This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A four-hour legislative committee hearing in June, punctuated by applause and anger, offered a window into the growing backlash against data centers. The prospect of unchecked development has galvanized a cross-section of Ohioans, urban and rural, Democrat and Republican, alarmed about the spread of the giant computing facilities. Residents are demanding that local governments impose bans and moratoria on data centers while gathering signatures for a statewide ballot measure that could go before voters in 2027. Leading the push is an eclectic group from rural Southern Ohio, including an outdoor-tourism guide, a lawyer and others who fear that the state’s data center boom is changing their communities faster than they can respond. “Especially on America’s 250th anniversary it’s your job to make sure there’s life for another 250,” Nikki Gerber, the tourism guide, said at the June 1 statehouse hearing. Data centers powered by fossil fuels are a rising source of planet-warming emissions. But for many opponents, the concerns are closer to home: They fear that data centers will change the look and feel of familiar landscapes and threaten local air and water. Resistance to data centers is spreading across the country, especially against the supersize complexes being built to support artificial intelligence. The issue is emerging as a focal point in the November midterm elections, with about 40 local ballot measures in seven states, according to Ballotpedia. Ohio has the most, with 21, including 10 communities set to vote next month on local restrictions on data centers: Conneaut, Defiance, Granville, Oregon, Pataskala, Piqua, Sunbury, Upper Sandusky, Trenton, and Urbana. The Ohio campaign stands out because the Columbus region has become one of the nation’s data center development hot spots. If opponents prevail in Ohio, the outcome could reverberate beyond the state. But Gerber is not thinking about the national stakes. Her focus is the 1.3-gigawatt data center that Amazon Web Services wants to build about 15 miles from her campground. She’s worried about what the project could do to the area’s water levels and biodiversity. Inside Climate News visited her business, Moondoggie Liveree, tucked into the woods near Ohio Brush Creek, which flows into the Ohio River in Adams County. Gerber’s office is an open-air shed left behind by a previous owner, with walls covered with knickknacks, bumper stickers and signs. Among the messages: “Watch! 4 Turtles! Caution!” The business rents campsites, canoes and kayaks, and assists hikers. “Everybody thinks Ohio’s flat,” she said. “But it’s not, and it’s a really, really special area out here.” The office of Moondoggie Liveree, a business that supports camping, kayaking and outdoor tourism.Dan Gearino/Inside Climate News Gerber is a local leader in promoting Adams County—one of Ohio’s poorest counties based on median household income—as a destination for outdoor tourism. She’s worried that the proposed data center could open the door to more projects, transforming the rustic landscape into an industrial zone. She bought her property after working for years as a medical assistant. During the offseason, she builds rental cabins around the region. After learning about the proposed Amazon data center early this year, she grew frustrated by what she saw as a lack of details from the local government. Adams County officials did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In neighboring Brown County, also one of the poorest counties in the state, attorney Austin Baurichter left his job at a law firm office in Cincinnati, partly because he didn’t want to work on behalf of data center developers. He opened his own practice and connected with Gerber and others looking for answers about the projects. They seem to have little in common. Gerber spends most of her day outdoors in flip-flops and shorts, while Baurichter is an early-career lawyer, usually dressed in a suit and tie. But they share a dedication to the cause. Gerber is “the living embodiment of the sparkle emoji,” Baurichter said, interviewed by phone from his home office. He praised her energy and optimism. The two are among the half-dozen people at the core of Conserve Ohio, the organization leading a statewide campaign for a data center moratorium. Austin Baurichter testifies before the Select Committee on Data Centers on June 1 in Columbus, Ohio, asking lawmakers to listen to concerns about out-of-control development.The Ohio Channel via Inside Climate News Baurichter has grown frustrated with local governments, which he says are becoming more hostile toward data center opponents. He argues that some officials “got bamboozled” by developers early on, sometimes signing nondisclosure agreements and supporting projects without understanding the ramifications. He approaches his activism with intensity, bringing his legal skills into the fight, filing public-records requests and questioning officials at public meetings. > “We would rather you fight for our honor than for scraps that are being > offered by people who know what they’re offering [is] scraps.” In late September, he was there when the Ohio General Assembly voted on a temporary pause in the state’s gasoline tax. Data center opponents, along with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, a former director of the state health department, urged lawmakers to pass a measure pausing data center development that day. Majority Republicans declined to take up the issue. Ohio political blogger D.J. Byrnes, who writes The Rooster newsletter about Ohio politics, captured video of Baurichter speaking on the sidelines with state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, a Cleveland-area Democrat. Baurichter admonished her for not doing more. “We would rather you fight for our honor than for scraps that are being offered by people who know what they’re offering [is] scraps,” he said. His conversations at the statehouse underscored his sense that leaders are not listening. “It’s exhausting, like throwing your energy down a black hole,” he said soon after. The legislature responded to public concerns last spring by creating the Select Committee on Data Centers. The panel has met five times, including the June 1 hearing, and has gathered feedback from local officials, data center companies, and the public. “We’re committed to being a good neighbor—operationally, economically, and in how we engage with communities across the state,” Thor Underdahl, data center and energy public policy manager for Meta, said at a June 4 committee hearing. Craig Sundstrom, head of energy and sustainability policy for Amazon Web Services, testified about the jobs and investment that data centers could bring. He pushed back against concerns about their water use, saying claims about excessive water consumption are false. An Amazon data center “uses less water than a few car washes do annually,” he said. State Rep. Adam Holmes, a Republican from a rural district in the east-central part of Ohio, is the committee’s co-chair. In an interview, he said that legislators are in a fact-finding phase, trying to understand how the state can reap the economic benefits of development while addressing the issues raised by voters. “It’s overwhelming the amount of money that’s coming, and it’s coupled with this historic transformation in technology that we’re facing,” he said. “The change is dramatic; that creates a lot of anxiety.” Ohio Rep. Adam Holmes, co-chairman of the Select Committee on Data Centers, speaking on the House floor.Ohio General Assembly via Inside Climate News Holmes wants to make sure consumers are protected from potential increases in electricity and water bills tied to data centers’ demand for those resources, he said. But he’s still figuring out how to approach proposals that would pause development. He noted that both Acton, the Democratic nominee, and her Republican opponent, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, support some form of a moratorium. That said, candidates differ on what could come next. On her campaign website, Acton has called for greater transparency, ending state incentives for data centers and restricting where they can be built. This is in addition to a moratorium that would give lawmakers time to establish new rules. Ramaswamy, a former presidential candidate and prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, has proposed making electricity free for residents of communities with data centers and strictly enforcing clean-air and clean-water rules for the projects. He supports pausing development until state law clearly protects consumers. “Despite my opponents’ claims, I’m not ‘pro-data center,’” he said on his campaign website. “I’m pro-Ohio, and I have a plan to fix the problem.” Conserve Ohio leaders are skeptical of both candidates. They question whether politicians, especially Republicans, can withstand pressure from gigantic tech companies and Trump. The Trump administration has a stake in Ohio’s data center debate because the federal government owns the land that would host the largest data center in the country, Ports Technology Campus near Piketon, which is not far from Adams and Brown counties. When fully built, the project would require 10,000 megawatts of electricity. A proposed natural-gas power plant would supply 9,200 megawatts, with an additional 800 megawatts that may come from other sources. The federal government is working with SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate, to develop the site, with OpenAI expected to be its primary user. Even though Ports Technology Campus is a short drive from where Gerber and Baurichter live, the project is almost too large for them to comprehend, and its federal ownership makes it difficult to challenge, they said. So far, the proposal has drawn little opposition in Pike County, which, like Adams and Brown counties, has struggled to attract jobs for decades. Data center opponents are focusing on several dozen hot spots where resistance is strongest. Conserve Ohio advises local activists on how to obtain public records. In return, local activists help gather signatures for a statewide moratorium vote. As of Oct. 2, the campaign has collected about 140,000 signatures of the roughly 410,000 needed to qualify for the ballot, Baurichter said.The campaign is too late to make the November ballot, meaning the earliest the issue could go before voters is 2027. Polling suggests the campaign has public support. A survey released by Bowling Green State University’s Democracy and Public Policy Network found that 75 percent of residents opposed data center construction in their communities, while 63 percent oppose such projects anywhere in Ohio and 55 percent oppose them anywhere in the United States. Ohio has emerged as one of the country’s leading data center markets, ranking among the top five states for development based on the number of projects and their electricity demand, according to industry research firms. Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate research firm, ranks Columbus third among US data center markets behind Virginia and Portland and Eastern Oregon. Much of the development has happened in New Albany, a suburb northeast of Columbus. Amazon and Meta were among the companies that built large data centers in New Albany in the 2010s. Today, rows of buildings filled with computer equipment, surrounded by muddy construction sites, occupy much of the city, as The Columbus Dispatch showed in a recent video. For data center opponents, New Albany is an example to be avoided. An aerial view of Google’s New Albany data center campus in Central Ohio. Google via Inside Climate News Michael Thomas, CEO of Cleanview, a research firm that tracks power plants and data centers, said that the Columbus-New Albany area is attractive for data centers because of its abundant electricity and close proximity to many of the nation’s population centers. “Ohio has cheaper power than most other states, and historically the state and its utilities have offered generous incentives and easy permitting,” he said in an email. Back on Gerber’s property, she led a tour of Ohio Brush Creek, where the water level was unusually low. The area, she said, has suffered from drought broken up by flooding, making her wary of projects that may affect the region’s water. The campaign has cost Gerber time and added to her stress, but she sees those costs as small compared with what is at stake. She believes this fight will determine the future of Adams County. “It’s overwhelming,” she said.

As our tech overlords continue pumping more resources into AI development and innovation—responsibly, of course—they’re facing a massive trust gap: the people they want to use the tech keep asking who the technology is actually for. Is it for those who clamor for a surveillance state? Is it meant to help us compete with other nations? Or is it for replacing employees—and deciding which ones should lose their job? A vast majority of these decisions are made by wealthy men in government and industry.  According to a study released Wednesday by Harvard University researchers, which included a survey of more than 5,000 US adults, women reported that they are habitually excluded from those conversations—let alone the decision-making—compared to men. Women are disproportionately concentrated in jobs most vulnerable to automation by AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini—more than 80 percent of women face such risks, according to the National Partnership of Women and Families—and were more likely to say they didn’t have sufficient access to information and training about how the tools are used in their workplaces. It’s therefore no surprise that the study found women less likely to trust AI tools, and the information they did get about them, than men. (The researchers note that most respondents identified as men or women, and that the analysis therefore “centers on these two groups, though we recognize that not everyone identifies within a gender binary.”) “Independent researchers rank among our respondents’ most trusted sources on AI, and caution is part of what they offer,” Laura Manley, the executive director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center told me. The US employment landscape offers little government or industry regulation on how employers incorporate AI technology into the workplace, or what specific products are promoted to the public. But women are “rarely quoted as experts,” Manley continued—according to data the researchers collected from July 2025 to June 2026, among the well over 100,000 experts cited in domestic news coverage of AI, men appeared 4.3 times more often than women. AI tools, the study found, were disproportionately seen as by and for men—women weren’t seen to have the same level of authority or perceived expertise on the technology, and male and female respondents in the study agreed that “men’s needs and perspectives are better represented in AI development and AI-generated content.” Women, meanwhile, were more likely to report concern and skepticism around AI: a sentiment many leading figures at the world’s largest AI firms do not want to hear, and an especially unwelcome perspective in a sector where a leading AI CEO—and the world’s richest man—already loves to complain about feminism. > Feminism and lack of children has killed the happiness of so many women > > — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 29, 2026 AI, in other words, is a boys’ club—and some of its leading figures like it that way.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is developing a generative artificial intelligence tool to find patterns across data reported to a national vaccine monitoring database and to generate hypotheses on the negative effects of vaccines, according to an inventory released last week of all use cases the agency had for AI in 2025. The tool has not yet been deployed, according to the HHS document, and an AI inventory report from the previous year shows that it has been in development since late 2023. But experts worry that the predictions it generates could be used by HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to further his anti-vaccine agenda. A long-standing vaccine critic, Kennedy has upended the childhood vaccination schedule in his year in office, removing several shots from a list of recommended immunizations for all children, including those for Covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A and B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Kennedy has also called for overhauling the current safety monitoring system for vaccine injury data collection, known as Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), claiming that it suppresses information about the true rate of vaccine side effects. He has also proposed changes to the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that could make it easier for people to sue for adverse events that haven’t been proven to be associated with vaccines. Jointly managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration, VAERS was established in 1990 as a way to detect potential safety issues with vaccines after their approval. Anyone, including health care providers and members of the public, can submit an adverse reaction report to the database. Because these claims are not verified, VAERS data alone can’t be used to determine if a vaccine caused an adverse event. > “I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a > need for a lot of skilled human follow-through.” “VAERS, at best, was always a hypothesis-generating mechanism,” says Paul Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was previously a member of the CDC’s Advisory Council on Immunization Practices. “It’s a noisy system. Anybody can report, and there’s no control group.” Offit says the system only shows adverse events that happened at some point following immunization; it doesn’t prove that a vaccine caused those reactions. CDC’s own website says that a report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine caused an adverse event. Despite this, anti-vaccine activists have misused VAERS data over the years to argue that vaccines are not safe. Leslie Lenert, previously the founding director of the CDC’s National Center for Public Health Informatics, says government scientists have been using traditional natural language processing AI models to look for patterns in VAERS data for several years, so it’s not surprising that HHS would move toward the adoption of more advanced large language models. One major limitation of VAERS is that it doesn’t include data on how many people received a vaccine, which can make events logged in the database seem more common than they actually are. For that reason, Lenert says it’s important to pair information from VAERS with other data sources to determine the true risk of an event. LLMs are also famously good at producing convincing hallucinations, underscoring the need for humans to follow up on any hypotheses generated by an LLM. “VAERS is supposed to be very exploratory. Some people in the FDA are now treating it as more than exploratory,” says Lenert, who is currently the director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Health Artificial Intelligence at Rutgers University. Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, reportedly proposed stricter vaccine regulation in a recent memo sent to staff in which he blamed the deaths of at least 10 children on the Covid-19 vaccine without citing evidence. The deaths were reported to VAERS and had previously been reviewed by FDA staff. More than a dozen former FDA commissioners responded with a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine, expressing concern about Prasad’s proposed guidelines. The changes, they wrote, would “dramatically change vaccine regulation on the basis of a reinterpretation of selective evidence.” Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at Georgetown University, says that the use of LLMs could potentially detect previously unknown safety issues with vaccines. But since VAERS can contain inaccurate and incomplete data, he says it’s important that any leads are thoroughly investigated first. “I would expect, depending on the approaches used, a lot of false alerts and a need for a lot of skilled human follow-through by people who understand vaccines and possible adverse events, as well as statistics, epidemiology, and challenges with LLM output,” he says. With deep staffing cuts at the CDC, Goodman says it would be important to have plans and capacity in place to deal with any emerging data, including screening it and deciding what may need to be studied further and how. In the past, VAERS has flagged legitimate safety issues, including instances of a rare clotting disorder among some people who received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and rare cases of myocarditis, particularly among younger males, who got the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

As the Trump administration continues to violently occupy Minnesota, the role of the defense tech firm Palantir—which continues to sell its data mining, automation, and surveillance technology to ICE—is coming under increasing scrutiny. A new tool, launched Thursday, follows the money making it happen. Palantir Payroll, the product of an effort by the campaign Purge Palantir, compiles data from FEC filings to account for the two-way cash flow: from the government to Palantir via contracts, and from company executives to elected officials.  The campaign’s Jacinta González, head of programs at the progressive communications shop MediaJustice, says the tool helps bring to light Palantir’s business model to “operate in the shadows” through lobbying and political donations. Palantir makes roughly half of its revenue through government sales, including a $30 million deal last April to build an “Immigration OS” to facilitate ICE’s “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens,” according to the Washington Post. According to internal communications reviewed by WIRED, Palantir then began a six-month pilot supporting ICE in three major areas: “Enforcement Operations Prioritization and Targeting,” “Self-Deportation Tracking,” and “Immigration Lifecycle Operations focused on logistics planning and execution.” The program was renewed in September for an additional six-month period.  Earlier this month, 404 Media reported that Palantir is working on a tool for ICE that “populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address.” The tool reportedly obtains many target addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services—the White House granted ICE access to data on Medicaid enrollees last summer.   González has been organizing against immigrant detentions and deportations since the George W. Bush administration, under which ICE was founded; she says she’s seen over time how ICE adopted surveillance technology and data, and that Palantir Payroll “gives us the clarity to be able to demand something different.”  There are other valuable kinds of collective action around ICE’s suppliers, González says—she has seen students kicking out technology corporations holding recruiting events on campus and organizing at investor briefings within the financial sector—but even fundamental information about those firms’ funding and relationships with ICE can fly under the radar. In fact, as a Monday report in Wired notes, Palantir’s own employees—some of whom are openly disturbed by the firm’s ICE collaboration—rely on outside news reports for information on their employer’s practices. CTO Akash Jain reportedly responded to one query about Palantir’s work with ICE by saying that the company does “not take the position of policing the use of our platform for every workflow.” That attitude defines the company’s leadership. As Sophie Hurwitz wrote in Mother Jones last February, CEO Alex Karp said on an investor call following stock price surges that the company “is here to disrupt…and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” Since Palantir’s founding in 2003—the same year as ICE—by Karp and right-wing megadonor Peter Thiel, its tech has also reportedly been used to help make “kill lists” for the Israel Defense Forces. González says that successive governments, Democrats included, have let the Palantir-DHS relationship grow entrenched: Since 2013, Palantir has provided ICE with the systems it currently uses to look through people’s information through a network of federally and privately-owned databases. Elected officials, meanwhile, continue to take Palantir’s money. The top six Palantir-funded politicians—via the company’s corporate PAC or individual contributors employed there—are Donald Trump, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) The campaign includes a pledge for elected officials to commit to refusing Palantir-linked donations in the lead-up to the midterm elections.  “The only way that we’re able to win against a company that has as much power and influence as Palantir, is if as many people get involved as possible,” she said.

Yesterday I published a story about what was quickly becoming a surprising site of capital R Resistance: the Letterboxd review page for the $75 million documentary film, Melania. Comments were profane, fun, silly, unprintable. I included some of my favorites. The point I was making was this: Even before the movie’s release this Friday, it has become a lightning rod for anger, not least because Melania Trump’s oligarchic private premiere gala at the White House came the same day Alex Pretti was shot dead in the streets of Minneapolis amid her husband’s disastrous siege of the city. A real let-them-eat-cake moment. But as my colleague Arianna Coghill went to promote the story today on our social media channels, she discovered the reviews have been wiped from the site entirely. Wiped clean. Sad. So I sent an email to the Letterboxd press team asking why. What terms were violated? When did that happen? Even though the reviews appeared before the official release of the film, how is Letterboxd to know reviewers hadn’t seen the film itself? They haven’t gotten back to me, and I’ll share their response when they do. But I presume they’ll hit me with their Terms of Service, which prohibit using Letterboxd to “game the Service’s mechanics,” “alter consensus,” or “participate in orchestrated attacks against films or filmmakers.” Letterboxd also asserts the “absolute discretion” to remove any post. Any account can be suspended for “any reason or no reason whatsoever, with or without notice.” Letterboxd is also pretty clear in its FAQ: “Letterboxd is for reviews of films you’ve seen, not those you want to see,” and it encourages people to flag “pre-release reviews,” which, it says, “we’ll remove at our discretion.” It also says its undisclosed platform magic helps ensure its ratings are less vulnerable to being abused in online campaigns “to accurately represent the global consensus for each film”—but says people are welcome to report those suspected of waging such a campaign. I guess we’ll have to wait until Friday, when the “global consensus” will begin to take shape—I suspect somewhat quickly. Meanwhile, as if pocketing $28 million for just 20 days of being followed by filmmakers wasn’t grifty enough, Melania went on Fox News this morning to sermonize about “unity” after the Pretti killing—beneath a banner promoting her new film, bearing her own name. Subtle. > .@FLOTUS: "We need to unify. I'm calling for unity. I know my husband, the > President, had a great call yesterday with the Governor and the Mayor… If you > protest, protest in peace. We need to unify in these times." > pic.twitter.com/oj3skxpAYf > > — Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 27, 2026

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. California lawmakers are considering two bills that would slash red tape for households looking to add certain types of clean tech. Earlier this month, Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, whose district includes San Francisco, introduced legislation that would make it easier for individuals to adopt all-electric, super-efficient heat pumps (SB 222) and plug-in solar panels (SB 868). “The cost of energy is too high,” Wiener told Canary Media.  “We want to lower people’s utility bills; we want people to be able to participate in the clean energy economy; and we want people to be able to take control of their energy future. And that’s what these bills do.” The proposals come as Americans are in the grip of a worsening cost-of-living crisis—of which energy is a key driver. > “We should empower people to use this technology. And right now, it’s too > hard.” Electricity costs have grown at about 2.5 times the pace of persistent inflation, and home heating costs are expected to surge this winter. In California, which has the second-highest electricity rates in the nation, the problem is particularly pressing. Heat pumps and plug-in solar panels could help. Heat pumps—air conditioners that also provide all-electric heat—are about two to five times as efficient as gas furnaces without those appliances’ planet-warming and health-harming pollution. Even in California, where gas is relatively inexpensive compared with electricity, a heat pump’s high efficiency can enable households to save on their energy bills, especially when tapping the sun for cheap, abundant power. Enter portable, plug-and-play solar panels. These modest systems, which users can drape over balcony railings or prop up in backyards, allow renters, apartment dwellers, and others who can’t put panels on their roofs to harvest enough of the sun’s rays to power a fridge or a few small appliances for a fraction of the day. A connected battery can save solar energy for use at night. The tech is booming in Europe. In Germany, for example, where people can order kits via Ikea, as many as 4 million households have hung up Balkonkraftwerke, or  “balcony power plants.” There, households can cover as much as one-fifth of their energy needs using these systems. In the US, an 800-watt unit for $1,099 can save a household as much as $450 annually in states with higher electricity prices like California, according to the Washington Post. But unlike those in Germany, US households typically need to apply for an interconnection agreement with their utility before they can install these systems—just as they would for adding a rooftop solar array. That process often requires fees, permits, and an inspection, and it can take weeks to months. Only one state allows residents to install plug-in solar without a utility’s permission: deep-red Utah. > Permitting in some cities  “is way too lengthy and onerous and expensive.” Lawmakers elsewhere are now stampeding to make plug-in solar available to their constituents. Besides Utah and now California, legislatures in more than a dozen states want to unleash the tech: Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington have all introduced bills, according to Cora Stryker, co-founder of plug-in solar nonprofit Bright Saver, which has been advising some states on their proposals. Based on conversations the organization has had with state representatives, Stryker said she expects a whopping half of US states to introduce bills this year. “We should empower people to use this technology,” Wiener said.  “And right now, it’s too hard. The idea that you have to get an interconnection agreement with the utility to put…plug-in solar on your balcony—it makes no sense.” Administrative hurdles are also holding back heat pumps. “The current permitting process is difficult,” Aaron Gianni, president of Larratt Brothers Plumbing in San Francisco, told state policymakers on January 6.  “As a contractor dealing with more than 109 different building departments in the Bay Area, we must navigate the nuances of each: different inspectors, changing paperwork requirements, high fees, and strict setbacks [that] sometimes make installation impossible.” The situation can be even worse when a customer lives in a unit governed by a homeowners association, Gianni said.  “Many HOAs have outright prevented new electric equipment from being installed.” Wiener, who is running for US Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s seat and boasts a tongue-in-cheek MAGA fan club, put it bluntly. Permitting in some cities  “is way too lengthy and onerous and expensive.” “The [heat-pump] bill creates a streamlined path to be able to get a quick, automatic permit,” he explained. It would also loosen restrictions on equipment placement, cap permit fees at $200, and make it illegal to ban heat pumps. Wiener’s heat-pump legislation, which has some industry detractors as well as grassroots supporters, has already passed out of the California Senate’s housing and local-government committees. The plug-in solar bill has yet to come up for any votes. Still, with energy affordability shaping up to be a decisive issue in the 2026 midterm elections, both proposals  “have, I think, a real possibility of passing,” Wiener said. “These technologies are a win-win-win, and enabling access to them is simply good government.”

There’s a picture of myself that I had saved on my desktop for years; I suppose we could call it a caricature. A little more than a decade ago, someone on a Nazi messageboard pulled a photo of me from social media, then updated it with some antisemitic flair: a little cartoon rat sitting on my shoulder, a yellow Judenstern pinned on its tiny body. Referencing what Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust is meant to be a humiliation; the goal isn’t hard to figure out, given that the whole star patch thing is near-medieval in both its imagery and its aims. Unfortunately for the messageboard user, the rat was adorable, making the overall effect of the illustration really, really cute—like I had a lovable ratty little sidekick. I kept the image for a long time, until I eventually lost it to the sands of time and the need to clean my computer’s desktop. > “Generative AI has fueled a surge in deepfake abuse.” Of course, there have been other, much worse, manipulated images of me out there, which I’m deliberately not describing because it would probably please their creators. As long as the social internet has existed, some of its users have wanted to deface, sully, and degrade images of women. The methods used to effect that outcome range from the slapstick—hello, Herr Rat—to the truly vile. When I first started working at the feminist website Jezebel, a semi-common practice from troll messageboard users was to masturbate on a writer’s photo, then email her a picture of the results. In 2014, the site dealt with a barrage of disgusting and graphic photos in our comments, often featuring pictures of female corpses. The same year, scores of celebrity nude photos were hacked and leaked online, with a subreddit dedicated to sharing the photos left up for almost a full week—making violation of both the living and the dead an ongoing theme.  Websites that produce deepfake nude images have also existed for several years. In 2024, a Guardian investigation found that these sites contained faked images of thousands of celebrities and other women, which were then often uploaded to porn sites. The problem was clearly snowballing, the paper wrote: “In 2016, researchers identified one deepfake pornography video online. In the first three-quarters of 2023, 143,733 new deepfake porn videos were uploaded to the 40 most used deepfake pornography sites—more than in all the previous years combined.”  And now, of course, there’s Grok, the generative AI tool created by Elon Musk’s X, which has been embroiled in a scandal over users using its new graphics-editing feature to create gross images of women—and, crucially, to put those manipulated images on Twitter, where other people can see them, because attempted public humiliation is the goal. Those manipulated images have reportedly included one of the dead body of Renée Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, slumped over the wheel of her car, in a bikini.  All of this adds up to a chilling and global picture, experts say, one sometimes referred to as “technology-facilitated gender-based violence.” And while the problem is very old, generative AI is making things much worse, said Kalliopi Mingeirou, the chief of UN Women’s Ending Violence Against Women section.  “Generative AI has fueled a surge in deepfake abuse,” she told me in a statement, “with women comprising the overwhelming majority of victims.” Mingeirou added that a December 2025 UN Women report found that almost one in four women working as human rights defenders, activists, or journalists had “reported experiences of AI-assisted online violence.”  “Urgent regulation and safety-by-design are essential,” Mingeirou added, “to ensure AI advances women’s rights rather than undermining their safety and participation.” > “Many of the victims are feminists who dare criticize the phenomenon.”  Carrie Goldberg, an attorney who often represents victims of sexual abuse, trolling, stalking, and revenge porn, says deepfaked images come up regularly in her practice. The earliest iteration were images of actresses being turned into deepfaked porn, but the problem didn’t stop there. Today, “the main sets of victims coming to us are kids deepfaking kids,” she told me, “and then anonymous trolls creating deepfakes to sextort their target into giving them actual nudes. I know of one case on Discord where a targeted child was coerced down a very dark road that began with somebody threatening her with a deepfake he’d made.” “We have observed popular online personalities getting targeted a lot,” Goldberg adds, “and of course this recent spate on X, many of the victims are feminists who dare criticize the phenomenon.”  In the United States, there are both state and federal laws designed to address the harms caused by “nonconsensual intimate imagery” (NCII), another common term to describe both real nudes and deepfakes distributed online. In March 2025, President Trump signed the “Take It Down Act,” a bipartisan bill criminalizing the distribution of NCII and requiring platforms to remove such images within 48 hours of a victim’s request. The bill was introduced by Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), after an incident in Texas where a high schooler took images of his classmates, manipulated them to appear nude, and posted them on Snapchat. California’s AB 621, also passed last year, strengthen the legal enforcements available against people who distribute—and not just create—deepfake images.  “The law has been dealing with false information and bad information for a long time,” points out David Greene. He’s the senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the preeminent digital rights and privacy group in the United States. “We have structures in place for balancing the competing free speech and harm interests when dealing with false information.”  But law isn’t the only response. It’s always advisable, Greene says, “to urge the companies to look for tech solutions… some way they can do something to make it harder to make these images.” Other AI image generators, he points out, “do have filters in place,” more than Grok seems to.  When it comes to tech companies fixing the very problems they’ve created, Greene doesn’t see “relying on their good faith” as the sole solution. “As with any bad actions by a company, consumers and users only have so many points of leverage,” he says. “People fleeing the site, or other ways of exerting financial pressure on the company, those will probably be more effective than trying to appeal to [Musk’s] feelings, and certainly to his ethics.”  With sexualized deepfakes, Greene adds, it’s important not to lose sight of why they’re being created in the first place. If “women tend to disproportionately be victims, then it’s probably part of a larger sociological phenomenon,” he says, of harm to women not being “evaluated as being as harmful as it actually is.” True to form, tech companies aren’t leading the way to a less disgusting future. In recent tweets, Musk clarified that Grok should, as he put it, “allow upper body nudity of imaginary adult humans (not real ones) consistent with what can be seen in R-rated movies on Apple TV.” In a cryptic post, Musk also recently declared that Grok should “have a moral constitution.” He didn’t elaborate.

On Sunday, Palantir CEO Alex Karp announced that the company, which counts Peter Thiel as its chairman, and is doing work for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will have a “Neurodivergent Fellowship.” The X post sharing this news noticeably did not have captions, making it inaccessible for some disabled people. > While cross-country skiing this morning, Dr. Karp decided to launch a new > program: The Neurodivergent Fellowship. > > If you find yourself relating to him in this video — unable to sit still, or > thinking faster than you can speak — we encourage you to apply. > > The final round of… pic.twitter.com/2Xdrc13uj5 > > — Palantir (@PalantirTech) December 7, 2025 Neurodivergent people face barriers when it comes to employment in all industries, due to biases about disability and failure to give adequate accommodations. Disabled people can also very much participate in technofascism and also lateral ableism of other disabled people—as I previously reported, Elon Musk is very strong example of this—and this fellowship will do nothing to break down barriers that neurodivergent people face. Virginia Tech professor Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism, noted to me that some disabled people being seen as better than other disabled people is not new. Hans Asperger, after all, chose which autistic people were worth saving and which children were sent to their death under the Nazi regime. “Disabled people know keenly the dangers of surveillance technology, about what it means to be reduced to data and misread, and the societal impetus to scrutinize our lives and lived expertise,” Shew told me. “It’s a terrible shame that disability gets the most celebration and investment when it is coopted by corporate and industrial interests.” “Being a disabled token for a morally questionable industry is by no means a step toward disability liberation or true inclusion of any sort, but rather leads us in the other direction,” Shew added. University of North Carolina at Charlotte assistant professor Damien P. Williams, who researches how technologies are impacted by values, concurs with Shew that this fellowship is very harmful. “A ‘neurodivergent fellowship’ at a corporation like Palantir isn’t meaningful inclusion or representation so much as it’s an exercise in having an often punitively surveilled population be complicit in making platforms of weaponized surveillance, to build and be the systems and tools of their own and others’ oppression,” Williams said. Looking at how the job is described, Seton Hall University assistant professor Jess Rauchberg—who researches the cultural impacts of digital media technologies— finds that the fellowship dives into harmful tropes of neurodivergent people. “Some of the language the job call uses about neurodivergent people as ‘able to see past performative ideologies’ reinforces really dangerous rhetoric that disabled people aren’t human,” Rauchberg told me. “It also presents neurodivergent people using the supercrip trope: that these are disabled people whose ‘savant’ status makes them not like other disabled people, especially intellectually and developmentally disabled people.” Shew, in general, feels “pretty gross about most neurodiversity hiring programs.” Shew notes that these programs tend to misunderstand the neurodivergence umbrella and focus on autism. “These programs are rarely about thinking bigger about how to include people with a range of disabilities and neurotypes in all places and still reify impairment models in how they describe the hired workers, which too easily results in situations where people hired in this model cannot meaningfully advance and are seen in specific and limiting ways,” Shew continued.

In the summer of 2019, a group of Dutch scientists conducted an experiment to collect “digital confessions.” At a music festival near Amsterdam, the researchers asked attendees to share a secret anonymously by chatting online with either a priest or a relatively basic chatbot, assigned at random. To their surprise, some of the nearly 300 participants ­offered deeply personal confessions, including of infidelity and experiences with sexual abuse. While what they shared with the priests (in reality, incognito scientists) and the chatbots was “equally intimate,” participants reported feeling more “trust” in the humans, but less fear of judgment with the chatbots. This was a novel finding, explains Emmelyn Croes, an assistant professor of communication science at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. Chatbots were then primarily used for customer service or online shopping, not personal conversations, let alone confessions. “Many people couldn’t imagine they would ever share anything intimate to a chatbot,” she says. Enter ChatGPT. In 2022, three years after Croes’ experiment, OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence–powered chatbot, now used by 700 million people globally, the company says. Today, people aren’t just sharing their deepest secrets with virtual companions, they’re engaging in regular, extended discussions that can shape beliefs and influence behavior, with some users reportedly cultivating friendships and romantic relationships with AIs. In chatbot research, Croes says, “there are two domains: There’s before and after ChatGPT.” Take r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, a Reddit community where people “ask, share, and post experiences about AI relationships.” As MIT Technology Review reported in September, many of its roughly 30,000 members formed bonds with AI chatbots unintentionally, through organic conversations. Elon Musk’s Grok offers anime “companion” avatars designed to flirt with users. And “Friend,” a new, wearable AI product, advertises constant companionship, claiming that it will “binge the entire [TV] series with you” and “never bail on our dinner plans”—unlike flaky humans. The chatbots are hardly flawless. Research shows they are capable of talking people out of conspiracy theories and may offer an outlet for some psychological support, but virtual companions also have reportedly fueled delusional and harmful thinking, particularly in children. At least three US teenagers have killed themselves after confiding in chatbots, including ChatGPT and Character.AI, according to lawsuits filed by their families. Both companies have since announced new safety features, with Character.AI telling me in an email that it intends to block children from engaging in “open-ended chat with AI” on the platform starting in late November. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, is suing OpenAI for copyright violations.) As the technology barrels ahead—and lawmakers grapple with how to regulate it—it’s become increasingly clear just how much a humanlike string of words can captivate, entertain, and influence us. While most people don’t initially seek out deep engagement with an AI, argues Vaile Wright, a psychologist and spokesperson for the American Psychological Association, many AIs are designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible to maximize the data we provide to their makers. For instance, OpenAI trains ChatGPT on user conversations (though there is an option to opt out), while Meta intends to run personalized ads based on what people share with Meta AI, its virtual assistant. “Your data is the profit,” Wright says. Some advanced AI chatbots are also “unconditionally validating” or sycophantic, Wright notes. ChatGPT may praise a user’s input as “insightful” or “profound,” and use phrases like, I’m here for you—an approach she argues helps keep us hooked. (This behavior may stem from AI user testing, where a chatbot’s complimentary responses often receive higher marks than neutral ones, leading it to play into our biases.) Worse, the longer someone spends with an AI chatbot, some research shows, the less accurate the bot becomes. People also tend to overtrust AI. Casey Fiesler, a professor who studies technology ethics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, highlights a 2016 Georgia Tech study in which participants consistently followed an error-prone “emergency guide robot” while fleeing a building during a fake fire. “People perceive AI as not having the same kinds of problems that humans do,” she says. At the same time, explains Nat Rabb, a technical associate at MIT’s Human Cooperation Lab who studies trust, the way we develop trust in other humans—perception of honesty, competence, and whether someone shares an in-group—can also dictate our trust in AI, unlike other technologies. “Those are weird categories to apply to a thermostat,” he says, “But they’re not that weird when it comes to generative AI.” For instance, he says, research from his colleagues at MIT indicates that Republicans on X are more likely to use Grok to fact-check information, while Democrats are more likely to go with Perplexity, an alternative chatbot. Not to say AI chatbots can’t be used for good. For example, Wright suggests they could serve as a temporary stand-in for mental health support when human help isn’t readily accessible—say, a midnight panic attack—or to help people practice conversations and build social skills before trying them out in the real world. But, she cautions, “it’s a tool, and it’s how you use the tool that matters most.” Eugene Santos Jr., an engineering professor at Dartmouth College who studies AI and human behavior, would like to see developers better define how their chatbots ought to be used and set guidelines, rather than leaving it open-ended. “We need to be able to lay down, ‘Did I have a particular goal? What is the real use for this?'” Some say rules could help, too. At a congressional hearing in September, Wright implored lawmakers to consider “guardrails,” which she told me could include things like stronger age verification, time limits, and bans on chatbots posing as therapists. The Biden administration introduced dozens of AI regulations in 2024, but President Donald Trump has committed to “removing red tape” he claims is hindering AI innovation. Silicon Valley leaders, meanwhile, are funding a new PAC to advocate for AI industry interests, the Wall Street Journal reports, to the tune of more than $100 million. In short, we’re worlds away from the “digital confessions” experiment. When I asked Croes what a repeat of her study might yield, she noted that the basic parameters aren’t so different: “You are still anonymous. There’s still no fear of judgment,” she says. But today’s AI would likely come across as more “understanding,” and “empathetic”—more human—and evoke even deeper confessions. That aspect has changed. And, you might say, so have we.

I began this morning, as I do every morning, by reading my daughter a book. Today it was Arthur Dorros’ Abuela, illustrated by Elisa Kleven. Abuela is a sweet story about a girl who imagines that she and her grandmother leap into the sky and soar around New York City. Dorros does an elegant job weaving Spanish words and phrases throughout the text, often allowing readers to glean their meaning rather than translating them directly. When Rosalba, the bilingual granddaughter, discovers she can fly, she calls to her grandmother, “Ven, Abuela. Come, Abuela.” Her Spanish-speaking grandmother replies simply, “Sí, quiero volar.” Their language use reflects who they are—a move that plenty of authors who write for adults fail to make. Abuela was one of my favorite books growing up, and it’s one of my 2-year-old’s favorites now. (And yes, we’re reading my worn old copy.) She loves the idea of a flying grandma; she loves learning bits of what she calls Fanish; she loves the bit when Rosalba and Abuela hitch a ride on an airplane, though she worries it might be too loud. Most of all, though, she loves Kleven’s warm yet antic illustrations, which capture urban life in nearly pointillist detail. Every page gives her myriad things to look for and gives us myriad things to discuss. (Where are the dogs? What does Rosalba’s tío sell in his store? Why is it scary when airplanes are loud?) I’ve probably read Abuela 200 times since we swiped it from my parents over the summer, and no two readings have been the same. I don’t start all my days with books as rich as Abuela, though. Sometimes, my daughter chooses the books I wish she wouldn’t: ones that have wandered into our house as gifts, or in a big stack someone was giving away, and that I have yet to purge. These books have garish, unappealing computer-rendered art. Some of them have nursery rhymes as text, and the rest have inane rhymes that don’t quite add up to a story. One or two are Jewish holiday-oriented, and a couple more are tourist souvenirs. Not a single one of these books has a named author or illustrator. None of their publishers, all of which are quite small, responded to my requests for interviews, but I strongly suspect that these books were written and generated by AI—and that I’m not supposed to guess. The maybe-AI book that has lasted the longest in our house is a badly illustrated Old MacDonald Has a Farm. Its animals are inconsistently pixelated around the edges; the pink circles on its farmer’s cheeks vary significantly in size from page to page, and his hands appear to have second thumbs instead of pinkies. All of these irregularities are signs of AI, according to the writer and illustrator Karen Ferreira, who runs an author coaching program called Children’s Book Mastery. On her program’s site, she warns that because AI cannot create a series of images using the same figures, it generates characters that are—even if only subtly—dissimilar from page to page. Noting this in our Old MacDonald, I checked to see whether it was copyrighted, because the US copyright office has ruled out copyright for images created by machine learning. Where other board books have copyright symbols and information—often the illustration and text copyright holders are different—this one reads only, “All rights reserved.” It’s unclear what these “rights” refer to, given that there is no named holder; it’s possible that the publisher is gesturing at the design, but equally possible that the statement is a decoy with no legal meaning. > What makes a good children’s book, and how much does it matter if a children’s > book is good? I have many objections to maybe-AI books like this one. They’re ugly, whereas all our other children’s books are whimsical, beautiful, or both. They aren’t playful or sly or surprising. Their prose has no rhythm, in contrast to, let’s say, Sandra Boynton’s Barnyard Dance! and Dinosaur Dance!, which have beats that inspire toddlers to leap up and perform. (The author-illustrator Mo Willems has said children’s books are “meant to be played, not just to be read.”) They don’t give my daughter much to notice or me much to riff on, which means she gets sick of them quickly. If she chooses one, she’s often done with it in under a minute. It gives me a vague sting of guilt to donate such uninspiring books, but I still do, since the only other option is the landfill. I imagine they’ll end up there anyway. But I should admit that I also dislike the books that trigger my AI radar—that uncanny-valley tingle you get when something just seems inhuman—out of bias. I am a writer and translator, a person whose livelihood is entirely centered and dependent on living in a society that values human creativity, and just the thought of a children’s book generated by AI upsets me. Some months ago, I decided I wanted to know whether my bias was right. After all, there are legions of bad children’s books written and illustrated (or stock photo–collaged) by humans. Are those books meaningfully and demonstrably different from AI ones? If they are, how big a threat is AI to quality children’s publishing, and does it also threaten children’s learning? In a sense, my questions—not all of which are answerable—boil down to this: What makes a good children’s book, and how much does it matter if a children’s book is good? I’m not the only one worried about this. My brother- and sister-in-law, proud Minnesotans, recently sent us a book called Count On Minnesota—state merch, precisely the sort of thing that’s set my AI alarms ringing in the past—whose publisher, Gibbs Smith, includes a warning on the back beside the copyright notice: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies and systems.” Count On Minnesota is nearly wordless and has no named author, but the names of its artist and designer, Nicole LaRue and Brynn Evans, sit directly below the AI statement, reminding readers who will be harmed if Count On Minnesota gets scraped to train large vision models despite its copyright language. In this sense, children’s literature is akin to the many, many other fields that generative AI threatens. There’s a danger that machines will take authors’ and illustrators’ jobs, and the data sets on which they were trained have already taken tremendous amounts of intellectual property. Larry Law, executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, told me that his organization’s member stores are against AI-created books—and, as a matter of policy, refuse to stock anything they suspect or know was generated by a large language or vision model—because “as an association, we value artists and authors and publishers and fundamentally believe that AI steals from artists.” Still, Law and many of GLIBA’s members are comfortable using AI to streamline workflow. So are many publishers. Both corporate publishing houses and some reputable independent ones are at least beginning to use AI to create the marketing bibles called tip sheets and other internal sales documents. According to industry sources I spoke to on background, some corporate publishers are also testing large language and vision models’ capacities to create children’s books, but their attempts aren’t reaching the market. The illustrations aren’t good enough yet, and it’s still easier to have a human produce text than to make a person coach and edit a large language model. > “Kids are weird! They’re joyfully weird, and if you spend time with them and > are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can > really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross.” Other publishers, meanwhile, are shying away. Dan Brewster, owner of Prologue Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio—a shop with an explicit anti-AI policy—told me, “The publisher partners we work with every day have not done anything to make me suspect them” of generating text or illustrations with AI; many, he added, have told him, “‘You’re never going to see that from us.’” (Whether that’s true, of course, remains to be seen.) In contrast, Brewster has grown more cautious in his acquisitions of self-published books and those released by very small independent presses. He sees these as higher AI risks, as does Timothy Otte, a co-owner and buyer at Minneapolis’ Wild Rumpus, a beloved 33-year-old children’s bookstore. Its legacy and reach, he says, means they “get both traditionally published authors and self-published authors reaching out asking you to stock their book. That was true before AI was in the picture. Now, some of those authors that are reaching out, it is clear that what they’re pitching to me was at least partly, if not entirely, generated by AI.” Otte always says no, both on the grounds Law described and because the books are no good. The art often has not just inconsistencies, but errors: Rendering models aren’t great at getting the right number of toes on a paw. The text can be equally full of mistakes, as children’s librarian Sondra Eklund writes in a horrified blog post about acquiring a book about rabbits from children’s publisher Bold Kids, only to discover that she’d bought an AI book so carelessly produced that it informs readers that rabbits “can even make their own clothes…and can help you out with gardening.” (Reviews of Bold Kids’ hundreds of books on Amazon suggest that its rabbit book isn’t the only one with such issues. Bold Kids did not respond to repeated efforts to reach them for comment.) The text of more edited AI books, meanwhile, tends to condescend to young readers. Otte often sees books whose authors have “decided that there is a moral that they want to give to children, and they have asked a large language model to spit out a picture book that shows a kid coming up against some sort of problem and being given a moral solution.” In his experience, that isn’t what children want or how they learn. “Kids are weird!” Otte says. “They’re joyfully weird, and if you spend time with them and are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross. The number of times I’ve seen kids make a stank face at a book that’s telling them how to be!” > AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make > high-quality contemporary board books go extinct. But is a lazy, moralizing AI book any worse than a lazy, moralizing one written by a person? When I put this question to Otte, the only distinction he could come up with was the “ancillary ethical concerns of water usage and the environmental impact that a large language model currently has.” Other book buyers, though, pointed out that while AI can imitate a particular writer or designer’s style or mash multiple perspectives together, it cannot have a point of view of its own. Plenty of big publishers create picture books and board books—which are simple, sturdy texts printed on cardstock heavy enough to be gnawed on by a teething 8-month-old—in-house, using stock photos and releasing them without an author’s name. Very rarely is the result much good, and yet each publisher does have its own visual signature. If you’re a millennial, you can likely close your eyes and summon the museum-text layout of the pages in a DK Eyewitness book. It’s idiosyncratic even if it’s not particularly special. To deny our children even that is to assume, in a sense, that they have no point of view: that they can’t tell one book from another and wouldn’t care if they could. Frankly, though, I’m less concerned with the gap between bad AI and bad human than I am with the yawning chasm between bad AI and good human, since bad children’s books by humans are the ones more likely to become rarer or cease existing. If rendering models get good enough that corporate publishers stop asking humans to slap together, let’s say, stock-photo books about ducks, those books could, in theory, vanish. That doesn’t mean Robert McCloskey’s canonical, beautiful Make Way for Ducklings will go out of print. But it’s much less expensive to publish a book that was written years ago than it is to pay an author and illustrator for something new. It’s also less expensive to print a picture book like Make Way for Ducklings than a board book, with its heavier paper and nontoxic (again: gnawing baby) inks. AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make high-quality contemporary board books go extinct. > Only instinct and imagination can tell you what Sandra Boynton means when she > writes in ‘Dinosaur Dance!’ that “Iguanodon goes dibbidy DAH.” It doesn’t help that everyone from parents to publishers is susceptible to undervaluing board books. It’s very difficult to argue that the quality of a picture book doesn’t matter, since they are the ones that most children use to learn to read. But it’s easy to dismiss board books, which are intended for children not only too young to read, but too young to even follow a story. Can’t we just show a baby anything? According to Dr. John Hutton, a pediatrician and former children’s bookstore owner who researches the impact reading at home has on toddlers’ brain function and development, we shouldn’t. In fact, we should avoid reading our kids anything that bores us. Beginning in utero, one of the greatest benefits of shared reading is bonding, and unsurprisingly, Hutton has found that the more engaged parents are in the book they’ve chosen, the greater its impact on that front. But reading to babies is also important, he explained, because the more words a child hears, the greater their receptive and expressive vocabularies (that is, the words they know and can say) will be. This, starting around age 1, lets parents and children discuss the books they’re reading, a process that Hutton told me “builds social cognition and later dovetails with empathy.” It does this by training children’s brains to connect language to emotion—and to do so through imagination. Hutton presented this as vital neurological work. “Nothing in the brain comes for free,” he told me, “and unless you practice empathy skills—connecting, getting along, feeling what others are feeling—you’re not going to have as well-developed neural infrastructure to be able to do that.” It’s also a social equalizer. Research has shown that reading aloud exposes children whose parents have lower income levels or educational backgrounds to more words and kinds of syntax than they might otherwise hear—and, Hutton notes, this isn’t a question of proper syntax. Rather, what matters here is creativity. Some of the best board books out there bend or even invent language—only instinct and imagination can tell you what Boynton means when she writes in Dinosaur Dance! that “Iguanodon goes dibbidy DAH”—and this teaches their little listeners how to do the same. Of course, not all good board books’ strength is linguistic. Ideally, Hutton says, a book’s text and illustrations should “recruit both the language and visual parts of your brain to work together to understand what’s going on.” From ages 6 months to 18 months, my daughter was enamored with books from Camilla Reid and Ingela Arrhenius’ Peekaboo series, which have minimal text, cheery yet sophisticated illustrations, and a pop-up or slider on each page. My daughter loved it when I read Peekaboo Pumpkin to her, but she also loved learning to manipulate it herself. It was visually and tactilely appealing enough to become not just a book, but a toy—and it was sturdy enough to do so. She’s got plenty of other books with pop-ups, but Peekaboo Pumpkin and Peekaboo Lion are the only ones she hasn’t more or less destroyed. Reid and Arrhenius publish with Nosy Crow, a London-based independent press. I reached out to ask if the company was concerned about AI threatening its business and got an emphatic no from its preschool publishing director and senior art director, Tor England and Zoë Gregory. England immediately highlighted the physical durability of Nosy Crow’s books. “We believe in a book as an object people want to own,” she said, rather than one meant to be disposable. They invest in them accordingly: England and Gregory visit Arrhenius in Sweden to discuss new ideas and often spend two or three years working on a book. Neither fears that AI could compete with the quality of such painstaking work, which, for the most part, is entirely analog. Some of Nosy Crow’s books do make sounds, though—something I generally hate, but I make an exception for the shockingly realistic toddler giggle in What’s That Noise? Meow! Gregory told me that while working on that book, she couldn’t find a laugh she liked in the sound libraries Nosy Crow normally uses, so she went home, set her iPhone to record, and tickled her daughter. > A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues > disproportionately to the elite. But somebody shopping on Amazon won’t hear that giggle. Nor can an online shopper identify a shoddily printed book, which may well be cheaper than Nosy Crow’s but will certainly withstand less tugging and chewing before it falls apart. A risk that Otte and the other buyers I spoke to identified—and while it serves booksellers’ interests to say this, it is also an entirely reasonable projection—is that while independent bookstores and well-curated libraries will continue to stock high-quality books like Nosy Crow’s, Amazon, which is both the largest book retailer and the largest self-publishing service in the nation, will grow ever fuller of AI dreck. If corporate publishers turn to AI to write and illustrate their board books, this strikes me as very likely to occur. It would mean that parents with the time and resources to browse in person would be likely to provide significantly higher-quality books to their pre-reading-age children than parents searching for “train book for toddlers” online. A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues disproportionately to the elite. In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao writes that technology revolutions “promise to deliver progress [but have a] tendency instead to reverse it for people out of power, especially the most vulnerable.” She argues that this is “perhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence.” The key word here is perhaps. As of now, AI children’s books are on the fringes of publishing. Large publishers can choose to keep them that way. Doing so would be a statement of conviction that the quality and humanity of children’s books matter, no matter how young the child in question is. When I asked Hutton, the pediatrician, what worried him most about AI books, he mentioned the example of “lazy writing” they set, which he fears might disincentivize both hard work and creativity. He also pointed to an often-cited MIT study showing that writing with ChatGPT dampened creativity and less fully activated the brain—that is, it’s bad for the authors, not just the readers. Then he said, “You know, there are things we can do versus things we should do as a society, and that’s where we struggle, I think.” On this front, I hope to see no more struggle. We should not give our children, whose brains are vulnerable and malleable, books created by computers. We shouldn’t give them books created carelessly. That’s up to parents and teachers, yes—but it’s also up to authors, illustrators, designers, and publishers. Gregory told me that “there’s a lot of love and warmth and heart” that goes into the books she works on. Rejecting AI is a first step toward a landscape of children’s publishing where that’s always true.