 billion in Fortnite creator Epic Games, acccording to the article, and is planning a world in Fortnite where gamers can interact with Marvel superheroes and creatures from Avatar. But "an experiment to allow gamers to interact with an AI-generated Darth Vader was fraught. Within minutes of launching the AI bot, gamers had figured out a way to make it curse in James Earl Jones's signature baritone." (Though Epic patched the workaround within 30 minutes.)

But the article spells out another concern for Disney executives. "If a Fortnite gamer creates a Darth Vader and Spider-Man dance that goes viral on YouTube, who owns that dance?

Napster's latest AI pivot "is the latest in a series of attempts by various owners to ride its brand cachet during emerging tech waves," Fast Company reported in July. In March, it sold for $207 million to Infinite Reality, an immersive digital media and e-commerce company, which also rebranded as Napster last month. Since 2020, other owners have included a British VR music startup (to create VR concerts) and two crypto-focused companies that bought it to anchor a Web3 music platform. Napster's launch follows a growing number of attempts to drive AI adoption beyond smartphones and laptops.
And tonight the Washington Post re-visited the legacy of Napster's original mp3-sharing model, arguing Napster "inspired successive generations of entrepreneurs to risk flouting the law so they could grow enough to get the laws changed to suit them, including Airbnb and Uber." "Napster to me embodies the idea that it is better to seek forgiveness than permission," said Mark Lemley, director of Stanford Law School's Program in Law, Science & Technology. "It didn't work out well for Napster or for many of the others who got sued, but it worked out very well for everyone else — users, and eventually the content industry, too, which is making record profits...." [Napster co-founder Sean] Parker later advised Spotify, and Napster marketing chief Oliver Schusser is now Apple's vice president for music.

Although many users saw Napster as an extension of rock-and-roll rebellion, that was not the company's real plan. First Fanning's majority-owning uncle, and then venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, wanted the start-up to leverage its knowledge of individual music consumers to make lucrative deals with the labels, according to internal documents this reporter found in researching a book on Napster. They warned that if no agreement were reached and Napster failed, more decentralized pirate services would take the audience and offer the labels nothing.

But settlement talks failed. The litigation blitz also took down a Napster competitor called Scour, which a young Travis Kalanick had joined shortly after its founding. Kalanick later created Uber, dedicated to overthrowing taxi regulations.
The article concludes that "Now it is Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, among the largest companies in the world, bankrolling the consumption of all media.

"They, too, have absorbed Napster's lessons in realpolitik, namely to build it first and hope the regulators will either yield or catch up."

NBC News reports that in the U.S., many recent graduates looking to enter the labor force "are painting a dire picture of their job search." NBC News asked people who recently finished technical school, college or graduate school how their job application process was going, and in more than 100 responses, the graduates described months spent searching for a job, hundreds of applications and zero responses from employers — even with degrees once thought to be in high demand, like computer science or engineering.

Some said they struggled to get an hourly retail position or are making salaries well below what they had been expecting in fields they hadn't planned to work in. "It was very frustrating," said Jensen Kornfeind, who graduated this spring from Temple University with a degree in international trade. "Out of 70-plus job applications, I had three job interviews, and out of those three, I got ghosted from two of them."

The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday. "Recent college graduates are on the margin of the labor market, and so they're the first to feel when the labor market slows and hiring slows," said Jaison Abel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Across the economy, hiring in recent months has ground to its slowest pace since the start of the pandemic, with employers adding just 73,000 jobs in July, according to data released Friday... Tech workers have been some of the hardest hit in a slowing job market, with more than 400 employers including Meta, Intel and Cisco announcing more than 130,000 jobs cut in 2025, according to tech job site TrueUp.
The article cites an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab who believes early adoption of AI "is also likely driving some of the cuts and leading employers to rethink hiring plans in anticipation of AI's future role." So besides federal policy changes, the article blames "the emergence of AI, which some companies have said they are using to replace certain entry-level jobs, like those in customer support or basic software development."

Seven months after graduating, one CS major told NBC News he'd applied for 100 jobs, and got one job offer — for the 4 a.m. shift at Starbucks.

The Chinese government "has embarked on an all-out drive to transform the technology from a remote concept to a newfangled reality, with applications on factory floors and in hospitals and government offices..." reports the Washington Post.

"[E]xperts say Beijing is pursuing an alternative playbook in an attempt to bridge the gap" with America: "aggressively pushing for the adoption of AI across the government and private sector." DeepSeek has been put to work over the last six months on a wide variety of government tasks. Procurement documents show military hospitals in Shaanxi and Guangxi provinces specifically requesting DeepSeek to build online consultation and health record systems. Local government websites describe state organs using DeepSeek for things like diverting calls from the public and streamlining police work. DeepSeek helps "quickly discover case clues and predict crime trends," which "greatly improves the accuracy and timeliness of crime fighting," a city government in China's Inner Mongolia region explained in a February social media post. Anti-corruption investigations — long a priority for Chinese leader Xi Jinping — are another frequent DeepSeek application, in which models are deployed to comb through dry spreadsheets to find suspicious irregularities. In April, China's main anti-graft agency even included a book called "Efficiently Using DeepSeek" on its official book recommendation list...

Alfred Wu, an expert on China's public governance at the National University of Singapore, said Beijing has disseminated a "top-down" directive to local governments to use AI. This is motivated, Wu said, by a desire to improve China's AI prowess amid a fierce rivalry with Washington by providing models access to vast stores of government data.

But not everyone is convinced that China has the winning hand, even as it attempts to push AI application nationwide. For one, China's sluggish economy will impact the AI industry's ability to grow and access funding, said Scott Singer [an expert on China's AI sector at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was attending the conference]... Others point out that local governments trumpeting their usage of DeepSeek is more about signaling than real technology uptake. Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of artificial intelligence, said DeepSeek is not being used at scale in anti-corruption work, for example, because the cases involve sensitive information and deploying new tools in these investigations requires long and complex approval processes.

Microsoft's AI coding assistant "GitHub Copilot" has now had 20 million "all-time users," a GitHub spokesperson told TechCrunch. That means 5 million people have tried out GitHub Copilot for the first time in the last three months — the company reported in April the tool had reached 15 million users.

Microsoft and GitHub don't report how many of these 20 million people have continued to use the AI coding tool on a monthly or daily basis — though those metrics are likely far lower.

Microsoft also reported that GitHub Copilot, which is among the most popular AI coding tools offered today, is used by 90% of the Fortune 100. The product's growth among enterprise customers has also grown about 75% compared to last quarter, according to the company... In 2024, Nadella said GitHub Copilot was a larger business than all of GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it in 2018. In the year since, it seems GitHub Copilot's growth rate has continued in a positive direction.

Established in 1943 to coordinate America's building of the first atomic bomb, the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico is still "one of the world's largest and most advanced scientific institutions" notes Wikipedia.

And it now has a "National Security AI Office," where senior director Jason Pruet is working to help "prepare for a future in which AI will reshape the landscape of science and security," according to the lab's science and technology magazine 1663. "This year, the Lab invested more in AI-related work than at any point in history..." Pruet: AI is starting to feel like the next great foundation for scientific progress. Big companies are spending billions on large machines, but the buy-in costs of working at the frontiers of AI are so high that no university has the exascale-class machines needed to run the latest AI models. We're at a place now where we, meaning the government, can revitalize that pact by investing in the infrastructure to study AI for the public good... Part of what we're doing with the Lab's machines, like Venado — which has 2500 GPUs — is giving universities access to that scale of computing. The scale is just completely different. A typical university might have 50 or 100 GPUs.

Right now, for example, we have partnerships with the University of California, the University of Michigan, and many other universities where researchers can tap into this infrastructure. That's something we want to expand on. Having university collaboration will be critical if the Department of Energy is going to have a comprehensive AI program at scale that is focused on national security and energy dominance...

There was a time when I wouldn't have advocated for government investment in AI at the scale we're seeing now. But the weight of the evidence has become overwhelming. Large models — "frontier models" — have shown such extraordinary capabilities with recent advances in areas as diverse as hypothesis generation, mathematics, biological design, and complex multiphysics simulations. The potential for transformative impact is too significant to ignore.
"He no longer views the technology as just a tool, but as a fundamental shift in how scientists approach problems and make discoveries," the article concludes.

"The global race humanity is now in... is about how to harness the technology's potential while mitigating its harms."

Thanks to Slashdot reader rabbitface25 — also a Los Alamo Lab science writer — for sharing his article.

It's a cultural milestone. Fiverr just released an ad mocking vibe coding.

The video features what its description calls a "clueless entrepreneur" building an app to tell if an avocado is ripe — who soon ends up blissfully singing with an avocado to the tune of the cheesy 1987 song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." The avocado sings joyously of "a new app on the rise in a no-code world that's too good to be true" (rhyming that with "So close. Just not tested through...")

"Let them say we're crazy. I don't care about bugs!" the entrepreneur sings back. "Built you in a minute, now I'm so high off this buzz..."

But despite her singing to the overripe avocado that "I don't need a backend if I've got the spark!" and that they can "build this app together, vibe-coding forever. Nothing's going to stop us now!" — the build suddenly fails. (And it turns out that avocado really was overripe...) Fiverr then suggests viewers instead hire one of their experts for building their apps...

The art/design site Creative Bloq acknowledges Fiverr "flip-flopping between scepticism and pro-AI marketing." (They point out a Fiverr ad last November had ended with the tagline "Nobody cares that you use AI! They care about the results — for the best ones higher Fiverr experts who've mastered every digital skill including AI.") But the site calls this new ad "a step in the right direction towards mindful AI usage." Just like an avocado that looks perfect on the outside, once you inspect the insides, AI-generated code can be deceptively unripe.
Fiverr might be feeling the impact of vibecoding themselves. The freelancing web site saw the company's share price fall over 14% this week, with one Yahoo! Finance site saying this week's quarterly results revealed Fiverr's active buyers dropped 10.9% compared to last year — a decrease of 3.4 million buyers which "overshadowed a 9.8% increase in spending per buyer."

Even when issuing a buy recommendation, Seeking Alpha called it "a short-term rebound play, as the company faces longer-term risks from AI and active buyer churn."

Remember, it's all synthesized "anthropomorphizing". But with that caveat, Science News reports: In populations of simple software agents (like characters in "The Sims" but much, much simpler), having "guilt" can be a stable strategy that benefits them and increases cooperation, researchers report July 30 in Journal of the Royal Society Interface... When we harm someone, we often feel compelled to pay a penance, perhaps as a signal to others that we won't offend again. This drive for self-punishment can be called guilt, and it's how the researchers programmed it into their agents. The question was whether those that had it would be outcompeted by those that didn't, say Theodor Cimpeanu, a computer scientist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and colleagues.
Science News spoke to a game-theory lecturer from Australia who points out it's hard to map simulations to real-world situations — and that they end up embodying many assumptions. Here researchers were simulating The Prisoner's Dilemma, programming one AI agent that "felt guilt (lost points) only if it received information that its partner was also paying a guilt price after defecting." And that turned out to be the most successful strategy.

One of the paper's authors then raises the possibility that an evolving population of AIs "could comprehend the cold logic to human warmth."

Thanks to Slashdot reader silverjacket for sharing the article.