AI is significantly impacting software development. Programmers write code. Their job is to translate product specifications into text a computer can understand, compile, and execute. There is some room for programming creativity to architect an application to simplify future maintenance or improve performance. However the most creative aspects of digital product development (e.g., mobile, wearable, web, and desktop apps) involve humans, from identifying their challenges when contemplating a product to gathering feedback when refining it. Successful digital products require a team of creative, critical thinkers. A typical team includes product owners, designers, developers, project managers, quality assurance specialists, and marketers.
In recent years, low-code and no-code tools have become more capable, making it possible for non-developers to create prototypes and proofs of concept. AI is taking that to another level with its ease of building and the capabilities of the resulting product.
Quantity versus quality in this new era
Firebase Studio and tools like it generate code, not a black box. Suppose the product fails to meet requirements for any reason. It can then either be regenerated from an altered prompt or maintained like a traditional software project by engineers skilled in the projects programming language. That kind of troubleshooting and maintenance will benefit from a trained developers knowledge and experience.
Im in favor of tools that help people get ideas out of their heads and onto a device where others can interact with it and provide feedback. Cocktail napkins may be relegated to their more limited wicking roles. But these new capabilities have the potential to rapidly expand the number of available digital products (web products, apps in the App Store, etc.). We could face a quantity over quality challenge with significantly more rough products obscuring the diamonds. Marketing teams will face a greater challenge boosting their product above the noise to be noticed.
Technology and the role of human creativity
The promise for non-developers is compelling, but what about professionals? Digital product professionals with extensive digital product development experience will benefit from advanced AI tools for design exploration, code generation, and test authoring. Drawing on experience, those professionals can direct AI tools to produce higher-quality results than someone with less experience directing the same tools. Lessons learned from prior experience should result in better prompts and, ultimately, better products. A powerful tool in the hands of someone who knows how to wield it can produce excellent results.
A cautionary tale
Decades ago, I was involved in the third rewrite of a struggling software product in the education market. The business owners were convinced their products problems were tied to their programming language choice. It was early in my career, and the migration was to a language I enjoyed, so I didnt think to ask questions.
As with previous rewrites, the feature set remained essentially the same. The basic architecture remained the same. And the team driving the requirements remained the same. Not surprisingly, the rewrite results were also the same. The product was not noticeably faster or easier to use, and customers didnt like it any more than the previous version.
I learned an important lesson from the project. Technology by itself (in that case, a programming language) rarely moves the product success needle. Solving the right problem with the right basic approach, driven by user feedback and the marketing skills and budget to spread the word, has a far greater impact on the results. The same is true for AI. It is a fantastic tool that bestows the superpower on unskilled people to make really awful software products faster than they ever could before.
Beyond programming: Solve the right problem with empathy
While greater accessibility for non-developers and more powerful tools for skilled professionals are positive, the outlook isnt all rosy. Currently, AI is best at building products when specific instructions are given. The more detail we provide, the better the results. That is very similar to the programmers role. Businesses that currently thrive by turning detailed specifications into functioning software products have the most to lose when AI tools most closely match their skillset.
There is much more to digital product development than programming. Our clients value creative thinking, critical thinking, empathy, and a passion for creating compelling user experiences. Those characteristics are vital in ensuring were solving the correct problems for our clients. Less programming effort will be required to build digital products. However, for the foreseeable future, there will still be a significant need for the distinctly human creativity and skills that make products great.
Brad Weber is the founder and president of InspiringApps.
As a wave of state-level retirement mandates quietly rolls out across the country, most small businesses arent prepared. More than 30 states have proposed mandates that would require small businesses to offer a retirement plan, and 10 states already have active state-sponsored retirement plans.
California, the largest state economy, is leading the charge. By the end of this year, all California businesses with at least one employee must offer their employees a retirement benefit, either a 401(k) or enrollment in the state-run CalSavers program. By the end of 2025, those that dont could end up paying fines of up to $750 per employee, with more penalties added annually until they comply.
That would be troubling on its own. But in a recent Guideline survey of California small business owners, 75% werent familiar with CalSavers and 65% didnt know about the fines. While the intention behind the legislation is good, the execution is falling short.
Expanding access to retirement savings is important. About 7.5 million Californians lack access to a workplace retirement plan, and most of them work for small businesses. But when 98% of firms in the state have fewer than 100 employees, poor execution turns into a statewide problem.
Whats happening in California is just the beginning. For small business owners across the country, this is a preview of whats coming nextfrom hidden compliance traps to unexpected penalties. The result: Policies meant to help workers are instead creating confusion, compliance headaches, and financial risk for the countrys most vulnerable employers.
A system designed without small businesses in mind
Many small business owners I talk to want to help their employees and offer retirement benefits. But theyre also stretched thin, juggling HR, payroll, complianceand now, state-level mandates that come with little warning and even less education.
In Guidelines survey, 70% of California small business owners said managing a 401(k) is too complex, and 51% said its too expensive. Yet most had never heard of the SECURE 2.0 tax credits, which can cover 100% of the administrative cost of a 401(k) for the first three years. Thats a clear failure in communication.
So instead of unlocking access, these well-intentioned policies are creating traps: rules most businesses dont know about, with fines they can’t afford.
The fine print matters
Meanwhile, many small businesses are defaulting to state-run programs like CalSavers, which are designed to be a simple option, but not necessarily a long-term solution. These programs dont allow employer contributions and come with limited plan options. According to Guideline research, 47% of employers who tried CalSavers shared that their employees thought the set up and management were difficult to use.
Thats why many employers nationally are opting to offer their own 401(k) plans instead. Its not because they have to, but because they want to attract talent, retain employees, and build long-term loyalty. When the playing field is levelmeaning tax credits, modern tech, and low-cost plans are accessiblesmall businesses can offer big-company benefits.
What small businesses should do now
Whether or not your state has a mandate, its worth paying attention to whats happening in California. Here are some helpful tips for any small business owner:
Check your states retirement rules. You might be surprised to learn whats already in place.
Consider your options. You dont have to default to a state-run program, especially when a private 401(k) could cost less than you think.
Review federal tax credits. If you qualify, you might get your plan fully paid for over the next few years.
Dont wait for a fine to start planning. Retirement benefits are becoming important, as a cost of doing business, and may provide a competitive edge in hiring.
Mandates shouldnt be a minefield
Retirement access can be critical. But when small businesses are blindsided by mandates, miss deadlines they didnt know existed, and face unexpected fines, were not expanding accesswere undermining it.
For small businesses to succeed, we need to design policies with their reality in mind. That means better communication, simpler solutions, and real financial support, not just penalties. Because when small businesses thrive, so can their employees.
Kevin Busque is cofounder and CEO at Guideline.
It’s not just youPride is a lot less corporate this year, and one company sees it as an opportunity to adjust how it serves the LGBTQ+ community during June.
What was once a month full of colorful ads, temporary rainbow-hued logos, and big-name brands committing ad dollars and sponsorship money to Pride efforts throughout June, is now seeing big businesses dialing down their monetary support for Pride initiatives, fearing political backlash.
Companies like Target, Walmart, PepsiCo, and Anheuser-Busch, have largely rolled back their pride-themed products and donations to pride-related events.
But not all companies are pulling their pride initiativesand one New York brewery is taking an entirely different approach to how businesses actually show up for the LGTBQ+ community. This month, Williamsburg-based Brooklyn Brewery will be giving away 25 grants of $1,000 each to trans, nonbinary, or two-spirit New Yorkers.
In an email to Fast Company, Brooklyn Brewery president Robin Ottaway said direct donations to members of a vulnerable communitywho overall had higher odds than their cisgender counterparts for income at or below 200% of the federal poverty levelfelt like a better way to use money that would typically go to ads.
OR , —where 22%, or 1 in 5 LGBTQ+ adults in the United States live in poverty, compared to an estimated 16% of their straight and cisgender counterparts—
We looked at what wed typically spend on advertising during Pride Month and realized that money could have a much more meaningful impact if it went directly to the people who need it most, Ottaway wrote. Instead of running flashy ads we are choosing to redirect that [money] into direct aid.
For the effort, called Brooklyn Brewery Supports, the company is partnering with Angelica Christina, an LGBTQ+ activist who serves on the board of the nonprofit Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative. Christina has worked with the brewery in the past through the organization’s Certified Safe Space initiative, as well as for the brewerys Stonewall IPAwhich has been the official beer of NYC Prides events for the past three years.
Trans folks, non-binary, and two spirit folks are often denied job opportunities or denied access to affordable housing,” Christina says. I am a formerly homeless person, and so I know how difficult it is to survive in such a large metropolitan city like New York, especially when you’re pushed into the brink of poverty.
Christina is leading the effort’s outreach to the city’s trans community to get word out about the grants. She’ll ultimately help choose recipients and share their stories on social media, if they’re willing.
To apply, people can either nominate themselves or someone else (21 or older) via a Google form that includes space to explain what a nominee plans to do with grant money. Christina notes that the money will ideally help recipients with rent, medical bills, groceries, and other basic needs.
She says the brewery’s focus on direct aid and connection with the city’s LGBTQ+ community was what sold her on the partnership when Brooklyn Brewery approached her about it.
There is not a day that goes by where Brooklyn Brewery does not support this community, Christina said. Whereas other corporations will put up a pride flag for Pride Month, but then for the rest of the year, we’re ignored.”
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If youre a founder, raising money is as high stakes as it gets. For a startup, capital can be the difference between scaling and failing.
Ive raised rounds from under $1 million (yes, thats how things were done back in the day) to over $200 million, in timeframes varying from months, to a tightly orchestrated two weeks, to getting preempted with a term sheet. The lessons I learned from our hardest fundraise, our Series A, have stuck with me the most. I endured 29 nos before I heard a yes, and only in retrospect was it clear that it didnt have to be that way.
I knew raising our Series A would be tough; I wasnt a lawyer and had no reputation as a founder, and hardly anyone was investing in the legal tech industry. This might be surprising today, with legal tech venture investments approaching $2 billion in Q1 2025 alone, but in 2015, legal tech was more of a curiosity than it was a software category.
On the flip side, we had built a strong product and were on our way to a real business, with over $2 million in annual revenues. Some of the countrys top law firms and more than half of U.S. state attorneys general were using our e-discovery solution to quickly pinpoint key evidence in the millions of documents they reviewed during litigation and investigations. I put together a pitch that highlighted the tough problems we had solved and the big opportunity ahead.
The need for experimentation
As I drove up and down the highways of Silicon Valley in my 1999 Nissan Altima, pitching to venture capitalists (VCs), a pattern emerged. Rarely did I hear an immediate no; VCs were interested. I would be invited back for meetings with increasingly senior folks, only to eventually be let down for a variety of reasons: They didnt have an investment thesis about legal, the market wasnt big enough, and so on.
But each one felt so close. I kept refining my pitch and delivery, squeezing out a bit more interest each time, seemingly just one meeting away from the golden ticket.
I was wrong.
Twenty-nine rejections later, there was no denying it. Somewhere in my Altima along Highway 101, with just a few names left on my list, I knew I had to change my approach. I realized I had made a big mistake: I had focused on refinement rather than experimentation.
When a company is small, fundraising is intensely personal and emotionally daunting. If you cant raise money for the team, it feels like you are letting them down. This pressure yields an interesting dampening effect: Because raising is so critical, every meeting could be the one, so you feel compelled to deliver your best performance.
Thus, as the rejections mounted, the stakes felt ever higher. Given the positive signals I had gotten in prior VC pitches, it felt reckless to risk that meeting with an experimental approach, so I delivered the practiced spiel that had gotten me so close in the pastwith the same results.
Had I crashed and burned early on in the process, experimenting would have been obvious. Instead I was deluded by proximity to success. Fundraising is not a popularity contest; you dont need a lot of likes, you need one love.
Rethink everything
And that meant I had to rethink everything. Even if it meant lowering my chances of success in the next few pitches, I had to believe it would get me to a better overall outcome. If you asked me about technological disruption, I could have told you in a heartbeat that big changes rarely happen incrementally, but I hadnt generalized that lesson to business. Incremental improvement might work (for a while) if youre a market leader, but any other situation requires constant experimentation and reinvention to do your best. You have to be willing to take some short-term losses to earn bigger long-term gains, evenor especiallywhen it matters the most. When it came to raising money, it took me a mere 29 rejections to relearn this lesson.
So I went for broke and restructured my entire pitch.
Instead of trying to convince VCs about the opportunity in legal, I used analogies to industries they were much more familiar with, so that they could pattern-match better. Instead of showcasing all the rich functionality we had built (which, frankly, they didnt seem to care much about), I spoke more conceptually about our vision to build a platform in a space that didnt have one.
In other words, instead of educating VCs about my language, I learned to speak theirs. Were these obvious and sensible changes? Yes. The revelation wasnt so much the changes I was making to the pitch, but their magnitude and my willingness to make them.
After months of failure, I wasnt prepared for how quickly things improved. My new approach immediately resonated with VCs. Within a week, I had a term sheet from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most reputable VCs. Now, a16z deserves plenty of credit: They had some experience with the legal process and understood its potential, and were one of the few firms that viewed my PhD in computer science more favorably than they would have the JD I didnt have. It was also clear that my new pitch struck a chord and framed the company in the right light; we sailed by the usual roadblock questions in the final meeting. With a16zs investment, we were off to the races.
Nearly a decade later, our business serves more than 1,000 customers and brings in 9-figures of revenue a year. Its now clear how pivotal that raise was for our company. It was also a massive growth moment for me as a founder. It taught me to have an exploratory mindset, whether its to new product areas, markets, or technologies. Experimentation is at the heart of progress, and its essential when the stakes are the highest.
AJ Shankar is founder and CEO of Everlaw.
Singles are increasingly turning to AI to boost their odds in the dating world.
According to a new study, just over a quarter (26%) of singles are using artificial intelligence to enhance their dating lives. Thats a 333% increase from 2024.
Match and the Kinsey Institute surveyed around 5,000 U.S. singles between the ages of 18 and 98 for their 14th annual Singles in America study. The findings show that nearly half of Gen Z singles have already used AI in their dating lives, whether to shape their profiles, craft conversation starters, or screen for compatibility.
So if youve been active on dating apps recently, theres a good chance you werent flirting with just a person. You were flirting with AIor at least with someone getting a little help from it.
AIs role in modern dating is only growing. Looking ahead, nearly half (44%) of all singles say they want AI to help filter potential matches, and 40% want help optimizing their profiles. Even Gen X, the group least likely to use AI for dating (only 15%), is showing a rising interest in AI-powered matchmaking.
“AI isn’t replacing intimacy, it’s giving singles an edge,” said Dr. Amanda Gesselman, psychologist at Kinsey and Match’s director of sex and relationship science, in the press release. “For a generation overwhelmed by options, tools that bring clarity and efficiency are more than welcome.”
That sense of overwhelm is widespread. Nearly half of singles (47%) report feeling dating burnout, while 54% say the modern dating landscape leaves them emotionally drained. AI is stepping in as a potential wingman, with apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble already introducing AI features designed to improve the dating experience.
Hinge recently launched an AI-powered coaching tool to help users refine their prompt responses. No more pineapple belongs on pizza as your most controversial opinion, please. For a limited time, Tinder even let users test out pick-up lines on an AI chatbot before using them in real conversations, through a feature called The Game Game, developed in collaboration with OpenAI.
If all this has you ready to delete the apps and swear off dating altogether, youre not alone. The study found that 46% of singles have taken intentional breaks from dating, and two-thirds of them said those breaks helped them clarify what they truly want.
Still, its not all bad news. With or without AI, hope remains high. Seven in 10 respondents said they believe in destiny when it comes to relationships, and 73% of singles still believe in forever love. So dont give up just yet.
President Donald Trump announced, back on February 25, that his administration would soon debut a gold card, an immigration program that would allow wealthy foreigners, for the low, low price of $5 million, to become lawful permanent residents of the United States. At the time, Trump touted the program as a great and fantastic revenue generation strategy that would help reduce the national deficit, which approached $2 trillion during the most recent fiscal year.
Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card, theyll be wealthy and theyll be successful, and theyll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people, Trump said. He told reporters that gold card buyers would not be required to pay tax on their income outside the United States; that the program was totally legal and all worked out from the legal standpointand that he expected it to go live within two weeks.
Two weeks, confirmed Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, standing behind Trump in the Oval Office. When Trump estimated that the government could raise an easy $5 trillion by selling maybe a million gold cards, Lutnick was unable to suppress a chuckle of delight. Wow! he said.
Today, though, anyone hoping to relocate to a budding police state where riot cops might shoot you point-blank for looking at them is still waiting for the chance to cut a check. In mid-March, Lutnick said during a podcast interview that gold cards would be available in about two weeks, and claimed hed presold 1,000 already. (I assume these sales, to the extent they exist, are handshake deals, since the alternative would involve the Secretary of Commerce personally collecting $5 billion and stashing it God knows where.)
On April 3, Trump showed reporters a physical gold card bearing his scowling face and seismogram signature, and (again) said it would be out in less than two weeks. But the delays kept coming.
On April 11, Lutnick announced that gold cards would be available within a week and a half. On May 21, he moved the goalposts even further, revealing that a website where people can start to register for gold cards would be online in about a week.
On Thursdaythree weeks after that update, for those keeping scoreTrumpCard.gov at last went live. Trump celebrated the launch on Truth Social as a way to ride a beautiful road in gaining access to the Greatest Country and Market anywhere.
On Fox Business, Lutnick claimed to have logged 25,000 sign-ups in 15 hours. But he also acknowledged that these are waiting list spots, and that the administration is still getting everything set up. The website itself most closely resembles an especially lazy phishing attempt; its only content is a contact submission form assuring prospective buyers that the gold card is coming, and urging them to provide their email addresses to get notified the moment access opens.
The White Houses struggles to get this initiative off the ground demonstrate just how unprepared Trump is for the basic work of governing, on the rare occasions that he expresses any interest in engaging in it. A key part of his pitch to voters has always been that, as an outsider to politics, only he has the Business Guy Mindset necessary to transform the federal government from a bureaucratic morass into a slickly branded, profitable enterprise. But fulfilling his more ambitious promises is always harder than he expects. As a result, an idea that Trump once suggested would single-handedly wipe out this countrys $36 trillion national debt is, four months later, still taking the form of a bare-bones website that looks like it is soliciting interest in a new over-the-counter erectile dysfunction medication.
At the announcement earlier this year, Trump explained that gold cards would replace the existing EB-5 visa program, which allows immigrants to obtain green cards if they invest at least $800,000 (and usually more) in a new business, and create at least 10 full-time jobs in the United States. In a Cabinet meeting, Lutnick clarified that the gold card program would technically modify the EB-5 visa program, allowing buyers to obtain a license from the Department of Commerce that would entitle them to make a proper EB-5 investment. In response to a question from reporters, Trump asserted that the program does not require legislation because it allows buyers to obtain lawful permanent resident status and a very strong path to citizenship, but does not directly confer U.S. citizenship.
In news I am sure will astonish you, Trump and his handlers do not appear to have a firm grasp on the legal intricacies here. Congress, not the president, has the authority to create, modify, or end visa programs like EB-5. Federal law limits EB-5 visas to around 10,000 per year, which is of course nowhere near the million units Trump and Lutnick imagine selling in short order. The amount of the required capital investment, too, is set by statute, and nothing in th law would allow Trump to increase it to $5 million just because he feels like it. His distinction between programs that confer citizenship and programs that only confer lawful permanent resident status is nonsensical, as is Lutnicks reference to a license from the Department of Commerce. Depending on what he has in mind, Trumps promise that gold card holders will enjoy some form of VIP treatmentgreen card privileges plus, he called itprobably also hinges on Congresss willingness and ability to pass a law to that effect.
Absent congressional action, Trumps best bet for making this work might involve using his statutory authority to allow gold card buyers to enter the United States on the grounds that doing so entails a significant public benefit, since a willingness to fork over $5 million to the Treasury Department arguably qualifies as such. But this statusthe product of a legal process known as paroleis typically temporary, and is not even considered a form of admission to the United States. It also would not make gold card buyers lawful permanent residents or give them a path to citizenship, which are things that people who pay that much would reasonably expect to get in return. Given that the Trump administration has spent the last several months gleefully repudiating the very concept of parole, I understand not wanting to pay seven figures for the right to be in the country for as long as Stephen Miller feels like allowing it.
The lingering uncertainty around the programs specifics has resulted in a gold card market that is likely cooler than Trump might have imagined. Earlier this month, NPR interviewed several immigration attorneys who said theyd fielded inquiries from wealthy foreigners who are eager to pay upwhich is, to be fair, exactly what I would say if I were an immigration lawyer contacted by a national publication for comment about a program aimed at potential clients who have at least $5 million in cash.
Other experts, though, told NPR they anticipate sales in the low thousands; one explained that callers often lose interest once they find out that the $5 million is not an EB-5-style investment that they might recoup, but a de facto donation to the U.S. government. (As London School of Economics professor Kristin Surak points out, if youre a rich person looking to pick up another passport, why pay $5 million for a glorified green card when you can buy Maltese citizenship, and thus the right to live anywhere in the European Union, for about a fifth of the cost?) Nuri Katz, a Canada-based immigration consultant, told Bloomberg that he would expect a grand total of 50 to 200 applicants for Trump gold cards; more recently, in Forbes, he hypothesized that the White House is backpedaling on the proposal because it realized it would have to expend a lot of political capital in order to get this done.
Perhaps there was a time when more than a handful of people might have been interested in ponying up for green card privileges plus, whatever that may entail. But regardless of the legal form that Trump gold cards eventually take, the basic challenge of selling them will be that that they are branded with the face of an unabashed xenophobe whose administration is waging a global trade war, trying to bar foreign-born students and academics from entering the country, torpedoing international educational exchange programs, attempting to end birthright citizenship, and snatching noncitizens (and sometimes citizens) off the streets. Chances are that if you are privileged enough to be able to pay $5 million for the right to live in the United States, you are wise enough to decide that that money is better spent on something else.
Women in the U.S. are waiting longer to have babies. For the first time, the average age for giving birth has risen to nearly 30, according to a new report.
The data, which comes from the National Vital Statistics System, was published on Friday in the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics report. Per the report, the average age for giving birth rose by nearly a year from 2016 to 2023. It went from 28.7 years old to 29.6. Likewise, the age for first-time mothers increased similarly over the same time period, from 26.6 to 27.5.
Interestingly, teen pregnancies fell, too. In 2016, they accounted for 11.8% of all births. In 2023, they made up only 8.7%.
The latest findings are in line with the fact that many people are delaying marriage until later in life. According to a 2021 Pew Research report, the average age for tying the knot has risen dramatically since the 1980s. The number of U.S. adults who were married by age 21 dropped from about 33% in 1980 to 6% in 2021. And marrying by age 25 plunged, too, from nearly 66% to 22%.
However, according to the same report, people aren’t just delaying marriage until their late 20s or even 30s. About 25%a record numberwere still unmarried at 40.
Of course, the fact that it’s become massively more expensive to have a family likely plays a role in women delaying having children, or not having any at all. A recent LendingTree analysis found that since 2023, the annual cost of raising a young child has jumped by nearly 36%. In 2025, the tab is around $30,000 per year. Over 18 years, raising a child costs $300,000 (though in several states, it’s even higher).
However, women also are increasingly becoming financially independent, and perhaps decentering the goal of marriage and motherhood at the same time. In 2024, 20% of homebuyers were single women, while only 8% of single men bought their own homes last year. And a 2019 Morgan Stanley report projected that by 2030, 45% of women between 25 and 44 will be single and child-free.
U.S. women are not the only ones delaying motherhood. According to recent government data, per The Guardian, Japanese women are doing the same. In 2024, the number of births in Japan dropped by 5.7% from the previous year, to 686,061. The number marks the lowest birth rate since the recordkeeping began in 1899.
The latest data comes as the Trump administration has recently floated the idea of incentivizing childbirth by giving families a $5,000 “baby bonus” to help offset the costs. Given that the hospital bills alone for giving birth in the U.S. can average around $3,000 (for a vaginal delivery with insurance), it’s unlikely the plan will persuade too many American women to have babies before they’re financially ready and able (or even at all).
Consumer sentiment increased in June for the first time in six months, the latest sign that Americans views of the economy have improved as inflation has stayed tame and the Trump administration has reached a truce in its trade fight with China.
The preliminary reading of the University of Michigans closely watched consumer sentiment index, released Friday, jumped 16% from 52.2 to 60.5. The large increase followed steady drops that left the preliminary number last month at the second-lowest level in the nearly 75-year history of the survey. Consumer sentiment is still down 20% compared with December 2024.
Consumers appear to have settled somewhat from the shock of the extremely high tariffs announced in April and the policy volatility seen in the weeks that followed, Joanne Hsu, director of the survey, said in a written statement. However, consumers still perceive wide-ranging downside risks to the economy.
Americans have largely taken a darker view of the economys future after President Donald Trump unleashed a wide-ranging trade war, imposing steep tariffs on China, the European Union, and dozens of other countries. Yet in April Trump postponed a set of sweeping tariffs on about 60 nations and last month reached a temporary truce with China, after both sides had sharply ratcheted up tariffs on each other.
The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index, released in late May, also increased after five straight declines that were linked to anxiety over tariffs.
U.S. duties remain elevated compared with historical levels, but so far they have not worsened overall inflation. Prices rose just 2.4% in May compared with a year ago, up slightly from 2.3% in April. Still, most economists expect tariffs to hit harder in the coming months.
Consumer confidence is sharply divided by political outlook, with Republicans feeling much better about the economy under Trump than Democrats. Democratic sentiment about the economy was much higher under Biden, while Republican views were low. This month, however, sentiment did improve among supporters of both parties and independents.
Consumers’ inflation expectations basically a measure of how worried people are about future inflation dropped this month, which will be welcomed by the inflation-fighters at the Federal Reserve. Inflation expectations can become self-fulfilling, because if people worry price increases will get worse, they can take steps such as demanding higher pay that push prices even higher.
The Fed meets next week, and is expected to keep its key short-term interest rate unchanged at about 4.3%.
Christopher Rugaber, AP economics writer
As AI car crashes go, the recent publishing of a hallucinated book list in the Chicago Sun-Times quickly became a multi-vehicle pile-up. After a writer used AI to create a list of summer reads, the majority of which were made-up titles, the resulting article sailed through lax editorial review at the Sun-Times (and at least one other newspaper) and ended up being distributed to thousands of subscribers. The CEO eventually published a lengthy apology.
The most obvious takeaway from the incident is that it was a badly needed wake-up call about what can happen when AI gets too embedded in our information ecosystem. But CEO Melissa Bell resisted the instinct to simply blame AI, instead putting responsibility on the humans who use it and those who are entrusted with safeguarding readers from its weaknesses. She even included herself as one of those people, explaining how she had approved the publishing of special inserts like the one the list appeared in, assuming at the time there would be adequate editorial review (there wasn’t).
The company has made changes to patch this particular hole, but the affair exposes a gap in the media landscape that is poised to get worse: as the presence of AI-generated contentauthorized or notincreases in the world, the need for editorial safeguards also increases. And given the state of the media industry and its continual push to do “more with less,” it’s unlikely that human labor will scale up to meet the challenge. The conclusion: AI will need to fact-check AI.
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Fact-checking the fact-checker
I know, it sounds like a horrible idea, somewhere between letting the fox watch the henhouse or sending Imperial Stormtroopers to keep the peace on Endor. But AI fact-checking isn’t a new idea: In fact, when Google Gemini first debuted (then called Bard), it shipped with an optional fact-check step if you wanted it to double-check anything it was telling you. Eventually, this kind of step simply became integrated into how AI search engines work, broadly making their results better, though still far from perfect.
Newsrooms, of course, set a higher bar, and they should. Operating a news site comes with the responsibility to ensure the stories you’re telling are true, and for most sites the shrugging disclaimer of “AI can make mistakes,” while good enough for ChatGPT, doesn’t cut it. That’s why for most, if not all, AI-generated outputs (such as ESPN’s AI-written sports recaps), humans check the work.
As AI writing proliferates, though, the inevitable question is: Can AI do that job? Put aside the weirdness for a minute and see it as math, the key number being how often it gets things wrong. If an AI fact-checker can reduce the number of errors by as much if not more than a human, shouldn’t it do that job?
If you’ve never used AI to fact-check something, the recently launched service isitcap.com offers a glimpse at where the technology stands. It doesnt just label claims as true or falseit evaluates the article holistically, weighing context, credibility, and bias. It even compares multiple AI search engines to cross-check itself.
You can easily imagine a newsroom workflow that applies an AI fact-checker similarly, sending its analysis back to the writer, highlighting the bits that need shoring up. And if the writer happens to be a machine, revisions could be done lightning fast, and at scale. Stories could go back and forth until they reach a certain accuracy threshold, with anything that falls short held for human review.
All this makes sense in theory, and it could even be applied to what news orgs are doing currently with AI summaries. Nieman Lab has an excellent write-up on how The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo News, and Bloomberg all use AI to generate bullet points or top-line takeaways for their journalism. For both Yahoo and the Journal, there’s some level of human review on the summaries (for Bloomberg, it’s unclear from the article). These organizations are already on the edge of whats acceptablebalancing speed and scale with credibility. One mistake in a summary might not seem like much, but when trust is already fraying, its enough to shake confidence in the entire approach.
Human review helps ensure accuracy, of course, but also requires more human laborsomething in short supply in newsrooms that don’t have a national footprint. AI fact-checking could give smaller outlets more options with respect to public-facing AI content. Similarly, Politico’s union recently criticized the publication’s AI-written reports for subscribers based on the work of its journalists, because of occasional inaccuracies. A fact-checking layer might prevent at least some embarrassing mistakes, like attributing political stances to groups that don’t exist.
The AI trust problem that wont go away
Using AI to fight AI hallucination might make mathematical sense if it can prevent serious errors, but there’s another problem that stems from relying even more on machines, and it’s not just a metallic flavor of irony. The use of AI in media already has a trust problem. The Sun-Times‘ phantom book list is far from the first AI content scandal, and it certainly won’t be the last. Some publications are even adopting anti-AI policies, forbidding its use for virtually anything./p>
Because of AI’s well-documented problems, public tolerance for machine error is lower than for human error. Similarly, if a self-driving car gets into an accident, the scrutiny is obviously much greater than if the car was driven by a person. You might call this the automation fallout bias, and whether you think it’s fair or not, it’s undoubtedly true. A single high-profile hallucination that slips through the cracks could derail adoption, even if it might be statistically rare.
Add to that what would probably be painful compute costs for multiple layers of AI writing and fact-checking, not to mention the increased carbon footprint. All to improve AI-generated textwhich, lets be clear, is not the investigative, source-driven journalism that still requires human rigor and judgment. Yes, we’d be lightening the cognitive load for editors, but would it be worth the cost?
Despite all these barriers, it seems inevitable that we will use AI to check AI outputs. All indications point to hallucinations being inherent to generative technology. In fact, newer “thinking” models appear to hallucinate even more than their less sophisticated predecessors. If done right, AI fact-checking would be more than a newsroom tool, becoming part of the infrastructure for the web. The question is whether we can build it to earn trust, not just automate it.
The amount of AI content in the world can only increase, and we’re going to need systems that can scale to keep up. AI fact-checkers can be part of that solution, but only if we manageand accepttheir potential to make errors themselves. We may not yet trust AI to tell the truth, but at least it can catch itself in a lie.
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California’s top insurance regulator on Thursday launched an investigation into State Farm over the company’s handling of claims from the January Los Angeles-area wildfires.The investigation comes after survivors of the Palisades and Eaton fires said that the state’s largest home insurer was delaying and mishandling claims regarding damage to their homes and possible contamination from smoke.The blazes destroyed thousands of buildings around Los Angeles, killed 30 people and displaced thousands of others. They were estimated to be among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said the investigation will review whether the company complied with state consumer protection and claim-handling laws.“Californians deserve fair and comprehensive treatment from their insurance companies,” the Democrat said in a statement. “No one should be left in uncertainty, forced to fight for what they are owed, or face endless delays that often lead consumers to give up.”State Farm, which has about 1 million home insurance customers in California, said it will cooperate with the state’s review. The insurer has received roughly 13,000 claims related to the fires and has paid out about $4 billion to customers, the company said.“We’re here to help our customers recover and we empathize with those who are rebuilding their lives,” State Farm said in a statement. “Our focus continues to be on supporting our customers in their recovery from the largest fire event we have ever experienced.”Survivors of the Eaton fire in Altadena have raised concerns about possible lead, asbestos and heavy metal contamination in their homes because of smoke.State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Democrat representing Pasadena, in April called on Lara to launch a probe into the alleged mishandling of claims.“The survivors of the Los Angeles County fires are experiencing financial and emotional hardships due to State Farm’s delays and denials of their valid insurance claims,” she and other lawmakers said at the time. “Despite years of faithfully paying premiums, they have been met with excessive documentation demands, denial of claims despite clear evidence, a convoluted and arduous claims process, and silence when seeking help after the disaster.”Lara said homeowners should file formal complaints regarding State Farm’s handling of claims to help the state take action. The Department of Insurance announced a task force last month to recommend best practices for addressing smoke damage.A wildfire victims advocate praised the investigation as a “critical step toward accountability.”“State Farm is unjustly denying legitimate smoke damage claims, forcing families already harmed by the Eaton and Palisades fires to make the impossible choice of living in toxic homes or paying tens of thousands out of pocket for remediation. We stand ready to hold State Farm accountable,” Kiley Grombacher, co-founder of the California Fire Victims Law Center, said in a statement.Insurers including State Farm had difficulty doing business in California even before the wildfires. In 2023, State Farm and others stopped issuing residential policies because of the wildfire risk.Last year, Lara unveiled regulations aimed at giving insurers more latitude to raise premiums in exchange for more policies in high-risk areas. State Farm said at the time the company was struggling.The wildfires, which destroyed more than 16,000 buildings, made matters even worse.In May, state regulators allowed State Farm to raise premiums 17% statewide for its California home insurance customers to help the company rebuild its capital after the costly wildfires.State Farm initially sought a 22% rate increase for homeowners but revised it down a recent hearing before an administrative judge. The new rates in effect this month include a 38% hike for rental owners and 15% for tenants.People who lost homes in the fires sued in April, alleging State Farm and other insurers colluded to “suddenly and simultaneously” drop coverage or halt writing new policies in fire-prone areas, including areas that burned. That left the homeowners underinsured and struggling to rebuild, the lawsuit alleges.The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the largest national trade association representing home, auto and business insurers, called the lawsuits meritless, saying it monitors to ensure its members comply with the state’s antitrust laws.
Associated Press writer Mead Gruver reported from Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Austin is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on X: @sophieadanna
Sophie Austin and Mead Gruver, Associated Press/Report for America
