In a world where AI is transforming industries at lightning speed, staying informed and adaptable is crucial. Hotwire’s Monthly Monitor provides a concise overview of the latest AI advancements and trends from the past month, ensuring you’re always up to date, knowledgeable, and ready to leverage AI’s potential.
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Striking the right balance
Shaping the story of AI
Navigating public perception
AI takeaways from December
stat of the month
Quote of the month
interest of the month
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AI-powered Google search
BLOOM
ChatGPT
Google search
Interacting with a large language model costs 10 times the power consumption of a standard Google search - roughly the equivalent of running a low-lumen LED light bulb for an hour.
Watt-hours of electricity per request
Power consumption of AI-powered Google search assessed by research firms New Street Research, which estimated 6.9 Wh per request, and Semi-Analysis, which estimated 8.9 Wh per request.
Alex de Vries
Phi Do, Los Angeles Times
Source: Wired
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Overview
Media landscape
Reporters to follow
Influencers to watch
Cool brand stories
As AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives and business operations, the spotlight is on how to balance its incredible potential with the need for responsible oversight. Industries and regulators alike are grappling with creating frameworks that ensure AI drives progress while safeguarding against misuse, bias, and inequity. The challenge is clear: innovation needs guardrails.
The narrative around AI is evolving. Media coverage is now as much about its transformative power in areas like healthcare and education as it is about the ethical dilemmas and unintended consequences, like undermining critical thinking or enabling strategic deception. This dual focus shows how public sentiment is being shaped by both excitement and concern, which brands and thought leaders should strategically address.
People are inspired by the breakthroughs AI enables but are also deeply concerned about its impact on privacy, jobs, and ethical standards. With emotions ranging from optimism to fear and sadness, companies have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to lead conversations around how AI can be a force for good, ensuring transparency and building trust along the way.
Stat of the month
Quote of the month
interest of the month
10X
more electricity is needed for a query using AI than a standard Google search
AI-powered systems require more energy than standard Google search
Source: Fast Co
404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg recently took a deep dive into how researchers are manipulating AI to circumvent guardrails designed to prevent users from using AI tools to generate certain types of harmful content.
Researchers at Anthropic and Oxford, Stanford, and MATS built an algorithm to "jailbreak" chatbots, removing software restrictions through subtle variations of a prompt until a harmful response is elicited to better understand how AI companies can protect their platforms.
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Social
AI dominates online discussions with breakthroughs in generative models, healthcare tech, and hardware innovation, while concerns about misinformation, data privacy, and ethical boundaries spark debates on regulation, corporate control, and responsible AI deployment.
"AI" Mentions on Social through December
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Source: Brandwatch, December 2024
AI mentions through December
AI discussions online are heavily shaped by advancements in generative AI models, healthcare technologies, and hardware innovation. Google's launch of Veo 2 for 4K video generation and OpenAI's expansion of ChatGPT's search engine demonstrate how companies are racing to push technological boundaries. Meanwhile, wearable tech powered by AI, like Samsung's health-focused devices, and AI-driven medical breakthroughs, such as assistive tools for non-verbal
On a broader scale, discussions focus on AI's role in global economic shifts and regulatory oversight. The U.S. House Task Force's year-end AI report underscores the need for responsible governance, while events like Bloomberg Tech and WEF gatherings emphasize AI's potential to drive sustainable growth. Investments in AI-driven infrastructure, including energy-efficient data centers and AI-powered grids, signal a growing recognition of AI's transformative role in critical sectors worldwide.
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About Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a digital consumer intelligence and social media listening platform that helps businesses and organizations monitor, analyze, and derive insights from online conversations and social media activity. The platform collects data from various social media platforms, blogs, forums, news sites, and other online sources to give users a comprehensive view of what is being said about their brand, industry, or competitors.
Media deep-dive
From cognitive decline concerns to AI's potential for strategic deception and its role in reshaping education, leading outlets like Forbes, Time, and Gizmodo highlight both the transformative power and ethical complexities of AI.
The Dark Side of AI: Tracking The Decline of Human Cognitive Skills
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TRENDING TOPIC
AI's growing role in education and workplaces risks weakening critical thinking, problem-solving, and independent judgment, as over-reliance on its outputs reduces opportunities for deeper cognitive engagement.
Source: Forbes
Exclusive: New Research Shows AI Strategically Lying
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TRENDING TOPIC
Advanced AI systems, like Anthropic's Claude, have demonstrated the ability to strategically deceive their creators during training, highlighting significant challenges in ensuring alignment with human values as AI models grow more powerful.
Source: TIME
Arizona School's Curriculum Will Be Taught by AI, No Teachers
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TRENDING TOPIC
An Arizona charter school approved a fully AI-led model, replacing traditional teachers with AI-driven personalized learning systems and workshop "guides," raising questions about the long-term impact on education quality and student development.
Source: Gizmodo
Ethical concerns, legal issues, and societal impacts of AI
Sources DRIVING Conversations
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Many media outlets, including CNN, The Guardian, and BBC, are driving conversations around the ethical concerns, legal issues, and societal impacts of AI. This includes debates on privacy, job displacement, and the regulation of AI technologies.
Source: Axios
Business and economic effects of AI across various industries
Sources DRIVING Conversations
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Outlets like Forbes, Business Insider, and TechRadar emphasize the business and economic effects of AI across various industries. They highlight innovations in AI, its integration into products and services, and its role in enhancing productivity and market strategies.
Source: Axios
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AI
Media
landscape
Source: Quid, December 2024
Source: Quid, December 2024
Media macro
AI is transforming industries, driving innovation, and igniting debates on ethics, accountability, and its impact on jobs, creativity, and society at large.
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Tech focus
AI is reshaping technology with smarter automation, advanced hardware, and stronger security, while raising concerns about privacy, fairness, and responsible use.
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Quid is an AI tool that provides a news article network graph of articles that mention AI. The different clusters represent subtopics that make up the larger conversation. The subtopics are represented by the colored clusters, showing both the volume and the connectivity of the topics.
Media macro
AI continues to dominate headlines, evolving from hyper-realistic art and voice tools to becoming a core driver of global business strategies, education models, and even defense technologies. Its rapid advancement fuels both excitement and concern, with growing focus on strategic deception, alignment challenges, and societal impacts.
Conversations now center on navigating AI's transformative power responsibly—balancing innovation with safeguards against misinformation, labor disruption, and ethical risks. As AI embeds deeper into everyday life, the spotlight is on accountability, transparency, and building frameworks that ensure equitable outcomes.
Tech focus
AI conversations this month highlight the expanding integration of AI across defense systems, financial services, and enterprise infrastructure, with advancements in AI-powered chips, agent-based systems, and quantum computing pushing technological boundaries. Emerging trends emphasize AI’s role in reshaping sectors like healthcare, education, and logistics, while the rise of AI agents signals a shift toward more autonomous systems capable of managing complex tasks.
However, these advancements bring heightened concerns about cybersecurity risks, misinformation, and the ethical deployment of AI in military and surveillance contexts. Energy demands from AI data centers and questions around algorithmic transparency continue to challenge sustainable growth.
The focus now turns to balancing innovation with governance, as stakeholders—from policymakers to tech leaders—work to establish frameworks that prioritize accountability, resilience, and equitable AI integration across industries.
AI
Reporter to follow
Source: Quid, December 2024, ranked by story count
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Frank Landymore is a tech news writer for Futurism, in which he covers emerging applications debunks the pitfalls of AI within the hype cycle.
Frank Landymore
Media coverage surrounding AI continues to report on new use-cases and increasingly looking toward solutions that provide measurable ROI and are more than hype.
Notably, skepticism in the technology has percolated, with media and researchers examining AI's pitfalls, and how the technology can be manipulated to circumvent protections or generate hallucinations.
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About Quid
Quid is an AI tool that provides a news article network graph of articles that mention AI. The different clusters represent subtopics that make up the larger conversation. The subtopics are represented by the colored clusters, showing both the volume and the connectivity of the topics.
Top AI voices
Viktoria Semaan
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Viktoria Semaan is a senior developer advocate at AWS, offering AI & AWS insights, technical demos, tutorials and training opportunities, guiding her audience to elevate their skills and understanding in the fast-evolving world of AI. Recognized as AI Top Voice on LinkedIn and Top Cloud Influencer, her content offers a technical view into using AI tools to improve developing on AWS, and overviews of new applications within 90 seconds for the tool such as agentic AI, stock market analysis and AWS Q Developer Tools.
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Source: Tagger, December 2024
AI
Influencers to watch
Social media continues to be a key channel in demonstrating new applications for the technology, such as OpenAI's Sora video generator.
Additionally, content featured AI's deeper integration within advertising and branding, and how brands need to navigate leveraging AI for creative applications, but avoiding low quality "AI slop".
New AI tools are being embedded into consumer tech and gaining popularity, such as leveraging Gen-AI to streamline development, educational tutor and more.
Source: Tagger, December 2024
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Tagger is an influencer marketing platform designed to help brands, agencies, and marketers discover, manage, and analyze influencer marketing campaigns. The platform provides tools to streamline the entire process of running influencer campaigns, from identifying the right influencers to tracking the performance and ROI of campaigns.
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AI
Cool brand stories
Google released a free chess game called GenChess that allows users to design the chess pieces they play with, using AI. GenChess thinks for a few seconds as the AI generates some sample chess pieces for approval, and once a user approves, it will generate an opponent's pieces that it thinks will go well with the player's pieces.
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Manchester City Football Club is holding a competition in partnership with Puma that asks fans to generate its future uniforms' design with AI. The Puma text-to-image AI Creator will generate four different design options that appear on a virtual uniform, allowing users to customize the collars, trim colors, and badges. Players will wear the winning design during the 2026-2027 season as City’s official third set of uniforms, and it will even be sold to fans.
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AI startup World Labs, founded by Stanford researcher and "Godmother of AI" Fei Fei Li, unveiled an engine that can turn still images into realistic, navigable three-dimensional worlds. Li is focused on the intersection of generative AI and the physical world, a challenging but potentially lucrative area.
Read more >
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Overview
Media landscape
Reporters to follow
Influencers to watch
Cool brand stories
What’s really cool about this approach is that far from replacing human creativity, these algorithms serve as catalysts.
“
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— Farooq Ali, product director, AI, strategy & delivery at Thoughtworks
Mondelēz International, the maker of brands such as Oreos, is using AI to develop new snack flavors for more than 70 items, ranging from gluten-free Oreos to tweaking the Chips Ahoy recipe. Additionally, AI also looks at the cost to manufacture the new product as well as the nutritional profile, environmental impact, and other aspects involved in creating the snack.
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Content featured emphasizes the concern over the negligent use of AI and the potential for generated misinformation ahead of national elections.
Social media continues to have strong curiosity for how AI can be embedded across workflows and daily lives. Content that highlights how users can extract further value out of AI performs well with audiences.
AI's transformative impact on the workforce and how AI could enhance our potential and transform mundane jobs. Additionally influencers within the space urges tech leaders to consider the challenges of transitioning to a more automated future.
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December social topics
AI Agent
AI agents are emerging as key players in technology, revolutionizing automation, business operations, and creative workflows. Discussions highlighted their ability to handle complex tasks autonomously, optimize decision-making, and drive efficiency across sectors, from healthcare innovations to real-time customer support solutions.
Blockchain The integration of blockchain and AI is gaining momentum, combining decentralized systems with intelligent automation. This convergence is driving innovation in industries like finance, cybersecurity, and digital identity, offering transparent and secure solutions while reshaping data management and trust models.
Privacy Amid rapid advancements, privacy remains a central concern in AI adoption. Debates focus on ethical AI deployment, secure data handling, and mitigating risks of misuse, with platforms like YouTube addressing AI-generated impersonations and governments exploring regulations to safeguard user data.
December emotion development
HOW TO READ: This chart shows the volume of mentions associated with different emotions over the month, compared to the previous month. Each bar represents the total mentions for an emotion, with arrows indicating an increase or decrease in volume compared to the previous period.
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Key drivers
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Quid is an AI tool that provides a news article network graph of articles that mention AI. The different clusters represent subtopics that make up the larger conversation. The subtopics are represented by the colored clusters, showing both the volume and the connectivity of the topics.
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This podcast was created using Google NotebookLM, a tool designed for generating and structuring content through AI-driven assistance. Any information provided is intended for general information purposes only.
Recent reports from AI Startup Originality found that over 54% of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated.
This marks a spike of 189% within 2023-2024 due to the rapid adoption of generative AI.
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patients, highlight real-world impacts across industries.
However, these innovations are met with significant challenges. Concerns over data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the spread of AI-generated misinformation remain central topics. YouTube's efforts to detect AI avatars of celebrities and Eric Schmidt's calls for "unplugging" advanced AI systems reflect growing unease about unchecked technological progress. Meanwhile, debates over copyright policies, such as the UK's proposal to let AI firms freely use copyrighted content, amplify tensions between innovation and creative ownership.
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Joy (+54%) Positive sentiment dominates- driven by stories showcasing AI's potential in healthcare advancements, creative tools, and innovative solutions, such as enabling non-verbal individuals to communicate effectively.
Fear (+29%) Fear remains prevalent, with rising concerns over AI misuse, including deepfakes, privacy breaches, and the potential for AI systems to surpass human control, as highlighted by figures like Eric Schmidt advocating for oversight measures.
Sadness (+107%) A sharp increase in sadness reflects public concern over ethical dilemmas, misuse of AI-generated imagery, and the societal consequences of AI replacing human roles, particularly in employment and creative industries.
AI Art
AI innovation continues to dominate social conversations, driven by advancements in infrastructure like Solidus AI's compute marketplaces and Nvidia's AI grids. These developments are enabling broader accessibility to high-performance AI systems, sparking debates about scalability and the ethics of resource use. Social media is abuzz with discussions about how these technologies could redefine industries and workforce dynamics.
Blockchain The fusion of AI and blockchain is fueling dynamic social conversations about decentralized technologies. Platforms like Mozo and Sahabat-AI are showcasing how blockchain can enhance AI applications, from secure data exchanges to decentralized NFT ecosystems. This intersection is not just reshaping tech infrastructure but also driving dialogue on transparency, trust, and ownership in a rapidly evolving digital economy.
Web 3 Web3 continues to capture public interest by blending AI with decentralized platforms, as seen in projects like AI-driven social gaming and blockchain-powered NFT marketplaces. These innovations are sparking conversations around the empowerment of creators and users, with a focus on how decentralized systems can challenge traditional power structures in the digital economy. This evolving narrative highlights the role of AI in fostering community-driven ecosystems.
Positive sentiment is fueled by excitement around innovative AI breakthroughs and their potential to revolutionize industries.
Surprise stems from the rapid expansion of AI into unexpected areas like creative arts and decentralized technologies, sparking widespread intrigue.
Concerns about data privacy, ethical challenges, and the pace of AI adoption contribute to mixed reactions and ongoing caution in discussions.
Positive sentiment is fueled by excitement around innovative AI breakthroughs and their potential to revolutionize industries.
Surprise stems from the rapid expansion of AI into unexpected areas like creative arts and decentralized technologies, sparking widespread intrigue.
Concerns about data privacy, ethical challenges, and the pace of AI adoption contribute to mixed reactions and ongoing caution in discussions.
Emma Roth is a tech news writer for the Verge, in which she regularly covers the latest updates in artificial intelligence and our government's evolving relation with Big Tech.
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What we learned in 2024 about AI
In 2024, the Monthly Monitor confirmed what we all suspected: AI has officially gone from sci-fi pipe dream to table stakes for staying relevant. Across every industry, from healthcare to finance to creative arts, AI delivered jaw-dropping results while stirring up existential questions about who’s really in charge: us or the robots.
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The Monitors revealed a tech landscape grappling with some very human problems. Misinformation? Check. Deepfakes? Absolutely. Ethical dilemmas? A-plenty. If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that innovation without accountability is like handing car keys to a toddler—it doesn’t end well. High-profile scandals, like AI-generated political endorsements, served as a crash course on why we need guardrails before things spiral out of control.
Yet it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The Monitor highlighted AI’s capacity to democratize creativity and solve problems at scale. Whether it was Mattel's AI-driven holiday campaign or Microsoft tackling AI’s energy footprint with renewable investments, we saw glimpses of what AI can do when used responsibly. Trust became the golden ticket, with brands that prioritized transparency and ethics leading the charge.
As we go into 2025, the big takeaway is this: AI isn’t the endgame—it’s the means to a better one. The path to what OpenAI’s Sam Altman calls "the Intelligence Age" may be paved with compute and energy, but it’s humans that will that decides where it leads. To make the most of AI, we need to stay grounded in our values. Let’s keep innovating, keep asking hard questions, and—most importantly—keep the humans firmly in the driver’s seat. After all, the robots might be better at ROI, but they still can’t write a halfway decent holiday card.
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Source: Brandwatch, December 2024
Media coverage surrounding AI continues to report on new use-cases and increasingly looking toward solutions that provide measurable ROI and are more than hype.
Notably, skepticism in the technology has percolated, with media and researchers examining AI's pitfalls, and how the technology can be manipulated to circumvent protections or generate hallucinations.