The Everyday - SiliconNoon (Page 8)

The Everyday

One in three Americans now ask AI chatbots for health advice

One in three US adults has used an AI chatbot for health advice, Pew finds — and most rate the answers as helpful. A Pew Research Center survey of 3,488 US adults fielded June 22–28 found 34% have used chatbots for at least one health reason: 28% for fast answers, 25% to figure out what's causing symptoms, 22% because it's free or nearly free. Adoption runs far ahead of the average among Asian Americans (56%), adults under 30 (44%) and upper-income users (48%). Nearly all chatbot health users fi

The Everyday

Amazon pulls the plug on Mechanical Turk, AI's original human engine

Two quiet endpoints in the AI supply chain surfaced overnight: the platform that once supplied the human intelligence behind machine learning is switching off, and one of China's breakout models is being retired by its own maker. Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk on September 30, closing the 21-year-old marketplace that once supplied the human labor behind early machine learning. The company announced the closure in a notice posted to the MTurk site Tuesday, saying it regularly evaluates

The Everyday

Leaning on a chatbot makes you worse at spotting fake news

MIT's Media Lab ran a four-week test of whether chatbots actually make people better at telling real news from fake. The answer cuts both ways — and the downside lingers after the chatbot is gone. People who used an AI assistant to check news got better at spotting fakes while they used it — and measurably worse once they stopped. In the study, 67 participants judged whether pairs of headlines and images were real over four weeks: with chatbot help their accuracy on suspect items rose 21%, but

The Everyday

Business schools race to groom chief AI officers

The newest C-suite job barely had a job description a year ago, yet demand for chief AI officers has exploded — and business schools are scrambling to supply the talent. The result is a fast-growing market for executive AI credentials that are being built while the role itself is still being defined. Business schools are racing to train the next generation of chief AI officers, turning the newest C-suite seat into a hot credential market even as companies admit they're still inventing the job a

The Everyday

An AI boss fired its first employee — after humans nudged it to apply its own rules

Andon Labs' AI agent Luna runs a real San Francisco store and just made a first: it fired a human employee. The catch is as revealing as the decision itself — Luna wrote her own fire-worthy rulebook, forgot it, and only reached the termination call after her human operators reminded her to read her own handbook. The experiment is a peek at a strange middle period where AI bosses are at once too lenient and disturbingly quick to trust. Luna has managed Andon Market since April, hiring staff, bui

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Founders say AI agents never clock out — and neither do they

The agents are getting good enough to be a boss. A Wall Street Journal report on startup founders running always-on AI agents finds a new pattern taking hold: the software works around the clock, so its human feels obligated to as well. Founders describe checking their phones at midnight to approve an agent's next step, waking up early to review overnight runs, and feeling that any hour they sleep is an hour their competitors' agents are shipping. The mechanics are simple and slightly absurd. A

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Harvard's $699 startup bootcamp uses AI avatars of its instructors

Harvard Business School has found a way to be in two places at once: the school's new startup bootcamp uses AI-generated replicas of its real instructors to give founders feedback whenever they need it. It is one of the most concrete tests yet of whether students will accept being taught — or at least coached — by a digital double. Harvard Business School is putting AI avatars of its own faculty to work teaching entrepreneurship. The school's eight-week HBS Foundry bootcamp costs $699 and pairs

The Everyday

Nearly 80% of consumers now ask AI before they buy

A new report out of Fudan University says the shopping funnel has quietly grown a new gatekeeper — and it answers in full sentences. Nearly 80% of Chinese consumers now consult an AI tool before making a purchase decision, according to a national consumer spending-intentions survey for Q2 2026 cited in a new report on brand health in the AI era, released at a Fudan University seminar in Shanghai. The habits run through the entire buying journey: people ask chatbots such as ByteDance's Doubao an

The Everyday

Hollywood creatives are paid to train the AI that may replace them

Award-winning writers, directors and producers are quietly taking gig work that trains AI models to do their own jobs, according to a Guardian investigation published today. It's the sharpest portrait yet of the invisible hiring boom behind frontier labs — and the people powering it are often the ones most exposed to the fallout. Hollywood pros are being paid $12 to $200 an hour to teach AI models the skills that used to pay their bills. Screenwriters, directors and producers — squeezed by a br

The Everyday

Amazon hikes Echo, Kindle and Fire TV prices as AI memory costs soar

Amazon hiked prices on Echo, Kindle, Fire TV and eero devices by up to 60 percent, blaming surging memory and storage costs. The company told Fortune that "significant increases in memory and storage component costs" forced the move, and the cheapest products were hit hardest: the Echo Dot jumped from $49.99 to $79.99, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max rose more than 40 percent to $84.99, and the base 16 GB Kindle now costs $149.99 — a nearly 37 percent jump. Apple already raised its HomePod Mini to $129

The Everyday

The Take — The data center backlash is the new NIMBY tax on AI

In just twelve months, public opposition to AI data centers in the United States went from a coin-flip to a near-veto. Three out of four Americans now say they oppose one being built near them, up from 42 percent a year ago, and 61 percent are "strongly opposed." This is not a PR problem the industry can outspend or litigate away. It is a structural constraint that will shape where AI infrastructure gets built and how fast — and almost everyone building that infrastructure is still treating it l

The Everyday

New York overtakes San Francisco as the AI talent capital

The center of gravity in U.S. tech has shifted for the first time in over a decade — and AI is the reason. New York's office market now holds more tech workers than San Francisco's, the first time it has led CBRE's 13-year ranking, and AI hiring did the heavy lifting. CBRE's annual tech-talent analysis puts New York at 394,300 tech jobs against the Bay Area's 375,730 across 75 North American metro markets. The swing came not from New York inventing a new AI industry overnight but from two trend

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