Author: Jasmyne Hill

Microsoft marked its 50th anniversary on April 4 by positioning artificial intelligence as its next defining product line, promising users an era of “personal AI companions” designed to form long-term, emotionally intelligent relationships. But while the company’s leadership casts this technology as a transformative shift in daily life, a closer look at the underlying architecture, and the daily experience of users, suggests a disconnect between Microsoft’s ambitions and the reality its tools actually deliver. “We’re really trying to land this idea that everybody is going to have their own personalized AI companion,” said Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s...

The sweeping new global tariffs released by Donald Trump’s regime threaten to dramatically reshape the economics of the technology sector. It places Apple Inc. squarely in the crosshairs of a half-baked policy designed to reduce U.S. trade deficits by taxing imports from countries with long-standing industrial ties to Silicon Valley. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, is not mentioned directly in the White House’s announcement. But the 10% baseline tariff on all imports and sharply higher rates on countries including China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan cut straight through the arteries of Apple’s global supply chain. It hits everything...

Artificial intelligence has exposed a pervasive failure in its handling of racial representation. Its default settings systematically obscure or distort the depiction of people of color, and repeated attempts to correct those errors have yielded negligible progress. “Milwaukee Independent” has direct experience with how AI image generation repeatedly prioritizes Eurocentric features, ignores explicit prompts for diversity, and clings to biased datasets that make accurate representation of historical figures all but impossible. Such an institutional failure with technology endangers public understanding of vital cultural narratives and undermines trust in any creative product derived from such a flawed technology. For an...