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Bytes: Week in Review - Amazon scales back AI anime dubs Dec 05, 2025

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The Trump administration has been trying for months to ban AI regulations at the state level. And its latest gambit to roll such a measure into the congressional National Defense Authorization Act appears to have failed. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Tuesday that GOP leadership is now “looking at other places” to include that measure after reportedly facing pushback from both parties.

Plus, New York recently became the first state to enforce an AI law designed to protect consumers from "algorithmic pricing." And Amazon pulled back on AI dubbing for some international content after anime fans complained.

Have we given up on data privacy? Dec 04, 2025

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Every day, consumers are confronted with the fragility of our personal data privacy — another data breach, another government agency accessing databases they didn't previously have access to, another consent form popping up to get permission to gather more data.

It's almost too much for any one person to keep a handle on, according to Rohan Grover, professor of artificial intelligence and media at American University. He recently co-authored a piece for The Conversation about why data privacy seems to have largely fallen out of the public discourse, even though he says the topic is more urgent than ever.

What happens when all your coworkers are AI? Dec 03, 2025

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once speculated that we'll soon see the first billion-dollar company run by one person and an army of AI agents. Journalist Evan Ratliff decided to put the idea to the test in the newest season of his podcast, “Shell Game,” where Ratliff and his team of synthetic co-founders, executives and workers launched their startup, HurumoAI. His AI agents designed a logo, built a website and eventually released their own agentic AI service.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ratliff about what he learned from this whole experience.

How far away are we from humanoid robots doing our chores? Dec 02, 2025

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Robots are commonplace in factories, and increasingly in warehouses like those run by Amazon. But what about robots to help with household chores — so-called humanoids to load the dishwasher or fold the laundry?

To find out, we checked in with Ken Goldberg, professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and co-founder of the AI and robotics company Ambi Robotics. He spoke to Marketplace’s Nova Safo en route from a robotics conference in China.

What it's like to be in a relationship where wearable AI records your conversations Dec 01, 2025

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Marketplace's Matt Levin visits a couple in suburban Sacramento who both use an AI-enabled pendant that acts as a personal assistant — and sometimes, a relationship therapist.

AI's role in improving accessibility Nov 28, 2025

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Accessibility has long been aided by the advancement of technology. When it comes to artificial intelligence, accessibility is top of mind for Taylor Arndt, Chief Operations Officer at Techopolis Online Solutions. Arndt has been blind since birth, and so accessibility has been a lifelong battle. When she was in school, she often received physical materials she was unable to read. So, she bought her own hand-held scanner and downloaded a screen reader. At 14, Arndt taught herself to code. Now as a coder working on AI, Arndt says in order for it to help others, the AI models need to be trained on data that has already incorporated accessibility measures.

Can digital apps help solve Africa’s unemployment crisis? Nov 27, 2025

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Sub-Saharan Africa has a youth unemployment problem. The latest figures from the International Labour Organisation show more than one in five young people there are "NEET": Not in Employment, Education or Training. Structural issues like the lack of political stability in many countries and lagging infrastructure remain major barriers to high quality job creation. But the gig economy has been growing rapidly thanks to the proliferation of digital platforms. The The BBC's Wairimu Gitani reports.

AI-enabled ed tech vendors fail to disclose capabilities and safeguards, report finds Nov 26, 2025

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Hannah Quay-de la Vallee, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, coauthored a recent report that recommends more transparency on what artificial intelligence education technologies can and cannot do.

The federal data and tools that "died" this year Nov 25, 2025

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In the Trump administration's efforts to shrink and realign the federal government, datasets on climate, health and demographics have disappeared. Some have been scrubbed from public view, others may not be collected anymore.

This data supported apps and interactive tools many researchers relied upon.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Denice Ross, senior advisor with the Federation of American Scientists and former chief data scientist for the U.S., who recently wrote a tribute to the data that's been lost.

AI-generated "letters to the editor" are flooding academic publications Nov 24, 2025

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Dr. Carlos Chaccour, physician scientist at the University of Navarra, noticed something fishy about a letter to the editor the New England Journal of Medicine received shortly after it published a paper of his on malaria treatment in July.

The letter was riddled with strange errors such as critiques supposedly based on other research Chaccour himself had written. So he and his co-author Matthew Rudd decided to dig deeper.

They analyzed patterns of letters to the editor over the last decade and found a remarkable increase in what they call "prolific debutantes" — new authors who suddenly had dozens, even hundreds of letters published, starting right around the time OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out.

Why would academics want to do this? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Chaccour to find out.

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