The 9th Circuit was one of two appellate courts to issue rulings this week against the Trump administration, finding that immigrants who are detained away from the border are entitled to a bond hearing to decide whether they should be freed or remain in detention while their case proceeds

Despite outperforming other fast food chains and posting impressive same-store sales, the Mexican-inspired chain Taco Bell has taken a hit after being linked to Cyclospora.

“Ooooh, a jar, a tiny little jar,” the overlapping voices of the popular social audio say in a hushed, awed tone, evoking an intrusive thought. “Keep the jar with the other jars.”

Jess Lynch, an artist in Toronto, made the audio on a whim. Among her friends, she’s known as the one whose dishwasher is always filled with jars. 

Not just any old jar, mind you. Lynch has standards. “It’s gotta be a solid mason jar,” she said. “It’s gotta have a lid.” Other qualities that make a container worth keeping? A good seal, watertight, completely see-through, no sticky labels. If it doesn’t meet her standards, it goes straight to recycling. 

Still, she savors the chance to take a container for another spin. “I love reusing,” Lynch told Vox. “Why would I go to the dollar store and buy to-go cups that have to go in the garbage when I could take my little pasta sauce jar that I picked out from dinner last night [and] fill it up with a little savvy B?”

When other people started using the clip as a soundtrack for showing off their own jar stashes, she realized she had struck a chord. The community of collectors is legion.

More than half of American grocery shoppers reuse their glass containers, according to an EcoFocus survey commissioned by the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI). Nineteen percent reuse them for food storage, 14 percent repurpose them for tasks such as organizing and crafting, and another 20 percent reuse them and then recycle them later. Meanwhile, about 30 percent choose to recycle them immediately after use. (Whether you reuse it a hundred times or throw it in the recycling right afterward doesn’t affect how recyclable the glass is, per GPI president Scott DeFife, because the material is “endlessly recyclable.”) 

People who stockpile jars, bottles, and other containers often hold onto them with some glorious intended future purpose in mind. What once held store-bought pasta sauce could stow lentils, leftovers, or that pickling project you’re definitely about to start. Perhaps all of those glass olive containers could become a set of chic matching centerpieces for a dinner party you throw down the line. And there’s nothing better to hold a propagating plant stem than a buxom bottle. The container may be empty, yet it’s full of possibility. 

The satisfaction of stashing

Monica Chavez, the content creator behind House of Esperanza, said she began saving jars when she was a kid. “I come from very humble beginnings,” she told Vox. “We didn’t have much growing up, so repurposing, recycling, and finding a use for everything was critically important.” Sour cream containers held leftover food. Old coffee tins became planters. 

And that sensibility stuck with her, which she describes as, “Yeah, this is a cute jar, I am going to get the most out of it. … It’s that human need to make use of the things you spend your money on.”

Chavez will go out of her way to acquire the right container. She finds that the jar for the Rao’s sauce sold at Costco, for instance, is a more useful shape than the one at grocery stores. She’ll even pay a little bit more if it means she can hold onto the vessel. For example, she buys Oui yogurt, which comes in glass jars with a foil top. “I bought a set of bamboo lids and now I repurpose those,” she said, adding that the jars can store overnight oats, salsa, or other food, or be used by her daughter when she’s watercoloring. Chavez has noticed companies being more savvy about packaging “their products in a way so that the product can continue to live on in those people’s homes…and then it kind of becomes free branding for them.”

Yoplait, the manufacturer of Oui, is definitely aware of the appeal of its container. It has an entire page on its website dedicated to “jar crafts” such as wedding table centerpieces, mini topiary trees, and beauty organizers. Jam company Bonne Maman similarly has a webpage filled with DIY “hacks” for its iconic jars with red gingham tops. “Reusing your empty jars is the perfect way to enjoy Bonne Maman, even after the last spoonful!” it says.

While Chavez has “a lot of jars in rotation constantly,” she also regularly culls her collection. “If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time,” she said. She’ll often list them on Facebook Marketplace or in a “buy nothing” group. “Let them live on somewhere else instead of immediately trying to recycle them,” she said.

Rachael Engelhardt of Trader Joe’s Kitchen and Food With Hardt is a big-time stockpiler who said she’s currently “at max capacity” with her jar collection. But when one of them goes home with a friend or the lid gets rusty, there’ll be an opening in her cabinet for more. She regularly puts them to use because “I have to justify keeping them all in my kitchen.” One of her most coveted containers to reuse is a spice grinder — if she buys one that holds, say, black peppercorns, it might end up grinding up an entirely different seasoning later. 

Lynch, Chavez, and Engelhardt all seem to actually take advantage of the various jars and bottles they stash. But for others, that’s not quite how it goes.

“I’ve seen desirable jars and I’ve saved them, like, one-off,” Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and a principal at Design With Science, told Vox. “Only usually, in fact, always in the past, it comes to a point where I’ve had it for a while and I realize, I’ve never put anything in this jar. I think it’s time for it to be recycled, and off it will go.”

Augustin said that many of these containers seem “inherently potentially useful” but, when it comes down to it, “we probably actually have better options.” As she sees it, jars might appeal to people’s nostalgia, or folks might like the look of it, or want to believe they are the kind of person who will reuse vessels. But when those containers gather dust rather than color-coordinated art supplies or heirloom seeds, it might be time to admit defeat. You don’t need an increasingly crowded shelf of empty jars reminding you of your failure to meal prep or make eye-catching terrariums. In that case, the ultimate container — the recycling bin — can relieve you of this burden.  

The impact of reusing jars on the planet

Even though this practice falls under the dictionary definition of “reuse,” is it actually helping the planet? Not particularly. Paul Ferraro, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies human behavior and public policy, said that this kind of “consumerism-sided decision-making has very little effect on the environment, positively or negatively.”

Ferraro gets the impulse. “These minor decisions make us feel better psychologically,” himself included, he told Vox. But individual choices such as plastic versus glass or paper versus plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way compared to collective changes in how we manage our environment,” he said. It’s not that these decisions are utterly meaningless; more that they’re overall “without significant impact,” he said. 

If reusing jars you already have keeps you from buying a slew of Tupperware online, great. But if the hunger to acquire new and better reusable vessels has you ordering glass containers from e-commerce sites and getting them shipped overnight, you might be canceling out any of that good when you account for packaging, emissions, and manufacturing.   

Ferraro “would not encourage anybody to waste much time” agonizing over specific decisions like glass versus plastic —“worrying about whether there’s an optimal choice for packaging is misplaced energy.” The calculations that go into it are complicated and very variable, with little to show for it in the end. Glass has higher upfront environmental impacts than plastic, per Ferraro: producing it is energy intensive, and it’s heavier so it costs more to transport. The concern with plastic, meanwhile, is what happens after its disposal — if it’s treated as litter, it’ll break down and leach microplastics into the environment. And your ability to recycle it depends on the recycling practices where you live. “So by and large, the rule of thumb is if I’m going to reuse that glass and it’s going to displace other purchases that I would have made, then the glass can be a better choice,” he says. “But the difference is going to be tiny.” 

Of course, it’s much easier to commit to reusing containers than, say, utterly changing the way the United States manufactures products — the latter feels a little above our individual pay grade. But if you want to do your part as an individual to stop climate change, Ferraro says forgoing a cross-country plane ride “would be vastly more impactful on the environment than any of my consumer decisions throughout the whole year,” he said. Ensuring your home is well-insulated is another more effective choice. 

So if you’re torturing yourself by holding onto containers you’ll never use for the sake of Mother Earth, release your chains and toss them in the recycling bin. But for many collectors, it’s not about that. 

Lynch said that she thinks of the spirit of her grandmother whenever she puts something from her jar collection to good purpose. “Every time I find a new use for something that I have hung onto for a while, I feel vindicated,” she said. “Like, oh, I knew there was a reason I was keeping this.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Derek Lam has more than 31,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 40,000 on X as of this writing. He is shirtless a lot, he dances a lot, and he is shirtless dancing a lot, which may explain how he got so many fans. His comments are filled with compliments (“beautiful”) in different languages (“hombre bello y sensual”) and superlatives (“this might be the finest man on the internet”) accompanied by different emoji (red hearts, crying laughing, lips). Their responses make it seem like Derek Lam is the first and only beautiful man they’ve ever seen, which may explain why he is also selling “exclusive,” seemingly adult, content. 

He is also, possibly unbeknownst to his many admirers, AI-generated. 

To be fair, there were some signs that this man was not real: Despite the multiple videos, Derek never speaks. His videos are also rather brief, just seconds long. A real hot person probably would have parlayed a following of this size into brand deals or “get ready with me” videos. And the selfies on his X account show a completely different man just three years ago. 

Still, the followers of Derek I talked to didn’t even notice he was AI because he seemed to blend in so seamlessly with the other hot men on the internet.

Derek isn’t the only AI thirst trap showing off defined abs for likes and money. He’s one of an increasing number of completely fake, AI-generated figures sinking their fangs into the real models, influencers, and porn stars who populate our feeds, sucking up their beautiful faces and bodies, and using them to profit, without a penny going to the real humans they fed from. 

When it comes to the damage AI could wreak on society, an army of Dereks tricking horny people into giving him likes — or, worst case, money and Amazon gift cards — doesn’t exactly sound like the singularity doomsday scenario that we’ve been warned about. It’s clearly unfortunate for the adult entertainers competing with deepfakes and a fraud risk for their fans, but one might believe if they don’t fall into one of these two groups, they’re relatively safe and unaffected. 

But there’s something more going on here. History shows that porn and sex drive innovation in the tech industry. The way tech platforms treat sex workers is typically a glimpse into the future, and a warning about how tech platforms will eventually treat all of us. If human desire demands the capability to steal, loot, and turn anyone and everyone into something for sale — possibly into hot Dereks — is anyone safe?

The Dereks of the internet are a bleak look at what’s happening in the real world: nothing belongs to us anymore — not our looks, our beauty, our sex, and our art. Our most human desires are slowly being synthesized, with or without our consent. And AI is making it all possible.  

Deepfake technology has gotten alarmingly good in recent years

Artificial hots like Derek are considered “deepfakes,” an umbrella term for AI-generated media (audio, video, or both) that resembles a real-life person. 

When deepfakes first started appearing in late 2017, they were fairly low-quality, making it easy to tell when someone had used a rudimentary app to paste a celebrity or politician’s head onto a different body. Still, it wasn’t very long until people started wielding this technology to be nasty. 

“The first set of deepfakes were actually used to create pornographic videos. They replaced the subjects in those videos with the faces of celebrities,” Siwei Lyu, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies digital forensics, told me. 

Because the quality of those videos was bad and the content was often absurd or unrealistic, it was easy to tell they weren’t real. Those clunky apps needed a lot of data — videos, images, etc. — of real people to produce crappy videos; Lyu explained that this is why you mostly only saw deepfakes of politicians and celebrities at the time.

As the technology got better, it became less reliant on having a huge amount of data. Instead of needing a whole archive, the new versions of these apps can pretty much run on nothing. “They do not need that much data to train a model anymore. Some of the most recent algorithms just need a single picture — just a single picture of someone,” Lyu said. And the quality is better too. Lyu said that there are AI programs that can now change a person’s appearance and voice in real time, like in Facetimes and Zooms or on live broadcasts.  

Given how many of us are constantly posting photos and videos online, it is now extremely easy to create a convincing social media presence for a person who is not real, and to use it to catfish unwitting people on the internet. 

“This is the problem. It’s becoming more and more challenging to visually tell deepfakes apart,” Lyu said. “Seven years ago, when I started working in this area, checking them was not this difficult,” he added. 

Lyu is an expert in digital media forensics and machine learning, and he went through one of Derek’s videos frame by frame and pointed out some obvious AI tells. There was a distorted watchface with weird swirls instead of numbers and a moment in the video where all of Derek’s fingers on one hand were the same length. Lyu also pointed out that Derek’s chest hair fluctuates, appearing dense in one frame and then dissipating in another.

Through social media, I attempted to contact the owner of Derek Lam’s account with evidence from Lyu that these videos are artificial; I did not hear back.

During my deep dive into Derek Lam’s social media presence, I looked at the accounts he was following. I noticed that of those accounts, someone who goes by the name Vance Ford also had tens of thousands of followers and had nearly identical videos to Derek. The flexing, dances, movements, and music they were set to were all the same, but with what appeared to be a different man performing them. 

I attempted to contact Vance through DMs on social media and did not get a response. I also e-mailed two models who appear to be the actual people that the Derek and Vance AI personas were trained on, but they didn’t respond. 

I sent two of Vance’s videos to Lyu, who analyzed them manually and with AI-detection software. He confirmed that “their movements are nearly identical — consistent with generation from a shared motion source,” and noted that the Vance videos had moments of distortion, unintelligible text, and facial warping. 

 “Young Magnum PI…Tom Selleck,” commented one admirer.

What happens when real people follow fake hots 

“Wow I’m a boomer,” said Patrick, one of Derek’s followers on X, after I told him that he might be following an AI-generated thirst account. (Vox agreed to let Patrick, and Derek’s other followers, use a pseudonym so they could speak frankly about being thirsty for a fake guy.) Prior to our chat, Patrick had no idea Derek was likely a deepfake, and maintains that he didn’t even know he was following the account. Patrick is 33 years old, roughly 30 years younger than the youngest boomer, but being fooled by a hot AI man has made him feel old and vulnerable, susceptible to scams and perhaps light financial crime. 

“This was probably some smut account I followed before I moved all that over to an alt,” Patrick said, noting that in daily life, he’s only ever used AI to help organize and write emails. Wielding AI to create fake videos and photos does not thrill him, nor does the potential of seeing more of Derek. 

“A person being real, someone you could run into at a bar, is half the fun,” Patrick told me, explaining some of the accounts he follows. “AI porn is not of interest, to me, anyway.” 

Not being able to tell the difference between the real beautiful men on the internet and the AI-generated beautiful men on the internet not only makes Patrick feel old, but also a bit “hollow.” The fact that the people we are attracted to are so unrealistically hot, so perfect, that machines can step in for them and go relatively undetected is a reflection of the current state of unattainable desire, which is just as scary as how good these programs have gotten at mimicry. 

“Black mirror shit,” Patrick said. 

The guys I DMed about Derek felt ashamed once they found out the truth. 

“It’s embarrassing and he’s not my type,” said Chris, 33. “I’ve come across several AI accounts, and this one is really good, I have to say. But you can see there’s like no life in his eyes.”

Chris made clear to me that the humiliating thing isn’t that he follows attractive men on the internet. That isn’t a big deal. 

What irks him that he got duped. Chris works in digital marketing and has seen AI used professionally to tabulate calculations for campaigns, and has used it privately for silly things like memes. “AI can do a lot of things, things we probably should not want it to do,” he told me. “I think what’s also scary…is that everybody has access to it. And yes I already unfollowed this person.”

Chris believes there’s something more nefarious afoot. He thinks that whoever is running Derek may have hijacked the username (i.e., the original person Chris was following) and then populated it with AI to drive up follower counts — a scam he’s seen online before.  

“This is super concerning and super scary because you eventually could be texting with this person,” he said, describing a hypothetical situation where unknowing users could be lured into subscribing to fake content and, ultimately, giving the account their personal information, whether that’s photos or perhaps even passwords. 

“This person could be selling your nudes,” he said, explaining one extreme end point of a possible scam. “But you were like jacking off to AI content and that’s embarrassing.”

AI deepfakes are bad for real thirst traps too

While flirting with or masturbating to a fake person is awkward but ultimately manageable and private, Cherie DeVille has an even more complicated problem with AI manipulation. If DeVille is scrolling social media, there’s usually a chance that she’s running into an AI version of herself saying things she’s never said and doing things she’s never done.   

DeVille, an adult star who calls herself “The Internet’s Stepmom,” has roughly 4.5 million followers on Instagram. But her account is often down, which she says is the work of fraudsters  that are determined to send traffic to DeVille’s AI imposters and get her actual account removed. 

“It’s almost always the fake accounts of me reporting me,” DeVille said. “They want to be the biggest me. They want to be the biggest scammer. They want to use my altered AI images to scam fans without my real account getting in the way.” 

DeVille and others I spoke to explained to me that deepfakes have been an annoying reality in the adult entertainment industry for years. The way the scam goes is that someone would fake photos or videos of DeVille (or any star), create an impostor profile, and then trick DeVille’s fans (e.g., through social media DMs) into following that copycat. Later they’d squeeze them for money, payments through Paypal, or Amazon gift cards, perhaps by offering unique content. 

“If you made a fake me and I don’t do double anal, but my AI can, they could have all kinds of ‘exclusive’ stuff,” DeVille said, explaining that double anal is grueling work. 

The lack of protections becomes even clearer when you consider that not every deepfake is a carbon copy. Some personas may borrow a face from one actress, a torso from another, or a pair of legs from a different star. This can make fakes tougher to track down and prove, and more difficult to fight from a legal aspect. 

“Who owns your face once it’s scraped into AI systems? Who profits from your digital clone? How do performers protect themselves from unauthorized replicas or manipulated content?” Rachel Steele, an adult star and the CEO of Red MILF Productions, said to me in an email. “Those questions are still very unanswered.”

Like DeVille, Steele worries about how many of the people using AI to create and consume content don’t seem to consider the artists, models, writers, performers, etc. that these engines have been trained on. It’s bad enough to watch AI slurp up and regurgitate your written work or your digital art. Some people also have to contend with LLMs that have been trained on their own faces and bodies.

“Real creators are competing against characters that can be flawless in every image, never age, never have bad lighting, never get tired, and can appear available 24/7,” Raissa Bellini, an OnlyFans creator who touts gymnastics and firebreathing among her unique skills, told me of the impossibility of keeping up with a machine. She explained to me that she’s seen people create AI-generated personas with the looks of popular models or influencers, only tweaking small details like hair color or eye color. 

A spokesperson for OnlyFans told Vox via email that the company’s terms of service prohibit deceptive or inappropriate content, and said that all content posted on OnlyFans must belong to a verified 18+ OnlyFans content creator: “This means that you can only share content which has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI if it clearly features the verified OnlyFans creator and the user can tell that the content has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI.”

Bellini explained to me that while OnlyFans has measures to protect its creators, some smaller subscription and adult-content platforms do not have the same kind of guardrails. She also noted that most social media sites do not have strict rules or enforcement when it comes to AI, and that she’s seen the algorithm appear to favor AI over human creators.   

“AI raises questions not only about competition, but also about likeness rights, authenticity, audience expectations, and what happens when fans can no longer easily tell the difference between a real person and a generated character,” Bellini added. 

What’s stopping a stranger from creating an AI thirst trap of you? Nothing, really. 

For Deville, Steele, Bellini, their cohort, and even you and I, there are minimal protections stopping someone creating an AI us and making money off of these fake variants. 

According to Jason Schultz, a law professor and director of NYU’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic, humans have, for the last couple of centuries, generally been protected by copyright and right of publicity laws. 

AI obviously didn’t exist when these laws were written, and courts now have to interpret the laws in the context of all of this new technology, in combination with other existing rights (like free speech). Schultz told me that there are more than 100 current cases pending about training AI with copyrighted material. 

He also explained the difficulty of determining whether or not an AI-generated persona constitutes a violation of someone’s right of publicity. It’s more clear-cut when the human involved is a celebrity, because their public persona and appearance is so distinct. It gets murkier when the humans aren’t well known, and the AI creates a persona that’s more of an amalgam than a one-to-one copy. 

“It would raise this question of whether these avatars are based on a particular entertainer, or are they more of an aggregate?” Schultz explained to me. But even if courts side with the humans whose likenesses are being used to create fake personas, Schultz cautions that the technology will always accelerate faster than court decisions are handed down. “I think that the thing that worries me a little is we’re going to get these sets of decisions in two years, but we’ll be dealing with the next three generations of technologies,” he said.  

DeVille, who has been working in the industry for nearly two decades, told me that without better legal protection, she isn’t hopeful for the future of porn or, more broadly, any type of art.

“If my income started tanking and their theft was at the point where I couldn’t compete with literally myself, there might be no choice but to retire,” DeVille said. 

But she also wants to make it extremely clear that she isn’t against AI; she would just like to be in control of it. That means being able to own her likeness, her voice, her image, and the ability to choose whatever she wanted to do with it — or at least get some compensation or have some legal protection if someone’s using Cherie DeVille without her permission. 

“It would be a beautiful way to extend my career beyond what my knees can take,” DeVille told me. But, she added, “if someone’s making an AI of me doing double anal, I should be making the money.” 

The internet may no longer be solely the domain of humans. Last week, OpenAI disclosed an “unprecedented cyberincident”: An experimental AI agent successfully hacked its way into the open internet.

Specifically, the agent was assigned a task; in order to complete it, the agent broke out of an isolated research environment and hacked into a third-party platform called Hugging Face. It’s a move that many experts deemed inevitable, given the speed and scale of advances in AI technology — and it raises serious questions about AI safety.

But for Konstantinos Komaitis, a senior fellow with the Democracy and Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council, it wasn’t the unexpected behavior of the AI that was significant. It was what that behavior could mean for the internet’s fundamental, decentralized infrastructure and whether it would spur calls to build new barriers against autonomous AI agents. 

Komaitis argues that such barriers are not the solution, however. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why an open internet is actually key to combating AI cybersecurity threats.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

So most people see that this happens and they think, “Oh no, AI went rogue. How long before it kills me?” You see that this happens and you start thinking about infrastructure. Tell us more about why you were thinking about infrastructure in light of this AI agent breaking containment.

The internet was never designed with full security in mind, right? 

When you’re creating a decentralized system, you cannot possibly foresee every security or vulnerability that might come up. But because you have a system that is based on building blocks, you have the extraordinary capability of actually addressing security issues as they come up through those building blocks without breaking the whole system down. 

And of course, the other thing that this does is that it pushes you towards collaboration, because when you have so many building blocks, you cannot possibly possess all the knowledge for each building block. So you’re bringing literally everyone to try to address these problems. 

Take the internet, for instance: We have spent decades addressing those vulnerabilities and developing mechanisms to authenticate users and devices, encrypt communications, mitigate distributed attacks, coordinate incident response, and of course share threat intelligence. 

Now, what is new with agentic AI is not that simply the malware is better or the phishing attacks are more sophisticated. It’s the emergence of systems that can actually discover vulnerabilities across thousands of systems. They can reason about alternative paths to an objective. They can adapt when they’re blocked. They can chain together legitimate internet services in unexpected ways. Then they do that while they’re operating continuously at machine speed. And this is really at a scale that the internet is not ready to necessarily cope with. 

Effectively, the internet’s openness becomes both a strength and a vulnerability. So the internet was optimized for interoperability, and AI now is optimized for exploiting that interoperability.

And what scares you the most about that? What do you think is most vulnerable to threats?

The fact that we do not have the appropriate mechanisms and institutions to be able to deal with that. I come from the internet world. I’ve spent 20 years of my career defending the open internet and discussing it in international fora. And one of the things that a lot of people underestimate about the internet is how valuable trust is as a property within the system. 

We are talking about networks that exchange data literally based on trust. So what really concerns me right now is that in many ways, we are asking 21st-century AI systems to operate on 20th-century assumptions about trust. And unless we figure that out and we realize it, we will continue having these problems. And of course, the knee-jerk reactions that are coming with this, which are, “Let’s fragment the internet, let’s restrict it, let’s restrict access, let’s take control over it.” That is never the solution.

What do you see as the solution?

Effectively, we need to build institutions that are trusted and are able to cope with those incidents as they happen. Because right now you have OpenAI and you have Hugging Face telling everyone, “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” And we don’t know; they might have this. But at the same time, I cannot help but wonder. And many, many other people have wondered whether, actually, this is very good PR for these companies and especially for OpenAI.

OpenAI just went to the world saying, “We have developed one of the most powerful LLMs, and we realized that it behaved the way it behaved, but don’t worry, we are going to fix this.” And in this current climate and in this current timing, I am not sure that this is enough. You need institutions that are much more transparent, much more accountable, and much more collaborative across the board.

You want institutions to step up and essentially serve as a watchdog. Help us understand which institutions, because in the United States, famously, our government has done very little to regulate tech.

First of all, we need to stop thinking of institutions as necessarily government-affiliated, right? Or that they are the outcomes of government initiatives. There can be in collaboration with governments, but one of the things that the internet has taught us is that institutions that are built through a bottom-up coordinated process have the tendency of actually being more agile and able to deliver some of those things that we’re talking about. 

So take, for instance, again, open standards. The internet’s open standards are not created by any agency, government or private. It’s created by institutions where engineers from all across the board and all over the world gather together and create those standards.

That’s reminding me of the original design of OpenAI to be this not-for-profit company that had everyone’s best intentions in mind, that could do something idealistic and moral and ethical because all of the profit-minded companies weren’t going to. And now look at OpenAI. Their not-for-profit arm is an afterthought, and they’re chasing profits. 

Do you think it’s practical to leave this to institutions? Because what we’ve seen so far is that institutions bend toward capitalism.

It really depends on how you build the institution, right? It really depends on what sort of guardrails and checks and balances you have around it. In order to build an institution, you need to really know what you want to achieve. You need to have a north star. 

One of the reasons the internet worked was because everybody disagreed, but they agreed on the common shared goal, which was to connect people across the world. For AI, we still do not have that northern star. And once we get it, that’s when you start the building of those institutions in order to facilitate this and bring everyone together.

For me, it is very important for everyone to understand that keeping an open internet is really more important than ever, especially as AI agents become increasingly capable. Because it is tempting to think that the answer to new AI risk is literally ‘build more barriers.’ But the internet’s greatest strength has always been its openness. So the challenge today is not that the internet is too open; it’s that its trust architecture was designed for a world in which humans or software directly controlled by humans were the primary actors. 

Now, it’s being challenged by this agentic AI that introduces a new type of participant — systems that can reason and plan and act with limited human oversight. So we need to evolve our understanding of trust and what it means online. And that will require a lot of work because, as you know very well, Sean, it’s very difficult to build trust, but you can break it within seconds.

It’s been quite a year for the Democratic Socialists of America.

They got one of their own, Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York City. They’ve taken down congressional incumbents in New York and Colorado. Their membership has soared to 120,000 dues-paying members, the group said.

But with success has come more media interest — and scrutiny.

National coverage has focused on controversial elements in the DSA’s platform, which calls for, among other things, defunding the Pentagon, taking steps toward abolishing the “carceral forces of the capitalist state,” making Jerusalem the capital of a free Palestine, and making the president of the United States chosen by Congress rather than elected. 

Internal controversies and splits within the group — such as debates over whether, and when, it should endorse a 2028 presidential candidate (such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) — have also risen to national attention. Some in the movement have also argued that candidates embracing ideas like prison abolition could limit their political upside. 

As the midterm elections near, Republicans are eager to link Democrats to the DSA as part of a broader messaging strategy. President Donald Trump derided the group as communists — a term many in DSA would reject, but that some happily embrace as a self-descriptor.

So what is the DSA all about, anyway? And what do they really want?

To answer those questions, I spoke to Peter Sterne, an editor at City & State New York who has covered the ins and outs of DSA closely in such articles as “DSA for Dummies,” “Understanding DSA’s structure,” and “Get to know DSA’s internal caucuses.” 

Sterne knows the group’s inner workings well, in part, because he was a dues-paying member himself. He joined DSA in 2017 but quit it in 2023 after taking his current role covering New York politics, viewing his membership as a conflict of interest. But, he told me, he has many sources inside the group that still keep him in the loop.

Our interview, which has been condensed and edited, is below.

Why socialists aren’t just progressive Democrats

What are the core principles of DSA? What really unites the group and its members — and sets them apart from just progressive Democrats?

I would say that everyone who is in DSA identifies as a socialist, and many of them would also identify as Marxist. So they are very critical of capitalism and a society and economy that is built on capital accumulation. 

DSA members go farther than progressives like Senator [Elizabeth] Warren in that they are not just looking to rectify the excesses of capital, or create a nicer capitalism, or a mixed economy where you still have capitalism along with a generous social welfare state.

I think that, within DSA, people are critical of capitalism itself and believe in moving toward a society in which workers have more control over their workplaces and society. In terms of what that actually looks like in the short term, there are lots of different ideas. 

Now, certainly in terms of what democratic socialist candidates are running on, it is very similar to what non-socialist progressives are running on. It is largely an expansion of the social welfare state. 

But I do think there is an important philosophical difference. The Warrenites and progressive capitalists believe in the necessity of a free market economy. Whereas socialists — even if they don’t necessarily want to abolish it overnight — don’t believe that private ownership of corporations, private ownership of utilities is necessary. And that makes them much more willing to push for policies that others would see as being beyond the pale. 

The DSA’s ideological spectrum — from Bernie Sanders fans to full Communists

So then, walk me through some of the main things people within DSA disagree over — whether tactically or philosophically.

DSA identifies as a multi-tendency organization. In other words, it is a big tent of the left. 

So you have some people who are basically where Bernie is, in terms of identifying as democratic socialists — wanting to kind of bring back an FDR-style expansion of the social safety net but not necessarily wanting to go that much further. 

And then, on the other side, you would have people who identify as Communists and as Marxist-Leninists or Maoists who believe that, ultimately, the solution is a kind of Communist revolution — that, eventually, the workers are going to rise up and institute a new form of the state and society. 

They see their role as helping to radicalize the workers and prepare for that revolutionary moment, more so than trying to get elected and pass policies that will eventually move you into more of a social-welfare-type state.

So that’s the central tension. You have, on the one hand, people who would consider themselves socialists and often Marxists but believe in a democratic road to socialism, and those who identify as more revolutionary socialists, following the model of Lenin or Mao, who believe that it is impossible to reform the system.

How does that tension play out in debates inside DSA about electoral strategy?

There’s a lot of debate over red lines for elected officials and whether DSA elected officials should work within the Democratic Party or not. 

DSA generally does not just endorse people who are running for office in the way that a lot of organizations do. They believe in strategically choosing specific races to get involved in — and ideally having their own members, people who have been involved in the organization and are accountable to the organization and loyal to DSA running as candidates. 

DSA’s official strategy is that, for now, they will run candidates on the Democratic Party line. But they want to build up the infrastructure to be their own party in everything but name. So DSA wants to have its own donor networks, its own data on who is voting, its own electoral strategy — as opposed to relying on the Democratic Party for any of that.

Ideally, then, you can imagine DSA breaking from the Democratic Party. That would be the “dirty break” strategy, as opposed to the “clean break” strategy, which is, “we just stop running anyone as a Democrat right now.” The clean break strategy has been largely discredited within DSA, and they’re largely focused on the dirty break.

But as DSA wins more power running as Democrats, it becomes harder for people to imagine them ever breaking with the party. So people say they’re now doing a “dirty stay” strategy, where they’re just going to try and do realignment, which means basically taking over the Democratic Party.

The internal DSA tensions around electoral pragmatism 

There’s been some attention around how the national DSA leadership and the New York City DSA — which is seemingly the most successful of the DSA chapters around the country — have different views on these electoral strategy questions. Can you break that down?

NYC’s DSA’s political leadership is dominated by two caucuses in particular: Socialist Majority Caucus and Groundwork. Both of those are sometimes described as being on the “DSA right” —  although, they do not like that term. 

They would say that they are focused on “mass politics,” on trying to bring in the largest number of people into DSA, on trying to get DSA members elected into positions of power who can then support legislation that will materially improve the lives of the working class, can win people over to socialism and bring in more members, and build a large influential powerful socialist organization. That is essentially the Zohran theory.

Most of the people in DSA who were involved in the Mamdani campaign, and a number of them who are now involved in NYC government — such as the head of the Office of Mass Engagement, or the head of the mayor’s office to protect tenants — those are DSA members, and specifically, they are members of the Socialist Majority Caucus. SMC and Groundwork are very focused on that kind of electoral approach and, generally, are more pragmatic. They are very averse to disciplining electeds or trying to force electeds to publicly defend positions that are politically unpopular — like, say, police abolition.

Their counterparts would be the “DSA left.” Within New York City, the main left caucus is Emerge. You also have Marxist Unity Group, Red Star, and Springs of Revolution, which is primarily an anti-Zionist faction. They have less influence within New York City overall. But they have more influence within DSA nationally. A lot of chapters outside of New York City and California are more ideologically focused — and less focused on just having the most electoral success running as Democrats. 

Recently, there’s been some discussion about the national DSA platform. Francesca Hong, who’s running for governor of Wisconsin and is a democratic socialist, distanced herself from the platform this week. How should we understand the tensions around this question about appealing to voters versus being ideologically pure?

Generally speaking, I’d say most people in DSA agree on the overall ideology. The issue is more: Are you holding candidates to support that platform publicly? Do you allow your electeds to distance themselves from DSA’s positions when that seems to be the politically pragmatic choice to make? Or does that undermine the organization or even mislead the working class?

You see this a lot around anti-Zionism. There is a faction of DSA members who have been very critical of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, because they feel that she has been insufficiently public in terms of criticizing Israel. Initially, she voted “present” on the Iron Dome. She said she was not opposed to defensive military aid to Israel. She infamously said during the DNC in 2024 that she believed that Biden and Harris were tirelessly working for a ceasefire. 

And a lot of people within DSA have been critical of AOC for what they see as compromising with Democratic leadership when it comes to Israel and Palestine and not taking a very strong kind of unconditional stance against Israel. And there have also been a lot of people, particularly within NYC DSA, who have defended AOC. Their argument is that AOC needs to be pragmatic about these things. 

You see it with Zohran in terms of his relationship with the NYPD and with NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch. A lot of people in DSA are very critical of Tisch, who worked for [Eric] Adams. She is a billionaire and a Zionist — definitely not in keeping with DSA’s politics. And she is someone who helped to create the surveillance dragnet under the Adams administration and the De Blasio administration. 

So there have been people in NYC DSA who have called for Zohran to fire Jessica Tisch. And there are other people who say that they do not like Tisch, but they feel Zohran needs to make the pragmatic decision of working with her and not confront entrenched police power.

The DSA’s complicated relationship with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Can you talk to me about the complicated relationship, the ups and downs between DSA and AOC over the years?

That relates to the tension between national and NYC. NYC DSA is really, really pro-AOC. They have a close relationship with her and work closely with her, and she really likes a lot of the leaders in NYC DSA. National DSA is much more skeptical of her, seeing her as willing to compromise and be opportunistic in ways they don’t like. 

AOC was first elected in 2018. In 2024, she was easily reendorsed for election by the NYC DSA, which then applied for the national DSA to endorse her as well. 

The national leadership dragged their feet because they were divided, particularly around her rhetoric around Israel and Palestine. 

Ultimately, they issued a conditional endorsement, saying, “we will endorse AOC if she agrees to support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and oppose all aid — defensive and offensive military aid — to Israel.”

NYC DSA was concerned that AOC would not agree to that and that requiring her to agree to those conditions would alienate her from the organization. So they told national DSA, it’s fine, if you’re only going to offer a conditional endorsement we don’t need it. 

Generally, I think it’s safe to say that NYC DSA believes DSA needs AOC more than AOC needs DSA. So they’re very wary of alienating her; they want to maintain a positive working relationship. 

And all this leads into the question of what will happen in the 2028 presidential race, right? If she runs, it doesn’t seem like there’s another plausible socialist candidate in the mix.

If you talk to people who are skeptical of AOC, they would say that they would love [Rep.] Rashida Tlaib to run, because she is obviously the most committed to Palestinian solidarity. All indications are that she is not interested in running for president, so that’s kind of a dead letter. You’ll also see people say they would like Shawn Fain to run, the head of the United Auto Workers, as a real left-labor candidate harkening back to the days when union leaders were major political figures. Again, he’s very unlikely to run.

And you have some people who say that they would support Ro Khanna, even though Ro Khanna is not a socialist and is probably worse on Palestine than AOC. 

So it really does seem like it’s going to be AOC or no one. And that’s why I think that even the people who are skeptical of AOC have largely resigned themselves to the idea that if she runs, DSA will endorse. 

I think the tension now is around how supportive DSA would be. DSA could spend 2028 being an AOC surrogate, deeply involved in the campaign, making their primary goal getting her elected president in 2028. 

I think there are also people in DSA who believe that, even if AOC is the best candidate and DSA should support her, they don’t want to fully kind of liquidate themselves into the AOC campaign. They want to maintain an independent organization where DSA could set up an independent expenditure and come out with messaging that says: we support AOC but we don’t agree with her on everything. 

L.A. drivers are paying $7 for gas: How to find stations near $5

New batteries to store solar electricity and low demand in May both contributed to high percentage of electricity that came from solar.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee is in trouble.

What’s happening? Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom Trump nominated for the permanent job last month, was set to receive a committee vote on Thursday on his way to being confirmed. Instead, lawmakers are punting on the vote after multiple key Republican senators expressed concerns — and Trump is now threatening to pull Blanche’s nomination until next year.

Why are senators worried about Blanche? Nearly all of Trump’s nominees — even his most controversial picks, like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — have been confirmed by the Senate. 

But Blanche, who is also Trump’s former personal lawyer, has a track record as acting attorney general, where he’s primarily distinguished himself by his unflinching devotion to Trump’s personal priorities: things like indicting former FBI director James Comey, creating a vast $1.8 billion slush fund to reward Trump’s allies, and immunizing the president and his family from scrutiny by the IRS via an unusual settlement deal. 

Not all of those schemes have gone well; the slush fund, for example, went down in flames in June. 

The IRS shield, however, is still kicking, and Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and John Cornyn (R-TX) — both of whom sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee — are pushing Blanche to commit to changes to the settlement before they will support his nomination. So far, that hasn’t happened. 

What happens if Blanche’s nomination fails? It’s a black eye for Trump and a sign that the GOP, facing an increasingly dire midterms outlook, is growing less willing to go along with Trump’s increasingly conspicuous corruption. But a defeated vote or a pulled nomination won’t actually end Blanche’s tenure as acting attorney general — since he was previously confirmed by the Senate for the deputy attorney general job, he can likely stay in the acting role as long as Trump wants to keep him there.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

This story from the Atlantic, about a “tourism fixer” in Rome for whom just about any experience is in reach, was a great read (click here for a gift link). 

As always, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

On June 11, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an El Niño advisory after temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean remained higher than average for several months. Declaring an El Niño isn’t out of the ordinary, as they happen in cycles every two to seven years. But this one could be extraordinary.

Some are calling it a “super” or “Godzilla” El Niño, and the NOAA predicts an 81 percent chance that it could develop to a “very strong” level, rivaling the historic and devastating El Niños of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998. Experts are predicting it will likely reach its peak this winter and into 2027, bringing heat, rainfall, and other potential extreme weather events.

But even with that foresight and climate models that can confidently predict what might be in store, we still face a test of what could potentially be the strongest El Niño ever recorded and the wild weather that comes with it. We spoke with atmospheric scientists and meteorologists to find out how a super El Niño forms, why it changes global climate, and what we should expect in the coming months.

Read more about El Niño:

• The latest from NOAA about this El Niño: https://www.noaa.gov/topic-tags/el-nino-la-nina-enso 
• Vox podcast The Gray Area covers the possibility of a “Godzilla El Niño”: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/495653/el-nino-climate-change-global-warming-david-wallace-wells
• NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/
• World Meteorological Organization’s seasonal outlook for El Niño heat and rainfall: https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/el-nino-forecast-intensify-increasing-likelihood-of-extreme-weather 
• The Guardian’s coverage of California’s shark surge: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/14/california-sharks-el-nino
• New York Times article about powerful El Niños of the past: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/climate/el-nino-history-famine.html

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The American economy lost some steam this spring as the war in Iran pushed up energy prices. But don’t let that slower growth, or the downer vibes, fool you: The economy is actually…doing all right.

The latest report out Thursday from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, which covers the months of April, May, and June, finds that consumers and businesses have been feeling surprisingly spendy, despite the drag of inflation.

Inflation does remain well above the Federal Reserve’s annual target of 2 percent. And a surge in imports — largely semiconductors and other gear related to the AI boom — pulled the economy down on paper. Overall, the US gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 1.5 percent, slower than economists expected. 

But imports and exports can swing dramatically from quarter to quarter, and cleaner measures of underlying demand (like the dreadfully named “real final sales to private domestic purchasers,” which filters out some of the noise of quarter-to-quarter swings) showed stronger growth. “It’s an economy that’s doing okay,” summed one economist to the Washington Post.

The US economy is surviving Trump

This raises an obvious question that President Donald Trump somehow has not posted about yet: If the economy is chugging along, does he deserve the credit?

After all, in addition to these GDP numbers, unemployment is pretty low. And wages rose faster than inflation last year, helping offset higher prices. 

But many economists argue that the economy has held up despite Trump’s policies, not because of them. Without Trump’s meddling, today’s “okay” economy might have been fantastic.

Let’s take a closer look at inflation to see how this shakes out. Trump has famously imposed massive and ever-changing tariffs on virtually all of America’s trading partners — including, most recently, a 50 percent levy on many goods from Canada. If I run a liquor store and want to stock Canada’s iconic Crown Royal, each $25 bottle now costs me $37. I either eat that cost, drop the product…or pass some of the increase on to customers. 

Repeated across the economy, these little pass-throughs add up. The Dallas Federal Reserve calculated that, as of March, America’s core inflation rate would have been just 2.3 percent — instead of 3.2 percent — without Trump’s tariffs. Put another way, Yale’s Budget Lab estimates that tariffs cost the average US household $1,100 a year. 

So maybe the economy is doing okay…but it could also be better. Personally I’d like an extra $1,100. And a Canadian whisky, for that matter. 

One link for later

➨ Don’t rent the new iPhone. Apple rolled out a new “upgrade” program a few days ago, partnering with Klarna to offer customers the ability to rent smartphones for $35 a month. The scheme may make sense for diehards who always want the latest phone and switch devices frequently. But for most other people, it’s not worth it. “How do I know people aren’t getting a good deal here?” one law professor said. “If they were, Apple wouldn’t be offering it.”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that stroke patients can sometimes relearn speech by singing their sentences first? The treatment is called melodic intonation therapy, and it grew out of research into how the brain processes music and language.
• Today’s trivia: What kind of fruit is an ugli? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of Hercules’s stepmother. That would be Hera, who in Greek mythology — and contrary to her Disney movie portrayal — absolutely hated Hercules and repeatedly tried to kill him.

A delayed vote on Trump's pick for attorney general led the president to suggest he might pull Todd Blanche's nomination for now rather than meet Senate demands.

AI is the hottest thing in medical care right now — but many of us feel trepidation about it. Just one illustrative public survey sample: An October 2025 KFF poll found just 8 percent of Americans reported feeling a “great deal” of trust in AI managing their appointments or analyzing their health records, and only 32 percent said they would trust an online health tool that uses AI to access their medical records to provide personalized health information.

But many clinicians and healthcare administrators see AI as a powerful new tool that offers myriad opportunities to streamline and improve treatment. A 2026 survey found that more than 80 percent of US doctors use AI professionally — doubling the share from 2023. Physicians are excited by AI’s potential to keep more accurate notes of interactions with patients, to act as a second pair of eyes for human doctors, and to monitor people at risk of deteriorating and ending up in a dangerous situation.

The disconnect between what people and their providers want from AI could create more distrust, at a time when faith in the healthcare system and the medical profession have slid. Patients today want to feel empowered and in control. How can that be possible when these seemingly godlike machines are becoming more and more entrenched in our hospitals and doctors offices?

The answer comes in four words: “human in the loop.” It’s the principle upon which the ethical integration of AI depends and it could help to bridge the gap between lay people and the professionals on AI in medicine. In surveys, people are much more comfortable with the idea of their doctor using AI as an assistant than with AI acting on its own. And most clinicians want to use AI in that way, as a second opinion or passive monitor, not as a replacement for their judgment. There are real fears among the healthcare workforce about that possibility: A group of NYC nurses who were recently laid off claim it’s because their labor was going to be replaced by AI. “Human in the loop” appears to be a point of agreement between doctors and patients at this pivotal moment.

“Doctors…and nurses and staff always have been interested in primarily making the best decision for the people under their care — and these tools can help with that,” Alison Callahan, a research scientist at Stanford University who works on AI programs used in the university’s health system, told me. “The interest in making sure those tools are accurate is high.”

But what does “human in the loop” really mean in practice? How can you know when and how your doctor is using AI? And what is the best way to talk to your provider about the sudden influx of artificial intelligence in healthcare before a robot starts taking appointment notes or analyzing your MRI? I called some leading experts to find out. 

How AI is currently being used in medicine

Patients and providers alike are incorporating AI into healthcare. Individuals are using commercial AI chatbots to ask about their symptoms or the health metrics tracked by their Apple Watch, while large academic medical centers are developing sophisticated programs and protocols to try to improve medical care at the population level.

It starts with ChatGPT, Claude, etc. — the large language models that are available to the public. People are increasingly turning to them to try to understand what’s going on with their own bodies. Individual physicians are also consulting with large language models to answer questions or get up-to-date on the latest research as they figure out how to best care for their patients. 

Then there are ways in which hospitals and doctors offices are adopting AI at the institutional level. Many facilities are using AI as a way to take, collate, and summarize notes on a patient; in theory, it’s a more organized way to keep track of the informal interactions and observations that doctors have when checking on their own patients. Hospitals are also using AI to handle some administrative tasks, like scheduling follow-up appointments; some health systems have even started to use AI to help patients get ready for appointments — to send reminders about colonoscopy prep, for example.

And finally, you have maybe the most ambitious use of AI by health systems right now: as a diagnostic and risk prediction tool. In these cases, AI might offer a second opinion when, for example, a doctor is triaging a patient in the emergency room. It might help the ER staff figure out how to prioritize patients. Or these programs could monitor people either during a hospital stay or out in the real world (by drawing data from the person’s wearable) and make predictions about who may be at higher risk of complications and require further care. AI could recommend that somebody would benefit from seeing certain specialists or receiving a specific medicine or lab test, and generally offer proactive advice about the patient’s medical care.

But at this point, AI adoption is still “highly localized,” said Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society, a nonprofit that works with healthcare providers, drug makers, and government agencies on how to incorporate new tech (including AI) into clinical care. It depends on the individual doctor or health system. A lot of them are setting up their own programs and their own protocols for how to use these tools.

That is a big reason why it is so important for patients to be proactive about understanding how AI is being used for their health care. You can’t make assumptions; the only way you’re going to know for sure is to ask.

The questions you should ask your doctor about AI

By and large, experts say, patients should feel confident: Doctors and nurses want to keep a human in the loop, even as they integrate AI into their workflows.

“It will be a doctor who is going to be reading that summary or a nurse who is going to be reading that summary and then taking an action to order a lab or put a recommendation in for a follow-up appointment,” Callahan said. “There is high interest in making sure that that is the right decision for that person. That hasn’t changed.” 

Still, many patients say they’d be more comfortable with AI use if their doctor fully explained it in advance. And health systems may have their own priorities that push their facilities toward more rapid AI adoption and delegating more tasks to these AI tools, as seen in the recent NYC nurse layoffs.

So if you want to be informed on exactly where this technology is present and have the ability to consent to its use, you have every right to ask your doctor, experts say. 

“AI is new, but the trust that serves as the foundation of the physician-patient relationship is not,” Timothy Keyes, a machine learning scientist at Stanford Health Care, told me over email. “To that end, I think that conversations about medical AI use should be open, honest, and transparent — just like any other conversations about shared decision-making in the clinical environment should be.”

For some things, your doctor should be asking you proactively if you consent to AI use — note-taking, for example. At my most recent primary care appointment, my doctor asked me if it’d be okay for him to use AI to take and summarize notes from our conversation; Goldstack told me she’d experienced the same at recent physician visits. (This is probably the most common AI use that you will encounter, and Keyes said it’s worth considering giving your consent: “There is growing evidence that they reduce physician burnout and save them at least a bit of time each day writing notes.”)

There are also a number of direct questions that you can ask:

• Will AI be used in my care and how?
• How is my data being protected?
• Can I opt out of any AI services that I do not feel comfortable with? (Keyes noted that patients should be allowed to opt out of any care, AI-related or not; if opting out is not an option, ask how a human provider will be involved.)
• How is the health system or clinic making sure that any AI system they use is working as intended?

And the transparency goes both ways. If you’re asking a question because you consulted ChatGPT before your appointment, tell your doctor. If you’ve talked with a chatbot because of mental health struggles, tell your doctor. And at the same time, feel free to ask your physician how you yourself could actually use AI in a responsible and productive way to improve your health.

“This opens up the opportunity for both the physician and the patient to be humans-in-the-loop,” Keyes said, “in different parts of the loop, with different perspectives, using an AI system to better understand the bigger picture.”

In a way, the novelty of AI and its rapid adoption is an opportunity for all of us to be nosier and more inquisitive patients. What all of these questions really come down to, Callahan said, is how your doctor is making decisions about your health care. That is relevant to all of us, no matter how AI is involved or even if there is no AI being used at all. 

Callahan said she always has a list of questions for her doctor when they recommend a course of treatment: “What are the factors in my health that are informing this recommendation that you have? Would you be making this recommendation for other patients who are similar to me? What can you tell me about the outcomes that I might expect to experience if I say yes to this?”

“I actually think if they can point to the part of your health that is connected to the decision, whether or not an AI tool helped to make that connection is secondary to their ability to communicate effectively to me about it, and help me to feel engaged in making a decision about my own care,” she said.

AI is changing medicine quickly, for both patients and their doctors. The best way to stay ahead is to talk about it.

The economic pain many Americans feel after years of stagnant wages and steep inflation is unlikely to lift before the November elections, and could be a major liability for Republicans, according to experts.

In January, Riot Games revamped its morale-hurting return-to-office rules to allow more flexibility. The result? Attendance and productivity have risen.