The list of air-travel fiascos this past year reads like a verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: A chunk of plane fell off mid-flight. Boeing workers went on strike. A CrowdStrike software issue grounded thousands of planes worldwide. A major airline merger was blocked. Passengers were terribly unruly.

And yet, in roughly that same time period, much about the experience of air travel actually went pretty well: Cancellations in the first half of this year (even with that software outage) were way down from the chaos of 2022, even amidst record-breaking travel days, and last year was by some metrics the safest on record. The Biden administration implemented new requirements for airlines to give passengers refunds for canceled or significantly changed flights and announced a new rule to crack down on airline junk fees. Flights are more affordable than they were decades ago, adjusted for inflation.

An air-travel paradox has emerged. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this year, “although air safety is getting markedly better over time, the experience of flying is arguably worse than ever.” Flying in 2024 is safe and relatively consumer friendly but also quite annoying, especially for the customers unwilling or unable to tack on the perks or upgrades that make it more pleasant. In most economy flying situations, seats are cramped, snacks are expensive, storage space is tight, tensions are high. Airlines are seeing record demand; the TSA is predicting that this week will be the busiest Thanksgiving travel week on record. But staffing shortages persist, adding to inconvenience for fliers.

Many of these frustrations are the fault of individual airlines. But a presidential administration’s approach to consumer welfare can play a meaningful role in the experience of flying (and what happens when things, inevitably, go wrong). Under President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the federal government pushed to block mergers that it saw as concentrating the industry in a way that might hurt consumers, and generally focused on consumer protections (sometimes to the ire of the industry). The Trump administration will likely take a more “business-friendly” approach, Henry Harteveldt, an industry analyst, told me. Former Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, Trump’s pick to replace Buttiegieg as transportation secretary, used to be an airline lobbyist. Meanwhile, Project 2025 (which Trump has denied affiliation with) has identified airline consumer protection as a “problematic area.” And many Trump allies have also harshly criticized Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s approach to antitrust policy. Trump—even if he doesn’t fully undo the regulations introduced under Biden—could curb some of the actions that are currently in motion but have not yet made their way to Congress, Harteveldt predicted.

In his first term, Trump’s administration bailed out the airline industry in the early days of the pandemic. And on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2020, Trump’s Transportation Department quietly announced a new rule that redefined what counted as deceptive practices, to the benefit of airlines over consumers. The airline industry has high hopes for Trump’s next term: Delta’s CEO celebrated the end of an era of “overreach,” and Southwest’s CEO said he is optimistic that the next administration is “maybe a little less aggressive in terms of regulating or rule-making.”

The full scope of Trump’s plans for the airline industry isn’t yet clear, but in a statement announcing his transportation-secretary selection, Trump said that Duffy “will make our skies safe again by eliminating DEI for pilots and air traffic controllers.” Aviation officials have expressed concern that clean-fuel programs will be stymied under Trump, who has promised to repeal parts of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. And another initiative Trump floated during his first term—privatizing air-traffic control—may be revived in his next term (the overworked and sometimes dysfunctional Federal Aviation Administration is presently funded with federal dollars). If air-traffic control does indeed become run by a private company, consumers likely wouldn’t see a big difference in ticket prices, Harteveldt said, but it would be a huge change to the way the travel industry operates.

So much about travel is unpredictable, especially during busy weeks like this one. Will your flight be delayed? Will your boarding area be crowded with “gate lice” trying to skip the line? Will your seat be double-booked, and will the Wi-Fi work? Some of this uncertainty is just the reality of human experience—you could be seated next to a crying baby no matter who is president—but some of the experience will be shaped by the administration’s approach in the next four years. As Trump and his allies attempt to balance the interests of consumers and corporations in a massive, complicated, and closely watched industry, a big question is who will get priority.

Related:

All airlines are now the same. Flying is weird right now.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Good on Paper: Is ambivalence killing parenthood? A guide for the politically homeless Thanksgiving should be in October.

Today’s News

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire deal, which will take effect tomorrow and pause fighting in the region, President Joe Biden announced. President-Elect Donald Trump said yesterday that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10 percent tariff on imports from China. Boris Epshteyn, a top Trump aide, allegedly asked potential nominees for Trump’s second administration to pay him consulting fees if they wanted him to advocate for them to Trump, according to a review by the president-elect’s legal team. Epshteyn has denied the allegations.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Americans need to put down the vacuum and get off the tidiness treadmill, Annie Lowrey writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

The AI war was never just about AI. “Dear James”: My home is a horror of unfinished tasks. The sense that most defines a culture The road dogs of the American West

Evening Read

Kimberley French / A24

A Horror Movie About an Atheist Who Won’t Shut Up

By McKay Coppins

This article contains spoilers for the movie Heretic.

When I was a Mormon missionary in Texas in the early 2000s, my companions and I used to get strange phone calls from a man with a British accent named Andrew. We didn’t know who he was, or how he’d gotten the numbers for a bunch of Church-owned cellphones, but the calls always went the same. He would begin in a friendly mode, feigning interest in our lives and work. Then, gradually, the questions would turn confrontational as he revealed his true agenda: to convince us that everything we believed was wrong.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Dave Free.

Listen (or skip). On Kendrick Lamar’s new album, GNX, a rapper who is obsessed with excellence tries to entertain the masses, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Watch. Jimmy O. Yang spent years stuck in small, clichéd roles. Now, starring on Interior Chinatown (streaming on Hulu), he’s figuring out who he wants to be.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

As the Swifties and/or Black Friday die-hards among you may know, Taylor Swift is releasing a book this Friday at Target. For The Atlantic’s Books section, I wrote about what Swift’s decision to self-publish means for the publishing industry. Have a great Thanksgiving!

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic published a new investigation by Alex Reisner into the data that are being used without permission to train generative-AI programs. In this case, dialogue from tens of thousands of movies and TV shows has been harvested by companies such as Apple, Anthropic, Meta, and Nvidia to develop large language models (or LLMs).

The data have a strange provenance: Rather than being pulled from scripts or books, the dialogue is taken from subtitle files that have been extracted from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and internet streams. “Though this may seem like a strange source for AI-training data, subtitles are valuable because they’re a raw form of written dialogue,” Reisner writes. “They contain the rhythms and styles of spoken conversation and allow tech companies to expand generative AI’s repertoire beyond academic texts, journalism, and novels, all of which have also been used to train these programs.”

Perhaps it no longer comes as a major shock that creative humans are having their work ripped off to train machines that threaten to replace them. But evidence demonstrating exactly what data have been used, and for what purposes, is hard to come by, thanks to the secretive nature of these tech companies. “Now, at least, we know a bit more about who is caught in the machinery,” Reisner writes. “What will the world decide they are owed?”

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI

By Alex Reisner

For as long as generative-AI chatbots have been on the internet, Hollywood writers have wondered if their work has been used to train them. The chatbots are remarkably fluent with movie references, and companies seem to be training them on all available sources. One screenwriter recently told me he’s seen generative AI reproduce close imitations of The Godfather and the 1980s TV show Alf, but he had no way to prove that a program had been trained on such material.

I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies. I recently downloaded this data set, which I saw referenced in papers about the development of various large language models (or LLMs). It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. It even includes prewritten “live” dialogue from Golden Globes and Academy Awards broadcasts. If a chatbot can mimic a crime-show mobster or a sitcom alien—or, more pressingly, if it can piece together whole shows that might otherwise require a room of writers—data like this are part of the reason why.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

“What I found in a database Meta uses to train generative AI”: “Nobel-winning authors, Dungeons and Dragons, Christian literature, and erotica all serve as datapoints for the machine,” Alex Reisner wrote in an earlier investigation for The Atlantic. AI’s fingerprints were all over the election: “But deepfakes and disinformation weren’t the main issues,” Matteo Wong writes.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

One of the most wonderful, and frustrating, things about Google Search is its inefficiency. The tool, at its most fundamental level, doesn’t provide knowledge. Instead, it points you to where it may, or may not, lie. That list of blue links can lead you down rabbit holes about your favorite sports team and toward deep understandings of debates you never knew existed. This tendency can also make it impossible to get a simple, straightforward fact.

But the experience of seeking information online is rapidly changing. Tech giants have for almost two years been promising AI-powered search tools that do provide knowledge and answers. And last week, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google made announcements about their AI-powered search products that provide the clearest glimpse yet into what that future will look like. I’ve spent the past week using these tools for research and everyday queries, and reported on my findings in an article published today. “These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me,” I wrote, “yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.”

The promise of AI-powered search is quite different from Google’s—not to organize information so you can find it yourself, but to readily provide that information in a digestible, concise format. That made my searches faster and more convenient at times. But something deeply human was lost as a result. The rabbit holes and the unexpected obsessions are what’s beautiful about searching the internet; but AI, like the tech companies developing it, is obsessed with efficiency and optimization. What I loved about traditional Google searches, I wrote, is “falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.”

Illustration by The Atlantic

The Death of Search

By Matteo Wong

For nearly two years, the world’s biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine.

Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia—ChatGPT will do it all. Search is an appealing target, too: Shaping how people navigate the internet is tantamount to shaping the internet itself.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

The AI search war has begun: “Nearly two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, and with users growing aware that many generative-AI products have effectively been built on stolen information, tech companies are trying to play nice with the media outlets that supply the content these machines need,” I reported this past summer. Google is playing a dangerous game with AI search: “When more serious health questions get the AI treatment, Google is playing a risky game,” my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote in May.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.

You might think, given the extreme pronouncements that are regularly voiced by Silicon Valley executives, that AI would be a top issue for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Tech titans have insisted that AI will change everything—perhaps the nature of work most of all. Truck drivers and lawyers alike may see aspects of their profession automated before long. But although Harris and Trump have had a lot to say about jobs and the economy, they haven’t spoken much on the campaign trail about AI.

As my colleague Matteo Wong wrote yesterday, that may be because this is the rare issue that the two actually agree on. Presidential administrations have steadily built AI policy since the Barack Obama years; Trump and Joe Biden both worked “to grow the federal government’s AI expertise, support private-sector innovation, establish standards for the technology’s safety and reliability, lead international conversations on AI, and prepare the American workforce for potential automation,” Matteo writes.

But there is a wrinkle. Trump and his surrogates have recently lashed out against supposedly “woke” and “Radical Leftwing” AI policies supported by the Biden administration—even though those policies directly echo executive orders on the technology that Trump signed himself. Partisanship threatens to halt years of bipartisan momentum, though there’s still a chance that reason will prevail.

Illustration by The Atlantic Something That Both Candidates Secretly Agree On

By Matteo Wong

If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the technology in their public messaging, and they have not articulated particularly detailed AI platforms. Bots do not seem to rank among the economy, immigration, abortion rights, and other issues that can make or break campaigns.

But don’t be fooled. Americans are very invested, and very worried, about the future of artificial intelligence. Polling consistently shows that a majority of adults from both major parties support government regulation of AI, and that demand for regulation might even be growing. Efforts to curb AI-enabled disinformation, fraud, and privacy violations, as well as to support private-sector innovation, are under way at the state and federal levels. Widespread AI policy is coming, and the next president may well steer its direction for years to come.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next The slop candidate: “In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of artificial intelligence,” Charlie Warzel writes. The near future of deepfakes just got way clearer: “India’s election was ripe for a crisis of AI misinformation,” Nilesh Christopher wrote in June. “It didn’t happen.”

P.S.

Speaking of election madness, many people will be closely watching the results not just because they’re anxious about the future of the republic but also because they have a ton of money on the line. “On Polymarket, perhaps the most popular political-betting site, people have wagered more than $200 million on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election,” my colleague Lila Shroff wrote in a story for The Atlantic yesterday. So-called prediction markets “sometimes describe themselves as ‘truth machines,’” Lila writes. “But that’s a challenging role to assume when Americans can’t agree on what the basic truth even is.”

— Damon

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

In their final pitches to voters, Donald Trump spent the week sowing doubt about election results, while Kamala Harris cast Trump as a threat to democracy. With Election Day less than a week away, panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic discuss one of the closest presidential races in memory, and what the election could mean for the future of the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Since 2015, the Republican Party has reached multiple points when they could have coalesced and taken a stance against Trump, McKay Coppins explained last night. But “they couldn’t muster the collective action,” he said. As a result, Trump has been able to remake the Republican Party into one that “has become a cult of personality where his lies, and distortions, and conspiracy theories are indulged by almost every elected official in his party.”

Where Republicans go from here is still an open question, Coppins continued. “The party that [Trump] has remade in his image is not going to change overnight, no matter what happens next week.”

Meanwhile, Harris has been running a carefully calibrated, centrist campaign. “If this improbable campaign that started only four months ago essentially works, what does it mean for the future of the Democratic Party?” Jeffrey Goldberg asked panelists. According to Eugene Daniels, unlike the ideological aspects of Harris’s 2019 campaign, which felt, in part, disingenuous to watch, “the person you’re watching now and the policies that she’s talking about … that’s who Kamala Harris is” and “that is how she wants to govern.”  

If elected, Harris will also likely have to contend with at least one Republican-controlled chamber of Congress. This means she “will be forced into governing as a centrist,” Daniels continued. “She’s going to have to bend and try to compromise in ways that a ‘San Francisco liberal’ wouldn’t want to and would fight more on.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent at Politico; and Vivian Salama, a national politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.