The New Yorker

The New Yorker 2026-05-31-1

The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.

Twelve professors put AI use at 50 to 90 percent of student writing and read the loss as the end of thinking, but the one calm voice, a CS instructor, already moved his course from writing code to grading AI-written code that is correct or subtly wrong. Generation was always the proxy; judgment was the skill, and the essay just got unbundled from it. The same gap drives enterprise AI, where generation is solved and verification was never built, which puts the pricing power in AI-resistant assessment and evaluate-the-output training rather than in another tutoring app.

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education-ai ai-cognitive-dependency credential-disruption verification-infrastructure evaluation harness-as-moat cognitive-offloading evalrig-adjacent ai-and-human-capacity eval-as-infrastructure new-yorker

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Jay Caspian Kang The New Yorker Jane Sloan Peters Bryan Caplan ChatGPT

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The New Yorker 2026-04-26-1

When Your Digital Life Vanishes

DriveSavers' ransomware recoveries went 6x in two years: under 50 in 2023, nearly 300 in 2025, with the firm's ransomware lead naming AI directly as the multiplier turning unsophisticated IT operators into sophisticated attackers. Buried in the same New Yorker piece: data center proliferation is wildly inflating storage costs, AI agents are now "notorious" for accidental deletions, and HDD lifespan stays flat at seven years even as Seagate ships 44TB drives. The cloud-abundance narrative has the order book pointed the wrong way — the AI revolution is also a data destruction revolution, and the recovery industry is the only place reading the signal correctly.

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ai-economics ai-cybersecurity agentic-ai-viability ai-infrastructure memory reliability ai-security saas-margins memory-chips new-yorker whitespace-adjacent

The New Yorker 2026-04-26-2

A.I. Is Making Influencing Even Faker

A 300,000-member Facebook group, organized Discord pornbot mentorships, and a fictional Army recruiter with a million followers reveal the same structural shift: race, body type, and demographic archetype have become A/B-testable parameters in attention monetization, with measurable conversion lift. The contrarian read isn't whether brands should use synthetic creators — it's that every brand running influencer marketing now has undisclosed synthetic exposure and zero audit infrastructure to price the liability. The provenance gap shows up brand-side, not consumer-side: consumers tolerate fake; CFOs underwriting the next campaign cannot.

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synthetic-media creator-economy ai-identity content-provenance platform-strategy advertising ai-displacement ai-trust-signals new-yorker ai-content-markets ai-1.0-defensibility saas-margins agentic-ai-viability brand-strategy consulting whitespace-adjacent