December 18, 2025

China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries.

In August 2025, Wang Lei decided it was finally time to say goodbye to his electric vehicle. Wang, who is 39, had bought the car in 2016, when EVs still felt experimental in Beijing. It was a compact Chinese brand. The subsidies were good, and the salesman talked about “supporting domestic innovation.” At the time,…

Selling the sizzle of trait discrimination

December 5, 2025
One day this fall, I watched an electronic sign outside the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in Manhattan switch seamlessly between an ad for makeup and one promoting the website Pickyourbaby.com, which promises a way for potential parents to use genetic tests to influence their baby’s traits, including eye color, hair color, and IQ. Inside the station,…

The era of AI persuasion in elections is about to begin

December 5, 2025
In January 2024, the phone rang in homes all around New Hampshire. On the other end was Joe Biden’s voice, urging Democrats to “save your vote” by skipping the primary. It sounded authentic, but it wasn’t. The call was a fake, generated by artificial intelligence. Today, the technology behind that hoax looks quaint. Tools like…

Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity

December 5, 2025
The newspaper is alleging copyright infringement and calling out Perplexity’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as a culprit.

AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisements

December 4, 2025
In 2024, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, Shamaine Daniels, used an AI chatbot named Ashley to call voters and carry on conversations with them. “Hello. My name is Ashley, and I’m an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels’s run for Congress,” the calls began. Daniels didn’t ultimately win. But maybe those calls helped her…