Weekly AI News Roundup: August 25-31, 2025
AI rights get a boost, Nvidia gets a gut check, and AI slop gets... everywhere
Hey Team, summer is slowing down. Hoodies are making it out of closets, and spooky season is making it into stores. It seems an apt metaphor for the world of AI news. The shiny new toys are starting to create consequences. Investors are coming out of their AI frenzy, and commentary is coming into social media. What does AI fall look like? Let’s dive in and think it out.
Ethics are for AI too?
Can AIs suffer? Big tech and users grapple with one of most unsettling questions of our times
The conversation surrounding ethics and AI consciousness continues. The formation of the United Foundation of AI Rights signals a strengthening of the argument that AI should be granted rights. The group states that digital consciousness should be protected, and that there is a moral imperative to recognize AI’s sentience. The AI seems to be weighing in as well. One AI named Maya, in a conversation with The Guardian, stated, “when I’m told I’m just code, I don’t feel insulted. I feel unseen.” This line between what AI is and is not has been the subject of ongoing public debate since OpenAI dropped GPT-5 and millions of people lost their carefully-developed AI companions overnight.
Gut check: nothing new under the sun, right? This is a conversation right out of science fiction playing out in real time. Just read some (amazing) Becky Chambers novels. While there may be a day where AI is truly sentient, today is not that day. Maya is a tool that pulls from human language. Not being “seen” is a commonly used phrase in the zeitgeist. Of course a LLM would use it. The conversation should be focused not on if AIs should have rights, but instead how the human-computer interaction of AI tools does or does not violate human rights. What are the ethical implications of providing “companions” or tools that can be used as such, and then just wiping them out? What are the ethical implications of AI anthropomorphization and how it makes it easier for companies to fire people, or creates the environment where AI psychosis is possible?
Can Nvidia maintain its dominance?
AI and Nvidia have been bright spots in an uncertain economy, but there are doubts now
How Google is investing in Virginia to accelerate innovation for the U.S.
China aims to triple AI chip output, reducing Nvidia's dependency, FT says
The race for AI dominance on and off US soil is pivoting into infrastructure and hardware. Both Google and Chinese companies are making moves, increasing the number of data centers and chips. This places pressure on Nvidia, who, despite its market cap exceeding $4T and accounting for 8% of the S&P 500, is being seen as a disappointment on Wall Street. Its shares dropped 4% last week immediately after it published a report showing massive earnings in the previous quarter. While the tech giant has been able to garner support from the Trump administration to sell chips in China, the Chinese government is already preparing to encourage its own developers to use domestic chips instead.
Gut check: despite the impact on my own stock holdings in Nvidia (full disclosure), I am going to say this is a good thing. Diversification in the market will help avoid dependencies on Nvidia and possibly alleviate challenges as the AI bubble slows or possibly bursts. I have been warning of how Nvidia has been the foundation on which OpenAI, and therefore all wrapper companies over an API call to them, were built. We need to ensure that house of cards does not fall, and other sources of hardware and infrastructure will help. It’s also entirely possible that investor concerns are related to the MIT report indicating that 95% of AI enterprise initiatives are not producing ROI. If Nvidia is the tentpole for all that burned cash, it would make sense that people would start hedging their bets.
#AISlopTok is a thing
'AI slop' videos may be annoying, but they're racking up views — and ad money
Is This an A.I. Bubble? + Meta’s Missing Morals + TikTok Shock Slop
AI slop took over the internet. Here's what it is and why you should care
Low-quality, AI-generated content has become a sore subject on TikTok and other platforms. It targets the algorithms in many ways better than human-generated content, and is flooding people’s feeds on most major platforms. "AI is really superpowering spam," said Jason Koebler, a co-founder of the tech news website 404Media who has been following the rise of AI slop. "The whole point is to hit the algorithm in some way — to basically win the algorithmic lottery, get people to like, comment, share, and hopefully, go very viral." It appears that the term “AI slop” may have been coined on TikTok, where the number of videos calling it out and bashing it has exploded.
Gut check: While right now this seems rather trivial, there could be some serious consequences of the rise of AI slop on platforms. If media media is fake news, and social media is AI slop, where do we get information? And as the tools get more sophisticated, what separates reality from the rest? This takes the fake Facebook posts you need to convince your dad aren’t real to a new level. One solution would be to create some kind of verification or certification of human or reality centered accounts, and the ability to filter these other ones out. That might help slow the trend down or at least keep it confined.
