Instagram enshitification.
Reportedly in testing since June, I've now been served three of these unskippable 'Ad break' ads over the last two days. It's jarring, and has accelerated my desire to quit the platform that's increasingly less fun and flooded with AI slop.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
14 minutes ago
- Forbes
AI Guilt And Comms Professionals: Working With Expectation Overload
AI tools are changing how comms pros work—but not without emotional cost. Many feel a quiet sense of ... More AI guilt, wondering if using generative tools undermines their value. The reality: when used with discernment, AI elevates human judgment—it doesn't erase it. Recently, I spoke with Kelley Darling, a comms professional at a multi-division real estate firm in Washington, DC. She essentially does most of the comms herself. Darling has started using AI to keep up with demands across four distinct audiences. But she's wrestling with a feeling I expect is all too familiar: AI guilt among comms professionals. 'It makes my work sharper and more efficient,' Darling told me. 'But I wonder—would people still see the value I bring if they realized I have AI partners helping behind the scenes?' Darling's comment stuck with me. As someone who supports people designing and scaling thought leadership programs, I meet many communications professionals like Darling. They carry the full weight of brand voice, narrative coherence, and content strategy—often as solo contributors. The introduction of AI into their workflows was supposed to be a relief. But instead of reducing pressure, it often introduces a quiet, creeping question: Am I cheating? Let's name this feeling AI guilt. And let's unpack it. AI Guilt And The High-Wire Act of Modern Thought Leadership Communications professionals—particularly those shepherding thought leadership programs—have never had it easy. They must help surface big ideas, package them elegantly, channel them through diverse media, and measure the results. They must be both the wellspring of creativity and the guardrails of brand integrity. In many organizations, these professionals are not just the engine of thought leadership—they're its lone mechanic, driver, and GPS. It's not unusual for one person to play the role of ghostwriter, editor, strategist, and project manager across multiple teams and initiatives. Some also shoulder the emotional labor of working with subject-matter experts who don't quite understand the invisible lift that creating strategic content requires. It's no wonder the promise of AI is so tempting. AI tools like ChatGPT can offer relief: a sounding board for ideas, a fast draft, a rewriter, a tone checker. Used wisely, they multiply capacity and preserve energy for higher-order thinking. And in the world of thought leadership, where ideation can take time, and every sentence must pull its weight, that's no small gift. But what happens when the relief is tinged with guilt? Some of the guilt stems from old narratives: Real writers don't need help. If you were good at your job, you'd do it all yourself. Or worse: If the AI can do this, why do we need you? These beliefs ignore a simple truth—AI is not ideation. It's not judgment. It's not discernment or audience intuition or editorial strategy. Those are human strengths. AI assists with execution, not invention. For thought leadership professionals, the ideas are the value. The clarity and courage to frame an idea in a way that moves a market or sparks a conversation is still uniquely human. AI can help shape or smooth or structure, but it cannot originate with the same insight born from years of study, client work, and editorial rigor. Another source of guilt is the fear of being 'found out'—as if using AI is a shortcut or a crutch. But in a communications environment where you're expected to 'do more with less' year after year, it's not cheating to use the best tools. It's survival. And smart leadership will recognize that. AI Guilt And Transparency In fact, those building thought leadership functions inside organizations should be leading the charge in adopting AI—not hiding it. AI enables faster content iteration, testing of different angles for different audiences, and more frequent publishing without burnout. For firms investing in a thought leadership culture, that matters. Research by Bob Buday and others has shown that thought leadership is no longer a niche marketing function—it's a competitive strategy. Companies with strong thought leadership engines gain more traction with buyers, more trust in the marketplace, and more influence with clients. If comms professionals are tasked with building this strategic muscle, they deserve to use the best available tools to do so. Darling described how she is experimenting with AI to write a single newsletter differently for four employee personas. That's exactly the kind of work that moves content from noise to nuance. It requires understanding what matters to each audience, testing language, and being able to consider different variations quickly. AI supports her judgment—it doesn't replace it. To Conquer AI Guilt, Embrace the Tools And Own the Process The way forward is not to pretend you're not using AI. And leaders in companies should not be putting their employees in a position where they can't be open about it. The way forward is to use generative AI transparently, wisely, and strategically. As thought leadership becomes central to brand identity and differentiation, comms pros need space to think—not just execute. They need time to ideate, to frame, to test. AI can free up that space—but only if we stop apologizing for it. Let's rewrite the narrative: You're not less valuable because you use AI. You're more valuable because you use it well. In thought leadership, the real measure of value isn't how fast you write or how many words you produce. It's how clearly and originally you think—and how well you help others do the same. Using AI thoughtfully is not just acceptable—it's strategic. The best thought leadership professionals I know treat generative AI as a partner in the creative process, not a threat to their credibility. They use it to test their assumptions, to sharpen their hooks, to find new metaphors, and to get out of ruts faster. And yet, even those leading the charge may feel the tension between innovation and authenticity. That tension is a sign of professional integrity. It means you care about the quality of your work. It means you haven't outsourced your standards. Thought leadership, at its best, is a disciplined form of meaning-making. It's about surfacing ideas that aren't just smart, but useful—ideas that can reshape how people think, work, and lead. If AI can help you bring those ideas into the world with more precision and less burnout, I say you should use it. Comms and thought-leadership professionals need to stop whispering about the tools we rely on and start focusing on the value we create with them. Again, thought leadership is about thinking well and helping others do the same. If you're doing that with the help of AI, you're not falling short—you're showing the way forward. And there's no need for AI guilt in that scenario.
WIRED
14 minutes ago
- WIRED
Big Tech Asked for Looser Clean Water Act Permitting. Trump Wants to Give It to Them
Jul 29, 2025 12:39 PM New AI regulations suggested by the White House mirror changes to environmental permitting suggested by Meta and a lobbying group representing firms like Google and Amazon Web Services. An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia. Photograph:All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Last week, the Trump administration announced a set of sweeping AI policy recommendations to 'usher in a new golden age of human flourishing.' Among the suggested environmental rollbacks laid out in both an executive order and a corresponding AI Action Plan is a set of specific recommendations to essentially loosen Clean Water Act permitting processes for data centers. They mirror suggestions made to regulators earlier this year by both a major data center lobbying group and Meta. In March, the Data Center Coalition (DCC), a lobbying group for the industry whose members include tech giants like Google and Amazon Web Services, wrote a public comment to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to its request for information to develop the AI Action Plan. In the comment, the DCC suggested smoothing the permitting process for data centers under a specific section of the Clean Water Act. A similar ask around this section of the law was also made by DCC member Meta in its own separate response. The part of the Clean Water Act specifically named in these comments and in the recommendations from the White House deals with how projects like data centers could impact federally protected waters during construction or use, and what materials are discharged into those waters or dredged from them. Activities that range from building a bridge or road to filling marshland to construct a building or redirecting a stream require a permit under Section 404 of the law. Getting these types of permits, known as 404 permits, for individual projects can be expensive and time-consuming. But the government allows exemptions for a list of specific activities and industries, creating a nationwide permit that results in a process with less public participation and federal review. It's this type of nationwide permit that the new Trump AI agenda seeks to gain for data centers. The AI Action Plan also recommends exempting data centers from what's known as pre-construction notification, an additional form that helps regulators understand the impacts of a project before it begins—another proposal that was in the DCC public comment. 'The data center industry takes compliance and accountability seriously and works closely with the many local, state, regional, and federal bodies responsible for permitting and project approvals, regulation in environmental, safety, and other key areas, and oversight,' Cy McNeill, the director of federal affairs at DCC, told WIRED in an emailed comment. Environmental lawyers who spoke with WIRED stressed that direct impacts from data centers depend entirely on the specifics of each individual project. Many data centers have relatively low environmental profiles for the buildings themselves. Filling in a marshy corner of a vacant lot is a practice done all over the country for all types of construction. 'For a while there was a joke that Walmarts were being built on wetlands, because it's like, well, where's the land that hasn't already been developed?' says Jim McElfish, a senior adviser at the Environmental Law Institute, a research nonprofit. There are currently more than 50 issued nationwide 404 permits—some of which still require pre-construction notifications—which are renewed once every five years. Many of those exemptions are for agricultural activities, like cranberry harvesting and constructing ponds for farms, or ecosystem and scientific services like surveying and soil maintenance. Some types of coal mining and oil and gas activity are also included in the program. Buildings like stores, restaurants, hospitals, and schools currently have their own nationwide permit, which some data centers fall under. However, the permit requires a more in-depth, individual analysis if the project impacts more than half an acre of protected water. The DCC in its March comment recommended the creation of a nationwide permit with 'robust notification and coverage thresholds' and argued that 'lengthy timelines for the approvals are not consistent with other national permits that have higher or no limits or have a threshold where a PCN is not needed, which allows immediate action.' Meta, which has announced its intent to build massive data centers across multiple states and is currently developing a 2,250-acre data center in Louisiana, also asked for a nationwide permit in its comment and suggested that the federal government further 'streamline' the 404 permitting process. Meta's chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan posted on X last week that the AI Action Plan 'is a bold step to create the right regulatory environment for companies like ours to invest in America,' and that Meta is 'investing hundreds of billions of dollars in job-creating infrastructure across the US, including state-of-the-art data centers.' Meta declined to comment further for this article through a spokesperson. Environmental lawyers aren't so sure that a nationwide permit for data centers, regardless of their size, would follow the intent of the Clean Water Act. 'What makes [a blanket data center exemption] a little bit tricky is that the impacts are gonna differ quite a bit depending on where these are,' McElfish says. While one data center may impact just a 'fraction of an acre,' he says, by rebuilding a stream crossing or filling in a wetland, other data centers in different areas of the country may have much larger impacts to local waterways during their construction. Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees. 'What we're seeing here is an attempt to expand the 404 nationwide permitting program so that it goes through this much reduced regulatory review outside of the intention of why [the permitting] program was created,' she says. 'There's much reduced regulatory review to kind of literally speed along the paving of wetlands.' There are some data center projects in development today that have run into significant issues with federally protected waters. In Indiana, Amazon is currently galvanizing local opposition as it attempts to fill in nearly 10 acres of wetland and more than 5,000 streams to build a massive data center. In Alabama, environmentalists caution that the water footprint from a proposed data center could have serious impacts on local waterways and cause the possible extinction of a species of fish. In a response to a request to comment from WIRED, Amazon spokesperson Heather Layman sent several details via email on the company's global water replenishment projects and its efforts to conserve water at its Indiana data centers. 'To maintain global leadership in AI, the US must prioritize the deployment of energy generation and infrastructure to support data center growth,' she wrote. 'We are also constantly working to optimize our water consumption across Amazon's operations.' The proposed changes from the White House are no surprise to lawyers like Connor: 'The 404 permitting program has had a developer target on its back for a pretty long time,' she says. Sackett v. EPA , the 2023 Supreme Court case that dealt a major blow to the reach of the Clean Water Act, was based on a 404 permitting issue. This ruling, Connor suspects, is partly why we may be seeing so many companies choosing to build data centers in dry states like Arizona. 'They have a lot of waters that have lost their jurisdictional reach within the Clean Water Act,' she says. 'It's just easier to pave over the desert, which is the saddest thing to say out loud.' The coal industry has also battled for more than a decade to get nationwide 404 permits for mountaintop mining. Meanwhile, 404 permits for gas pipelines like the Mountain Valley Pipeline have been locked in years of litigation. The executive order signed Wednesday calls for a review of 404 permits not just for data centers, but for a host of other 'covered components' that are used to build data centers, ranging from transmission lines to gas pipelines to coal and nuclear power equipment. 'The energy objectives of the administration are baked into [the new AI policies],' says Connor. Trump officials, she says, are 'trying to create more dexterity in the 404 program for all the kinds of means that [they] want to be reflected within the administration's priorities. That includes fossil fuels, that includes coal, and that includes data centers.'
The Verge
14 minutes ago
- The Verge
Corsair's tiny PC takes on Framework Desktop with the same 128GB Strix Halo for LLMs (and gaming).
Posted Jul 29, 2025 at 4:54 PM UTC Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Sean Hollister Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Sean Hollister Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Desktops Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech
