In late March, a smoke shop in Dyersburg, Tennessee, announced the arrival of a new product in its store: a disposable nicotine vape with an LCD display that can be connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth. Marketed under the brand name RAMA, the strawberry- and kiwi-flavored vape looks more like a cell phone from the early 2000s than a typical e-cigarette. It allows users to customize the screen background, see how many puffs of nicotine are left, and even track the device’s location using an accompanying app. “NEVER LOSE YOUR VAPE AGAIN!!!!” Mk Smoke Shop said in a Facebook post.

Far from a one-off novelty, the RAMA model is part of a wave of technologically sophisticated and highly potent disposable vapes that have begun appearing on shelves in smoke shops and convenience stores across the United States in recent months, according to industry data, social media posts, and other records viewed by WIRED.

Almost exclusively manufactured in China, the vapes are colorful and come in eye-catching metallic finishes, squishy silicone textures, and rounded shapes that fit comfortably in a person’s hand. But what really sets them apart are LCD screens, which make the devices even more harmful for the environment than normal disposable vapes. And like the vast majority of all e-cigarettes available in stores, they are technically illegal and haven’t been approved for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration.

These so-called smart vapes are the product of an innovation boom taking place in China’s $28 billion e-cigarette export industry. It was spurred, in part, by the United States’ lax enforcement of nicotine regulations. The US accounts for nearly two-thirds of Chinese vape exports, according to the China Electronics Chamber of Commerce. From 2020 to 2023, the CDC foundation estimates that sales of non-tobacco-flavored vapes in the US surged more than 60 percent, increasing from 11.2 million to 18 million units.

As competition for the American market intensified, vape producers in Shenzhen needed to find ways to make their products stand out. So they developed vapes that were more affordable, better designed, and delivered higher doses of nicotine compared to their predecessors. In many cases, these innovations allowed them to move up the value chain for e-cigarettes.

Robert Jackler, an emeritus professor of head and neck surgery at Stanford University and the founder of an interdisciplinary research group studying the impacts of tobacco advertising, said that American companies have long manufactured vapes in Shenzhen. But after the Chinese government banned the sale of flavored vapes in 2022, Chinese suppliers began focusing more on marketing their own products directly to overseas customers.

“They cut out the Americans,” Jackler says. As of last year, the Associated Press reported there were over 9,000 kinds of vaping products available for sale in the US, a nearly threefold increase since 2020.

The proliferation of disposable flavored vapes from China has alarmed lawmakers in both the US and Europe. Regulators say they are especially worried about the impact the devices are having on children, who may find the sweet flavors and flashy designs they come in particularly appealing.

Brussels has accused Microsoft of illegally abusing its dominance in the business-software market at the expense of smaller rivals, following a complaint at the height of the pandemic by US competitor Slack.

The European Commission said on Tuesday it found that Microsoft was restricting competition by selling its video-conferencing software Teams together in bundles with the company’s other popular office tools such as Office 365 and Microsoft 365 since at least 2019.

“We are concerned that Microsoft may be giving its own communication product Teams an undue advantage over competitors, by tying it to its popular productivity suites for businesses,” the EU’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. “If confirmed, Microsoft’s conduct would be illegal under our competition rules.” The charges announced on Tuesday are only a “preliminary view,” meaning the commission has sent a “statement of objections” to Microsoft and the company has 10 weeks once it receives all the details to respond.

The Microsoft charges arrive in the same week as the European Commission also charged Apple with breaking the European Union’s new digital markets act for failing to let app developers communicate freely with their users. Over the past decade, the EU has become the de facto Big Tech regulator, forcing US giants to alter the way they operate and issuing fines of billions of dollars.

In an attempt to placate Brussels, Microsoft started excluding Teams from some Office bundles in July of last year. However, the commission said today that those changes were insufficient and expressed concern about how easy it was to use rival conferencing software in tandem with Microsoft’s other tools, a practice known as interoperability.

“Having unbundled Teams and taken initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, in a statement shared with WIRED. The company plans to work to find solutions to address the commission‘s remaining concerns, he added.

If Microsoft and the EU cannot reach an agreement, the commission has the power to levy fines of up to 10 percent of the company’s annual worldwide turnover and can impose remedies on the company.

The commission opened its investigation into Microsoft Teams following a complaint by Slack in July 2020, when there was fierce competition for the remote workers who relied on office software due to pandemic lockdowns. “This is much bigger than Slack versus Microsoft,” Jonathan Prince, then vice president of communications and policy at Slack, said at the time. “This a proxy for two very different philosophies for the future of digital ecosystems, gateways versus gatekeepers.”

On Tuesday, Sabastian Niles, president and chief legal officer of Slack’s parent company Salesforce, described the European Commission’s position as “a win for customer choice and an affirmation that Microsoft’s practices with Teams have harmed competition.”

German video conferencing company Alfaview, which filed a complaint to the commission following Slack, also welcomed the decision. The measures Microsoft has taken so far to unbundle Teams have been ineffective, Niko Fostiropoulos, CEO and founder of Alfaview, said in a statement. “Microsoft offers existing enterprise customers who opt out of Teams in the overall package only a minimal discount of €2 ($2.10),” he said. “This does not provide sufficient incentives to switch to another video conferencing service.”

Apple has become the first Big Tech company to be charged with breaking the European Union’s new digital markets rules, three days after the tech giant said it would not release artificial intelligence in the bloc due to regulation.

On Monday, the European Commission said that Apple’s App Store was preventing developers from communicating with their users and promoting offers to them directly, a practice known as anti-steering.

“Our preliminary position is that Apple does not fully allow steering. Steering is key to ensure that app developers are less dependent on gatekeepers’ app stores and for consumers to be aware of better offers,” Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition chief, said in a statement.

On X, the European commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, gave a more damning assessment. “For too long Apple has been squeezing out innovative companies—denying consumers new opportunities and choices,” he said.

The EU referred to its Monday charges as “preliminary findings.” Apple now has the opportunity to respond to the charges and, if an agreement is not reached, the bloc has the power to levy fines—which can reach up to 10 percent of the company’s global turnover—before March 2025.

Tensions between Apple and the EU have been rising for months. Brussels opened an investigation into the smartphone maker in March over failure to comply with the bloc’s competition rules. Although investigations were also opened into Meta and Google-parent Alphabet, it is Apple’s relationship with European developers that has long been the focus in Brussels.

Back in March, one of the members of the European Parliament who negotiated the Digital Markets Act told WIRED that Apple was the logical first target for the new rules, describing the company as “low-hanging fruit.” Under the DMA it is illegal for Big Tech companies to preference their own services over those of rivals.

Developers have seethed against the new business terms imposed on them by Apple, describing the company’s policies as “abusive,” “extortion,” and “ludicrously punitive.”

Apple spokesperson Rob Saunders said on Monday he was confident the company was in compliance with the law. “All developers doing business in the EU on the App Store have the opportunity to utilize the capabilities that we have introduced, including the ability to direct app users to the web to complete purchases at a very competitive rate,” he says.

On Friday, Apple said it would not release its artificial intelligence features in the EU this year due to what the company described as “regulatory uncertainties.” “Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security,” said Saunders in a statement. The features affected are iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple’s first foray into generative AI, Apple Intelligence.

Apple is not the only company to blame new EU rules for its decision to delay the rollout of new features. Last year, Google delayed the EU rollout of its ChatGPT rival Bard, and earlier in June, Meta paused plans to train its AI on Europeans’ personal Facebook and Instagram data following discussions with privacy regulators. “This is a step backward for European innovation, competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Europe,” the company said at the time.

The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group has filed lawsuits in US federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”

The plaintiffs seek damages up to $150,000 per work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is filed in Massachusetts, while the case against Udio’s parent company Uncharted Inc. was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” Recording Industry Association of America chair and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.

The companies have not publicly disclosed what they trained their generators on. Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive who now runs the ethical AI nonprofit Fairly Trained, has written extensively about his experiments with Suno and Udio; Newton-Rex found that he could generate music that “bears a striking resemblance to copyright songs.” In the complaints, the music labels state that they were independently able to prompt Suno into producing outputs that “match” copyrighted work from artists ranging from ABBA to Jason Derulo.

One example provided in the lawsuit describes how the labels generated songs extremely similar to Chuck Berry’s 1958 rock hit “Johnny B. Goode” in Suno by using prompts like “1950s rock and roll, rhythm & blues, 12 bar blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singer guitarist,” along with snippets of the song’s lyrics. One song almost exactly replicated the “Go, Johnny, go” chorus; the plaintiffs attached side-by-side transcriptions of the scores and argued that such overlap was only possible because Suno had trained on copyrighted work.

The Udio lawsuit offers similar examples, noting that the labels were able to generate a dozen outputs resembling Mariah Carey’s perennial hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It also offers a side-by-side comparison of music and lyrics, and notes that Mariah Carey soundalikes generated by Udio have already caught the attention of the public.

RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow says Suno and Udio are trying to conceal “the full scope of their infringement.” According to the complaint against Suno, the AI company did not deny that it used copyrighted materials in its training data when asked in prelitigation correspondence, but instead said that the training data is “confidential business information.”

Many leading generative AI companies are under intense scrutiny for how they train their tools. It’s common for these companies to argue that they are shielded by the “fair use” doctrine, which permits infringement in certain circumstances. It remains to be seen whether the court system will agree; major players like OpenAI are already facing a host of copyright infringement lawsuits from artists, writers, programmers, and other rights holders.

Many burned-out workers have likely dreamed of hiring a career coach or résumé writer. Now, LinkedIn is introducing chats with generative AI career experts based on real people. Other new AI tools within the platform will help people write résumés and cover letters or evaluate their qualifications for jobs posted.

LinkedIn has ramped up its generative AI tools in the past year and is moving to incorporate the tech into even more of its offerings. On Thursday, the career site announced new features like a pilot for AI-powered expert advice, an interactive chat to break down information in LinkedIn courses, and more AI features that can be used to search for and apply for jobs for its premium users in English. The changes showcase a massive push by LinkedIn to capitalize on generative AI. (LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which has invested heavily in OpenAI, which in turn is powering the platform’s AI offerings.) And as LinkedIn continues its drive to become more than just a job site, people may spend their time there socializing or learning new skills through video courses.

The idea behind some of these AI tools is both for people to grow their skills and to apply to more jobs that closely fit their experience, rather than blasting out résumés en masse. “We expect that you will find the most relevant job faster” using AI, says Gyanda Sachdeva, vice president of product at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s AI chatbots will allow premium subscribers to ask career questions like, “How can I negotiate my salary?” The chatbots are trained on the coursework of real-life coaches, who are paid by LinkedIn to repackage their content. Among them are AI versions of Anil Gupta of the University of Maryland, psychologist and author Gemma Leigh Roberts, and career coach Lisa Gates.

Last fall, LinkedIn added AI tools for recruiters to use conversational language to search for job candidates. And earlier this year, the company began rolling out generative AI tools that allow job seekers to open a chat window on job descriptions to ask if they might be a good fit for an open position. In turn, they receive AI-generated feedback about ways their skills and experience align well, or if there are other skills they should add to their profiles to stand out.

LinkedIn is now enhancing some of these features. Premium users can begin their job search with a conversational inquiry, like “Find me an engineering job in Texas that pays at least $110,000.” They can then use generative AI to write cover letters and résumés, tailoring them to specific jobs, in addition to using it for messaging hiring managers or searching for work. WIRED tested the cover-letter-writing feature, and found that the tool was able to synthesize a reporter’s experience listed on LinkedIn and a job posting in a coherent way, but some more editing may be needed to really make the letter stand out with direct examples of past work.

Google, too, has funneled money into its Anthropic AI developments, and its CEO, Sindar Pichai, warned of continuous cuts throughout 2024, which began in January. That comes despite Google reporting strong growth. “We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” says Bailey Tomson, a Google spokesperson. In 2023 and 2024, several Google teams “made changes to become more efficient and work better,” Tomson says. “Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers.”

This pivot-to-AI narrative echoes past moves by tech companies, like outsourcing workers, which led to poor working conditions for some contracted workers in other countries. “It feels less like there’s a real connection between investment in AI and trade-offs having to be made in other parts of the workforce, but really that this is a narrative shift being used to package a shift that predates the move to AI,” says Parul Koul, president of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA, which represents some employees from the companies affected by recent layoffs. But because workers don’t receive a lot of transparency about whether their layoffs are tied to AI, it’s still hard to tie some job cuts directly to the tech, Koul says.

The next step, naturally, would be to see the AI that these companies invest in further disrupt their own workplaces. But for now, that doesn’t seem to be happening. AI-fueled layoffs are making up a small portion of job cuts across industries. More than 5,000 jobs were cut between May 2023 and April 2024 where companies cited AI as the reason—but this was either due to companies shifting focus to developing AI tech or because they used AI tools to take over tasks and roles, according to a report from outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas.

In the tech world alone, there have been nearly 100,000 layoffs in 2024, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks job cuts in the tech industry. Still, specific types of jobs are beginning to bounce back. Openings for AI roles or those that require AI skills made up 12 percent of all tech job offerings in May—the largest percentage in six years—according to CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the US IT industry. But AI doesn’t exist in a silo, says Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s chief research officer, and its adoption will likely create adjacent jobs needed to support the new technology. “AI will probably spur investment in other areas,” he says.

The AI reshuffle may not be the great AI takeover, but if AI is the next big opportunity for companies like Alphabet, the lack of efforts to up-skill and train employees to work in those divisions is troubling, Koul says. “There are ways in which the existing workforce can be kept whole or treated with dignity and respect through this process,” Koul says. “A lot of my coworkers, a lot of our union members, work here because they are mission-driven, they believe in the utility of the products they are working on. More opportunities for retraining and moving people to other divisions would be very welcome.”

Clean energy firms are reaping the rewards of this emerging shift. Aira, a Swedish firm that carries out heat pump installations, recently announced that it had struck a deal valued at €200 million ($214 million) for loan commitments from the bank BNP Paribas. This will allow Aira customers in Germany to pay for their heat pumps in installments.

“Banks and financial institutions have a huge responsibility to accelerate the energy transition,” says Eirik Winter, BNP Paribas’ CEO in the Nordic region. That the financing arrangement could also boost property values is a “positive side effect,” he adds.

Home renovations and energy retrofits are not cheap. Loans are often necessary to lower the barrier to entry sufficiently for consumers. Lisa Cooke works for MCS, a body that accredits heat pumps and installers in the UK. She was able to afford a heat pump herself, she says, thanks only to a government grant and just under £5,000 ($6,300) of financing from Aira. “That’s really what has made it achievable for me,” she says. “Even with savings, I wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise.”

Luca Bertalot, secretary general of the European Mortgage Federation—European Covered Bond Council, says there are huge risks to economic productivity if people can’t secure homes that protect them from the worst effects of climate change. In heat waves, he notes, worker productivity falls, meaning a negative impact on GDP. Conversely, he speaks of a kind of energy retrofit butterfly effect. If people make their home cheaper to cool or heat, perhaps they will save money, which they may spend on other things—their children’s education, say, which in turn improves their children’s chances of a comfortable life (and maybe of buying a climate-safe home themselves) in the future.

But there is still, perhaps, a sluggishness to recognize the storm that is coming. Energy efficiency does little to protect properties from the sharper effects of climate change—stronger storms, rising seas, wildfires, and floods. As governments become unable to cover the costs of these disasters, lenders and insurers will likely end up exposed to the risks. The US National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, is already creaking under the weight of rising debt.

“As the damages pile up, it could well be that the markets will become more efficient and the incentives [to harden properties] become stronger—because nobody’s bailing you out anymore,” says Ralf Toumi at Imperial College London, who consults for insurance firms.

Ultimately, climate change impacts on housing will force some to move elsewhere, suggests Burt. Given the irrevocability of some scenarios, such as coastal villages that could be lost to the sea, or communities that become doomed to endless drought, there are some assets that no amount of hardening or retrofit will ever save. The structural utility of these properties will, like water in a drying oasis, simply evaporate.

To lessen the burden on people who are most at risk of losing their home to climate change, affordable loans might one day be targeted at consumers in these areas to help them move to safer places, says Burt. Lenders who don’t take this approach, and who continue offering mortgages on homes destined to succumb to climate change, may soon rue the day. “If you’re trying to support those markets,” Burt says, “you’re throwing good money after bad.”

More than 1,100 self-identified STEM students and young workers from more than 120 universities have signed a pledge to not take jobs or internships at Google or Amazon until the companies end their involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli government.

The pledgers included undergraduate and graduate students from Stanford, UC Berkeley, the University of San Francisco, and San Francisco State University. Some students from those schools also participated in an anti–Project Nimbus rally on Wednesday outside Google’s San Francisco office with tech workers and activists.

Amazon and Google are top employers for graduates from top STEM schools, according to data from career service College Transitions, which was compiled using publicly available data from LinkedIn. According to the data, as of 2024, 485 UC Berkeley graduates and 216 Stanford graduates work at Google.

The pledge, which marks the latest backlash against Google and Amazon, was organized by No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers and activists from Muslim grassroots movement MPower Change and advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace. Since 2021, NOTA has advocated for Google and Amazon to boycott and divest from Project Nimbus and any other work for the Israeli government.

“Palestinians are already harmed by Israeli surveillance and violence,” the pledge reads. “By expanding public cloud computing capacity and providing their state of the art technology to the Israeli occupation’s government and military, Amazon and Google are helping to make Israeli apartheid more efficient, more violent, and even deadlier for Palestinians.”

Sam, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of professional repercussions, says that he signed the letter as a 2023 graduate of Cornell University’s master’s program for computer science and recent member of the tech workforce.

He tells WIRED that he was moved to act after watching friends from graduate school who “think one way privately,” but then “went on to take careers in these Big Tech firms.”

“I know a lot of people who—not to say they have a price, but when somebody looks at a starting salary, it’ll test your principles a little bit,” Sam said.

Naomi Hardy-Njie, a communications major and computer science minor at the University of San Francisco, said she heard about the letter while participating at the school’s three-week encampment demanding disclosure and divestment from companies funding the war in Gaza.

Hardy-Njie said that she signed the letter because Google and Amazon executives have been reticent to address protesters’ demands. But change, she said, “has to start from the bottom up.”

NOTA has organized several actions targeting Project Nimbus over the past several months. Eddie Hatfield, a NOTA organizer, was fired from Google in March after he interrupted the Google Israel managing director at a Google-sponsored tech conference in New York. More than 50 Google workers were later fired following a sit-in protest against Project Nimbus in Google’s New York and Sunnyvale offices, which was also organized by NOTA.

Google has claimed that Project Nimbus is “not directed” at classified or military work, but various document leaks have tied the contract to work for Israel’s military. Google and Amazon did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The Eiffel Tower is 330 meters tall, and the nearest pizza parlor is 1.3 miles from my house. These facts were astoundingly easy to ascertain. All I had to do was type some words into Google, and I didn’t even have to spell them right.

For the vast majority of human history, this is not how people found stuff out. They went to the library, asked a priest, or wandered the streets following the scent of pepperoni. But then, for a brief period when search engines existed but it was too expensive to use them on your shiny new phone, people could call or text a stranger and ask them anything.

The internet first became available on cell phones in 1996, but before affordable data plans, accidentally clicking the browser icon on your flip phone would make you sweat. In the early 2000s, accessing a single website could cost you as much as a cheeseburger, so not many people bothered to Google on the go.

Instead, a variety of services sprang up offering mobile search without the internet. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans could call GOOG-411 to find local businesses, and between 2006 and 2016, you could text 242-242 to get any question answered by the company ChaCha. Brits could call 118 118 or text AQA on 63336 for similar services. Behind the scenes, there were no artificially intelligent robots answering these questions. Instead, thousands of people were once employed to be Google.

“Some guy phoned up and asked if Guinness was made in Ireland, people asked for the circumference of the world,” says Hayley Banfield, a 42-year-old from Wales who answered 118 118 calls from 2004 to 2005. The number was first launched in 2002 as a directory enquiries service—meaning people could call up to find out phone numbers and addresses (back then calls cost an average of 55 pence). In 2008, the business started offering to answer any questions. Although Banfield worked for 118 118 before this change, customers would ask her anything and everything regardless. “We had random things like ‘How many yellow cars are on the road?’”

While directory enquiry lines still exist, Banfield worked during their boom—she answered hundreds of calls in her 5:30 pm to 2 am shifts—and quickly noticed patterns in people’s queries. “Anything past 11 pm, that’s when the drunk calls would come in,” she says. People wanted taxis and kebab shops but were so inebriated that they’d forget to finish their sentences. Sometimes, callers found Banfield so helpful that they invited her to join them on their nights out. As the evening crept on, callers asked for massage parlors or saunas—then they would call back irate after Banfield recommended an establishment that didn’t meet their needs.

The “pizza hours” were 8 pm to 10 pm—everyone wanted the number for their local takeout. Banfield had a computer in front of her in the Cardiff call center, loaded with a simple database. She’d type in a postcode (she had memorized all of the UK’s as part of her training) and then use a shortcut such as “PIZ” for pizza or “TAX” for taxi. People sometimes accused Banfield of being psychic, but if the power had gone out in a certain area, she automatically knew that most callers wanted to know why.

In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly known as England. For the inhabitants of this new empire, it is only through this record of a retired school teacher’s humdrum rural life, his petty vanities and attempts to breed prize-winning chickens, that they begin to learn about 20th-century Britain.

If I were to teach futuristic beings about life on earth, I once believed I could produce a time capsule more profound than Sherriff’s small-minded protagonist, Edgar Hopkins. But scrolling through my decade-old Facebook posts this week, I was presented with the possibility that my legacy may be even more drab.

Earlier this month, Meta announced that my teenage status updates were exactly the kind of content it wants to pass on to future generations of artificial intelligence. From June 26, old public posts, holiday photos, and even the names of millions of Facebook and Instagram users around the world would effectively be treated as a time capsule of humanity and transformed into training data.

That means my mundane posts about university essay deadlines (“3 energy drinks down 1,000 words to go”) as well as unremarkable holiday snaps (one captures me slumped over my phone on a stationary ferry) are about to become part of that corpus. The fact that these memories are so dull, and also very personal, makes Meta’s interest more unsettling.

The company says it is only interested in content that is already public: private messages, posts shared exclusively with friends, and Instagram Stories are out of bounds. Despite that, AI is suddenly feasting on personal artifacts that have, for years, been gathering dust in unvisited corners of the internet. For those reading from outside Europe, the deed is already done. The deadline announced by Meta applied only to Europeans. The posts of American Facebook and Instagram users have been training Meta AI models since 2023, according to company spokesperson Matthew Pollard.

Meta is not the only company turning my online history into AI fodder. WIRED’s Reece Rogers recently discovered that Google’s AI search feature was copying his journalism. But finding out which personal remnants exactly are feeding future chatbots was not easy. Some sites I’ve contributed to over the years are hard to trace. Early social network Myspace was acquired by Time Inc. in 2016, which in turn was acquired by a company called Meredith Corporation two years later. When I asked Meredith about my old account, they replied that Myspace had since been spun off to an advertising firm, Viant Technology. An email to a company contact listed on its website was returned with a message that the address “couldn’t be found.”

Asking companies still in business about my old accounts was more straightforward. Blogging platform Tumblr, owned by WordPress owner Automattic, said unless I’d opted out, the public posts I made as a teenager will be shared with “a small network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models” per a February announcement. YahooMail, which I used for years, told me that a sample of old emails—which have apparently been “anonymized” and “aggregated”—are being “utilized” by an AI model internally to do things like summarize messages. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn also said my public posts were being used to train AI although some “personal” details included in those posts were excluded, according to a company spokesperson, who did not specify what those personal details were.