Adobe will rebrand its Creative Cloud All Apps subscription to "Creative Cloud Pro" on June 17 for North American users, making significant price increases while bundling AI features. Individual annual subscribers will see monthly rates jump from $59.99 to $69.99, while monthly non-contracted subscribers face a $15 hike to $104.99.

The revamped plan includes unlimited generative AI image credits, 4,000 monthly "premium" AI video and audio credits, access to third-party models like OpenAI's GPT, and the beta Firefly Boards collaborative whiteboard. Adobe will also offer a cheaper "Creative Cloud Standard" option at $54.99 monthly with severely reduced AI capabilities, but this plan remains exclusive to existing subscribers -- forcing new customers into the pricier AI-focused tier.

Microsoft is starting to integrate AI shortcuts, or what it calls AI actions, into the File Explorer in Windows 11. From a report: These shortcuts let you right-click on a file and quickly get to Windows AI features like blurring the background of a photo, erasing objects, or even summarizing content from Office files.

Four image actions are currently being tested in the latest Dev Channel builds of Windows 11, including Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, the blur background and erase objects features found in the Photos app, and the remove background option in Paint. Similar AI actions will soon be tested with Office files, The Verge added.

Survey response rates have collapsed from 30-50% in the 1970s to as low as 5% today, while AI agents now account for an estimated 20% of survey responses, according to a new analysis.

The UK's Office for National Statistics has seen response rates drop from 40% to 13%, with some labor market questions receiving only five human responses. The U.S. Current Population Survey hit a record low 12.7% response rate, down from 50% historically.

The US tech sector shed 214,000 jobs in April amid continuing economic uncertainty, according to CompTIA analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Companies are extending hiring timelines to two or three times longer than last year while significantly raising skill requirements, particularly for AI competencies.

"It's the great hesitation," said George Denlinger of Robert Half, noting employers now demand 10-12 skills instead of 6-7 previously. Entry-level programming positions are disappearing as AI assumes those functions, with Janco Associates CEO Victor Janulaitis observing that "a job that has been eliminated from almost all IT departments is an entry-level IT programmer."

SAG-AFTRA has filed a labor complaint against Fortnite developer Epic Games, alleging the game improperly used AI to replicate James Earl Jones' Darth Vader voice without bargaining with the union, despite the estate's approval. Gizmodo reports: The union has now filed an unfair labor practice charge (link to the PDF is on the SAG-AFTRA website) that calls out "Fortnite's signatory company, Llama Productions" for "[replacing] the work of human performers with AI technology" without "providing any notice of their intent to do this and without bargaining with us over appropriate terms."

The union notes that it's not against the general idea here: "We celebrate the right of our members and their estates to control the use of their digital replicas and welcome the use of new technologies to allow new generations to share in the enjoyment of those legacies and renowned roles." The problem is that the AI being used here makes human voice actors obsolete, and "we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace the work of our members, including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader's iconic rhythm and tone in video games."

So far there's been no response from Epic Games on the filing. The Hollywood Reporter notes that despite the SAG-AFTRA's still-ongoing Interactive Media Agreement strike, which has been stuck for months on negotiating "AI protections for voice actors in video games," actors can actually work on Fortnite without violating the strike, since the game falls under an exception for titles that were in production before August 2023.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled), Apple has big plans to turn Siri into a true ChatGPT competitor. "A next-generation, chatbot version of Siri has reportedly made significant progress during testing over the past six months; some executives allegedly now see it as 'on par' with recent versions of ChatGPT," reports MacRumors. "Apple is also apparently discussing giving Siri the ability to access the internet to gather and synthesize data from multiple sources, just like ChatGPT." From the report: The report added that Apple now has artificial intelligence offices in Zurich, where employees are working on an all-new software architecture for Siri. This "monolithic model" is entirely built on an LLM engine that will eventually replace Siri's current "hybrid" architecture that has been incoherently layered up with different functionality over many years. The new model will make Siri more conversational and better at synthesizing information.

Google's Gemini is expected to be added to iOS 19 as an alternative to ChatGPT in Siri, but Apple is also apparently in talks with Perplexity to add their AI service as another option in the future, for both Siri and Safari search.

Qualcomm announced plans to re-enter the data center market with custom CPUs designed to integrate with Nvidia GPUs and software. As CNBC reports, the move supports Qualcomm's broader strategy to diversify beyond smartphones and into high-growth areas like data centers, PCs, and automotive chips. From the report: "I think we see a lot of growth happening in this space for decades to come, and we have some technology that can add real value added," Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, told CNBC in an interview on Monday. "So I think we have a very disruptive CPU." Amon said the company will make an announcement about the CPU roadmap and the timing of its release "very soon," without offering specifics. The data center CPU market remains highly competitive. Big cloud computing players like Amazon and Microsoft already design and deploy their own custom CPUs. AMD and Intel also have a strong presence.

Addressing the competition, Amon said that there will be a place for Qualcomm in the data center CPU space. "As long as ... we can build a great product, we can bring innovation, and we can add value with some disruptive technology, there's going to be room for Qualcomm, especially in the data center," Amon said. "[It] is a very large addressable market that will that will see a lot of investment for decades to come." Last week, Qualcomm signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi-based AI frim Humain to develop data centers, joining a slew of U.S. tech companies making deals in the region. Humain will operate under Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: While using website data to build a Google Search topped with artificial intelligence-generated answers, an Alphabet executive acknowledged in an internal document that there was an alternative way to do things: They could ask web publishers for permission, or let them directly opt out of being included. But giving publishers a choice would make training AI models in search too complicated, the company concludes in the document, which was unearthed in the company's search antitrust trial.

It said Google had a "hard red line" and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features. Instead of giving options, Google decided to "silently update," with "no public announcement" about how they were using publishers' data, according to the document, written by Chetna Bindra, a product management executive at Google Search. "Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully." "It's a little bit damning," said Paul Bannister, the chief strategy officer at Raptive, which represents online creators. "It pretty clearly shows that they knew there was a range of options and they pretty much chose the most conservative, most protective of them -- the option that didn't give publishers any controls at all."

For its part, Google said in a statement to Bloomberg: "Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them. This document is an early-stage list of options in an evolving space and doesn't reflect feasibility or actual decisions." They added that Google continually updates its product documentation for search online.

Google has launched the NotebookLM app for Android and iOS, offering a native mobile experience with offline support, audio overviews, and integration into the system share sheet for adding sources like PDFs and YouTube videos. 9to5Google reports: This native experience starts on a homepage of your notebooks with filters at the top for Recent, Shared, Title, and Downloaded. The app features a light and dark mode based on your device's system theme with no manual toggle. Each colorful card features the notebook name, emoji, number of sources, and date, as well as a play button for Audio Overviews. There's background playback and offline support for the podcast-style experience (the fullscreen player has a nice glow), while you can "Join" the AI hosts (in beta) to ask follow-up questions.

You get a "Create new" button at the bottom of the list to add PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, and text. Notably, the NotebookLM app will appear in the Android and iOS share sheet to quickly add sources. When you open a notebook, there's a bottom bar for the list of Sources, Chat Q&A, and Studio. It's similar to the current mobile website, with the native client letting users ditch the Progressive Web App. Out of the gate, there are phone and (straightforward) tablet interfaces. You can download the app for iOS and Android using their respective links.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft on Monday became one of the first hyperscalers to provide managed access to Grok, the AI model developed by billionaire Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI. Available through Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry platform, Grok -- specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini -- will "have all the service-level agreements Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product," says Microsoft. They'll also be billed directly by Microsoft, as is the case with the other models hosted in Azure AI Foundry. [...] The Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models in Azure AI Foundry are decidedly more locked down than the Grok models on X. They also come with additional data integration, customization, and governance capabilities not necessarily offered by xAI through its API.

Chatbots are more persuasive in online debates than people -- especially when they are able to personalize their arguments using information about their opponent. From a report: The finding, published in Nature Human Behaviour on 19 May, highlights how large language models (LLMs) could be used to influence people's opinions, for example in political campaigns or targeted advertising.

"Obviously as soon as people see that you can persuade people more with LLMs, they're going to start using them," says study co-author Francesco Salvi, a computational scientist at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL). "I find it both fascinating and terrifying." Research has already shown that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can make people change their minds, even about conspiracy theories, but it hasn't been clear how persuasive they are in comparison to humans. GPT-4 was 64.4% more persuasive than humans in one-to-one debates, the study found.

AI is eroding entry-level positions across multiple industries, threatening the traditional career ladder for young professionals, LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer warned Monday. College graduate unemployment has risen 30% since September 2022, compared to 18% for workers overall, according to LinkedIn data. The company's research shows Generation Z workers expressing greater pessimism about their futures than any other age group.

"Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder," wrote Aneesh Raman in a New York Times column, citing examples across technology, law, and retail where AI is replacing tasks traditionally assigned to junior workers. A LinkedIn survey of 3,000 executives found 63% believe AI will eventually handle mundane entry-level tasks, with professionals holding advanced degrees likely facing greater disruption than those without.

Some firms are adapting by redesigning roles. KPMG now assigns recent graduates tax work previously reserved for more experienced employees, while Macfarlanes has early-career lawyers interpreting complex contracts once handled by senior colleagues. Though economic uncertainty also impacts hiring, Raman warned that delayed career entry can cost young workers approximately $22,000 in earnings over a decade.

Microsoft has announced NLWeb, an open protocol designed to democratize AI-powered search capabilities for websites and apps. Developed by Microsoft technical fellow Ramanathan V. Guha, who previously created RSS and Schema.org, NLWeb allows site owners to implement ChatGPT-style natural language search with minimal code. The protocol enables websites to process complex queries like "spicy and crunchy appetizers for Diwali" or "jackets warm enough for Quebec," requiring only an AI model, some code, and the site's own data.

During his demonstration to news outlet The Verge, Guha showed how NLWeb remembers user preferences, such as dietary restrictions, for future interactions. "It's a protocol, and the protocol is a way of asking a natural-language question, and the answer comes back in structured form," explained Guha, who argues the approach is significantly cheaper than traditional search methods that require extensive web crawling and indexing. Microsoft is partnering with publishers and companies including TripAdvisor, Eventbrite, and Shopify to implement NLWeb, though Guha acknowledges the challenge of achieving widespread adoption in a web that historically tends toward centralization.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation's third-largest school district, is now deploying Google's Gemini chatbots to more than 105,000 high school students -- marking the largest U.S. school district AI deployment to date. This represents a dramatic reversal from just two years ago when the district blocked such tools over cheating and misinformation concerns.

The initiative follows President Trump's recent executive order promoting AI integration "in all subject areas" from kindergarten through 12th grade. District officials spent months testing various chatbots for accuracy, privacy, and safety before selecting Google's platform.

New submitter optical_phiber writes: In March 2025, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education discovered that Microsoft Teams had begun collecting students' voice and facial biometric data without their prior knowledge. This occurred after Microsoft enabled a Teams feature called 'voice and face enrollment' by default, which creates biometric profiles to enhance meeting experiences and transcriptions via its CoPilot AI tool.

The NSW department learned of the data collection a month after it began and promptly disabled the feature and deleted the data within 24 hours. However, the department did not disclose how many individuals were affected or whether they were notified. Despite Microsoft's policy of retaining data only while the user is enrolled and deleting it within 90 days of account deletion, privacy experts have raised serious concerns. Rys Farthing of Reset Tech Australia criticized the unnecessary collection of children's data, warning of the long-term risks and calling for stronger protections.

"The Danish government plans to evaluate the prospect of beginning a nuclear power programme," reports the Telegraph, noting that this week Denmark lifted a nuclear power ban imposed 40 years ago. Unlike its neighbours in Sweden and Germany, Denmark has never had a civil nuclear power programme. It has only ever had three small research reactors, the last of which closed in 2001. Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the expected growth in electricity demand from AI data centres, but Denmark is different. The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with the way power grids operate... ["The spinning turbines found in fossil-fuelled energy systems provide inertia and act as a shock absorber to stabilise the grid during sudden changes in supply or demand," explains a diagram in the article, while solar and wind energy provide no inertia.]

The Danish government is worried about how it will continue to decarbonise its power grid if it closes all of its fossil fuel generators leaving minimal inertia. There are only three realistic routes to decarbonisation that maintain physical inertia on the grid: hydropower, geothermal energy and nuclear. Hydro and geothermal depend on geographic and geological features that not every country possesses. While renewable energy proponents argue that new types of inverters could provide synthetic inertia, trials have so far not been particularly successful and there are economic challenges that are difficult to resolve.

Denmark is realising that in the absence of large-scale hydroelectric or geothermal energy, it may have little choice other than to re-visit nuclear power if it is to maintain a stable, low carbon electricity grid.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

OpenAI CEO and Sam Altman believe Artificial General Intelligence could arrive within the next few years. But the speculations of some technologists "are getting ahead of reality," writes the New York Times, adding that many scientists "say no one will reach AGI without a new idea — something beyond the powerful neural networks that merely find patterns in data. That new idea could arrive tomorrow. But even then, the industry would need years to develop it." "The technology we're building today is not sufficient to get there," said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years. "What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That's very different from what you and I do." In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today's technology were unlikely to lead to AGI.

Opinions differ in part because scientists cannot even agree on a way of defining human intelligence, arguing endlessly over the merits and flaws of IQ tests and other benchmarks. Comparing our own brains to machines is even more subjective. This means that identifying AGI is essentially a matter of opinion.... And scientists have no hard evidence that today's technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Claims of AGI's imminent arrival are based on statistical extrapolations — and wishful thinking. According to various benchmark tests, today's technologies are improving at a consistent rate in some notable areas, like math and computer programming. But these tests describe only a small part of what people can do.

Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before. That is why Frosst and other sceptics say pushing machines to human-level intelligence will require at least one big idea that the world's technologists have not yet dreamed up. There is no way of knowing how long that will take. "A system that's better than humans in one way will not necessarily be better in other ways," Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker said. "There's just no such thing as an automatic, omniscient, omnipotent solver of every problem, including ones we haven't even thought of yet. There's a temptation to engage in a kind of magical thinking. But these systems are not miracles. They are very impressive gadgets."
While Google's AlphaGo could be humans in a game with "a small, limited set of rules," the article points out that the real world "is bounded only by the laws of physics. Modelling the entirety of the real world is well beyond today's machines, so how can anyone be sure that AGI — let alone superintelligence — is just around the corner?" And they offer this alternative perspective from Matteo Pasquinelli, a professor of the philosophy of science at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy.

"AI needs us: living beings, producing constantly, feeding the machine. It needs the originality of our ideas and our lives."

IBM laid off "a couple hundred" HR workers and replaced them with AI agents. "It's becoming a huge thing," says Mike Peditto, a Chicago-area consultant with 15 years of experience advising companies on hiring practices. He tells Slate "I do think we're heading to where this will be pretty commonplace." Although A.I. job interviews have been happening since at least 2023, the trend has received a surge of attention in recent weeks thanks to several viral TikTok videos in which users share videos of their A.I. bots glitching. Although some of the videos were fakes posted by a creator whose bio warns that his content is "all satire," some are authentic — like that of Kendiana Colin, a 20-year-old student at Ohio State University who had to interact with an A.I. bot after she applied for a summer job at a stretching studio outside Columbus. In a clip she posted online earlier this month, Colin can be seen conducting a video interview with a smiling white brunette named Alex, who can't seem to stop saying the phrase "vertical-bar Pilates" in an endless loop...

Representatives at Apriora, the startup company founded in 2023 whose software Colin was forced to engage with, did not respond to a request for comment. But founder Aaron Wang told Forbes last year that the software allowed companies to screen more talent for less money... (Apriora's website claims that the technology can help companies "hire 87 percent faster" and "interview 93 percent cheaper," but it's not clear where those stats come from or what they actually mean.)
Colin (first interviewed by 404 Media) calls the experience dehumanizing — wondering why they were told dress professionally, since "They had me going the extra mile just to talk to a robot." And after the interview, the robot — and the company — then ghosted them with no future contact. "It was very disrespectful and a waste of time."

Houston resident Leo Humphries also "donned a suit and tie in anticipation for an interview" in which the virtual recruiter immediately got stuck repeating the same phrase. Although Humphries tried in vain to alert the bot that it was broken, the interview ended only when the A.I. program thanked him for "answering the questions" and offering "great information" — despite his not being able to provide a single response. In a subsequent video, Humphries said that within an hour he had received an email, addressed to someone else, that thanked him for sharing his "wonderful energy and personality" but let him know that the company would be moving forward with other candidates.

A new YouTube tool will let advertisers use Google's Gemini AI model to target ads to viewers when they're most engaged, reports CNBC: Peak Points has the potential to enable more impressions and a higher click-through rate on YouTube, a primary metric that determines how creators earn money on the video platform... Peak Points is currently in a pilot program and will be rolling out over the rest of the year.
The product "aims to benefit advertisers by using a tactic that aims to grab users' attention right when they're most invested in the content," reports TechCrunch: This approach appears to be similar to a strategy called emotion-based targeting, where advertisers place ads that align with the emotions evoked by the video. It's believed that when viewers experience heightened emotional states, it leads to better recall of the ads. However, viewers may find these interruptions frustrating, especially when they're deeply engaged in the emotional arc of a video and want the ad to be over quickly to resume watching.

In related news, YouTube announced another ad format that may be more appealing to users. The platform debuted a shoppable product feed where users can browse and purchase items during an ad.

"The world has changed," writes Stack Overflow's blog. "Fast. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we build, learn, and solve problems. Software development looks dramatically different than it did even a few years ago — and the pace of change is only accelerating."

And they believe their brand "at times" lost "fidelity and clarity. It's very much been always added to and not been thought of holistically. So, it's time for our brand to evolve too," they write, hoping to articulate a perspective "forged in the fires of community, powered by collaboration, shaped by AI, and driven by people."

The developer news site DevClass notes the change happens "as the number of posts to its site continues a dramatic decline thanks to AI-driven alternatives." According to a quick query on the official data explorer, the sum of questions and answers posted in April 2025 was down by over 64 percent from the same month in 2024, and plunged more than 90 percent from April 2020, when traffic was near its peak...

Although declining traffic is a sign of Stack Overflow's reduced significance in the developer community, the company's business is not equally affected so far. Stack Exchange is a business owned by investment company Prosus, and the Stack Exchange products include private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams) as well as advertising and recruitment. According to the Prosus financial results, in the six months ended September 2024, Stack Overflow increased its revenue and reduced its losses. The company's search for a new direction though confirms that the fast-disappearing developer engagement with Stack Overflow poses an existential challenge to the organization.
DevClass says Stack Overflow's parent company "is casting about for new ways to provide value (and drive business) in this context..." The company has already experimented with various new services, via its Labs research department, including an AI Answer Assistant and Question Assistant, as well as a revamped jobs site in association with recruitment site Indeed, Discussions for technical debate, and extensions for GitHub Copilot, Slack, and Visual Studio Code.
From the official announcement on Stack Overflow's blog: This rebrand isn't just a fresh coat of paint. It's a realignment with our purpose: to support the builders of the future in an AI world — with clarity, speed, and humanity. It's about showing up in a way that reflects who we are today, and where we're headed tomorrow.
"We have appointed an internal steering group and we have engaged with an external expert partner in this area to help bring about the required change," notes a post in Stack Exchange's "meta" area. This isn't just about a visual update or marketing exercise — it's going to bring about a shift in how we present ourselves to the world which you will feel everywhere from the design to the copywriting, so that we can better achieve our goals and shared mission. As the emergence of AI has called into question the role of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, one of the desired outputs of the rebrand process is to clarify our place in the world.

We've done work toward this already — our recent community AMA is an example of this — but we want to ensure that this comes across in our brand and identity as well. We want the community to be involved and have a strong voice in the process of renewing and refreshing our brand. Remember, Stack Overflow started with a public discussion about what to name it!
And another another post two months ago Stack Exchange is exploring early ideas for expanding beyond the "single lane" Q&A highway. Our goal right now is to better understand the problems, opportunities, and needs before deciding on any specific changes...

The vision is to potentially enable:

- A slower lane, with high-quality durable knowledge that takes time to create and curate, like questions and answers.

- A medium lane, for more flexible engagement, with features like Discussions or more flexible Stack Exchanges, where users can explore ideas or share opinions.

- A fast lane for quick, real-time interaction, with features like Chat that can bring the community together to discuss topics instantly.

With this in mind, we're seeking your feedback on the current state of Chat, what's most important to you, and how you see Chat fitting into the future.
In a post in Stack Exchange's "meta" area, brand design director David Longworth says the "tension mentioned between Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange" is probably the most relevant to the rebranding.

But he posted later that "There's a lot of people behind the scenes on this who care deeply about getting this right! Thank you on behalf of myself and the team."