The allegory of Plato’s Cave from Book VII of “The Republic” is a philosophical metaphor about enlightenment.
Prisoners are chained inside a dark cave, where they face a blank wall and unable to turn their heads. The prisoners can only see the shadows projected onto the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. Thus, these shadows are the only ‘objects’ the prisoners know. It is their truth. This truth becomes the prisoner’s reality.
As such, we are becoming trapped within the web of our own creation, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a psychic prison, locking us into views, ideas and the realities of others AI allows us to see. AI now bridges a gap between appearance, reality, and knowledge. AI turns appearance into the truth just like the prisoners inside Plato’s Cave, where the shadows are manifested into the prisoner’s reality inside the cave.
The “truth” is illuminated by a fire behind the prisoners, just as AI illuminates the truth through the light of a screen. AI is becoming communally accepted as fact. Thus, AI traps our modes of thinking, if it is allowed to. It shapes complex realties down into understandable ‘bites of knowledge’ people can conveniently consume.
This is what is occurring in education today. The pandora is now out of the box, where everyone can do well at school, at least in assignments. Going back to Plato’s Cave, if we are freed from the chains and can move around, he can see the shadows that created the prisoner’s reality, are in fact just the shadows of objects passing in front of the fire. The prisoner finds there is a different world with real objects that create different meanings.
AI is not the magic that comes out of a Pandora’s Box. AI is itself based on limited grounded knowledge (especially the mass consumer brands), the same knowledge we have been seeing on the internet for years. Pieces of information as texts, magazine articles, opinions, ideas, and presentation become the information AI uses to present realities to the person that makes the request. So, as information on the internet is limited and often skewed, subject to paywalls (that AI cannot penetrate), Google algorithms, and censorship. The realities AI often present are skewed or carry the bias already there.
This is not necessarily political bias, it might be bias created by the specific AI tool access to selected media, i.e., the sites AI mines for information. Some information, may be hidden in some way or the other. People forget AI is grounded in the information it has access to and seeks access. If you don’t believe the writer, ask AI itself. AI will tell you that.
AI is already playing a major role in education. Students and teachers are using the tool to look up, write, arrange, and research topics. Its easy and it saves time. AI takes away the element of curiosity, as information is given to the reader in a second. The only skill you need is how to ask the right questions.
The ease of using AI destroys our curiosity
Curiosity is a prime precursor to creativity. Without curiosity, there is rarely any creativity. Curiosity is a necessary driver. Curiosity is actually an emotion that sparks inquisitive behavior and an intricate part of both the creative and learning processes. And if creativity is a process, AI will interfere with humans exercising this process. Curiosity is also a driver of passion. The slow subduing of curiosity can have major affects upon a person’s ability to be intrinsically satisfied from the work they do.
When people rely on AI to undertake work tasks, many steps in cognition are skipped. If this is done regularly, neuron paths begin to close off.
IQ is not a constant. When you don’t keep using learned paths, templates and mental-maps in the brain, your cognitive abilities start to decline. This state of loss brings down IQ and other types of intelligence like logical and mathematical intelligence. A sort of dumbing down effect.
This is of great mental cost to humans who rely on the use of AI for long periods of time. Remember the Baby-boomer and Gen X generations could do mathematical calculations in their heads (mental arithmetic). Today’s generations must rely on the external assistance of calculators. AI will have a similar effect on cognition related to mental possessing.
AI is already beginning to become the major source of society’s truth. In its applications, AI is already taking over from journalists, teachers, academics, stockbrokers, data entry clerks, software engineers, copy writers, artists, musicians, doctors, and many other occupations. We are not as yet aware as to how much AI generated material we might read each day.
However, today’s generation of AI cannot easily replicate creativity due to the limited use of grounded information it uses and weakness of algorithms that project information into new thought concepts. The overuse of AI will greatly decrease the level of satisfaction a person generates by completing a challenging task. People are not going to feel that ‘high’ they get when they complete an assignment, presentation, or complete a book. Achieving a sense of satisfaction triggers the release of neurochemicals and hormones like serotonins, oxytocin, gamma-aminobutryic acid, and endorphins that interact to produce good emotional feelings, pleasure and a general wellbeing. In this way, AI will take-away some of the humanity in our work.
As AI takes us closer to this digital construct of the world that reflects a particular reality, society is heading closer to “The Matrix”. For all intents and purposes “The Matrix” is no more than Plato’s Cave in a digital format. What is now very important is teaching people to use AI just as a tool, and not let it become the master of your destiny.
We know what the value is of a graduate who has done all their work through AI generated work. The essence of curiosity, ability to be creative and actual intelligence will have been damaged by AI. With that comes lack of problem-solving ability, or just plain common sense.
Although AI is a massive breakthrough in information organization and management, AI is also ‘dumbing down’ our society. This is an (un)intentional consequence of AI. Just ask AI and it will tell you so.
Jobs aren’t disappearing. Through AI, talent acquisition is fast evolving from hand-crafted interviewing and recruiting to a data-driven model that ensures the right talent is hired at the right time, for the right role with unmatched accuracy
Traditional recruiting isn’t working: in 2024, only 17% of applicants received interviews and 60% abandoned slow application processes
AI drives 2–3x faster hiring, stronger candidate quality, sharper targeting—and 95% candidate satisfaction at Foundever, from 200,000+ applicants in just six months
OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The Josh Bersin Company, the world’s most trusted HR advisory firm, today released new research showing that jobs aren’t disappearing—they’re being matched with greater intelligence. The research, produced in collaboration with AMS, reveals major advances in talent acquisition (TA) driven by AI-enabled technology, which are yielding 2–3x faster time to hire, stronger candidate-role matches, and unprecedented precision in sourcing.
The Josh Bersin Company (PRNewsfoto/The Josh Bersin Company)
The global market for recruiting, hiring, and staffing is over $850 billion and is growing at 13% per year, despite the economic slowdown, though signs of strain are evident. This means TA leaders are turning to AI to adapt, as AI transforms jobs, creates the need for new roles, new skills, and AI expertise.
According to the research and advisory firm, even without AI disruption, over 20% of employees consider changing jobs each year, driving demand for a new wave of high-precision, AI-powered tools for assessment, interviewing, selection, and hiring. Companies joining this AI revolution are hiring 200-300% faster, with greater accuracy and efficiency than their peers, despite the job market slowdown.
According to the report, The Talent Acquisition Revolution: How AI is Transforming Recruiting, the TA automation revolution is delivering benefits across the hiring ecosystem: job seekers experience faster recognition and better fit, while employers gain accurate, real-time, and highly scalable recruitment.
This is against a context of failure with current hiring. In 2024, less than one in four (17%) of applicants made it to the interview stage, and 60% of job seekers, due to too-slow hiring portals, abandoned the whole application process.
The research shows how organizations are already realizing benefits such as lower hiring costs, stronger internal mobility, and higher productivity. AI-empowered TA teams are also streamlining operations by shifting large portions of manual, admin-heavy work to specialized vendors.
Early successes are striking: after deploying conversational AI, a major U.S. resort operator increased scheduled interviews by 423% in 12 months while reducing candidate drop-off by 85%. A new AI TA process at Foundever hit 95% candidate satisfaction rating from over 200,000 applicants in just six months, while a leading global automotive company reported $2 million in savings in its first year using AI-powered interview scheduling.
The research highlights how AI is helping TA overcome frustrations like vague job descriptions, inconsistent interviews, and labor-intensive processes.
HR teams now use AI to automate tasks from profiling and sourcing to screening, scheduling, interviewing, and negotiating offers. Companies showcasing these successes include major international brands spanning the hospitality, food, healthcare, and technology sectors, such as Fontainebleau Las Vegas and Compass Group.
Some organizations are using AI-powered recruiting assistants to manage routine communication and negotiations. Recruiters set parameters for salary, benefits, and start dates, while the AI answers questions, updates offers, and proposes alternatives in real time. By automating tasks and personalizing the experience, AI shortens turnaround times and frees recruiters to focus on strategy.
The vendor market is transforming, with SAP acquiring SmartRecruiters and Workday acquiring Paradox to stay competitive. Innovations include AI agents enabling automation of the full hiring journey (Eightfold AI, Maki People) conversational AI for candidate engagement (Glider AI, Paradox, Radancy), AI-driven assessments (CodeSignal, HireVue, TaTiO), and platforms that benchmark roles against labor market data (Draup, Galileo, Lightcast, Reejig, SeekOut, TechWolf).
Report author and Josh Bersin Company Industry Analyst & Senior Research Director, Stella Ioannidou, says:
“For decades, TA has been viewed as a cost center, focused on using applicant tracking systems to manage incoming candidates and relying on recruiters to screen and interview. This process was slow, expensive, and delivered a poor experience for job seekers.
“Today, by leveraging AI-powered platforms and integrated data, TA teams can identify, attract, and engage the best talent in the market with unparalleled precision, often before competitors even know those candidates are available—resulting in a proactive, data-driven approach that enables organizations to respond quickly to changing business needs, seize new opportunities, and fuel growth from within.”
Chief Executive Officer at AMS, Gordon Stuart, says:
“This research paper captures the urgency and scale of the AI revolution which is transforming TA. It doesn’t just reflect what’s happening now, it helps us understand what’s next. Candidates want speed, clarity, and connection. Recruiters need tools that free them to focus on strategy and relationships. And businesses must rethink how talent acquisition fits into their broader growth agenda. AI is not just automating tasks, it’s redefining roles, workflows, and expectations across the board. The cumulative power of people, process, data and technology is heralding a new era for talent acquisition.”
Global industry analyst and Josh Bersin Company CEO, Josh Bersin, says:
“AI is expected to provide CHROs with a data-rich view of talent comparable to an integrated supply chain, enabling them to track and analyze every detail of each hire with the same precision a luxury Swiss watchmaker applies to every component and its origin.
“This transition transforms HR from handcrafted processes to precision, dynamic hiring—something once unattainable without AI.
“The implications are significant for all stakeholders, particularly CEOs. Organizations that lacked a precision hiring process have historically faced millions in lost revenue, high turnover, and misaligned talent—but those days are now coming to an end.”
This new research follows previous Josh Bersin Company findings demonstrating how AI is transforming another core HR function: Learning & Development.
The Josh Bersin Company’s Galileo Suite delivers both strategic guidance and hands-on tools through its AI Agent for HR, as well as hyper-personalized learning through the exclusive Galileo Learn certificate course, AI-First TA Transformation. The full report is available to download here.
About AMS AMS is a leading global provider of talent acquisition and consulting services, providing unrivalled experience, driven by technology and underpinned by innovation. We help our clients to attract, engage and retain the talent they need for business success.
We have three core areas of service: acquisition, advisory and digital, mainly delivered as an outsourced model, and spanning our clients’ permanent and contingent workforce, and internal mobility requirements.
Our dedicated teams of experts are deeply embedded with our global blue-chip clients, enhancing talent acquisition processes and driving projects which align with overall strategic objectives. This relationship-driven approach is supporting our clients to redefine how they hire and retain top talent. For more, go to www.weareams.com/
About The Josh Bersin Company
The most trusted human capital advisors in the world. More than a million HR and business leaders rely on us to help them overcome their greatest people challenges.
Thanks to our understanding of workplace issues, informed by the largest and most up-to-date data sets on workers and employees, we give leaders the confidence to make decisions in line with the latest thinking and evidence about work and the workplace. We’re great listeners, too. There’s no one like us, who understands this area so comprehensively and without bias.
Our offerings include the industry’s leading AI-powered HR expert assistant, Galileo®, fueled by 25 years of in-depth Josh Bersin Company research, case studies, benchmarks, and market information.
We help CHROs and CEOs be better at delivering their business goals. We do that by helping you to manage people better. We are enablers at our core. We provide strategic advice and counsel supported by in-depth research, thought leadership, and unrivaled professional development, community, and networking opportunities.
We empower our clients to run their businesses better. And we empower the market by identifying results-driven practices that make work better for every person on the planet.
Specialized AI agents automate research workflows and accelerate drug discovery and development with transparent, evidence-backed insights
LONDON, Sept. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Causaly today introduced Causaly Agentic Research, an agentic AI breakthrough that delivers the transparency and scientific rigor that life sciences research and development demands. First-of-their-kind, specialized AI agents access, analyze, and synthesize comprehensive internal and external biomedical knowledge and competitive intelligence. Scientists can now automate complex tasks and workflows to scale R&D operations, discover novel insights, and drive faster decisions with confidence, precision, and clarity.
Industry-specific scientific AI agents
Causaly Agentic Research builds on Causaly Deep Research with a conversational interface that lets users interact directly with Causaly AI research agents. Unlike legacy literature review tools and general-purpose AI tools, Causaly Agentic Research uses industry-specific AI agents built for life sciences R&D and securely combines internal and external data to create a single source of truth for research. Causaly AI agents complete multi-step tasks across drug discovery and development, from generating and testing hypotheses to producing structured, transparent results always backed by evidence.
“Agentic AI fundamentally changes how life sciences conducts research,” said Yiannis Kiachopoulos, co-founder and CEO of Causaly. “Causaly Agentic Research emulates the scientific process, automatically analyzing data, finding biological relationships, and reasoning through problems. AI agents work like digital assistants, eliminating manual tasks and dependencies on other teams, so scientists can access more diverse evidence sources, de-risk decision-making, and focus on higher-value work.”
Solving critical research challenges
Research and development teams need access to vast amounts of biomedical data, but manual and siloed processes slow research and create long cycle times for getting treatments to market. Scientists spend weeks analyzing narrow slices of data while critical insights remain hidden. Human biases influence decisions, and the volume of scientific information overwhelms traditional research approaches.
Causaly addresses these challenges as the first agentic AI platform for scientists that combines extensive biomedical information with competitive intelligence and proprietary datasets. With a single, intelligent interface for scientific discovery that fits within scientists’ existing workflows, research and development teams can eliminate silos, improve productivity, and accelerate scientific ideas to market.
Comprehensive agentic AI research platform
As part of the Causaly platform, Causaly Agentic Research provides scientists multiple AI agents that collaborate to:
Conduct complex analysis and provide answers that move research forward
Verify quality and accuracy to dramatically reduce time-to-discovery
Continuously scan the scientific landscape to surface critical signals and emerging evidence in real time
Deliver fully traceable insights that help teams make confident, evidence-backed decisions while maintaining scientific rigor for regulatory approval
Connect seamlessly with internal systems, public applications, data sources, and even other AI agents, unifying scientific discovery
Availability
Causaly Agentic Research will be available in October 2025, with a conversational interface and foundational AI agents to accelerate drug discovery and development. Additional specialized AI agents are planned for availability by the end of the year.
Explore how Causaly Agentic Research can redefine your R&D workflows and bring the future of drug development to your organization at causaly.com/products/agentic-research.
About Causaly
Causaly is a leader in AI for the life sciences industry. Leading biopharmaceutical companies use the Causaly AI platform to find, visualize, and interpret biomedical knowledge and automate critical research workflows. To learn how Causaly is accelerating drug discovery through transformative AI technologies and getting critical treatments to patients faster, visit www.causaly.com.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is often criticised for ripping off artists, but the technology is now being used to combat fake copies of works by the Canadian artist Norval Morrisseau (1932-2007) that have flooded the market over the past two decades.
More than 6,000 pieces were produced and fraudulently sold as authentic works by the Ojibwe artist to collectors worldwide, with financial losses estimated to exceed C$100m ($72.5m). The trial of Jeffrey Cowan, the last of the suspected fraudsters in the tangled web of Morrisseau forgery rings, began this week. Two other men who pleaded guilty to participating in what the Ontario Provincial Police described as “the biggest art fraud in world history”, were each given a conditional sentence of two years less a day in August and September.
In a unique case of fighting fakes with fakes, the Montreal-based start-up Acrylic Robotics announced in July that, in partnership with the Norval Morrisseau Estate, its robots will reproduce five Morrisseau paintings and make the copies available for purchase.
Norval AI
“We have created our own artificial intelligence called Norval AI to help determine the probability of an authentic Norval Morrisseau painting,” Cory Dingle, the Morrisseau estate’s executive director, tells The Art Newspaper. “It has grown to do many other functions that will help with museums seeking provenance as well as law enforcement—such as catching the person who painted the fraudulent work.”
The idea of developing an AI authenticator began in 2023, when Dingle met Stephan Heblich, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, and Clément Gorin, an associate professor at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
“Clément and I were just two art-loving economics professors who are using the latest deep learning and visual recognition techniques to analyse paintings,” Heblich says. “We thought we could help restore Norval’s legacy, so we reached out to Cory and created Norval AI.”
A year later, Dingle met Chloë Ryan, the founder and chief executive of Acrylic Robotics. The artist-turned-engineer had developed technology that allows robots to paint works in the style of individual artists.
Better fakes
“We needed better replicas to test our artificial intelligence programme—the existing fake paintings were so terrible,” Dingle says. “So we collaborated with Acrylic Robotics and helped train their robot to paint more realistic fake paintings.” He adds: “They want to produce very accurate reproductions and our Norval AI tells their robot where it is doing a bad job. They use our data to make the robot do a better job, which makes those better replicas train our Norval AI even better.”
Last year, the Norval Morrisseau Family Foundation helped Acrylic Robotics produce a very accurate replica of one of Morrisseau’s original paintings. This in turn was run through the Norval AI programme and the results were shared with Acrylic Robotics to help improve its replicas.
The resulting works produced by Acrylic Robotics include limited editions of five paintings, including Morrisseau’s In Honour of Native Motherhood (1990), which was inspired by the murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada, and Punk Rockers (around 1991), in which Morrisseau fused traditional Anishinaabe iconography with contemporary idioms.
Marked as replicas
Prices for the Acrylic Robotics works range from C$3,240 to C$45,000. To avoid further fraud, several techniques have been applied to ensure the works are easily identifiable as replicas, including a mark on the back of the canvas.
According to an Acrylic Robotics spokesperson, the company hopes to investigate whether, with the support of Norval AI, its robots may be able to complete some of Morrisseau’s many unfinished or damaged works.
“What’s exciting here, even beyond the technology,” Ryan says, “is the opportunity to push the boundaries of what has been possible, make art history and reclaim a legacy.”
