weekend ai reads for 2025-09-26

“This artificial intelligence Pope would give them answers to their questions, and I said, ‘I’m not going to authorize that’.”

These fears are echoed by Noah Ha‘alilio Solomon, an assistant professor of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawai‘i. He reports that some 35% of words on some pages in the Hawaiian Wikipedia are incomprehensible. “If this is the Hawaiian that is going to exist online, then it will do more harm than anything else,” he says.

One of the standout trends is Indians using Nano Banana to re-create retro looks inspired by 1990s Bollywood, imagining how they might have appeared during that era, complete with period-specific fashion, hairstyles, and makeup.

The Lionsgate catalog is too small to create a model. In fact, the Disney catalog is too small to create a model.

And when people lose faith in shared institutions, when they can’t agree on basic facts or common procedures, they become vulnerable to manipulation by anyone with enough money or technology to fill that vacuum.

Surveyed workers reported spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes per incident dealing with low-quality AI outputs. Researchers calculated that, based on respondents’ salaries, workslop carries an invisible cost of around $186 per month.

A California attorney must pay a $10,000 fine for filing a state court appeal full of fake quotations generated by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.

A three-judge panel fined him for filing a frivolous appeal, violating court rules, citing fake cases, and wasting the court’s time and the taxpayers money, according to the opinion.

Responses to all seven scenarios lean more negative than positive. But many Americans don’t express an opinion in either direction, with sizable shares saying their view would not change if they learned that AI was used in various settings.

That’s because “real transformation requires process redesign -- not just new tools; enterprise-level projects -- not individual prompts; and years of persistent effort.”

In other words, AI is not too different from the technology waves of the past. And these lessons get learned over and over again. Simply firing up generative AI with prompts doesn’t create measurable economic value.

The director manages an AI chief-of-staff, the managers are player-coaches, both executing goals themselves & training/coaching others on how to manipulate AI successfully, which cuts the span of control by half.

The case for data is mixed. General data—i.e., things most people know, including everything anyone knew more than, say, 10 years ago, and most of what was learned after that—is a commodity. There may be room for a few companies to do the grunt work of collating and tagging it, but since the collating and tagging might best be done by AI itself, there will not be a lot of pricing leverage. Domain-specific models will need specialist data, and other models will try to answer questions about the current moment. Specific, timely, and hard to reproduce data will be valuable. This is not a new market, of course—Bloomberg and others have done well by it.

I led design for NotebookLM, shaping the product’s core user experience, brand identity, and visual system from experiment to launch.

Again, this is all built around a workflow we call frequent intentional compaction - essentially designing your entire development process around context management, keeping utilization in the 40-60% range, and building in high-leverage human review at exactly the right points. We use a “research, plan, implement” workflow, but the core capabilities/learnings here are FAR more general than any specific workflow or set of prompts.

For too long, personas have been something that many of us just created, despite the considerable work that goes into them, only to find they have limited usefulness. Paul Boag shows how to breathe new life into this stale UX asset and demonstrates that it’s possible to create truly useful functional personas in a lightweight way.

He was a systems thinker — a designer of inputs. His work across ambient music, generative compositions and creative philosophy is defined by a single principle:

“Set the conditions. Let the system evolve.”

One of Ohai’s top features is creating digital calendar entries out of unstructured data—an email attachment with a conference itinerary or a photo of that bake-sale flier stuffed in your child’s backpack.