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Consumer sentiment increased in June for the first time in six months, the latest sign that Americans views of the economy have improved as inflation has stayed tame and the Trump administration has reached a truce in its trade fight with China. The preliminary reading of the University of Michigans closely watched consumer sentiment index, released Friday, jumped 16% from 52.2 to 60.5. The large increase followed steady drops that left the preliminary number last month at the second-lowest level in the nearly 75-year history of the survey. Consumer sentiment is still down 20% compared with December 2024. Consumers appear to have settled somewhat from the shock of the extremely high tariffs announced in April and the policy volatility seen in the weeks that followed, Joanne Hsu, director of the survey, said in a written statement. However, consumers still perceive wide-ranging downside risks to the economy. Americans have largely taken a darker view of the economys future after President Donald Trump unleashed a wide-ranging trade war, imposing steep tariffs on China, the European Union, and dozens of other countries. Yet in April Trump postponed a set of sweeping tariffs on about 60 nations and last month reached a temporary truce with China, after both sides had sharply ratcheted up tariffs on each other. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index, released in late May, also increased after five straight declines that were linked to anxiety over tariffs. U.S. duties remain elevated compared with historical levels, but so far they have not worsened overall inflation. Prices rose just 2.4% in May compared with a year ago, up slightly from 2.3% in April. Still, most economists expect tariffs to hit harder in the coming months. Consumer confidence is sharply divided by political outlook, with Republicans feeling much better about the economy under Trump than Democrats. Democratic sentiment about the economy was much higher under Biden, while Republican views were low. This month, however, sentiment did improve among supporters of both parties and independents. Consumers’ inflation expectations basically a measure of how worried people are about future inflation dropped this month, which will be welcomed by the inflation-fighters at the Federal Reserve. Inflation expectations can become self-fulfilling, because if people worry price increases will get worse, they can take steps such as demanding higher pay that push prices even higher. The Fed meets next week, and is expected to keep its key short-term interest rate unchanged at about 4.3%. Christopher Rugaber, AP economics writer
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E-Commerce
As AI car crashes go, the recent publishing of a hallucinated book list in the Chicago Sun-Times quickly became a multi-vehicle pile-up. After a writer used AI to create a list of summer reads, the majority of which were made-up titles, the resulting article sailed through lax editorial review at the Sun-Times (and at least one other newspaper) and ended up being distributed to thousands of subscribers. The CEO eventually published a lengthy apology. The most obvious takeaway from the incident is that it was a badly needed wake-up call about what can happen when AI gets too embedded in our information ecosystem. But CEO Melissa Bell resisted the instinct to simply blame AI, instead putting responsibility on the humans who use it and those who are entrusted with safeguarding readers from its weaknesses. She even included herself as one of those people, explaining how she had approved the publishing of special inserts like the one the list appeared in, assuming at the time there would be adequate editorial review (there wasn’t). The company has made changes to patch this particular hole, but the affair exposes a gap in the media landscape that is poised to get worse: as the presence of AI-generated contentauthorized or notincreases in the world, the need for editorial safeguards also increases. And given the state of the media industry and its continual push to do “more with less,” it’s unlikely that human labor will scale up to meet the challenge. The conclusion: AI will need to fact-check AI. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Fact-checking the fact-checker I know, it sounds like a horrible idea, somewhere between letting the fox watch the henhouse or sending Imperial Stormtroopers to keep the peace on Endor. But AI fact-checking isn’t a new idea: In fact, when Google Gemini first debuted (then called Bard), it shipped with an optional fact-check step if you wanted it to double-check anything it was telling you. Eventually, this kind of step simply became integrated into how AI search engines work, broadly making their results better, though still far from perfect. Newsrooms, of course, set a higher bar, and they should. Operating a news site comes with the responsibility to ensure the stories you’re telling are true, and for most sites the shrugging disclaimer of “AI can make mistakes,” while good enough for ChatGPT, doesn’t cut it. That’s why for most, if not all, AI-generated outputs (such as ESPN’s AI-written sports recaps), humans check the work. As AI writing proliferates, though, the inevitable question is: Can AI do that job? Put aside the weirdness for a minute and see it as math, the key number being how often it gets things wrong. If an AI fact-checker can reduce the number of errors by as much if not more than a human, shouldn’t it do that job? If you’ve never used AI to fact-check something, the recently launched service isitcap.com offers a glimpse at where the technology stands. It doesnt just label claims as true or falseit evaluates the article holistically, weighing context, credibility, and bias. It even compares multiple AI search engines to cross-check itself. You can easily imagine a newsroom workflow that applies an AI fact-checker similarly, sending its analysis back to the writer, highlighting the bits that need shoring up. And if the writer happens to be a machine, revisions could be done lightning fast, and at scale. Stories could go back and forth until they reach a certain accuracy threshold, with anything that falls short held for human review. All this makes sense in theory, and it could even be applied to what news orgs are doing currently with AI summaries. Nieman Lab has an excellent write-up on how The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo News, and Bloomberg all use AI to generate bullet points or top-line takeaways for their journalism. For both Yahoo and the Journal, there’s some level of human review on the summaries (for Bloomberg, it’s unclear from the article). These organizations are already on the edge of whats acceptablebalancing speed and scale with credibility. One mistake in a summary might not seem like much, but when trust is already fraying, its enough to shake confidence in the entire approach. Human review helps ensure accuracy, of course, but also requires more human laborsomething in short supply in newsrooms that don’t have a national footprint. AI fact-checking could give smaller outlets more options with respect to public-facing AI content. Similarly, Politico’s union recently criticized the publication’s AI-written reports for subscribers based on the work of its journalists, because of occasional inaccuracies. A fact-checking layer might prevent at least some embarrassing mistakes, like attributing political stances to groups that don’t exist. The AI trust problem that wont go away Using AI to fight AI hallucination might make mathematical sense if it can prevent serious errors, but there’s another problem that stems from relying even more on machines, and it’s not just a metallic flavor of irony. The use of AI in media already has a trust problem. The Sun-Times‘ phantom book list is far from the first AI content scandal, and it certainly won’t be the last. Some publications are even adopting anti-AI policies, forbidding its use for virtually anything./p> Because of AI’s well-documented problems, public tolerance for machine error is lower than for human error. Similarly, if a self-driving car gets into an accident, the scrutiny is obviously much greater than if the car was driven by a person. You might call this the automation fallout bias, and whether you think it’s fair or not, it’s undoubtedly true. A single high-profile hallucination that slips through the cracks could derail adoption, even if it might be statistically rare. Add to that what would probably be painful compute costs for multiple layers of AI writing and fact-checking, not to mention the increased carbon footprint. All to improve AI-generated textwhich, lets be clear, is not the investigative, source-driven journalism that still requires human rigor and judgment. Yes, we’d be lightening the cognitive load for editors, but would it be worth the cost? Despite all these barriers, it seems inevitable that we will use AI to check AI outputs. All indications point to hallucinations being inherent to generative technology. In fact, newer “thinking” models appear to hallucinate even more than their less sophisticated predecessors. If done right, AI fact-checking would be more than a newsroom tool, becoming part of the infrastructure for the web. The question is whether we can build it to earn trust, not just automate it. The amount of AI content in the world can only increase, and we’re going to need systems that can scale to keep up. AI fact-checkers can be part of that solution, but only if we manageand accepttheir potential to make errors themselves. We may not yet trust AI to tell the truth, but at least it can catch itself in a lie. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
California’s top insurance regulator on Thursday launched an investigation into State Farm over the company’s handling of claims from the January Los Angeles-area wildfires.The investigation comes after survivors of the Palisades and Eaton fires said that the state’s largest home insurer was delaying and mishandling claims regarding damage to their homes and possible contamination from smoke.The blazes destroyed thousands of buildings around Los Angeles, killed 30 people and displaced thousands of others. They were estimated to be among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said the investigation will review whether the company complied with state consumer protection and claim-handling laws.“Californians deserve fair and comprehensive treatment from their insurance companies,” the Democrat said in a statement. “No one should be left in uncertainty, forced to fight for what they are owed, or face endless delays that often lead consumers to give up.”State Farm, which has about 1 million home insurance customers in California, said it will cooperate with the state’s review. The insurer has received roughly 13,000 claims related to the fires and has paid out about $4 billion to customers, the company said.“We’re here to help our customers recover and we empathize with those who are rebuilding their lives,” State Farm said in a statement. “Our focus continues to be on supporting our customers in their recovery from the largest fire event we have ever experienced.”Survivors of the Eaton fire in Altadena have raised concerns about possible lead, asbestos and heavy metal contamination in their homes because of smoke.State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Democrat representing Pasadena, in April called on Lara to launch a probe into the alleged mishandling of claims.“The survivors of the Los Angeles County fires are experiencing financial and emotional hardships due to State Farm’s delays and denials of their valid insurance claims,” she and other lawmakers said at the time. “Despite years of faithfully paying premiums, they have been met with excessive documentation demands, denial of claims despite clear evidence, a convoluted and arduous claims process, and silence when seeking help after the disaster.”Lara said homeowners should file formal complaints regarding State Farm’s handling of claims to help the state take action. The Department of Insurance announced a task force last month to recommend best practices for addressing smoke damage.A wildfire victims advocate praised the investigation as a “critical step toward accountability.”“State Farm is unjustly denying legitimate smoke damage claims, forcing families already harmed by the Eaton and Palisades fires to make the impossible choice of living in toxic homes or paying tens of thousands out of pocket for remediation. We stand ready to hold State Farm accountable,” Kiley Grombacher, co-founder of the California Fire Victims Law Center, said in a statement.Insurers including State Farm had difficulty doing business in California even before the wildfires. In 2023, State Farm and others stopped issuing residential policies because of the wildfire risk.Last year, Lara unveiled regulations aimed at giving insurers more latitude to raise premiums in exchange for more policies in high-risk areas. State Farm said at the time the company was struggling.The wildfires, which destroyed more than 16,000 buildings, made matters even worse.In May, state regulators allowed State Farm to raise premiums 17% statewide for its California home insurance customers to help the company rebuild its capital after the costly wildfires.State Farm initially sought a 22% rate increase for homeowners but revised it down a recent hearing before an administrative judge. The new rates in effect this month include a 38% hike for rental owners and 15% for tenants.People who lost homes in the fires sued in April, alleging State Farm and other insurers colluded to “suddenly and simultaneously” drop coverage or halt writing new policies in fire-prone areas, including areas that burned. That left the homeowners underinsured and struggling to rebuild, the lawsuit alleges.The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the largest national trade association representing home, auto and business insurers, called the lawsuits meritless, saying it monitors to ensure its members comply with the state’s antitrust laws. Associated Press writer Mead Gruver reported from Cheyenne, Wyoming. Austin is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on X: @sophieadanna Sophie Austin and Mead Gruver, Associated Press/Report for America
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E-Commerce
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