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Coco Gauff was surprised at how much tinier the replica trophy she got to keep after winning this year’s French Open was than the trophy she posed with on court at Roland-Garros for all the world to see. She even did a TikTok about the discrepancy, drawing more than 2 million views.Why was Gauff so taken aback by what she called the “miniature version”?“I honestly did not know the size it was going to be. I know you never really take the original, but when I won the U.S. Open, they gave me the same size (trophy), with my name engraved on it,” Gauff told The Associated Press. “So I just assumed that Roland Garros would be the same.”Actually, it turns out Gauff’s 2023 championship at the U.S. Open marked the first time the women’s singles winner in New York was given a silver cup significantly larger than the one that is used in the postmatch ceremony. Her replica hardware is 19 1/2 inches tall, the same as both the original and keepsake men’s trophies and 7 1/2 inches bigger than the original women’s trophy.That one, like the original men’s, is displayed during the tournament in a locked glass box near where players enter the event’s main arena and will be briefly handed to, then taken away from, whoever wins the women’s final in Arthur Ashe Stadium this Saturday.From 1987, when the tradition of providing keepsakes at Flushing Meadows began, until two years ago, the female champion took home a 12-inch-tall copy. But the U.S. Tennis Association asked Tiffany & Co. to create replicas for the women to match the size of what the men are allowed to keep. That change coincided with the 50th anniversary of the tournament’s 1973 move to pay equal prize money to women and men at then-player Billie Jean King’s urging.“Equality is in our DNA here at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Everything we do, we’re very intentional about equality and we wanted to do the same as it relates to the champion’s trophies,” U.S. Open tournament director Stacey Allaster said in an interview.“We had a very robust conversation: Should we recreate a new women’s singles champion’s trophy? In the end, we made the decision to stay with history and to not change the trophy itself, but to ensure that the replica trophy was of the same size as the men’s,” said Allaster, who is the chief executive of professional tennis at the USTA. “Trophies are so iconic to the history of this championships, and we just didn’t feel it was the right thing to move away from that history, but (we wanted) to be able to award the singles champions the same sizes.”King wasn’t aware of the switch until the AP asked her about it.“I did not know they did that. It’s fantastic. It’s equal,” King said. “It sends very positive messaging that we matter just as much. Our trophy’s just as big.” Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis writer since 2002. Find his stories here: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich. More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis Howard Fendrich, AP Tennis Writer
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Artificial intelligence, apparently, is the new fake news.” Blaming AI is an increasingly popular strategy for politicians seeking to dodge responsibility for something embarrassing among others. AI isn’t a person, after all. It can’t leak or file suit. It does make mistakes, a credibility problem that makes it hard to determine fact from fiction in the age of mis- and disinformation. And when truth is hard to discern, the untruthful benefit, analysts say. The phenomenon is widely known as the liar’s dividend. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump endorsed the practice. Asked about viral footage showing someone tossing something out an upper-story White House window, the president replied, No, that’s probably AI after his press team had indicated to reporters that the video was real. But Trump, known for insisting the truth is what he says it is, declared himself all in on the AI-blaming phenomenon. If something happens thats really bad,” he told reporters, maybe Ill have to just blame AI. He’s not alone. AI is getting blamed sometimes fairly, sometimes not On the same day in Caracas, Venezuelan Communications Minister Freddy áez questioned the veracity of a Trump administration video it said showed a U.S. strike on a vessel in Caribbean that targeted Venezuelas Tren de Aragua gang and killed 11. A video of the strike posted to Truth Social shows a long, multi-engine speedboat at sea when a bright flash of light bursts over it. The boat is then briefly seen covered in flames. Based on the video provided, it is very likely that it was created using Artificial Intelligence, áez said on his Telegram account, describing almost cartoonish animation. Blaming AI can at times be a compliment. (Hes like an AI-generated player, tennis player Alexander Bublik said of his U.S. Open opponent Jannik Sinner’s talent on ESPN ). But when used by the powerful, the practice, experts say, can be dangerous. Digital forensics expert Hany Farid warned for years about the growing capabilities of AI deepfake images, voices and video to aid in fraud or political disinformation campaigns, but there was always a deeper problem. Ive always contended that the larger issue is that when you enter this world where anything can be fake, then nothing has to be real, said Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. You get to deny any reality because all you have to say is, Its a deepfake. That wasn’t so a decade or two ago, he noted. Trump issued a rare apology (“if anyone was offended”) in 2016 for his comments about touching women without their consent on the notorious Access Hollywood” tape. His opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, said she was wrong to call some of his supporters a basket of deplorables. Toby Walsh, chief scientist and professor of AI at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said blaming AI leads to problems not just in the digital world but the real world as well. It leads to a dark future where we no longer hold politicians (or anyone else) accountable, Walsh said in an email. It used to be that if you were caught on tape saying something, you had to own it. This is no longer the case.” Contemplating the liars dividend’ Danielle K. Citron of the Boston University School of Law and Robert Chesney of the University of Texas foresaw the issue in research published in 2019. In it, they describe what they called the liar’s dividend. If the public loses faith in what they hear and see and truth becomes a matter of opinion, then power flows to those whose opinions are most prominentempowering authorities along the way,” they wrote in the California Law Review. A skeptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence. Polling suggests many Americans are wary about AI. About half of U.S. adults said the increased use of AI in daily life made them feel more concerned than excited, according to a Pew Research Center poll from August 2024. Pews polling indicates that people have become more concerned about the increased use of AI in recent years. Most U.S. adults appear to distrust AI-generated information when they know thats the source, according to a Quinnipiac poll from April. About three-quarters said they could only trust the information generated by AI some of the time or hardly ever. In that poll, about 6 in 10 U.S. adults said they were very concerned about political leaders using AI to distribute fake or misleading information. They have reason, and Trump has played a sizable role in muddying trust and truth. Trump’s history of misinformation and even lies to suit his narrative predates AI. He’s famous for the use of fake news, a buzz term now widely known to denote skepticism about media reports. Leslie Stahl of CBS’ 60 Minutes has said that Trump told her off camera in 2016 that he tries to discredit journalists so that when they report negative stories, they won’t be believed. Trump’s claim on Tuesday that AI was behind the White House window video wasn’t his first attempt to blame AI. In 2023, he insisted that the anti-Trump Lincoln Project used AI in a video to make him look bad. In the spot titled Feeble, a female narrator taunts Trump. Hey Donald … youre weak. You seem unsteady. You need help getting around. She questions his manhood,” accompanied by an image of two blue pills. The video continues with footage of Trump stumbling over words. The perverts and losers at the failed and once-disbanded Lincoln Project, and others, are using A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) in their Fake television commercials in order to make me look as bad and pathetic as Crooked Joe Biden, Trump posted on Truth Social. The Lincoln Project told The Associated Press at the time that AI was not used in the spot. Laurie Kellman, Associated Press Associated Press writers Ali Swenson, Matt O’Brien, Linley Sanders, and Jorge Rueda contributed to this report.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. AI is starting to reshape the workforce If you want a glimpse of how AI could reshape corporate staffing, look to Salesforce. CEO Marc Benioff said during a Labor Day podcast that the company has already cut 4,000 customer support roles after deploying its own AI agents. Ive reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads, Benioff said, calling the past eight months the most exciting of his career. (A Salesforce spokesperson later clarified that many of the affected jobs were support engineers who were shifted into other roles.) Still, Salesforce may be an outlier. Benioff was likely promoting his own AgentForce platform. Gartner predicted back in March that half of all organizations will abandon plans to shrink their customer service staff because of AI. In a poll of 163 customer service leaders, 95% said they intend to keep human agents and use AI more strategically. Customer service is a particularly sensitive area for automation, since it involves direct contact with customers. Many companies may prefer a human touch. Other roles behind the sceneslike software engineeringmay prove easier to replace. Junior developers, for example, are increasingly vulnerable as coding agents such as Cursor and Claude Code take on much of the basic work. A recent Stanford study found that employment for 22- to 25-year-old software engineers fell nearly 20% between late 2022 and July 2025, even as hiring for older engineers grew. Other research points to broader disruption. A new study from the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity estimates that AI will put 45 million U.S. jobs at risk by 2028, including roles such as retail managers, HR coordinators, and administrative assistantsoften the rungs younger workers climb toward stable, middle-income careers. The Fund warns that this hollowing out of entry-level jobs threatens long-term mobility for an entire generation. It advocates for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a cushion for displaced workers. Reskilling remains another challenge. Research from LinkedIn found that many professionals feel overwhelmed by the pressure to learn new AI tools, describing it as another job added to their workload. Nearly half said they arent using AI to its full potential, and 30% admitted they rarely or never use it (31% acknowledged exaggerating their AI skills at work). Meanwhile, more than a third of executives say they plan to hire and evaluate employees based on AI expertise. For many workers, theres no simple path through this AI-powered transition. While its human nature to ignore major disruptions, experts say there are real advantages to embracing AI and exploring the possibilities. The best strategy may be to expand their use of AI beyond general chatbots like ChatGPT, and find specialized toolsperhaps including new AI agentsthat can handle mundane, low-skill tasks. Doing so frees up time for higher-order, uniquely human work, much of which requires creativity and empathy. What the Google antitrust decision means for AI search companies A federal court in Washington, D.C., decided that Google will not have to sell off its Chrome browser after being found guilty of monopolistic practices in internet search and advertising last year. The remedies chosen by Judge Amit Mehta are more surgical: Google will no longer be able to ink exclusive deals that establish its search service as the default on other platforms. That change directly impacts one of Googles most lucrative arrangements: its multibillion-dollar payments to Apple to keep Google Search as the iPhones default. Google will likely go on paying Apple to put Google Search on the popular devices, but it will no longer be able to pay Apple to be the only search service on the devices. This opens the door for other search providersincluding new AI search upstartsto pay for a presence on Apple devices too. Mehtas decision also compels Google to periodically share its search indexincluding data on the quality and popularity of linkswith competitors. Google built its whole company around its search index, a vast and ever-changing database of all the sites and content on the internet (or at least everything that Googles web crawlers can reach). Now Google will have to share that crown jewel, including data about the quality and popularity of indexed web content, with a new wave of AI search providers like OpenAI and Perplexity. These new playerswhich deliver fully fleshed answers to users, not just a list of linkscan use the index data to improve the quality and accuracy of their own search results. Activists are using AI to unmask ICE agents The federal government has long failed to pass any meaningful legislation to protect peoples privacy from surveillance technologies. Now, in a strange twist, the government has become a victim of its own inaction. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids spread and become more bold, activists are attempting to use AI to unmask, then publicly identify, ICE agents. Politico reports that a Netherlands-based immigration activist Dominick Skinner and a group of volunteers have developed an AI model that analyzes the faces of ICE agents within screenshots of ICE raid and arrest videos. If at least 30% of the agents face is visible, the AI can generate a reasonable facsimile of the agents whole face. Using the AI-generated image, activists can use image search tools to find the ICE agent on social media or elsewhere, Politico reports. Skinner says his group has now publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests. The AI unmasking project is part of a larger effort called the ICE List, an activist web archive that has published the identities of more than 100 ICE employees and agents. The Department of Homeland Security insists that the ICE agents wear the masks to avoid being doxxed and harassed. But critics say the sight of masked agents (sometimes displaying no badge or other agency identification) manhandling alleged undocumented immigrants on the street presents a powerful image of callous authoritarianism and unaccountable government force. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Fantasy football nerds are using AI to get an edge in their leagues this year This startup is using AI to take on high real estate commissions 5 ways to write better AI prompts How Japan is using AI to prepare Tokyo residents for this natural disaster Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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