AI workplace fails: Google mass exits, Starbucks AI ads, Trump vs. GPT 5.6, malicious therapy bots, and conscious AI

Welcome to the SIXTH “What’s the AI Hype?” episode with Our Lives With Bots, brought to you by psychologists and AI ethicists Dr. Rose E. Guingrich and Dr. Angy Watson (ourliveswithbots.com/about) . OH - plus, there’s a special guest appearance from Phoebe, Angy’s sleepy (and mildly disgruntled) Ragdoll kitty.
We have a LOT to cover today - and much to debate. But we won’t spoil the whole thing for you just yet: you’ll just have to tune in to hear what’s been going on in AI in the past few weeks.
We’re here on various podcast platforms, but feel free to go check us out on YouTube or any of your preferred platforms. Learn more about us on our website, ourliveswithbots.com, and head over to the Listen + Watch (ourliveswithbots.com/listen-and-watch) page to tune in on those alternative platforms.
Timeline
01:52 ChatGPT 5.6, Fable 5, and Mythos 5: Trump administration cracks down on new model releases
11:57 High profile Googlers are leaving en masse. But for what reason? Some noble…some…perhaps…IPO driven (for those who fled straight back into big tech)
20:45 A court in Munich found Google liable for content generated in its AI overviews. What might this mean for false summaries of links provided within LLMs like ChatGPT?
26:31 Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna caught using AI / Claude to “write a bill.” Well, it was just the summary. But that begs the question about how much (or rather, how little) human oversight is required versus being applied in these cases
29:39 South Korea’s Starbucks stores close for mandatory historical and social sensitivity training after (wait for it) a marketing team used AI to create an advertising campaign that only an AI agent with no context could make
36:14 Cognitive Atrophy BENCH: Researchers create clinically-backed assessment tool for whether an LLM, applied in a mental health context, promotes autonomy and user agency or harms their skills and promotes dependence. Meanwhile Vermont joins the swath of US states banning AI therapy chatbots and products
47:12 AI consciousness - the tides are turning toward “AI is conscious” more so than “Could AI be conscious.” Geoffrey Hinton vs. Anil Seth, supercomputers, AlphaFold, generative AI, LLMs, and is AI more intelligent than a human? (Plus benchmarks and tokenmaxxing)
-
This is Our Lives With Bots (ourliveswithbots.com), the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.
Rose and Angy (ourliveswithbots.com/about) are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠.
-
Links:
GPT 5.6 (openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol)
OpenAI and Anthropic vs. Trump (wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-limits-access-to-new-mo…)
Executive order (wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-signs-ai-executive-order…)
Google’s big names are leaving: LinkedIn (linkedin.com/posts/thomas-h%C3%B6ppner-7ba59a7…), Financial Express (financialexpress.com/market/global-markets/why…), Tech Crunch (techcrunch.com/2026/06/24/ai-researchers-conti…)
Google found liable for AI overviews: Wired (wired.com/story/a-court-has-ruled-that-google-…), The Decoder (the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declare…)
AI used to draft bill summary: Original text (x.com/John_Hudson/status/2069802530524033259), Forbes (forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/06/24/gop-r…)
Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour (doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18129)
Starbucks South Korea AI ad campaign failure (theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/16/starbucks-ko…)
AI consciousness: Geoffrey Hinton (youtube.com/watch?v=uN6tKUb7AxI), Anil Seth (youtube.com/watch?v=tJV-vdbZ388)