AI models have a voracious appetite for data. Keeping up to date with information to present to users is a challenge. And so companies at the vanguard of AI appear to have hit on an answer: crawling the webconstantly.
But website owners increasingly dont want to give AI firms free rein. So theyre regaining control by cracking down on crawlers.
To do this, theyre using robots.txt, a file held on many websites that acts as a guide to how web crawlers are allowedor notto scrape their content. Originally designed as a signal to search engines as to whether a website wanted its pages to be indexed or not, it has gained increased importance in the AI era as some companies allegedly flout instructions.In a new study, Nicolas Steinacker-Olsztyn, a researcher at Saarland University and his colleagues analyzed how different websites treated robots.txtand whether there was a difference between sites measured as reputable versus not reputable, specifically in terms of whether or not they allowed crawling. For many AI companies, “It’s kind of a do now and ask for forgiveness later thing, Steinacker-Olsztyn says.In the study, more than 4,000 sites were checked for their responses to 63 different AI-related user agents, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, and Google-Extendedall of which are used by AI companies in their effort to soak up information.
The websites were then divided between reputable news outlets or misinformation sites, using ratings devised by Media Bias/Fact Check, an organization that categorizes news sources depending on their credibility and the factuality of their reporting.
Across all 4,000 sites assessed, around 60% of those deemed to be reputable news websites blocked at least one AI crawler from accessing their information; among misinformation sites, only 9.1% did so.
The average reputable site blocks more than 15 different AI agents through its robots.txt file. Misinformation sites, by contrast, tend not to shut out the crawlers at all.
The biggest takeaway is that the reputable news websites keep well up-to-date with the evolving ecosystem as it pertains to these major AI developers and their practices, Steinacker-Olsztyn says.
Over time, the gap between those who are willing to let bots crawl their sites and those that arent is widening. From September 2023 to May 2025, the proportion of platforms locking out crawlers increased from 23% to 60%, while the share of sites peddling misinformation stayed flat, the study found.
The result, Steinacker-Olsztyn says, is that less reputable content is being hoovered up by and then spat out of AI models used routinely by hundreds of millions of people. Increasingly these models are also being used simply for information retrieval, replacing traditionally used options such as search engines or Google, Steinacker-Olsztyn adds.
The conundrum over legitimate data
For AI models to stay up-to-date on current events, they are trained on reputable sites, which is exactly what these sites dont want.
The war over copyright and access to training data between AI companies and news sites is increasingly spilling into courtsThe New York Timess lawsuit against OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, for example, carried on into last week.
Those lawsuits are prompted by allegations that AI companies are illegally scraping data on news websites to act as regularly updated, ground-truth-based training data for the models powering their AI chatbots. In addition to litigating their disputes, reputable news websites are blocking AI crawlers.
Thats good for their businesses and rights. But Steinacker-Olsztyn is concerned about the broader impact. If reputable news is increasingly making this information unavailable, then this gives reason to believe this can affect the reliability of these models, he explains. Going forward, this is changing the percentage of legitimate data that they have access to.
In essence: It doesnt matter to an AI crawler whether its viewing The New York Times or a disinformation website run out of Hoboken. Theyre both training data, and if one is easier to access than the other, thats all that matters.
Not everyone is quite so certain about the negative impact of blocking crawlers. Felix Simon, a research fellow in AI and digital news at the University of Oxford-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, says he wasnt surprised to learn that sites trafficking in misinformation would want to be crawled, whereas traditional publishers have an incentive at this point to prevent such scraping. Some of these traditional publishers, he adds, still allow some scraping for a plethora of reasons.
Simon also cautions that just because misinformation sites are more likely to open their doors to AI crawlers, it doesnt necessarily mean that theyre polluting the information space as much as we may fear.
AI developers filter and weigh data at various points of the system training process and at inference time, he says. One would hope that by the same means by which the authors have been able to identify untrustworthy websites, AI developers would be able to filter out such data.
When the new year rolls around, many people will resolve to get in better shape. Last year, Americans poured $44.8 billion into the fitness industry, flocking to gyms and buying at-home fitness equipment. But it usually takes just two weeks for people to abandon their goals. Gym memberships go unused. Peloton bikes collect dust.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found that amidst all the fitness options on the market, personal training tends to lead to better results for several reasons: It involves a personalized program, fits into the participant’s schedule, and requires being accountable to the trainer. But personal training is expensive, priced anywhere from $50 to $150 (or more) per hour for one-on-one sessions.
Ray, a new AI-powered fitness app, wants to offer all the benefits of a personal trainer for a fraction of the price. (In fact, the service is free for early users, but will eventually start charging a monthly fee.) When you open the app, an AI trainer that looks and sounds like a real person will guide you through a workout. The program will be customized to your goals, your bodily limitations, the equipment you have handy, and the amount of time you have.
And like a human trainer, Ray will observe your movements to help you improve your form and offer more challenging workouts as you improve. Ray will also follow up with you by text, like a real trainer, to see how the session went and to help schedule the next one.
Importantly, the technology is going to keep improving as more people use Ray and as AI evolves. “The conversation’s going to get more fluid; the vision is going to get better,” says Colin Raney, Ray’s cofounder. “We’re currently working on grunt recognition, to see if we can identify how the user is doing based on the sounds they’re making.”
[Photo: Ray]
Why Personal Training Works
Ray is the brainchild of Rich Miner, cofounder of Android, and Raney, an Ideo veteran and former CMO of PillPack. Over the years, both have relied on personal trainers and found them transformative. For Raney, it was clear that there were many aspects of working with a human being that could cultivate real behavior change. “I needed the accountability of not wanting to let my trainer down by not showing up,” he says. “Or tuning the workout to me if I had a bad day, or my back wasn’t feeling right, or if it looked like I was ready to push myself that day.”
Raney has thought about improving people’s health by changing their behavior. He helped build PillPack, which was designed to help people actually take their medicine by delivering it monthly in packets sorted by date and time. He believed it would be possible to get people to workout more frequently if they had access to the qualities of a personal trainer.
[Photo: Ray]
“Our thesis was that if you build the right behavioral loop, people will workout more regularly,” he says. This aligns with research that finds that people who relied on a personal trainer lost fat and built muscle, with a lower rate of injury, compared to people who worked out alone or in groups.
As Raney spoke with Miner about building a fitness tool, it became clear that AI technology was evolving to the point that it could mimic a personal trainer. Miner has been working on AI for decades, and has the patent to one of the first “wake words” for a voice-based personal assistant 35 years ago. “If you’re not a movie star or someone with a lot of money, you can’t afford to get that kind of personalized training,” he says. “But I realized that with agentic AI, you could actually start building virtual people who could watch you and talk to you naturally.”
[Photo: Ray]
Building an AI Native Tool
The fitness industry is working hard to incorporate technology into existing tools. Over the last decade, there’s been an explosion of tech-enabled machines, from Peloton and NordicTrack machines with screens that provide feedback about the workout, to weight-lifting machines like Mirror, Tempo, and Tonal that can help count your reps. Now, these companies are figuring out ways to incorporate AI into their systems, to better tailor workouts to the user.
Minor and Raney began building Ray two and a half years ago. What sets it apart from many other tools on the market is that it is built on AI, rather than simply retrofitting existing technology with AI. Ray is designed to approximate a real person that can interact with the user in a natural way.
“It adapts to you,” Minor says. “You don’t have to change a bunch of settings to make sure the workout is tailored to you. You can just say, “Ray, my shoulder’s hurting today.”
The technology is equipped with several cutting-edge AI technologies. It has natural language processing, to create real conversations with the user. It is able to observe the user across 35 different points, and has a machine learning algorithm that identifies your body movements. It is also equipped with an AI planner that helps you dynamically plan workouts based on the user and their workout history.
Ray has also incorporated a lot of highly specific data about personal training. The data is trained on the textbooks and manuals that personal trainers use to get qualified. Raney also became certified as a personal trainer to ensure the Ray experience is as realistic as possible. “Ray’s team has a huge amount of domain expertise,” he says. “We have a lot of knowledge about things like what constitutes a good workout and how to create a complete workout in a given amount of time.”
Raney believes that the seamlessness of the interaction is important because one big obstacle to behavioral change is decision fatigue. “Part of what holds people back is the mental load,” he says. “You have to decide when you will do the workout, and then make a lot of decisions about what exactly you’ll do and for how long. With a personal trainer, all you need to do is to show up at the agreed upon time and do the program.”
Minor believes that consumers will immediately see the difference between an AI-native fitness app, versus one that is back-solving into an existing system. He compares it to how companies started making mobile-first apps instead of just adapting their websites to mobile apps. “That’s when you got Instagram and Uber,” he says. “People rethought what an app could be if you didn’t have to rely on a legacy application. That’s what we’re trying to do with Ray.”
How An AI Personal Trainer is Different
Six months ago, Ray quietly launched on the app store, without any marketing. Thousands of users have already started using it. The founders say they wanted to see how users interacted with it and use this data to further train the AI.
When I tried it, I was impressed by how well the program adapted to my needs. In 20 minutes, I was able to do a range of exercises in my office without any equipment. As I did push-ups and jumping jacks, my Ray trainer was encouraging, telling me that I was on the right track. It also respected the fact that I hate burpees. (You can pick whether the trainer is supportive or a little more assertive, since different users respond to different approaches.)
[Photo: Ray]
But as with other agentic AI platforms I’ve used, I found that the interaction wasn’t perfectly seamless. I didn’t exactly feel like I was interacting with a human trainer; the AI trainer’s eyes seemed blank and unfocused. When I spoke, Ray would pause before responding to me in a way that made the conversation a little stilted.
Ray’s founders say that these aspects of the interactions will only get better as the more people use the platform and the AI itself improves. But for now, Ray didn’t feel human enough that I felt bad about letting it down if I didn’t show up for a workoutthe way I wold if I were working with a real person.
[Photo: Ray]
Miner acknowledges that an AI agent won’t provoke the same level of accountability that a human would, but he says that there are still benefits to creating an anthropomorphic app. “It’s more than about creating a sense of guilt about letting a person down,” he says. “A trainer guides you through what to do and they’re watching you as you workout, counting your reps and motivating you. Ray gives you all of that.”
And there are some ways that a virtual personal trainer is more convenient than a human one. You can do workouts at odd hours that a human may find objectionable. You don’t have to compete with the trainer’s other clients and you can cancel at the last minute. And then there’s the price.
Right now, Ray is free. But in the coming months, the founders will develop a pricing structure that is designed to be significantly less than the price of hiring a human personal trainer. Over time, the founders believe that Ray will begin to feel even more like the real thing.
“Ray has improved so much over the past six months since it’s launched,” says Raney. “It’s going to feel more and more real as time goes on.”
A 220-pound, fully functional, solid-gold toiletonce offered to President Donald Trump as a satirical giftjust sold at a Sothebys auction for $12.1 million.
The commode is a work of art called America created by Maurizio Cattelan in 2016. Cattelan is most well-known for his surreal, conversation-starting, and often controversial art concepts, like the 1999 piece La Nona Ora, which depicts a life-size Pope John Paul II getting struck by a meteorite, or the infamous 2019 piece Comedian, which is, put simply, a banana taped to a wall (which sold at auction for $6.2 million).
After America debuted at the Guggenheim Museum in September 2016, it became an instant subject of public fascination, inspiring dozens of think pieces and even a front cover of the New York Post. In the nine years since, the intrigue surrounding the work has only grown after it was the target of a high-profile heist.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of America, though, will be its emergence as a striking symbol for Trumps first terma connection made even more poignant by the timing of its sale during Trumps second term, itself most visually recognizable by its glut of gilded motifs.
The original America, on display at the Guggenheim Museum in 2016 [Photo: William Edwards/AFP/Getty Images]
The storied, sometimes unbelievable history of America
When it debuted to the public, America was not sequestered on a pedestal or inside a gallery space. Instead, it was located in the Guggenheims bathroom, where visitors were allowed five minutes each to, as one New York Post article put it at the time, crap all over America. In all, more than 100,000 guests lined up to do just that.
At the time, the Guggenheim said that the artwork represented the American dream, with its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity. Cattelan put it more bluntly to The New Yorker: Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise, he said.
In 2019, the loo was sent to Englands Blenheim Palace, where it was to be put on view to the public for a second time. Just as the exhibition was set to open, a group of thieves broke into the palace, used sledgehammers and crowbars to pry the toilet out of the floor, and escaped in under five minutes.
Two of the people involved in the theft were sentenced to prison in June of this year, but the original America has never been recovered. The America that just sold at Sothebys is actually a second version of the work, which Cattelan had previously alluded to but did not reveal in public until the sale. According to Sothebys, its the only other version of America in existence.
People wait in line to use the fully functional installation of America at the Guggenheim Museum, 2016. [Photo: Christina Horsten/Picture Alliance/Getty Images]
An 18-karat-gold throne
In a new YouTube video about the whirlwind history of America, several Sothebys experts note that Cattelans reticence to provide much context about America is one of the reasons it became iconic. But the toilets connections to Trump were never exactly subtle.
When America arrived at the Guggenheim just two months before Trump was elected in 2016, the museums then-blogger, Caitlin Dover, wrote in a post, The aesthetics of this throne recall nothing so much as the gilded excess of Trumps real-estate ventures and private residences. When Dover asked Cattelan about the connection, he said that while Trump wasnt top of mind when he conceived the piece, it was probably in the air.
The allusion got a lot more explicit in 2018. That year, the Trump administration contacted the Guggenheim to request that the Vincent van Gogh painting Landscape With Snow be borrowed for Trumps private living quarters. According to The Washington Post, then-curator Nancy Spector, who wrote a book about Cattelans work in 1999, declined to lend the painting, suggesting America instead. The White House, it seems, did not respond to the subtle act of protest.
A gilded symbol
Trumps penchant for gold decor dates back decades. In 2004, he told reporters that the reign of Louis XIV represented his favorite styleand the gilded, rococo-esque aesthetic has become a visual hallmark of both his presidencies. This year alone, Trump has decked out the Oval Office in golden objects, accepted a luxury jet from Qatar filled with gold furniture, and begun construction on a new White House ballroom that will be, predictably, very gold.
In some ways, a golden toilet feels like the ultimate symbol of a second term in which Trump has repeatedly strengthened his ties with billionaire investors while the average American is in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. But when asked about the goal behind agreeing to offer America to the Trump family in 2018, Cattelan told The Post that his reasoning was a bit more lighthearted.
“What’s the point of our life? he said at the time. Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.”
The original America at Blenheim Palace, 2019 [Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images]
It looks like nothing more than a bedside fan. To program it, you hit the on button once.
But what happens next could improve your memory by 226%.
This is Memory Air, a new product born from decades of science charting the relationship between our nose and our brain. Each night, Memory Air cycles through 40 different, undisclosed scents, twice. As you sleepeven though you dont consciously smell these scentsresearch suggests that it can measurably improve your memory within weeks.
[Photo: Memory Air]
How is that possible?
As the companys founderUC Davis professor emeritus Michael Leonexplains, We are functionally odor deprived. Whereas humans evolved in a scent-filled world, where we didnt even shower, he suggests that whatever room youre residing in now probably smells like nothing by design.
Thats difficult, as our cognition and ability to smell are closely linked. “All memory loss precedes or is accompanied closely by olfactory loss,” notes Leon, who points out many of us experienced brain fog and loss of scent during COVID-19. “In most neurological diseases its the first symptom.”
We don’t need to completely untangle the relationship between smell and memory to understand that they affect one another. Smell is a learnable behaviorand often a re-learnable behavior. And relearning that behavior can actually improve our memory.
[Photo: Memory Air]
Leon believes that smell has such a powerful effect on memory because the olfactory system has an anatomical advantage. It is the only sense that has a straight pathway to your hippocampal cluster, which manages memory and emotion. (Meanwhile, all other senses take a detour through your thalamus first.)
By feeding this region of your brain new odors, research has found you can actually increase gray matter and neuroplasticitygenerating new connections in your brain. Smells appear to be a way to exercise and strengthen the very area of your brain that handles memory.
In 2023, Leon published a study demonstrating that by routinely exposing people to smells, you could improve some of their mental faculties. A randomly assorted collection of people ages 60 to 85 were exposed to one of seven smells each night for two hours over six months. After that time, his team observed that the smelling group tested with a 226% improvement in memory over a control groupand fMRI scans exhibited positive shifts in brain structures supporting memory.
But Leon is quick to point out that his findings are not special; rather, they are increasingly the norm. There are now about 20 studies that have used olfactory enrichment to improve memory, he says, noting that the methodologies vary wildly. I think the strength of literature as a whole is what we should look at. This is such a strong phenomenon. Who does it, and how they do it, is not as important as getting more odor to the brain.
[Photo: Memory Air]
Turning research into product
To develop this science into a functional product, Leons team raised an undisclosed sum from a group of wealthy investors. They also tapped Christian Garnett, from Garnett Design Group, to spend three years transforming theory into intervention.
For the final product, Leon wanted to mirror similar research out of South Korea, which subjected participants to a full 40 smells twice a day (and found similar gains around memory, while noting that it reduced depression and increased facilities with attention and language, too).
But how do you fit 40 smells in a box?
It was probably the biggest challenge, to figure out how to turn on and off scents at will, Garnett says.
Memory Air needed to run through dozens of scents, twice, making each distinctive with no lingering odor that would blend them from one to another. That meant each had four minutes to appear and dissipate.
Most of the scent industry is optimized to do the opposite: get the most scent out and have it last as long as possible, Garnett says with a laugh.
Garnetts team tested all sorts of ideas. It tried developing a white odor technologythink white noise but for smellswith so many frequencies that everything cancels out into nothing, blinding your nose. It tested enzymes, as used by Febreze, to break scents down to clear them out of the room.
But ultimately, it landed on an idea thats part Glade PlugIn, part machine gun.
When setting up the device, you load it with a belt that looks like a bandolier. Instead of bullets, its filled with 40 individual essential oilsscents the team refuses to detail but insists are nothing unusual. (The order appears irrelevant, but the sheer number helps reduce habituation.) As the bandolier rotates through the night, it uses a bit of heat on the active oil pouch. With a phase-changing material, scent diffuses out when warmed while a large, low-speed fan quietly wafts the scent toward the sleeping person.
The same moment you feel air from the fan hit you, you get the scent. The moment the fan cuts off, you don’t smell anything, Garnett says. This way you get 20 to 30 seconds of scent exposure before the fan tuns off, cools, and clears te room.
This whole experience is designed to be automatic. Garnett pared back the product, removing lights and test modes to ensure anyone could use it perfectly. When you set up the Memory Air, all you do is slip in the scent belt and hit the on button right before bed. From there, it will know when to kick on. And while the scent belt will run out after a month, a subscription ships replacements to customers on a schedule.
[Photo: Memory Air]
A UX you dont experience
The oddest part of Memory Air is that if it works as advertised, you wont actually even know its working. It runs in your sleep, leaving no olfactory footprint by design. And Leon notes that smells dont wake people up (smelling salts, incidentally, rouse people through irritation, not scent). In a way, its the opposite of sleep tracking. Memory Air isnt actively measuring anything. Its UX is largely imperceptible. But its value, if it works as research suggests, is that it could vastly impact someones mental capacity.
Leon believes users could discover other effects too: In his 2023 study, he discovered people whod done the olfactory battery got 22 minutes more sleep per nightbut hes validating the idea before making any bold claims around Memory Air as a sleep aid.
We think there are a number of other medical conditions that may be treatable with this same approach; weve identified 139 different medical conditions, all accompanied by olfactory loss, he says.
Benefits of Memory Air could be significant, while the only real cost is the price itself. Memory Air is available now for $799, including the first months scent belt. Replacement belts cost $39 with a monthly subscription.
For those of us who earn a living publishing content on the open internet, Amazon’s lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity can seem darkly amusing.
Perplexity is among the many AI companies that has spent years extracting value from the internet in exchange for little. Its crawlers have synthesized endless amounts of content from publishers, even working around publishers’ attempts to block this behavior, all so Perplexity can summarize content without having to send traffic to the websites themselves.
Now Perplexity and its rivals are going a step further, with a new wave of AI browsers that can navigate pages automatically. Perplexity has Comet, OpenAI has ChatGPT Atlas, Opera has Neon, and others are on the way. The pitch is that AI “agents” will soon be able to trudge through the web on your behalf, booking your flights, buying your groceries, and shopping on sites like Amazon. Both Perplexity and OpenAI view these browsers as imperative in their goals to build AI “operating systems” that can manage your life.
Amazon, which has a lot to lose if people stop accessing its website directly, is suing to stop that from happening. It’s been trying to block Perplexity, but so far to no avail.
Therein lies the irony: These AI browsers promise a future where you’ll never have to visit a website again, yet that promise depends on having viable websites to crawl through in the first place. Amazon’s lawsuit is a sign that these two goals may be incompatible.
Feeding the beast
For companies like Perplexity and OpenAI, web browsers are suddenly important because they open the door to content and data that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Consider Amazon. If you’re just using ChatGPT’s website, you might ask it to recommend a few Amazon items or summarize a product’s user reviews, but its answers wouldn’t include any personal data from Amazon’s site. By contrast, ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet can access Amazon exactly as it appears in your own browser window. That means they can crawl through your order history or weigh in on Amazon’s personalized product recommendations.
Perplexity says these “agentic” browsers make for a better shopping experience, which is why Amazon should embrace thembut Perplexity also stands to benefit in other ways. By understanding things like your order history, personalized recommendations, and all the questions you asked Perplexity’s AI to arrive at a particular product, the company can build a much richer user profile for things like targeted advertising.
“You’ve gone from behavior tracking to psychological modeling,” says Eamonn Maguire, who leads the machine learning team at Proton. “Where you have traditional browsers tracking what you do, AI browsers infer why you do it.”
This isn’t speculation. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on the TBPN podcast earlier this year that its browser will enable “hyper-personalized” ads by understanding more about users’ personal lives.
“What are the things youre buying, which hotels are you going to, which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” Srinivas said.
Amazon, meanwhile, has much to lose from AI shopping agents, even if they ultimately help make a purchase. The company has its own $56 billion advertising business, fueled in part by the ads it stuffs into its shopping pages. CEO Andy Jassy has acknowledged that AI agents could disrupt that business.
You may have little sympathy for Amazon in that scenario, but consider also the many smaller entities that stand to lose from an agentic web. Your favorite newsletter, for instanceone that paywalls content for its most loyal readersmay now have that content exposed within the tabs of an AI browser.
Eamonn also gives the example of research papers that sit behind paywalls, or personal documents that wouldn’t exist on the web at all. The contents of emails, shopping lists, and productivity apps could all become fodder for AI to learn more about you. And while Perplexity and OpenAI have said they won’t train AI models on what people view in their web browsers, Eamonn says they could easily change that policy in the future.
“Cynically speaking, it’s a smart way not only of building particularly good profiles of users but also getting more data,” Eamonn says.
Why the web?
Srinivas has acknowledged that AI companies need the openness of the web to provide them with all this context, because other platforms are too locked down.
“The only reason we’re doing a browser is there’s no other way to build an agent with enough control over many applications simultaneously,” Srinivas said at the Upfront Summit in February. “Especially on iOS, you cannot even access another app. You don’t want to be bottlenecked by how Apple is building its ecosystem. You want to work around it, and the browser is a very good work-around in the short term for us.”
OpenAI has similarly described the web browser as key to its broader ambitions.
“Now that we have feedback and signals from hundreds of millions of people around the world, its clear ChatGPT needs to become so much more than the simple chatbot it started as,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, wrote in a blog post announcing the Atlas browser. “Over time, we see ChatGPT evolving to become the operating system for your life: a fully connected hub that helps you manage your day and achieve your long-term goals.”
While AI companies have clear ideas of what they can do on te open web, it’s less certain whether the open web will cooperate. Lots of websites already attempt to block AI crawlersReddit has even cut off search engines that don’t provide compensationbut AI browsers represent yet another way around those restrictions. Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity could be a sign of further fights to come when attempts to block AI fail.
AI companies would have you believe that these efforts are just delaying the inevitable. But that raises a bigger question of what the open web even looks like if it becomes entirely intermediated by AI. A common complaint against AI tools like ChatGPT is that they’ll erode the incentives to create new content, and that AI itself will ultimately suffer from having nothing new to train on.
“Nothing really gets better unless you have content, but the content is getting worse because people are just using AI to generate this content, and then these models are getting worse because the content is getting worse,” Proton’s Maguire says.
With the rise of agentic AI browsers, a similar argument could be applied to the web as a whole: What motivation will exist to design beautiful, unique websites for humans when there’s no one left to browse them?
Tis the season for givingand that means tis the season for shopping. Maybe youll splurge on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, thinking, Ill just return it if they dont like it. But before you click purchase, its worth knowing that many retailers have quietly tightened their return policies in recent years.
As a marketing professor, I study how retailers manage the flood of returns that follow big shopping events like these, and what it reveals about the hidden costs of convenience. Returns might seem like a routine part of doing business, but theyre anything but trivial. According to the National Retail Federation, returns cost U.S. retailers almost $890 billion each year.
Part of that staggering figure comes from returns fraud, which includes everything from consumers buying and wearing items once before returning thema practice known as wardrobingto more deceptive acts such as falsely claiming an item never arrived.
Returns also drain resources because they require reverse logistics: shipping, inspecting, restocking, and often repackaging items. Many returned products cant be resold at full price or must be liquidated, leading to lost revenue. Processing returns also adds labor and operational expenses that erode profit margins.
How e-commerce transformed returns
While retailers have offered return options for decades, their use has expanded dramatically in recent years, reflecting how much shopping habits have changed. Before the rise of e-commerce, shopping was a sensory experience: Consumers would touch fabrics, try on clothing, and see colors in natural light before buying. If something didnt work out, customers brought it back to the store, where an associate could quickly inspect and restock it.
Online shopping changed all that. While e-commerce offers convenience and variety, it removes key sensory cues. You cant feel the material, test the fit, or see the true color. The result is uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes higher rates of returns. One analysis by Capital One suggests that the rate for returns is almost three times higher for online purchases than for in-store purchases.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the move toward online shopping went into overdrive. Even hesitant online shoppers had to adapt. To encourage purchases, many retailers introduced or expanded generous return policies. The strategy worked to boost sales, but it also created a culture of returning.
In 2020, returns accounted for 10.6% of total U.S. retail sales, nearly double the prior year, according to the National Retail Federation data. By 2021, that had climbed to 16.6%. Unable to try things on in stores, consumers began ordering multiple sizes or styles, keeping one and sending the rest back. The behavior was rational from a shoppers perspective but devastatingly expensive for retailers.
The high cost of convenience
Most supply chains are designed to move in one direction: from production to consumption. Returns reverse that flow. When merchandise moves backward, it adds layers of cost and complexity.
In-store returns used to be simple: A customer would take an item back to the store, the retailer would inspect the product, and, if it was in good condition, it would go right back on the shelf. Online returns, however, are far more cumbersome. Products can spend weeks in transit and often cant be resoldby the time they arrive, they may be out of season, obsolete, or no longer in their original packaging.
Logistics costs compound the problem. During the pandemic, consumers grew accustomed to free shipping. That means retailers now often pay twice: once to deliver the item and again to retrieve it.
Now, in a post-pandemic world, retailers are trying to strike a balancemaintaining customer goodwill without sacrificing profitability. One solution is to raise prices, but especially today, with inflation in the headlines, shoppers are sensitive to price hikes. The other, more common approach is to tighten return policies.
In practice, thats taken several forms. Some retailers have begun charging small flat fees for returns, even when a customer mails an item back at their own expense. For example, the direct-to-consumer retailer Curvy Sense offers customers unlimited returns and exchanges of an item for an initial $2.98 fee. Others have shortened their return windows. Over the summer, for example, beauty retailers Sephora and Ulta reduced their return window from 60 days to 30.
Many brands now attach large, conspicuous do not remove tags to prevent consumers from wearing items and then sending them back. And increasingly, retailers are offering store credit rather than cash or credit card refunds, ensuring that returned sales at least stay within their company.
Few retailers advertise these changes prominently. Instead, they appear quietly in the fine print of return policiespolicies that are now longer, more specific, and far less forgiving than they once were.
As we head into the busiest shopping season of the year, its worth pausing before you click purchase. Ask yourself: Is this something I truly wantor am I planning to return it later?
Whenever possible, shop in person and return in person. And if youre buying online, make sure you familiarize yourself with the return policy.
Lauren Beitelspacher is a professor of marketing at Babson College.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Heres a common pattern in my house. See if it seems familiar to you. After my husband showers, he often forgets to put his dirty clothes in the hamper. This drives me batty, so I remind him to please pick them up. Again and again and again.
Weve been married for 15 years now and the result of all my nagging appears to be exactly zilch. Half the time I go in the bathroom there is a ball of socks and underwear on the floor.
My husband is an otherwise thoughtful and considerate guy. So whats going on? According to psychology research, the problem likely isnt him. Its my belief that nagging is an effective strategy to get another person to change their behavior.
The psychology of why nagging doesnt work
We have a perception that we wont get what we want from the other person, so we feel we need to keep asking in order to get it, psychologist Scott Wetzler explained to The Wall Street Journal. But rather than prompting change, nagging causes people to feel demeaned and withhold the desired behavior. The nagger then nags more and resentment builds.
This dynamic can kill a romantic relationshipstudies find that, unsurprisingly, a lot of nagging is associated with low relationship satisfactionbut its equally useless between parents and kids, cofounders, or bosses and employees.
So what works better to get someone to actually change their behavior? A new study has a suggestion. But, be warned, if youre stuck in a pattern of habitual nagging, it will probably feel counterintuitive.
The jujitsu mind trick that actually changes behavior
After years of low-level laundry conflict, I admit the last thing I feel inclined to do is thank my husband the one time in a dozen that his clothes end up in the hamper. But according to a new study out of the University of Toronto recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, when it comes to changing his behavior, gratitude would beat nagging.
The research was conducted by psychologist Natalie Sisson and colleagues and consisted of three separate studies looking at the connection between expressions of gratitude and behavior change in couples.
One study asked 151 couples to keep a daily diary of their interactions around some change sought by one member of the pair. These diaries showed that the more a member of the couple felt their partner was grateful for their efforts to change, the more likely they were to make further adjustments. After nine months, partners who felt their better halves were most grateful had made the biggest changes.
Taken together, all the findings suggest that, if you ask your partner to change something about themselves or their behavior, and they say they are willing to try, being grateful will help them to develop their own motivation to make that change, making it more likely to happen, writes the British Psychological Societys Research Digest, summing up the results.
Easy to explain, harder to implement
In some sense, thats intuitive. When you praise someone for their efforts, even if theyre minimal, they feel positive about you and themselves. When you nag them, the opposite happens. Which scenario do you think is more likely to result in someone putting in more effort?
But my personal experience at least suggests that, in the heat of the moment, this jujitsu mind trickpraising faint signs of improvement even when you feel like complainingcan be hard to muster. The last thing I want to do when I finally spot one of my husbands socks in the hamper is to offer him kudos. Its hard not to think about the hundreds Ive had to deposit there before.
If you care about effectiveness more than venting, though, psychology suggests this is the way to go. Positive reinforcement works best to train a puppy. It also apparently works best to train people. Bigging others up with gratitude is more likely to motivate them to change their behavior than tearing them down with nagging.
Other tricks to help someone change their behavior
What else can you do to help other people change their behavior? This isnt the first study to dig into ths question. Experts have other ideas that may complement a liberal application of gratitude.
BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, has suggested catching a ride on the other persons motivational wave. When you notice the other party seems keen to make the desired change, step up and offer them concrete support.
If you want someone in your life to exercise more, that could mean going to tour gyms with them when they express an interest. Or it could mean sitting down with your perpetually disorganized employee and walking them through a new calendar system when they come to you for help.
Another idea, suggested by psychologist Devon Price, is digging into what barriers or obstacles might be preventing a person from changing. If my husbands laundry delinquency is a result of being rushed in the morning, maybe we could switch around some chores to ease his time crunch. If your colleague is putting off a task because of fear of failure, additional training or support will probably work better than scolding.
Finally, time-use expert and author Laura Vanderkam says that, if you want others to change, you should first talk about your own self-improvement projects. If a direct report is struggling with time management, for instance, she advises walking them through your own diary as a way to get a conversation about tradeoffs and challenges started.
Step one: Give up the nagging
What all of these experts agree on is that if you really want someone to change their behavior, nagging might relieve some of your frustration. But its not going to actually work. Try gratitude, support, and open dialogue instead.
By Jessica Stillman
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
This article originally appeared in Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Caralynn Nowinski Collens, Ramille Shah, and Adam Jakus spent years developing an innovative technology to regenerate injured bone. The results, they thought, were . . . okay. The company they founded, Dimension Bio, received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for its approach: providing a 3D-printed lattice or “scaffold” for new bone to grow in. However, it didn’t form new bone fast enough to compete with established treatment methods, such as transplanting a patients own bone tissue.
But Collens, Dimension’s CEO, sees the experience as a net positive, validating the companys technology and processes with the FDA. That could help the Chicago-based startup work toward a more-ambitious goal in about three years: building a human liver using its scaffold and donated cells. It would actually be a miniature, simplified version of the organ, meant to function well enough to keep someone alive. That could provide breathing room for an injured or diseased liver to heal, or buy time for the patient to receive a transplant.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 52,222 people died of liver disease and cirrhosis in 2023. The death rate from cirrhosis increased 26.4% from 2000 to 2019, per the National Institutes of Health. (Cirrhosis is most often the result result of fat buildup, viral hepatitis B and C, or long-term alcohol abuse, though there are other causes.)
“The mortality rates are very high when a patient can’t get a transplant. And so that’s where we’re looking to be able to provide [help],” Collens says.
[Photo: Dimension Bio]
Reprinting Older Science
Building a scaffold for cells to grow in is not novel, Collens concedes, nor is the material the company uses: poly lactic-co-glycolic acid. PLGA is found throughout everyday medicine, including in dissolving sutures, dermal fillers, and tiny capsules to deliver drugs to the body.
Dimension Bios innovation is in how it utilizes 3D printing to build the PLGA scaffold, part of an overall system its dubbed BioNidum. [When] we put that in the body, what happens is it gets new blood vessels very quickly, and that’s unusual,” says Collens, noting that typically the immune system walls off the foreign body and prevents blood vessels from growing easily.
Collens attributes the success to a scaffold structure that provides pores of different sizes, designed to help cells move into the scaffold easily and not provoke a strong immune response. The larger pores allow the blood vessels to grow into the new tissue.
The company was originally called Dimension Inx, a bit of wordplay. “We make biomaterial inks,” Collens says.
The technology grew out of Northwestern Universitys TEAM lab, short for tissue engineering and additive manufacturing (a fancy name for 3D printing), founded by Shah in 2010. At the time, Collens was running an advanced manufacturing innovation center in Chicago, part of a national network of institutes funded by the federal government and companies including Microsoft and Lockheed Martin. In 2015, one of the board members sent Collens an email, “and he said, I just saw this rock star young faculty member present, and I think you should meet her,” she recalls.
Shah, a materials science professor at the time, and then-graduate student Jakus founded Dimension Inx in 2016, and Collens joined as a cofounder and CEO 2019. Jakus left the company in 2023. Shah serves as chief science officer. She, Collens, and three other women account for all voting members on Dimension’s board of directors. The overall staff is about “70% diverse,” Collens says. “I’ll say it’s intentional only in the fact that we have a strong belief, and it’s one of the values of the company, that diversity leads to better outcomes and better innovation.”
The company raised $20.52 million through seed rounds in 2020 and 2021, and a series A in 2023. Lead investors include KdT Ventures and Prime Movers Lab. Another major investor is Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, which focuses on startups outside top investment regions and doesnt typically fund biotech. The company is planning what it calls a series A2 funding round in 2026, with the goal of raising up to $50 million.
Boning Up on the Technology
CMFlexthe companys earlier bone repair productis considered a “medical device, requiring a less-stringent FDA review than medications or Dimensions upcoming mini-liver. Thats because CMFlex is just the scaffold for the patients own cells to grow into, rather than to introduce new cells. Bone provided the “lowest hanging fruit,” for Dimension to prove out its technology, Collens says, because its a naturally regenerative tissue. “We were putting this matrix or scaffold inside to serve as a guide or an instigator to get new bone.”
The FDA didnt require human trials for this medical device. Although it had success in animal studies, Dimension chose to do a pilot program in patients before making the product available. “We have lots of examples of being able to create bone in patients and in animals,” Collens says, adding, however, “We didn’t do it fast enough for the structure that’s neededand the structure meaning the hardness to withstand the forces that bone allows you to withstand.” Dimension eventually decided working with tissue would be more impactful, and decided not to go to market with CMFlex.
Moving to soft tissue and then organs was part of the original pitch deck to investors. The company is investigating restoring function in ovaries, for instance. It also succeeded in growing insulin-producing cells seeded in its scaffold in diabetic mice, which could pave the way for treating diabetes in humans. But that area was already a crowded market, Collens says.
“We ended up focusing on liver failure for a variety of reasons, but probably one of the biggest reasons is it’s a huge problem with no good alternative, except for liver transplant,” she says.
Dimensions plan is to grow a small, simplified liver under the skin as a temporary fix until either the full liver can recover or the patient can get a transplant. “I think that’s a good way to go, says James Anderson, a retired professor of pathology, macromolecular science, and biomedical engineering who taught at Case Western Reserve University for more than 40 years. Anderson, who is not associated with Dimension Bio, reviewed its research and was impressed with the methods and results. The liver, he says, is not only a worthy target for regenerative medicine; its also a conducive one. “They picked an organ that can reproduce itself,” he says.
But even a mini-organ is much more complicated than bone. “It’s a fundamentally ifferent type of product, when we’re talking about putting cells on a scaffold,” Collens says.
In mice whose livers were deliberately damaged, the company reports that it increased the survival rate by more than 70% after seeding with liver cells from mice and humans. That required hundreds of millions of cells. But according to Collens, building the miniature human liver could require seeding the scaffold with 5 billion to 20 billion cells.
For humans, Dimension will use stem cells to produce those billions of liver cells. But first come tests in rats and pigs. The companys timetable is aggressive. It aims to start clinical trials in humans in 2028.
The next question might be: Why not grow an entire liver replacement? That seems to be, at best, a very distant goal. Anderson is not sure its possible, given the complex structure of the full organ. Collens says Dimension Bio is not working on that lofty goal, for now. But she doesnt rule it out.
“I think we’re at a really interesting inflection point . . . of this convergence of engineering and biology, where we can actually engineer biological systems that support function that we couldn’t do before.”
You may think working hard, showing initiative, boosting your skill set, and being a team player is what it takes to be noticed to get promoted. But even with all these notable wins and strides, the call to a higher position often never comes.
The reality of being repeatedly passed over is frustratingand such a promotion plateau can leave you questioning whats really within your control.
To learn more about the concept, Fast Company asked three career experts for advice on how to handle a stagnant job path . . . as well as what you can do to add some momentum to your promotion game plan.
What exactly is a promotion plateau?
The most significant telltale sign is the feeling of stagnation with ones career. This can include feeling like a promotion is coming slower than anticipated, ones skills are not improving, or that one is no longer being challenged in their role, says Ryne Sherman, chief science officer at Hogan Assessments, a personality insights provider based in Tulsa.
Typically, a promotion plateau results from the organizational structure of a business with barriers of advancement: hierarchy, red tape, poor structural systems in place, even budget constraints. In some cases, an employees apathy and lack of transferable skills due to these structural challenges can affect the possibility of being promoted.
Whatever the reason, if you cannot see a clear path for advancement in your organization, you may be at a promotion plateau, Sherman says.
Many large, long-standing organizations have built-in promotional structures that are reliable and predictable in nature. But if you work for smaller, midsized, or younger organizations, they may not have reliable promotional steps built into their system, says Sherman. So you might have to get a bit introspective instead.
Another place to look is in your gut, he also says. Ambitious employees who feel they have reached a promotional plateau will begin to feel dissatisfied with their work.
The upside of hiring ambitious workers is that they are often highly engaged and productive, continues Sherman. The downside? Organizations without a plan for them will struggle to retain talent.
The warning signs
Erin Pash, a Minneapolis-St. Paul-based CEO and founder of Pash Company, a social health incubator, offers the following red flags that signal youre approaching a promotion plateau:
A lack of new responsibilities or challenging assignments
Annual reviews that feel like carbon copies of previous years
Watching peers or junior colleagues advance more quickly
Receiving no substantive discussions about career development during evaluations
Feeling intellectually unchallenged and professionally stuck
Minimal or no exposure to strategic company initiatives
A sense of professional invisibility within the organization
Its a persistent sense that your career has hit an invisible wall, despite your continued dedication and competence, says Pash.
Surmounting the plateau
It requires a multifaceted approach, says Pash, and a commitment of effort and action is expected.
Broaden your skills. Invest in your own skill set and accomplishments by pursuing relevant certifications in your field, and by taking online courses to expand technical and soft skills, Pash explains.
Networkand network some more. Attend workshops and conferences to keep a pulse on your industry. These opportunities can help you develop skills that can keep you aligned with emerging industry trends, says Pash. Plus, attending such events can also build up contacts in your professional circle.
Consider other internal roles. Explore lateral moves within different departments of your company which could offer more room for growth.
Seek targeted feedback. Engage directly with supervisors to understand specific barriers to advancement, says Pash. Request a comprehensive performance review that outlines precise skills and achievements needed for progression, she continues. This candid dialogue transforms performance conversations from passive assessments to active career development planning.
Leave when you have to. Sometimes you can do everything right and still hit a brick wall with your career. Some companies are like old boys’ clubs where your brilliant ideas and hard work feel about as useful as a screen door on a submarine, adds Pash.The smartest move isn’t always fighting the system, but recognizing when it’s time to take your talents somewhere that actually values what you bring to the table. All the skills you learn to overcome the plateau will absolutely prove to be helpful in the event you begin looking to jump to another ship.
What are some ways of finding a growth-friendly organization?
When evaluating whether an organization offers growth opportunities for its employees, Karen Burke, a knowledge adviser with the Society of Human Resource Management, says the following strategies are recommended:
A review of a companys organizational chart can provide valuable insights. Companies with multiple hierarchical levels, such as associate, manager, director, and vice president, typically demonstrate clear pathways for advancement, says Burke.
Assess a companys management structure. The presence of various management positions (e.g., assistant manager, manager, senior manager, assistant vice president, vice president) reflects distributed leadership and increases the likelihood of opportunities to progress into management roles, she points out.
Evaluating a companys departmental structure is helpful as well. Organizations with a broad range of departments (such as marketing, operations, and finance), including specialized sub-departments, tend to offer greater internal mobility. This structure supports both vertical and lateral career progression, outlines Burke.
Consider any evidence of business expansion, such as published information regarding business growth, new initiatives, or expanded networks. Whether identified through company communications or external research, this information often signals the potential for future opportunities, she adds.
Identify project-based teams. Companies that utilize project-based or rotational teams frequently facilitate rapid skill development and provide avenues for promotion, notes Burke.
Monitor a companys vacancy trends. Commonly, frequent or multiple job vacancies may indicate active hiring and suggest the possibility of upward mobility within an organization, Burke says.
Or if youre up for the challengestart your own company
But Burke also says another option, as opposed to adapting to the dynamics and timing that ead to promotions, is simply to go into business yourselfa drastic change, to be sure, but it can lead to drastic growth.
Thats especially if you find yourself in a company or industry with inherently limited growth opportunities, says Burke. Again, sometimes growth-limiting organizational structures are simply too much for you (or anyone else) to overcome.
Should you decide to explore this option, its recommended that comprehensive market research is conducted: evaluating your risk tolerance, and developing a strong business plan. Starting your own business can provide a platform to pursue professional opportunities that align with your aspirations and skill set. Entrepreneurship also offers the ability to shape your own career path, respond proactively to market needs, and foster both personal and professional development.
This strategic approach will enable you to leverage your experience and expertise, resulting in greater autonomy and, possibly, career satisfaction, she says.
Unfortunately, a promotion plateau is tricky, because there can be so many different factors limiting your growth.
Fortunately, though, you do have a lot of options available to you, if youre willing to do your research and think outside the box.
Based on my experience, employees who encounter a promotion plateau typically pursue several strategies to advance their careers, says Burke.
After writing more than one article a day for the last 23 years, Ive accumulated a body of text large enough to train an AI model that could convincingly write like me. With todays technology, it would not be difficult to build a system capable of generating opinions that sound as if they came from Enrique Dansan algorithmic professor that keeps publishing long after Im gone.
That, apparently, is the next frontier of productivity: the digital twin. Startups such as Viven and tools like Synthesia are building AI clones of employees and executivestrained on their voices, writing, decisions, and habits. The idea is seductive. Imagine scaling yourself infinitely: answering emails, recording videos, writing updates, etc., while you do something else, or nothing at all.
But seductive doesnt mean sensible.
A world full of digital ghosts
We are entering an era where professionals will not just automate tasks; they will replicate their personas. A company might build a digital copy of its best salesperson or customer service agent. A CEO might train a virtual twin to respond to inquiries. A university might deploy an AI version of a popular lecturer to deliver courses at scale.
In theory, this sounds efficient. In practice, it invites a form of existential confusion: If the replica is convincing enough, what happens to the person? What does it mean to be productive when your digital version is the one doing the work?
The fascination with cloning ourselves digitally reflects the same temptation that has driven automation for centuries: outsourcing not just labor, but also identity. The difference is that AI can now replicate the voice of that identity, both literally and metaphorically.
What I would look like as an algorithm
I could easily do it. Feed a large language model the millions of words Ive written since 2003every article, every post, every commentand youd get a fairly accurate simulation of me. It would probably have the right tone, vocabulary, and rhythm. It could write plausible articles, maybe even publish them at the same pace.
But it would just miss the point.
I dont write to fill a schedule or a database. I write to think or to teach. Writing, for me, is not an act of production, but of reflection. Thats why, as I explained recently in Why I let AI help me thinkbut never think for me, I never let AI write my articles for me. It makes no sense. Asking a model to think for me would defeat the very reason I sit down every morning to write.
Of course, I use AI constantly: summarizing sources, checking facts, exploring counterarguments, and finding references. But I never let it finish my sentences. Thats the boundary that keeps my work mine.
The illusion of scaling yourself
The promise of digital clones is rooted in the same misconception: that replicating output equals replicating value. Companies now talk about bottling expertise or scaling human capital as if personality were a production line.
But cloning output is not the same as extending competence. A persons professional value is not their words or gestures. Its their judgment, built over time through context and curiosity. A model trained on your past decisions may imitate your tone, but it cannot anticipate your evolution. Its a fossil, not a future.
An AI clone of me could mimic my writing style from 2025. But if I let it publish, it would freeze me in that year forever, a museum piece updated daily.
From productivity to presence
Executives, entrepreneurs, and creators should be careful what they wish for. A digital twin may handle the inbox or record video briefings, but it also dilutes what makes leadership or creativity meaningful: presence.
In Axioss coverage of CEO clones, many executives confessed that they liked their AI doubles but didnt fully trust them. The clone could handle repetitive interactions, but not empathy, timing, or nuancethe qualities that define credibility.
Delegating those things to an algorithm is like sending a mannequin to a meeting: technically present, emotionally vacant.
Corporate immortality and the ethics of legacy
Theres also the question of what happens when your digital twin outlives you. Some companies already treat employee data as assets, so why wouldnt they treat their digital clones the same way?
Imagine a firm continuing to deploy the AI version of a beloved leader or educator after theyve passed away. It might seem like a tribute, but its really a form of corporate necromancy: using a persons intellectual remains to perpetuate a brand.
Its not hard to picture universities selling virtual professors or corporations reusing former CEOs as permanent avatars. In a recent academic paper on digital twins, researchers warned that the boundary between representation and possession is getting blurry. Who owns the clone? Who profits from it?
When we replicate people as data objects, we risk turning identity into infrastructure, into something that can be licensed, monetized, or rebranded at will.
The right way to use AI for personal scale
There is, however, a rational way to use AI for scale: as augmentation, not imitation.
I use AI every day as a thinking partner. It reads drafts, proposes structures, suggests sources, and critiques my logic. Its like having a tireless research assistant, one that never gets offended when I ignore its advice. But the act of reasoning, the decision of what to say and how to say it, remains mine.
Thats the key difference between using artificial intelligence and becoming it. When we outsource thinking, we lose the feedback loop that makes us human: the constant process of reflection, revision, and growth.
Professionals who embrace AI responsibly will amplify their reach without diluting their essence. Those who dont will eventually find their own voices indistinguishable from their machines.
What businesses should learn from this
For companies flirting with employee clones or AI avatars, heres a checklist worth remembering:
Define purpose, not imitation. Dont build AI twins to replicate people. Build systems that free them to do higher-value work.
Keep the human in the authorship loop. AI can assist in drafting, coding, and summarizing, but final judgment must remain human.
Treat data as legacy, not property. Respect employee and creator autonomy. No one should become a perpetual digital asset without consent.
Focus on augmentation, not automation. Use AI to enhance collective intelligence, not to eliminate the need for it.
AI is not here to replace human expertise; its here to challenge how we apply it.
The paradox of self-replication
Soon, anyone with enough data will be able to build a digital version of themselves. Some will see it as immortality; others, as redundancy. I see it as a mirror, a test of what truly matters in human work.
When my own digital twin can write a decent article about AI, I wont be impressed. The question isnt whether it can write. Its whether it can care, and whether it serves me for the purpose Im trying to achieve.
And until algorithms can care about truth, nuance, curiosity, or purpose, Ill keep doing what Ive done for the last 23 years: Sit down, think, and write. Not because I have to, but because I still can.
