AI Bought Attack Ads. Whoops.

The most expensive way to make someone famous is to spend millions trying to make them disappear.

A super PAC funded by the biggest names in AI just spent $2.4 million attacking a single New York assemblyman. He is now doing better than ever.

Meet Alex Bores, a Democrat running for Congress in NY-12. His crime, according to the industry: he sponsored the RAISE Act, a New York bill that would force companies to safety-test advanced AI models before release. A PAC called Leading the Future, backed by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz, decided to make him the first example of what happens when you cross them.

Then the attack ads ran. Small-dollar donations to Bores surged. He hit record fundraising. Anthropic, splitting from its peers, donated to a separate PAC backing candidates who actually want AI regulation. The proxy war is now public, and the guy in the middle has never had more name recognition.

The bigger number is the one nobody put in an ad. AI lobbying spending hit records this year: Anthropic up 494%, OpenAI up 98.5%. The industry that spent a decade insisting it just wanted to help humanity is now the loudest checkbook in Washington.

Sundar Pichai sat down for an hour and spent a good chunk of it arguing the open web is not, in fact, dying.

The fear has a name: “Google Zero,” the point where AI answers get so good that nobody clicks through to the actual websites, and the publishers, bloggers, and small businesses that depend on search traffic dry up. Pichai’s pushback was direct: the number of web pages Google indexes has grown 45% in the past two years. The web isn’t shrinking, he says. It’s growing.

He also claims AI Overviews send “higher quality” clicks to a more diverse set of sites. Which is a fascinating thing to measure when the loudest complaint from publishers is that AI Overviews answer the question so completely there’s no reason to click anything.

Both things can be true. More pages exist AND fewer of them get human visitors. A growing library nobody walks into is still a growing library.

For anyone whose job touches content, SEO, or marketing, this is the whole ballgame. The 2022 traffic playbook is being rewritten by the company that owns the field.

A New York Times engineer was pulled into a disciplinary meeting and told he was doing “one pull request per week, 25 percent below industry standard.” The number came from an AI tool. He didn’t know it was watching.

The Tech Guild, a NewsGuild unit of around 700 software engineers, designers, and analysts, filed grievances and an unfair labor practice charge against the Times. Their complaint: management rolled out two AI tools that quietly track and grade employees, then refused to explain how the data gets used.

One tool, DX, was pitched internally as a way to measure the engineering org as a whole. Over a few months it got personal, with individual benchmarks applied to individual workers. The other, Glean, indexes internal wikis, GitHub, Google Docs, and emails so staff can search them. The catch: a manager can also query it about any one person’s contributions.

The union’s word for what DX became is “a de facto quota.” The metrics don’t track quality, or features shipped, or anything an engineer would call real work. They track activity, and activity is easy to weaponize in a performance review.

This is the same surveillance creep that’s been spreading through offices for two years. What’s new is the pushback. The Times union is the rare workforce with the leverage to make a fight of it, and they’re using it.

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, and it’s the first papal document in history dedicated to artificial intelligence. Then a detection tool suggested some of it was written by artificial intelligence.

The encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, warns about AI’s pull toward dehumanizing people. Leo presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a cofounder of Anthropic. The plot thickened when analysts ran the text through Pangram, a respected AI detector. Some paragraphs flagged between 40 and 100 percent AI-written. One reviewer found 62 percent of the first chapter flagged. The Verge ran 2,000 words and got 46 percent.

The tell that AI nerds clocked immediately: the document uses the word “genuinely” far more than past encyclicals. “Genuinely” happens to be a known fingerprint of Anthropic’s Claude.

For context, the first 20 paragraphs of the last four encyclicals scored 100 percent human. Pope Leo’s spoken remarks also scored 100 percent human. Something changed for this one specifically.

Detection isn’t proof, and no detector is gospel (Pangram pegs its own false-positive rate at roughly 1 in 10,000). The funnier point stands on its own: the most powerful moral institution on earth wrote a warning about leaning on machines, and may have leaned on a machine to write it.

There’s a corner of Reddit where people make songs with AI and then listen to nothing else. As their entire music diet.

The Verge went looking in r/SunoAI, where Suno users were openly bragging about ditching Spotify for their own generated tracks. “It’s album after album of bangers,” one wrote. Another pulled the receipts from Last.fm: 2,239 plays of their own AI music in a single year.

The reporter messaged well over a dozen of these people to ask why. Not one would talk on the record. An entire subculture, suddenly shy the moment a journalist showed up.

The kindest read: Suno output is tuned exactly to one person’s taste, so of course they like it. The less kind read, from musician and YouTuber Adam Neely, is that it’s narcissism dressed up as personalization. You’re not discovering music. You’re listening to a mirror.

When making a thing costs nothing and finishing it takes seconds, some people stop seeking out anyone else’s work entirely. The endless feed was bad enough. This is a feed of one.