By MATT O’BRIEN

Artificial intelligence “agents” are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf.

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So far, they’re not doing much.

Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents — successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.

“We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”

Visa announced Wednesday it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers — among them U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative. Pilot projects begin Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.

The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it.

For emerging AI companies, Visa’s backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents.

The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI, though few are yet found in the real world. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models — the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarize documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that.

“The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments,” Forestell said. “You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, ‘OK, you go buy it.’

Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases.

“The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves,” Forestell said. “That’s why we started working with them.”

The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the U.S., making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant.

Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone’s digital credentials would authorize AI agents to work on a customer’s behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes.

Forestell said that doesn’t mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people — like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists — or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that “just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us,” Forestell said.

Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background.

And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit $1.21 trillion at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York.

Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to “go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B,” he said.

Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer’s consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases.

“Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer. “When we generate a recommendation — say you’re asking, ‘What are the best laptops?’ — we would know what are other transactions you’ve made and the revealed preferences from that.”

Perplexity’s chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it’s still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko says. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google’s internet browser, Chrome, if the U.S. forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.

By ANN LEVIN

Sophie Gilbert, a London-based staff writer for the Atlantic magazine, has taken a survey of the Anglo-American pop culture landscape, and her findings aren’t pretty. In a new book, “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves” she concludes that after decades of social and political progress for women, the patriarchy has come roaring back in the 21st century with the new-old belief that women’s proper place is in the kitchen and bedroom, not the boardroom or the military.

As a millennial herself, Gilbert wanted to explore, from the perspective of a critic, how and why seemingly every genre of entertainment in the 2000s, from movies and music to TV and fashion, was sending girls the message that it was OK to look and act like a pinup girl again.

“Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? Why, for decades and even now, has virtually every cultural product been so insistently oriented around male desire and male pleasure?” she writes.

This cover image released by Penguin Press shows “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves” by Sophie Gilbert (Penguin Press via AP)

The reasons are manifold, and the results indisputably clear. In music, the “ferocious activist energy of riot grrrls” gave way to the “ hyper-commercialized Spice Girls” over the course of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the emergence of hardcore rap celebrated misogyny and sexual violence against women. In literature and later in film, “Bridget Jones pioneered an enduring new female archetype: the trainwreck.” In fashion, powerful supermodels who knew what they were worth and demanded to be paid for it “were phased out in favor of frail, passive teenagers.”

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But in Gilbert’s view, nothing was as influential as the proliferation of porn, which has trained both men and women to see the latter as objects, “as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize.” She nods to it in the meaning of her double-barreled title. “Girl on girl” is both a genre of porn and an acknowledgement of the way women have been turned against themselves and each other by the forces of postfeminism.

Chapter by chapter, Gilbert methodically shows how the backlash against second- and third-wave and riot grrrl feminism fueled the rise of incel culture, trad wives, the stay-at-home girlfriends on TikTok, and much more. There is a lot to unpack here, but it is well worth the effort. Especially if you, like Gilbert, are still coming to grips with the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and the reelection of Donald Trump last year, demonstrating the evident appeal of his message to both men and a sizable minority of women.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

By TRAVIS LOLLER and AARON MORRISON

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A suspect whom authorities have linked to white supremacist movements has been arrested in the March 2019 fire that destroyed an office at a storied Tennessee social justice center.

Regan Prater was arrested last Thursday and charged with one count of arson.

An affidavit filed in federal court in East Tennessee says Prater’s posts in several group chats affiliated with white supremacist organizations connect him to the blaze at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market. In one private message, a witness who sent screenshots to the FBI asked a person authorities believe is Prater whether he set the fire.

“I’m not admitting anything,” the person using the screen name “Rooster” wrote. But he later went on to describe exactly how the fire was set with “a sparkler bomb and some Napalm.”

A white-power symbol was spray-painted on the pavement near the site of the fire. The affidavit describes it as a “triple cross” and says it was also found on one of the firearms used by a shooter who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, about two weeks before the Highlander fire.

Prater was previously sentenced to five years in federal prison for setting another fire in June 2019 at an adult video and novelty store in East Tennessee. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay $106,000 in restitution in that case. At the scene of that fire, investigators found a cellphone they later determined belonged to Prater. The phone included a short video showing a person inside the store lighting an accelerant, according to the affidavit.

The federal public defender listed as representing Prater did not respond to an email and phone message requesting comment.

Yearslong investigation sparked worries for Highlander’s leaders

The blaze at Highlander broke out in the early morning of March 29, 2019. No one was injured. The building that burned was part of a complex and it housed decades’ worth of irreplaceable documents, artifacts, speeches and other materials from different eras including the Civil Rights Movement.

In an interview, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a former co-executive director at Highlander, recalled arriving at the scene of the fire to discover some priceless items from the administrative office still smoldering.

“Every time the wind blew, we would see what was left of it go up in flames again, for weeks,” Woodard Henderson said.

The trauma of the ordeal was compounded by a feeling that, despite early signs that the culprit had ties to white supremacist movements, authorities were opaque about the investigation, Woodard Henderson said.

“We were told that it was like finding a needle in the haystack to prove who did it — that that’s in fact the point of an arson,” she said. “You’ve got to remember this was 2019, so Donald Trump was still in his first presidency. Frankly, for years, we didn’t get any updates.”

A week after the incident, Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, of Memphis, called for a federal probe. He also called on more government funding to counter an uptick in hate crimes and white nationalism nationwide.

Woodard Henderson said authorities informed Highlander’s leaders in 2022 that they were indeed victims of a hate-motivated attack.

Rosa Parks, John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. had ties to the center

Highlander is known as a place where Civil Rights icons such as Rosa Parks and John Lewis received training. Parks attended a workshop there on integration in 1955, about six months before she famously refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She always credited Highlander with helping her become a more determined activist.

Parks returned to Highlander two years later with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the school’s 25th anniversary celebration, where King gave a keynote address on achieving freedom and equality through nonviolence.

First established in Monteagle in 1932 as a center for union organizing, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was among its early supporters.

Highlander’s co-founder and longtime leader, Myles Horton, a white man, created a place that was unique in the Jim Crow South, where activists white and Black could build and strengthen alliances. In his memoir, Congressman Lewis wrote of how eye-opening being at Highlander was.

Highlander “was the first time in my life that I saw black people and white people not just sitting down together at long tables for shared meals, but also cleaning up together afterward, doing the dishes together, gathering together late into the night in deep discussion,” he wrote.

“That paved the way for Highlander’s work around the Civil Rights Movement, or the Black Freedom Struggle, as we should rightly call it,” said Allyn Steele, a co-executive director of Highlander.

Highlander turns 93 this year and, six years past the fire, it expects to complete a rebuild of its administrative office, Steele said.

Woodard Henderson said the arson attack on the center has never deterred it from its mission.

“I think if their goal was to break our spirit, they failed miserably,” she said. “If anything, it reminded us that there’s a collective responsibility in our movements to keep each other safe.”

Morrison reported from New York City. Associated Press writer Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Slow down, Minnesota, look up and buckle up.

With the summer travel season approaching, authorities are hoping to put the brakes on speeding and other dangerous driving.

Extra law enforcement will be out from Thursday, May 1 through Sept. 2, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Office of Traffic Safety announced on Wednesday.

Officers, deputies and troopers from nearly 300 agencies statewide will be participating in the extra enforcement.

Here’s why: Memorial Day through Labor Day are typically the most traveled days on Minnesota roads and nationwide.

“These so-called ‘100 deadliest days’ carry some of the largest fatal crash counts every year,” according to the DPS’ news release.

“To push back against the rise in deadly driving and to try to save lives, law enforcement will be focusing on speeding, seat belt usage, impairment and distraction — the four behaviors that are the largest contributors to fatal crashes.”

So far in Minnesota in 2025, there have been at least 15 speed-related fatalities, authorities report.

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