Share the goodness!
At one company, a leader discovered by chance that AI was rejecting job candidate applications within seconds of their arrival. One reason: They graduated from college before 2010, which contradicted the instruction to surface candidates who displayed “youthful energy.” What’s worse, the talent acquisition manager didn’t see any liability issues, since AI made the decision.
Also in this long-form episode for August 2026:
- An expert witness used ChatGPT to prepare a report. The prompts he used to generate the report were uncovered during discovery and entered into evidence.
- Nutrogena parted ways with its spokesperson, Hayden Panetierre, more than a decade ago. Its rationale for that decision has created a crisis for Nutrogena today in the wake of Panetierre’s untimely death.
- Brands suddenly care about Reddit thanks to its (perceived) role in AI-generated overviews and summaries. Redditors haven’t returned the feeling.
- Meta is facing a trillion-dollar-plus judgment in its current trial, but even more consequential could be a requirement to strip from its social media platforms the devices that addicted young people, many of which have become standards for social media. Will social media as we know it change in the wake of the verdict?
- Some companies are compensating employees who join the ranks of influencers and creators sharing content about the companies’ products and services. It sounds like a good idea, until you look at the labor, HR, and legal issues that arise.
In his Tech Report, Dan York provides more statistics about the decline in referral traffic thanks to AI overviews and searches via LLMs, Time magazine’s decision to inject ads into markdown files targeting AI agents (and Perplexity’s decision to block them), and LinkedIn’s “Seems Like AI Slop” option — is it working?
Complete show notes, including transcript, video, and links.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices