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If you’re in charge of an editorial team, you’re used to objections from the rank and file about using AI. “It gets things wrong.” “I don’t know what it’s doing with my data.” “Chatbots only say what you want to hear.” Those are all valid concerns, and I bring them up often in my introduction to AI classes. Each one opens a discussion about what you can do about them, and it turns out to be quite a bit. AI hallucinations require careful thought about where to apply fact-checking and “human in the loop.” Enterprise tools, APIs, and privacy settings can go a long way to protecting your data. And you can prompt the default sycophancy out of AI by telling it to give you critical feedback. There’s another objection to AI that’s been growing, however, and you can’t just prompt your way out of this one. There’s a growing reluctance among some knowledge workers to use AI because of how much energy it consumes and the consequential environmental impact. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} It’s no secret that, as the number of people using AI grows, the colossal energy footprint of the AI industry increases. It’s true that chips powering AI continually become more efficient, but tools like deep research, thinking models, and agents ensure the demand for energy rises, too. It didn’t help that Sam Altman once said that saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT was needlessly burning millions of extra dollars. Data center construction alone has soared by 40% year over year, raising concerns about not just energy needs but also water consumption. When guilt over AI use turns into pushback In the eyes of those concerned about the environment, these stories and statistics can weigh on a person. Using ChatGPT starts to feel like a betrayal, with every query producing both intelligence and a commensurate amount of guilt. If they feel their employer is pushing them to use these tools anyway, that guilt can bubble up into anger, and even resistance. We’re already starting to see serious objections. Civil servants in the U.K. voiced reluctance to use AI tools because of net zero emissions concerns, The Telegraph reported. Various officials charged with implementing AI-driven initiatives balked, fearing that doing so would conflict with Britains climate commitments. A similar dynamic is playing out at the municipal level in the U.S. Some city IT staff and policymakers in places like California have begun scrutinizing AI projects through a sustainability lens. Many media professionals are concerned too. A couple of weeks ago, I saw at least three journalists bring up the concernat separate eventswhile I was attending the Online News Association conference in New Orleans. And in a recent training I did with a large corporate comms team, I polled the audience: What is your chief concern about using AI, giving them five choices: hallucinations, bias, sycophancy, privacy, or energy use? A full 37% picked energy use. All the evidence points to AI’s energy use developing into a massive PR problemnot just for the industry, but for any business. It’s hard to be “AI forward” if your workers think using it is a huge step backward for climate change. To be clear, this isn’t to say the environmental concerns aren’t validit’s just that they’re simply not my area of expertise. But AI and managing teams are, and it’s clear this issue will be a growing challenge for AI leaders across industries, but especially media, since journalists are on the front lines of reporting AI’s environmental impact. Dos and donts for managing employee concerns So what can company leaders do to address this problem before it gets out of control? That will depend on a number of things: your AI policy, the tools you’re using, and the demographics of your workers. But here is some guidance, divided between dos and don’ts: Do listen carefully to their concerns. Are they objecting because of broad climate implications, or are their concerns more specific? Does it have to do with a specific tool? A local impact? The more detail you have on the issue, the more you will know what you can do about it. Don’t dismiss their concerns, or try to deflect them by pointing to other industries. Yes, cars spew carbon, and there are microplastics in the ocean. But there are also diesel engines and recycling programs. It’s fair to ask what the equivalent is for AI. Do research the problem. In August this year, Google became the first major lab to produce a detailed technical report on the energy, carbon, and water footprint of its AI services, which was an opportunity for the company to brag about its progress, reducing the energy consumed per prompt by 33 times from May 2024 to May 2025. This could be useful information for your team. Don’t encourage mitigating individual use. This might be controversial, but the worst thing an AI-forward worker can do is neglect to use AI to help solve a problem that it can really help with. And that goes for thinking, deep research, and GPT-5 Pro, too. Rather than mitigating individual use of tools, instead . . . Do transition workflows into dedicated tools. If a particular tool or workflow proves useful enough, you should develop it such that it uses the most efficient model possible, which will save on compute costs and the environment. Paying for your own compute is the ultimate incentivizer to throttling unnecessary use. Finally, don’t stop talking about the problem. When you give updates to your team, talk about what you’re doing, as an organization, to address the issue. Ambitious companies might even create an internally visible energy countersomething that would measure not just how much energy you’re using, but also how much compute you’re getting from it, showing how you’re improving efficiency over time. The risk when workers lose faith As AI advances, governed by mammoth trillion-dollar companies and world governments, it’s understandable that individuals may feel they have no agency in how it impacts society, and that includes the planet. It’s important for leaders to recognize that feeling of impotence and flip it into a quest for efficiency and open communication. Organizations that don’t might find that the workers using AI in unauthorized ways aren’t nearly as bad as the ones who refuse to use it at all. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
In part four of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Companys oral history of YouTube, insiders describe how the companys Partner Program began sharing ad revenue with creators, kicking off the age of the professional YouTuber. As monetization transformed the platform, creators faced the newfangled challenges of managing fame in the viral video age. YouTube, meanwhile, wrestled with hate speech and other unsavory content. With YouTube increasingly competing with TV in its classic form, it also spent billions to bring one of broadcastings most iconic offeringsthe NFLon board. Comments have been edited for length and clarity. Read more How YouTube Ate TV Part one: YouTube failed as a dating site. This one change altered its fortunes forever Part two: Pit bulls, rats, and 2 circling sharks: The inside story of Google buying YouTube Part three: How YouTube went from money pit to money printer Ian Hecox, cocreator (with his high school friend Anthony Padilla) of the comedy duo Smosh: We were one of the first 10 channels on YouTube to get monetization [in 2007]. That allowed us to move out of our parents’ houses and into a house where we lived and worked for multiple years. Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube chief product officer/CTO (20082014): At first you had to know somebody to get into the Partner Program. The choice to open it up in 2009 was big. It was heavily motivated by our interaction with Sal Khan and Khan Academy, and how important it was to support creators like that.Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, the pioneering maker of educational videos: I think I got on YouTube’s radar because of [Mehrotra]. He’s a close friend. He used to say, You know, Sal, I checked your viewership. If you turned your ads on, you could maybe make a living off of this.Mehrotra: Of every dollar that came in [to YouTube], 55 cents went right back out [to creators]. That was a promise we were willing to make. It was a very hard decision at a time when we were losing a lot of money.Justine iJustine Ezarik, YouTuber: The first few years, I wasnt making a lot of money. But then the YouTube Partner Program came along. And then the brand deals started coming. Zahavah Levine, YouTube general counsel, chief counsel (20062011): Paying this new generation of YouTube creatorswho developed content specifically for YouTubeled to an entirely new ecosystem for unknown performers and filmmakers by giving these artists new ways to promote their work to a global audience and rise to fame. Meanwhile, YouTubes cultural influence was still surging. Kevin Allocca, YouTube culture and trends executive (2010present): In 2010, you had Double Rainbow and Auto-Tune the News. Some of the Lonely Island stuff from Saturday Night Live was popping as well. In 2011, you had Rebecca Black and Nyan Cat. It was kind of the peak viral video era. The parents of unknown 13-year-old singer Rebecca Black paid $4,000 to produce a video of her song Friday. It got about 1,000 views in its first month on YouTubeand then, after going viral, racked up 167 million more in four months. Rebecca Black, singer: Friday was never intended to be a part of the internet. The idea of it being [seen] by anyone more than my family and the people I was making it with was the furthest thing from my mind.Allocca: The things that were viral at that point were the ones that people were sharing across different social media platforms or that were being embedded across all the big blogs. Though Blacks song hit the Billboard charts, it was widely mocked online, and she was targeted for harassment, including death threats. Black: The idea of putting yourself out there, for me as a kid, was terrifying. I dont think the internet knew at all what it was turning itself into, what it already was at that point. There was such a Wild West of the dark web and the deep web and strangers on the internet. As a child, theres just no way that you even can truly grasp what that means. Founded in 2010, VidConan annual conference for creators, executives, and fanshelped make the platforms community tangible. Tara Walpert Levy, Google ads director (20112021); VP, Americas at YouTube (2021present): We started taking advertisers and agencies to VidCon, where they could see the relationship between the creators and the fans.Jim Louderback, general manager and CEO, VidCon (20172022): All you had to do was stand there and watch a famous creator walk across the Anaheim Convention Center. The teens would scream and yell and run after them. It was Beatlemania for YouTubers.Ezarik: At the first VidCon I brought T-shirts to give away, and I was handing them out in the lobby. You cannot do that now. There are too many peopleit’s a safety hazard. But back then, we were all just hanging out. We didn’t know any better. How YouTube Shaped CultureI Counted to 100,000!, January 2017Jimmy MrBeast Donaldson shares 40 hours of himself counting, sped up to 23 minutes. His increasingly lavish stunts eventually make him YouTubes most followed creator. In 2014, Susan Wojcicki (19682024), a key architect of Googles ad business, succeeded Salar Kamangar as YouTubes CEO. She was soon confronted with complaints from marketers whose ads were being shown with videos that included hate speech and other offensive material. Some of them suspended advertising on the platform. Levy: Peple would send us videos and say, This is a problem.Johanna Voolich, YouTube VP of product management (20152021); chief product officer (2023present): We needed to figure out how to lean into the community guidelines that wed had, how to make them stronger, how to work on our advertiser guidelines, how to work on enforcement. How YouTube Shaped CultureCobra Kai, May 2018An updating of the 1984 movie The Karate Kid, this series is a hit among the companys big-budget YouTube Originals. After two seasons, it goes to Netflix. Ultimately, creating YouTube videos is still about connecting with a community and staying human, even if the demand on creators can be incessant and the good stuff can feel like its swimming in a sea of slop. Rhett McLaughlin, cocreator and cohost of Good Mythical Morning (2012present), whose recent topics have included a review of every flavor of Spam: You sit down and watch some videos that are designed for engagement, and you do that for an hour; you walk away and you feel like your brain has just had all its serotonin drained out of it. Link Neal, Good Mythical Morning cocreator, cohost: The cornerstone of everything we do is that were inviting viewers into our friendship. Chris Schonberger, CEO of First We Feast, which produces Hot Ones (2015present) featuring celebrities chatting while eating increasingly spicy wings: [Hot Ones host] Sean [Davis] says that the audience is like a cat that tells you where it wants to be scratched. Michelle Khare, whose activities on Challenge Accepted (2018present) have ranged from joining the circus to training at the FBI Academy: When we release an episode, we have immediate feedback. Many times we take those learnings and apply them to the next video, rather than having to wait for the next season of the show. Casey Neistat, filmmaker and YouTuber: You can have a moderately or mildly successful channel on the platform if you approach it with a moderate or mild level of attention. When I found a real inflection point in my YouTube channel by posting every day, I made the decision to go into that as aggressively as possible, to post every day for something like 800 days in a row. The demands on me were tremendous. Felicia Day, actress, singer, writer, and YouTuber: iJustine [Ezarik] is the survivor. Shes talked a lot lately about how shes pacing herself, not sharing as much, because you cannot sustain it as a human being. If you cant fill your well, because youre always online, youre going to burn out. Ezarik: Right now Im obsessed with Labubu, so I have a bunch of Labubu content coming out. I like sharing it with my audience, and if theyre not interested, theyll just click away and watch something else. Keeping consistent is key, even if youre not posting every day. Just letting them know that Im still here. How YouTube Shaped CultureSkibidi Toilet, February 2023Generation Alpha binges on Alexey Gerasimovs animated series about humanheaded toilets. It garners tens of billions of views within months and spawns memes and merch aplenty. As YouTube grows ever more central to how billions of people entertain and inform themselves, its boundaries have gotten tougher to pin downto the benefit of creators and viewers alike. Neistat: In the mid-2010s, YouTube was elevating specific creators. And in the decade since then, theyve necessarily taken their foot off the gas of defining what it means to be a creator, because they breached this critical mass where they no longer needed to tell people what the platform was. Everyone had their own understanding. What’s come out of that is really special. It’s expanded the definition of what it means to be a YouTuber. Day: When I launched my company, Geek & Sundry, on YouTube [in 2012], YouTube was looking to Hollywood to make content. Native creators weren’t as encouraged or valued or seen as important. And now it’s like creators rule. Its a wonderful place to be. Kevin Perjurer, a YouTube documentarian whose Defunctland channel tells the stories of abandoned theme park attractions: When I started on the platform [in 2017], it was all about regular uploading. You know, You gotta pick your day of the week, and then hit that time with a video of similar runtime and a similar style, and that’s how you grow. That is completely gone in terms of the modern-day YouTube, for better, I think. YouTube is now much more about longer projects that took a dedicated amount of time and effort put into them. Allocca: There’s not a day goes by that I don’t see something where I’m like, I don’t even know what I’m looking at right now. The ways that people use this technology evolve with the ways that society and human creativity evolve. Along with enabling YouTubers to explore new frontiers, YouTube has become essential to some of the worlds most well-established content providers as they seek mass audiences in changing times. One long-in-the-making landmark moment came in 2022, when it acquired rights to the National Football Leagues Sunday Ticket package, formerly a DirecTV staple. Hans Schroeder, executive VP and COO, NFL Media: I go back to somewhere in 2005, even before Google bought YouTube. A couple of us took a day trip out to Google and met with Jennifer Feikin, who was running Google Video at the time. Our excitement only grew once they acquired YouTube, and you saw the growth of that platform. Mehrotra: In 2012, we tried to buy the rights to Sunday Ticket from the NFL. We were ready to pay $2 billion for it and ended up not being able to make the offer. We couldn’t get Larry [Page] to approve it. And YouTube ended up with the exact same deal for the same price 10 years later. Christian Oestlien, YouTube VP of product management (2015present): As with all deals, it came together quickly. I was down in Australia at the time, so it was a lot of 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. type meetings. Schroeder: There was always excitement that we could do something together. They launched the YouTube TV platform and distributed NFL Network and RedZone on that. And that led to Sunday Ticket. Oestlien: One thing that’s really nice about NFL Sunday Ticket was it built on top of the several years of experience we had on YouTube TV of delivering sports as low-latency, high-quality broadcast-level experiences. We built a really big fan base on YouTube across sports with our clips and highlights business and our partnerships with the NFL and others. Levy: The NFL is doing incredibly creative stuff on YouTube, above and beyond distributing their content. Their strategy was very specific: They wanted to partner with us on younger and more female viewers. And so they did a whole series of partnerships with our creators where they let them backstage at exclusive events. Schroeder: As you think about the creator content that they have and how that gets wrapped around an NFL game, were just at the tip of the iceberg now. Oestlien: We’re 10 years into many of us working on our partnership with the NFL. It’s a really nice milestone to showcase how far the company has come and how invested we are in making sure that these great sporting moments can be a big part of the YouTube culture. Additional reporting by María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, David Salazar, and Steven Melendez.
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E-Commerce
Below, coauthors Ulrik Juul Christensen and Tony Wagner share five key insights from their new book, Mastery: Why Deeper Learning Is Essential in an Age of Distraction. Ulrik is founder and CEO of Area9 Lyceum. Formerly a member of the McGraw Hill executive board, he is a frequent keynote speaker and regular contributor to Forbes. He also serves on several boards including the Technical University of Denmark. Tony is senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and former codirector of Harvard Graduate School of Educations Change Leadership Group. He is the bestselling author of Creative Innovators and The Global Achievement Gap. Whats the big idea? In a world where AI can deliver information faster and more accurately than any human, what matters most are the uniquely human skills of critical thinking, communication, creativity, collaboration, and character. This is why we need to replace our outdated, time-based education model with a mastery-based approach. The future of learning depends on a ground-up redesign of our standards, metrics, and methods in the classroom. 1. The core purpose of education should be to develop the skills of mind and heart necessary for productive work, active citizenship, and personal health and well-being Our current education system is far too focused on information retention and recallthings that AI can do far better than any human beingand failing to develop our uniquely human skills. The world simply no longer cares how much students know. What matters far more is what they can do with what they know. A woman named Monique Little did everything society told her to do to succeed. She worked hard in high school, earned a bachelors degree from a good college, and yet, she was stuck in a series of dead-end, low-wage jobs because she lacked marketable skills. In fact, 45% of recent college graduates are underemployed, working in jobs that dont even require a bachelors degree. Monique told us that she had come to see her degrees as no more than certificates of attendance. She told us that she learned far more technical and people skills in 10 weeks at a nonprofit training program called Per Scholas than in all her years of schooling, which is what enabled her to land a great new job as an internet threat analyst for a startup. 2. We must abandon the traditional, time-based model of learning Progress should be based on clear evidence of mastery, not on arbitrary measures, like Carnegie units. The Carnegie unit, which defines a course as 120 hours of seat time, was established more than a century ago. This system, along with its reliance on multiple-choice tests, is fundamentally flawed. It leaves many students behind who simply need more time to master a subject. This system, along with its reliance on multiple-choice tests, is fundamentally flawed. We offer an inspiring alternative: performance assessments. Schools in Allen County, Kentucky, are holding defenses of learning where middle schoolers publicly present and defend their work to community members. This shifts the focus from passive memorization to active demonstration of skill and understanding. This kind of authentic, public assessment not only motivates students but also gives the community a clear, face-to-face sense of what their students can truly do. 3. Tapping into students intrinsic interests and passions motivates them Rote learning and external rewards and punishments (like grades) are not enough and lead to increasing levels of student disengagement and anxiety in schools. We provide a fantastic example from a program called the Center for Advanced Professional Studies, or CAPS. A student named Antonio Linhart entered the program interested in game design. CAPS didnt force him down a predefined path; instead, it helped him apply his passion to real-world projects, including a client project, a community outreach project, and a personal passion project. This process of connecting his interests to meaningful, hands-on work sparked his curiosity and led him to discover new career paths in computer science that he didnt know existed. We also saw this idea in practice at Red Bridge School, where a group of young girls interested in fashion created clothing designs based on their curiosity about roly-poly bugs. This kind of learning is foundational to creativity and mastery of skills. 4. A personalized approach is essential in mastery-based learning Nearly everyone can achieve high levels of mastery, but not everyone learns at the same pace. We bring this idea to life with a powerful story from the world of adult learning, specifically from the Danish road-safety certification organization, VEJ-EU. This program trains a diverse group of workers, from civil engineers with advanced degrees to laborers who didnt finish high school, all of whom must pass the same proficiency-based certification exam. True education is not a race. Instead of a one-size-fits-all class, they developed a personalized, computer-based learning system that allows individuals to progress at their own speed. The program proved that all learners could achieve the required mastery, even though the slowest learners might need 10 times longer than the fastest ones. True education is not a race. Its about providing the time and support necessary for every individual to reach a defined standard of competence. 5. This new model of learning requires educators to be sources of inspiration Teachers must become performance coaches, guides, and mentors who know and support their students. In Finland, a country whose education system is often praised globally, aspiring teachers enter a masters degree program where they spend a full year with a master teacher and a team of peers. They regularly observe each others classes, debrief on their practice, and collaboratively refine their lesson plans. This model, rooted in collaboration and continuous feedback, transforms teaching from an isolated profession into a community of practice dedicated to improvement. This systemic, mastery-based approach to teacher training is what has enabled Finland to consistently achieve excellent and equitable education outcomes. Its a stark contrast to the conventional conference, observe, conference model that is still common in many teacher preparation programs today. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with ermission.
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E-Commerce
Sinking morale. Low productivity. Lots of gossip. Quiet quitting. Sloppy work. Cynicism. Talent leaving. These are all examples of culture rot: the slow, subtle unraveling of what made a good company good. You can feel it before you can name it, Tara Kermiet, a corporate burnout strategist, explained in a recent TikTok post. Its less about one big event, and more about the daily drift that no one claims responsibility for. Instead of some big scandal or massive profit loss, culture rot is the gradual, subtle decay of a teams culture. Its fueled by bad, unaccountable leaders, and is characterized as a slow straying from original core company values. Your core mission may become unclear, communication breaks down, deadlines get missed. People get disengaged, processes fail and then suddenly, everyones in self-protection mode, Kermiet says. The term culture rot has recently been trending in other areas, such as branding, design, and creativity. Now, the term has started popping up in ways that it relates to the workplace, being discussed in places like HR publications and lifestyle publications. Alongside other issues like burnout, quiet cracking, and toxic workplaces, culture rot could well be just a handful of the factors driving all sorts of negative consequences in the workplace. According to the latest Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, the global number of engaged employees was just 21% in 2024; Gallup also estimates that low employee engagement cost the world economy $438 billion last year. In the case of culture rot, one of the main causes is a slow abandonment of the companys stated values. Its all well and good establishing your companys values early on, but without regularly revisiting and reinforcing them, it becomes mere grandstanding. (Sadly, one could argue that, these days, culture rot is inevitable; research shows that only 26% of U.S. employees strongly agree their company always delivers on its promises.) Having a thriving company culture, and thus avoiding team-wrecking rot, is crucial for retention. After all, those who feel strongly connected to their workplaces culture are 47% percent less likely to be on the lookout for other opportunities. Theyre also more than five times as likely to recommend their company to others as a great place to work. Plus, company culture is closely tied to team productivity, with one Oxford University study finding that workers are 13% more productive when happy. There are ways to prevent culture rot. In her TikTok, Kermiet says leaders should be sharing what healthy behavior looks like, and what wont fly, and that leaders look at their own habits: Are you following through when you say you will? She also recommends being visible and asking folks questions on a regular basisculture rot happens slowly and daily, so carefully tending to your teams culture bit by bit each day nips the rot in the bud. Culture takes cues from the leaders, Kermiet says in her post. Every action you take either reinforces trust or erodes it. If your churn rate is unusually high, and productivity levels low, your company culture has likely been rotting for some time. Its time to cut away the infected areas and reestablish values, beliefs and behaviors from the inside out, before it’s too late. Its worth it. After all, workers who feel strongly connected to their companys culture are more than four times more likely to be engaged at work, according to Gallup.
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E-Commerce
The Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women in Doha, Qatar, is the first mosque built for women. Architect Liz Diller designed the 50,000-square-foot complex to combine modern elements with traditional features. In addition to a prayer space, it also houses a library, classrooms, an event space, and café. The project is a winner of Fast Companys 2025 Innovation by Design Awards.
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E-Commerce
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