New this week · Week 41, 2026
AI, explained in plain English.What's happening, what it means, and why it matters to you.
Each week we pick the AI and tech stories that matter, alongside guides and true stories that show the bigger picture. Every fact is linked to its source.
New to AI? The big picture in 60 seconds
Read: Where AI stands in 2026 →- What AI isSoftware that learns patterns from examples instead of following hand-written rules.
- What it can do todayWrite, summarise, translate, code, create images and voices, and complete tasks.
- What it still gets wrongMakes up facts, can be unfair, and is often a black box.
- Where it's headingAI "agents" that do whole tasks for you, built into the apps you already use.
This week at a glance
Read the full issue →Did you know?
Solved by AIPolice caught two murder suspects after 19 years on the run, after AI "aged" their old photos.Read the story →Photo: Mari Lezhava, CC0
Solved by AIScrolls burned by Vesuvius in 79 AD can't be opened. AI read them anyway.Read the story →Photo: Franz Ludwig Catel, Public domain
Solved by AIIt took a century to find 430 Nazca Lines. AI helped find 303 more in six months.Read the story →
Decoded with AISperm whales may have a "phonetic alphabet". AI helped spot it in 9,000 recordings.Read the story →Photo: Gabriel Barathieu, CC BY-SA 2.0
AI failTwo lawyers were fined after citing court cases ChatGPT made up.Read the story →
AI failGoogle's AI told people to put glue on pizza. Here's why.Read the story →
AI failA newspaper recommended 15 summer reads. Ten of them don't exist.Read the story →
Scam alertA mother heard her daughter sobbing on the phone. It was an AI clone of her voice.Read the story →Photo: Youcef Smahi, CC BY 4.0
Scam alertEveryone on this video call was a deepfake. It cost a company $25 million.Read the story →Photo: Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0
30-second quiz
Myth or fact?
Three quick questions. How AI-savvy are you?
ChatGPT searches the internet every time you ask it something.
It's a myth. It searches only when it decides a question needs fresh information, or when you ask it to. Otherwise it answers from what it learned in training, which stops at a cutoff date.
AI chatbots can invent facts, quotes and sources that sound completely real.
It's a fact. This is called a hallucination. Two New York lawyers were fined $5,000 after citing court cases that ChatGPT had made up.
AI detectors can reliably tell whether an essay was written by AI.
It's a myth. OpenAI shut down its own detector in 2023 because it was not accurate enough: it caught only about a quarter of AI-written text and wrongly flagged some human writing.
A few seconds of someone's voice can be enough for AI to copy it.
It's a fact. In 2023 Microsoft showed a research model that could imitate a voice from a 3-second sample. Scammers now use voice cloning to fake calls from family members.
Deepfake video calls only target celebrities and big companies.
It's a myth. A retired man in Kozhikode, Kerala, lost ₹40,000 after a video call from a deepfake of his former colleague.
If a famous person recommends an investment app in a video, it's probably genuine.
It's a myth. Deepfake ads of business leaders, cricketers and even the RBI Governor have pushed fake investment schemes. The RBI says it never gives investment advice.
The term "artificial intelligence" was first used in the 2010s.
It's a myth. It dates from 1955, when John McCarthy and colleagues proposed a summer research workshop on "artificial intelligence" at Dartmouth College.
A computer beat the world chess champion back in 1997.
It's a fact. IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1997, a decade before the first iPhone.
ChatGPT was the first chatbot ever made.
It's a myth. ELIZA, built at MIT in the mid-1960s, chatted with people by spotting keywords. Some users became convinced it understood them.
AI has helped read scrolls burned by Mount Vesuvius almost 2,000 years ago.
It's a fact. Students used AI to find ink inside X-ray scans of still-rolled Herculaneum scrolls, reading over 2,000 characters of a lost text in 2024.
A company can be held responsible for what its website chatbot tells you.
It's a fact. A Canadian tribunal ordered Air Canada to honour a discount its chatbot had wrongly promised, rejecting the argument that the bot was responsible for its own words.
Electricity use by data centres is expected to roughly double by 2030, driven largely by AI.
It's a fact. The International Energy Agency projects data centres will use about as much electricity in 2030 as Japan does today.
AI helped crack a 50-year-old puzzle in biology, and it won a Nobel Prize.
It's a fact. AlphaFold predicts the 3D shape of proteins from their recipe. Its creators shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Some powerful AI models can be downloaded and run on your own computer.
It's a fact. These are open-weight models, such as Meta's Llama family: anyone can download the trained model instead of using it through a company's website.
Explore our guides
- 11 AI people worth following
- Before AI vs after AI: what really changed
- What powers AI: from chips to power plants
- The AI ladder: how close are we to really smart AI?
- AI tools by job: hand-picked tools for your kind of work
- Built with AI: real apps made by vibe coding, and what went wrong
- AI predictions: the hits, the misses and the spooky ones
- Where AI stands in 2026: the big picture in plain English
- AI fails: when AI got it badly wrong (and what to learn)
- Mysteries AI helped solve: from cold cases to ancient scrolls
- How to spot AI fakes and scams: cloned voices, deepfakes and fake ads
- The AI timeline: key moments from 1950 to today
- The best books to learn AI, machine learning and deep learning
- The 5 best AI chatbots right now