Backlash, Budgets, and Bots
· The Fluency Briefing
The Fluency Briefing
Your Guide to What's Happening in AI and Why It Matters to You
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
The Pope's new encyclical on AI ethics appears to have been partly written by AI. Uber blew through its entire annual AI budget by April and can't figure out what it got for the money. Meanwhile, college graduates are literally booing pro-AI commencement speakers off stage. If you're wondering whether AI has moved from theoretical disruption to deeply personal chaos, Tuesday's news answers that pretty definitively.
Today in AI:
- The Vatican's AI Encyclical Has an AI Ghost(writer) - Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on human dignity in the age of AI appears to be partly written by AI itself, according to analysis using the Pangram detector. The Italian-language original flagged highest for AI-generated content, with some chapters hitting 62%. Lesswrong, May 26, 2026
- Uber Burned Its AI Budget in Four Months - Uber reportedly exhausted its annual AI budget by April 2026 and still can't connect rising spending on Claude Code tokens to more useful features reaching consumers. The company's president called the ROI link "not there yet." The Verge, May 26, 2026
- Grads Are Booing Pro-AI Speakers at Commencement - Students at multiple universities booed graduation speakers who hyped AI's transformative power. One music executive told graduates to "deal with it," which went about as well as you'd expect. The Guardian, May 26, 2026
- AI Debt Collectors Are Calling, and They're Weird - AI-powered voice agents are now making debt collection calls, sometimes with outdated information and a willingness to engage in bizarre role-play scenarios before punting callers to humans. Debt delinquency in the US is swelling, and the bots are multiplying fast. Wired, May 26, 2026
- Fake Citations in Medical Papers Up Twelvefold - An audit of 2.5 million biomedical papers found that fabricated references, likely generated by language models, have surged since 2023. The fake citations match topics, follow correct formatting, and 98% of affected papers have received no publisher response. The Decoder
- Only 5% of Companies Are Getting Real Value from AI - Boston Consulting Group's survey of 1,000+ C-suite executives found the share generating substantial AI value crept from 4% to 5% in a year. History suggests the top 5% of firms will capture outsized gains while the rest muddle along. Fast Company
- People Are Ditching Spotify for Their Own AI Slop - A growing corner of the Suno subreddit is proudly declaring they now listen almost exclusively to AI-generated songs they prompted themselves. "It's album after album of bangers," one user wrote without apparent irony. The Verge
- Entry-Level Jobs With High AI Exposure Are Shrinking - Employment is declining specifically in early-career roles with high AI exposure, like software developers and customer service reps, while more experienced workers in the same fields remain stable. Underemployment for recent grads hit 42.5%, its highest since COVID. MIT Technology Review
Today's Takeaway:
Here's the thing about AI's economic impact: everybody's arguing about whether it's a job-killer or a nothing-burger, and today's data suggests both camps are wrong. MIT Technology Review reports that labor economist Erika McEntarfer, formerly of the BLS, notes only one in five companies are even using AI in any business function. The broad labor market remains relatively stable. That's the reality check for doomsayers. But zoom into one specific slice and the picture darkens: entry-level positions in AI-exposed fields are quietly eroding while senior roles hold steady. Translation: AI isn't eliminating entire professions, it's pulling the ladder up behind existing workers.
This connects directly to the BCG finding that just 5% of companies are generating real AI value, per Fast Company. And Uber's confession that it can't trace its AI spending to actual output, reported by The Verge, shows even sophisticated tech companies are struggling to convert AI investment into results. The pattern is clear: AI is already changing who gets hired and which tasks get automated, but the companies writing the checks often can't explain what they're buying. The disruption is real, it's just landing unevenly, hitting the most vulnerable workers first while executives chase returns that haven't materialized.
🔍 Myth Buster
The myth: "Most companies are successfully unlocking major value from AI investments"
The reality: According to a 2024 Boston Consulting Group survey of over 1,000 C-suite executives, only 4% of companies were generating substantial value from AI - and even one year later, that figure has barely moved. The bottleneck isn't the technology itself but organizational readiness: BCG's research identifies six foundational capabilities companies must build simultaneously, yet most organizations focus on only one or two, such as selecting a model or building a chatbot proof-of-concept, and stall before achieving real transformation.
The nuance: The concern that AI requires enormous investment is legitimate - closing the gap between pilot projects and enterprise-scale value genuinely demands sustained effort across data infrastructure, talent, governance, and culture, not just a software subscription.
The Bottom Line
The Pattern: AI isn't arriving as a tidal wave or a dud. It's landing unevenly, quietly hollowing out entry-level jobs, inflating corporate budgets without clear returns, and injecting fake citations into medical research, all while 95% of companies still can't figure out how to make it work for them.
Why It Matters: The gap between AI's costs and its proven value is widening, and the people absorbing the downside, recent graduates, debt-burdened consumers fielding robo-calls, researchers citing phantom papers, aren't the ones making the spending decisions. If you run a business or manage a team, the risk isn't just wasting money. It's sleepwalking into structural changes you didn't plan for.
Your Move: Before your next AI purchase or hire, ask one uncomfortable question: which specific junior role or entry-level task is this replacing, and what's your plan for the pipeline of talent that used to flow through it? The companies that answer that now will be the ones still standing in five years.
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