Pamela Minnoch

On 15 July, a regulation comes into force in China that has had far less coverage than it deserves. While most of the AI commentary this year has gone to model releases and benchmark wars, five Chinese government agencies quietly finished something with a much longer shelf life: a full lifecycle regulation for AI that acts emotionally human. The rule is called the Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, jointly issued in April...

Most weeks, the AI stories that land in my feed are about what these systems might take from us. Jobs, privacy, trust, the energy it takes to run a single query. I read them because I have to, because understanding the risks is part of building anything responsibly. But every so often a story comes along that is good news without any asterisk, and I want to give it the same attention we give the bad ones. This is one of those stories. Edward Kang is seventeen. He's a senior at Bergen County...

And I say that as someone who used to use them constantly, which probably makes me a hypocrite but also, I think, makes me a useful witness. Because I know exactly what is happening when I reach for shorthand instead of the full phrase. It is not efficiency. It is comfort. The term is already loaded in my brain, already familiar, and unpacking it feels like extra effort I do not always bother to make. I am working on that. But first, let me tell you what prompted this. I was in a meeting...