Author: Gareth

Carroll, Shannon. “The Ai Capex Spending Spree Just Keeps Getting Weirder.” Quartz, Quartz, 21 Mar. 2026, qz.com/ai-capex-spending-thinking-machines-yann-lecun-power.

Summary: Carroll uses economic data surrounding large tech companies dealing with the AI market to capture how large the industry has grown. This is emphasized through how she describes as how “weird” the capex funding (capex being the funding companies use to acquire, upgrade or maintain assets) specifically has been for AI companies after the recent industry boom. An example that Carroll uses of this funding is how AI companies are establishing funded partnerships with Jet engine manufacturing or EV battery manufacturing companies to assist in building data centers, the most eye-opening example to me is how, according to Carroll, AI companies are now giving capex funding to AI research organizations that are expressly anti LLM- despite LLMs being the primary dominant form of AI in the market and potentially most favored economically. “The same ecosystem is writing checks to the lab buying gigawatt-scale compute and to the lab arguing next-token prediction will not get you to broadly capable agents. -The anti-casino is still being financed with casino money.” (Carroll)

Why this matters: This article offers a glimpse into how big the AI market has gotten and how powerful it’s industry leaders have become, able to dish out quite sizable funds to a wide variety of companies and organizations with the motivation to integrate more and more of the economy into it’s influence. The economy of the US and potentially the global economy as well, is being completely restructured to accommodate the current AI tech boom.

Wirtschafter, Valerie. “Generative AI as a Weapon of War in Iran.” Brookings.Edu, Brookings, 8 Apr. 2026, www.brookings.edu/articles/generative-ai-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-iran/.

Summary: Wirtschafter argues that Generative AI is being used by both the US and Iran as a means of propaganda and information espionage, and are conducting misinformation tactics using AI at a much higher level than in previous conflicts where generative AI was still an available tool. Wirtschafter uses gathered data from community notes on X about posts flagged for AI use by multiple users. She argues that because community notes flagging AI has exponentially increased on post after the Iran conflict, that more generative AI content is being created that may pertain to the conflict. This method of data support might be shaky, as not all the flagged posts represented in the data may actually be AI generated, or not all the AI generated content is flagged, Wirtschafter still argues that this data does indicate the issue, as the amount of flagged posts has still greatly increased, indicating that something is going on involving AI generation.

Why this matters: With how fast AI programs have been advancing and how accurate they are at mimicking real-life text and video it is becoming harder and harder to determine what is real and what isn’t just from online sources. This is made even worse when governments have taken towards using generative AI for propaganda to promote their side in an escalating conflict.

Campbell, Sinéad. “‘Our Assumptions Are Broken’: How Fraudulent Church Data Revealed AI’s Threat to Polling.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Mar. 2026, www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/28/how-fraudulent-church-data-revealed-ais-threat-to-polling.

Summary: Sinead reminds readers of a previous controversy where survey polling data collected by the Christian Church in Britain that was used to generate popular news stories that Gen z was returning to church and religious practices more so than previous generations was re-evaluated and turned out to be wildly inaccurate. This is because many online accounts that were surveyed by the Church turned out to be ran by AI programs created to generate a more positive data set than what was predicted.

Why this matters: With the wide prevalence of AI, and it’s deep integration into online internet systems, and especially with how people can generate social media accounts using rudimentary AI LLM programing, it has become much harder to conduct research studies that utilize demographic polling. Internet-gathered data, especially if done anonymously has become much harder to prove if the collected data matches reality.

“NFL Expands Micro-Betting with Genius Sports, Experts Warn of Addiction.” Edited by Vlada Didenko, Mezha, Bukvy, 19 Mar. 2026, mezha.net/eng/bukvy/nfl_expands_micro-betting/.

*Note: this article acts as a follow-up piece to a news story originally published by CNN, the original CNN article is now locked under a membership paywall, so I cited this article as a free alternative. The organization behind this specific article, Bukvy, is currently based out of Ukraine. Many members of their writing staff work anonymously.

Summary: NFL has recently partnered with a tech start up company called Genius Sports who are seeking to create a digital program called BetVision. This program uses AI to track individual players as they make plays around the field allowing betting spectators to quickly input small bets on well-made individual plays. This tactic being coined as “micro-betting.” Micro-betting with AI systems is not new to the sports-world, as entire sportsbook rooms of AI assisted gameplay screens have been popping up in hotels and casinos across the country in recent years. However, this partnership between the NFL and Genius Sports sets a precedent of sportsbook style micro-betting potentially becoming an integrated part into official NFL game viewing. The Mezha article goes on to cite from medical experts how this integration could pose a danger to the American public by increasing risks of gambling addiction.

Why this matters: As seen through tactics like micro-betting, tech companies can use AI to take manipulative business strategies like gambling, and be able to conduct them at an even more insidious and wide-spread level than previously seen. Based on the article, the NFL is likely going ahead with their partnership with Genius Sports- despite even the controversy of legitimizing a method of gambling, because of a record total thirty-billion-dollar profit from last year’s football season just from bets alone. Additionally, because the NFL is the most watched sports entertainment in America, their partnership is incredibly dangerous to the entertainment industry broadly as it may encourage other media outlets to embrace AI in a similarly exploitative way.

Desouza, Kevin C. “Analyzing the Passage of State-Level AI Bills.” Brookings, 14 Jan. 2026, www.brookings.edu/articles/analyzing-the-passage-of-state-level-ai-bills/.

Summary: This article examines how legislation at State level governments are passing or rejecting AI bill proposals based on a multitude of considered factors; representative and State community political leanings, business sector regulation, clashing ideology between state institutions, as a few noteworthy examples. The results of the study indicate that richer and more educated states have more failures in AI regulation bills passing mainly because of legislative congestion, (there are more bills being proposed than ability to consider and pass them) While States with stronger business networking and less poverty have fewer failed AI bill proposals.

Why this is important: This kind of data is important to analyze because AI regulation is a proposed solution many are considering for some of the problems caused by AI usage or proliferation, having an understanding of what State governments are currently doing about AI and why gives a more nuanced perspective on what is being considered more in regulation and where.

Walker, Carla, and Ian Goldsmith. “From Energy Use to Air Quality, the Many Ways Data Centers Affect US Communities.” World Resources Institute, 17 Feb. 2026, www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts.

Summary: This article further contextualizes the current data center boom in the US and the economic and political reasoning for this rapid development, as well as covering in-depth potential impacts of the building of these data centers for nearby local communities such as air, water, and noise pollution, and how States and organizations involved with construction and development plans have been working to find solutions to these issues.

Why this matters: While previous articles posted to this site offer information on data center development in Michigan, this article offers a wider picture of the US as a whole. Giving broader context to the issue country wide, additionally, the article goes further in detail on the social and environmental impacts of these new data center projects on surrounding communities, as well as potential solutions.

Blum, Karen. “Ai Is Enabling Robots to Assist in Surgery. What to Know.” Healthjournalism.Org, Association of Health Care Journalists, 17 Sept. 2025, healthjournalism.org/blog/2025/09/ai-is-enabling-robots-to-assist-in-surgery-what-to-know/.

Utilizing several peer reviewed research articles, this journal from the AHCJ summarizes, as of it’s publishing, important advancements in robotic surgery due to rapid development of AI. The article details how a fully designed and trained robot surgeon, SRT-H was able to independently and perform a gallbladder surgery without human intervention with complete success. Additionally, more advances are being done in China to create incredibly advanced robotic arms to assist human surgeons in procedures with minimal patient risk.

Landry Signé, Hanna Dooley, et al. “AI Drives New Opportunities and Risks in Space.” Brookings, 23 Jan. 2026, www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-drives-new-opportunities-and-risks-in-space/.

This article shows how the advancement in AI has impacted the space market and technological advancements for space exploration. Both positively, in how it has brought more efficient and faster machines to the International Space Station for example, while also bringing some unforeseen challenges like weakening system cybersecurity.