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Your Daily Dose of Artificial Intelligence
🧠 From breakthroughs in machine learning to the latest AI tools transforming our world, AI Daily gives you quick, insightful updates—every single day. Whether you're a founder, developer, or just AI-curious, we break down the news and trends you actually need to know.
Welcome to Daily Inference, your essential guide to understanding the AI revolution transforming our world. I'm your host, and today we're diving into stories that reveal both the profound challenges and unexpected limitations of artificial intelligence in November 2025.
Let's start with a deeply concerning finding from the UK that highlights how AI is reshaping violence against women and girls. A new police-commissioned survey has uncovered something shocking: one in four people either see nothing wrong with creating and sharing sexual deepfakes without consent, or they feel completely neutral about it. Think about that for a moment. We're talking about AI-generated explicit images of real people, created and distributed without permission, and a quarter of respondents don't see the ethical problem. Senior police officers are sounding the alarm, stating that artificial intelligence is actively accelerating an epidemic of violence against women and girls, and they're not mincing words when it comes to assigning blame. They're calling out technology companies as complicit in this abuse. This raises urgent questions about platform responsibility, content moderation at scale, and whether the technology industry is doing enough to prevent their tools from being weaponized. The ease with which these deepfakes can now be created has democratized a particularly insidious form of harassment, and the survey results suggest that public understanding of consent in the digital age is dangerously lagging behind the technology itself.
Now, shifting to something that might seem lighter but reveals fundamental limitations in AI systems. Researchers from universities in the UK and Italy have been putting large language models to the test with puns, and the results are, well, not funny. At least not to the AI. The study found that current AI systems fundamentally don't understand wordplay. For comedians and headline writers who rely on clever puns, this might be reassuring news for job security. But it points to something more significant: these models lack a genuine grasp of humor, empathy, and cultural nuance. Puns require understanding multiple meanings, cultural context, and the playful manipulation of language. They're a uniquely human form of communication that relies on shared understanding and cognitive flexibility. The fact that even our most advanced language models stumble over them reveals that for all their impressive text generation capabilities, they're still missing something essential about how humans actually communicate and find meaning in language. It's a reminder that artificial intelligence, despite the name, isn't really intelligent in the way we are.
Let's turn to policy developments in the UK, where the copyright debate around AI training data is taking a potentially significant turn. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has indicated sympathy for artists demanding payment when AI companies scrape their copyrighted works. Her statement that 'people rightly want to get paid for the work that they do' marks what appears to be a shift from her predecessor Peter Kyle's approach. Kyle had been leaning toward an opt-out system, where artists would need to actively prevent AI companies from ingesting their work. Kendall is now talking about finding a way for both sectors to grow and thrive together. This matters because it goes to the heart of how we value creative labor in the age of generative AI. The previous opt-out framework essentially placed the burden on creators to protect their work, while the default position favored AI companies freely using whatever content they could access. A shift toward requiring consent or compensation would fundamentally change the economics of AI development and acknowledge that the massive value being created by these systems is built on the unpaid labor of millions of creators. It's part of a broader global conversation about whether AI companies should pay for their training data, with similar debates happening across Europe and in the United States.
These stories connect to a larger theme: the question of power and sovereignty in the AI age. An essay published this week examines whether Britain has effectively become an economic colony of American tech firms. The piece argues that the UK, like many nations, became almost entirely dependent on a small number of US platforms starting in the 2000s. We're talking about Google, Facebook, Amazon, and their peers, companies so dominant they effectively function as monopolies in their sectors. What's striking is the observation that Britain seems not just resigned to this arrangement but sometimes eager to subsidize its own dependence. The essay traces this back to the optimistic early 2000s belief that internet platforms would democratize opportunity and make everyone rich. That dream didn't quite pan out. Instead, we got concentration of power and wealth in a handful of corporations. Now, as AI becomes the next technological frontier, these same dynamics are playing out again. The companies developing the most powerful AI systems are predominantly American, and other nations must decide whether to develop alternatives, regulate more aggressively, or continue down the path of economic and technological dependence. The UK offers a case study in what happens when a country that could have been a true tech leader instead submits to dominance from abroad.
But it's not all concerns about power concentration and technological limitations. There's also genuine potential for AI to strengthen democratic institutions. Researchers Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier, who recently published the book 'Rewiring Democracy,' presented at the World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg with a more optimistic message. Yes, they acknowledge the risks: AI undermines confidence in our information ecosystem, biased AI systems can harm citizens, and authoritarian leaders can use these tools to consolidate power. But they also highlight positive examples of how AI is transforming democratic governance and politics for the better. The specifics of their four ways AI can strengthen democracy weren't fully detailed in the coverage, but the framework they present is important. It suggests that the relationship between artificial intelligence and democracy isn't predetermined. The technology itself is neutral; what matters is how we choose to deploy it, regulate it, and integrate it into our civic institutions. This more nuanced view pushes back against both uncritical techno-optimism and reflexive pessimism, suggesting instead that democracies need to actively shape how AI develops rather than simply reacting to whatever Silicon Valley builds.
What ties these stories together is the realization that we're in a critical period where the rules, norms, and power structures around AI are still being established. The deepfakes crisis shows how quickly new harms can emerge and how public attitudes may lag dangerously behind technological capability. The puns research reveals that current AI systems, for all their surface-level competence, lack fundamental aspects of human understanding. The copyright debate in the UK demonstrates that policy frameworks are still in flux, with different visions competing for how to balance innovation with fairness to creators. The economic colonization argument warns that technological dependence has real geopolitical consequences. And the democratic optimism from Sanders and Schneier reminds us that outcomes aren't predetermined.
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And speaking of staying informed, make sure you visit dailyinference.com to sign up for our daily AI newsletter. We curate the most important developments in artificial intelligence and deliver them straight to your inbox, helping you make sense of this rapidly evolving field without the information overload.
As we close today's episode, the message is clear: artificial intelligence is not a distant future concern. It's reshaping power dynamics, revealing its limitations, challenging our legal frameworks, and forcing difficult questions about consent, creativity, economic sovereignty, and democratic governance right now. The decisions we make in these formative years will echo for decades to come. The technology is powerful, but it's still humans who must decide what we build, what we allow, and what values we encode into the systems that increasingly mediate our lives.
Thanks for joining us on Daily Inference. Stay curious, stay critical, and we'll see you tomorrow with more essential AI news.