#generative-ai

#generative-ai

When my daughter turned 16, I didn't hand her the car keys and hope for the best. She spent a few months in driver's ed, practicing parallel parking, checking blind spots, and learning to handle heavy traffic and bad weather. Like all new drivers, she needed guidance and practice before she could drive safely on her own. With generative AI tools, we all have something far more powerful than a car. And most of us aren't getting lessons at all.

First, consider writing. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and dozens of other AI tools can draft newsletters, create ads, or write search-engine-optimized copy. In a recent ecommerce project, I directed AI to generate product copy from this manufacturer's description: At less than 5″ wide, the incredibly slim and easy-to-use K-Mini® single-serve coffee maker makes anywhere perfect for great coffee. Before composing, the AI tool searched the web and considered SEO keywords. After a couple of research steps, it produced several versions, including this one:

For decades, Adobe's software tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, have been the universal language of visual communication, shaping how marketers, artists, and brands build the modern creative world. As artificial intelligence transforms the nature of work and how we define productivity, the 42-year-old creative tech company is reinventing itself once again, transforming the world's creative supply chains through its AI ecosystem.

"We see that [the] world model is just as big and exciting, if not more [than the previous eras]," Li, who is also CEO of the company, told The Verge in an interview.

In recent months, Google has promised to inject generative AI into the online shopping experience, and now it's following through. The previously announced shopping features of AI Mode search are rolling out, and Gemini will also worm its way into Google's forgotten Duplex automated phone call tech. It's all coming in time for the holidays to allegedly make your gifting more convenient and also conveniently ensure that Google gets a piece of the action.

The launch of the generative world model, first released in limited beta preview two months ago, comes a little over a year after World Labs came out of stealth with $230 million in funding, and puts the startup ahead of competitors building world models. World models are AI systems that generate an internal representation of an environment, and can be used to predict future outcomes and plan actions.

When someone we love dies we often yearn for the impossible: one more conversation. Maybe we want the opportunity to finally gain clarity about a difficult relationship or to say, I love you one last time to someone we cherish. While raising the dead is still out of reach more and more people are turning to generative AI tools such as Replika to conjure the essence of their loved ones and have those final conversations.

AI image and video models aren't human, but they do have distinct "personalities," according to the creators who use them. The new phenomenon is a reaction to the rapidly expanding generative AI industry, highlighting how creators manage a dizzying number of choices. Generative AI has experienced a massive surge in growth over the past few years, but it wasn't until 2025 that AI image, video and other generative media models took center stage.

Vision AI Companion is based on an upgraded, generative AI-based version of Samsung's virtual assistant Bixby. Samsung suggests you can use it to ask questions about on-screen content - what that actor is famous for, who painted that artwork, or what the final score was in a football game. It can go beyond that though, offering TV and movie recommendations along with cooking advice, travel tips, and local restaurant discovery.

It hurts to see bad people win, but Meta, the company that burned billions trying to make the metaverse a thing, remains eye-wateringly profitable, thanks almost entirely to its advertising business, which accounted for 98 percent of its total revenue in the second quarter of 2025. And soon, if Meta executives have their way, that advertising will be powered by so-called artificial intelligence-and shocking quantities of fossil fuels-all so they can convince you to buy more stuff.

The Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) has published a report [PDF] titled "The Longitudinal Expert AI Panel" that attempts to distill the forecasts of knowledgeable folk - mainly men - in industry, academia, and policy about the capabilities, adoption, and impact of AI in the years ahead. The research project, led by Ezra Karger, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, suggests that few AI experts believe "superintelligence" as outlined by the likes of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will arrive anytime soon.

At the core of the new release is Builder agent, a generative AI system that converts plain text prompts into functional, customized map prototypes within minutes. Developers can type natural instructions like "create a Street View tour of a city" or "build a map that visualizes real-time weather in my region," and Builder agent automatically produces an interactive layout using Gemini's reasoning and visualization capabilities.

I smiled tightly as this man described using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I responded politely. Inside, however, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding. Some people have the typical relationship non-negotiables. Doesn't smoke, is a cat person, wants kids.

Adobe Firefly feels like the best-kept secret in software right now. Adobe is aggressively talking up the app and its capabilities at events like Adobe MAX, but even with so much limelight, it doesn't get nearly the attention that competitors do. The Firefly app is a creative AI playground that lets you use generative models to create images, videos, and more, but it can do more, from batch editing photos to turning a single frame into a full video.

A decade ago, Ben Collins quit his job as a corporate accountant and started teaching other people how to use spreadsheets more effectively. That move, terrifying as it seemed at the time, paid off brilliantly. Today Collins is the proprietor of an online spreadsheet training academy and the author of a weekly newsletter dedicated entirely to Google Sheets tips. Some 50,000 people subscribe.

The growth of AI, especially generative AI-related innovations, has introduced a promising way to automate manual activities in every computer-related field, including programming, technical writing, and even UI/UX design. The generative AI core has a predictive, probabilistic nature and high dependence on human-created data inputs, so AI can't ever be trusted to be used beyond human-reviewed automation. But professionals, including product designers, began to overuse AI and ruin their own professional fields.

Over the last two years, the value of content has collapsed. Thanks to the LLM revolution, the internet is drowning in an avalanche of indistinguishable output: an endless parade of fast-food writing, recycled reports, and SEO-bait fluff optimized for algorithms instead of people. That's why the only competitive moat left is the human story. For business leaders, this creates an urgent mandate: Storytelling is no longer a marketing tactic. It's a strategic business imperative-the only reliable engine for changing minds and shifting behaviors.

The most obvious use case for generative AI in editorial operations is to write copy. When ChatGPT lit the fuse on the current AI boom, it was its ability to crank out hundreds of comprehensible words almost instantly, on virtually any topic, that captured our imaginations. Hundreds of "ChatGPT wrote this article" think pieces resulted, and college essays haven't been the same since. Neither has the media.