Tech News

Ban on conversion ‘therapy’ to be reconsidered by Supreme Court. Here’s what the discredited practice that tries to change LGBTQ youth is like

Published

4 hours ago

March 18, 2025

John

Curtis Lopez-Galloway was 16 when he told his parents he was gay. And while he didn’t exactly expect them to throw him coming-out a party, their reaction left him stunned: They took him to so-called conversion “therapy”—driving him to a Kentucky therapist, two hours away, who used the sessions to berate him for being gay and for not trying hard enough to change into “the man that God wanted” him to be.

Further, the therapist confirmed to his parents all of their worst fears, telling them, “‘He’s never going to be happy. He’s going to be abused and get AIDS. He’s going to die,’” Lopez-Galloway, now 30, tells Fortune.

It was “mentally and emotionally abusive,” he says of his experience with conversion therapy—organized attempts to deter people from expressing non-heterosexual or transgender identities, which can include the subject receiving insults, threats, prayers, or physical abuse that can be severe.

The scoldings that Lopez-Galloway received from the licensed therapist led to screaming matches between himself and his parents that he says “tore my family apart.” It also pushed the teen deep into the closet, leaving him anxious and depressed for years to come.

Today, luckily, it’s behind him—and as the co-founder of the Conversion Therapy Survivor Network, created as a support system for others who have been subjected to such treatment, Lopez-Galloway knows that it could’ve been even worse.

“I know people that have been locked in church basements while exorcisms were performed and they were sexually assaulted,” he says. “I know people that had electrodes strapped to their genitals while they were shown homosexual pornography, and I know people…whose families locked them in their bedrooms because they felt they were a danger to the rest of the family.”

It’s why he’s been “angry and dismayed” over news from earlier this month that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case questioning the legality of Colorado’s conversion-therapy ban for LGBTQ children—despite the fact that the practice has been denounced by every major medical association, from the American Psychological Association (APA) to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and that studies have found the practice leads to increased suicidality, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

With bans enacted in roughly half of the states, any decision regarding Colorado will have far-reaching effects.

What is conversion therapy?

Over the weekend, actor Bowen Yang shared on his podcast to guest Lady Gaga that he had been subjected to conversion therapy, also called “reparative” therapy, as a teen, something he’s talked about before. There have also been a handful of films, including 2018’s Boy Erased and Ryan Murphy’s 2021 Netflix documentary Pray Away, depicting conversion therapy—which refers to a range of dangerous, medically discredited, and unscientific practices that attempt to change one’s LGBTQ identity, according to the Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people, which is careful to always put quotes around “therapy.”

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“‘Therapy’ gets quotes because conversion therapy is not therapeutic at all,” explains Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, which has denounced the Supreme Court’s latest move.

“It completely fails to abide by the ethical standards, the science, the research, and the best experience of decades of actual therapists who know that attempting to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity is actively harmful,” she says. “So what this situation is about is when you have state-licensed mental health professionals who are harming LGBTQ kids by trying to change a part of them that can’t be changed.”

While it’s unknown exactly how many youths are subjected to such practices each year, a 2023 intergenerational systematic review—analyzing 14 survey studies of LGBTQ people between 2011 and 2020, across several countries—found that between 2% and 34% of people globally, with a median of 8.5% and estimate of 13% in the U.S., had experienced conversion therapy.

The Trevor Project found, also in 2023, that there were over 1,300 conversion practitioners in the U.S.—46% of whom held active professional licenses and 54% who were operating in a religious or ministerial capacity.

When licensed therapists “abuse their position of trust” to “push an agenda” that queer youth should change, Pick says, research has shown that it puts kids at high risk of suicide attempts, depression, anxiety and other mental health harms.

“These are pressure tactics that can be deeply harmful. It can contribute to feelings of shame and failure,” Pick says. “The idea that I’ve heard from so many survivors of these practices is, ‘We were just told that they weren’t trying hard enough.’ And when you try and try and fail and fail, so many find themselves in a place of anxiety and depression.”

The organization’s peer-reviewed research has found, in fact, that young people who reported experiencing conversion therapy were twice as likely as other LGBTQ youth—who already have a disproportionately high suicide risk—to report a suicide attempt in the previous year, and two and a half times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts.

A large Stanford University study on the practice found it was linked to higher rates of depression, suicidality, and PTSD, and the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found came up with similar findings to the Trevor Project regarding suicide attempts, with researcher Ilan Meyer, senior scholar of public policy, noting, “This is a devastating outcome that goes counter to the purpose of therapy.”

A historically harmful approach

Practices that try to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity go back well over 100 years, says Pick. “As soon as psychology began to understand that sexual orientation was a part of who a person was, you had parts of the psychological profession that were trying to find ways to change that,” she says. “But even Freud rejected these practices as ultimately being harmful and not good for patients.”

The American Psychological Association declared that homosexuality is not a mental illness back in the 1970s, with gender identity following some years later. It’s why the APA, AAP, American Medical Association, National Association of Social Workers, American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry, American Counseling Association, and 22 other medical associations have condemned conversion therapy as ineffective and harmful—and how, as of 2013, states (and several countries) began to ban the practice.

In 2020, United Nations expert on sexual identity and gender identity Victor Madrigal-Borloz called for a global ban on conversion therapy, telling the Human Rights Council that such practices are “inherently discriminatory, that they are cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and that depending on the severity or physical or mental pain and suffering inflicted to the victim, they may amount to torture.”

Pick says the medical establishment has known since the ’70s that the best way to improve the mental health of LGBTQ people is “acceptance, affirmation, and helping folks to cope with what it means to be different in our society, rather than trying to change their identity to meet a therapist’s or a counselor’s own agenda.”

Lopez-Calloway is hoping that logic holds for the Supreme Court justices. “Even agreeing to take it up is giving credence to the practice itself,” he says. “And it’s just astonishing to me that it has become such a political issue when the fact of matter is that it’s child abuse.”

Tech News

How news organizations should overhaul their operations as the gen AI threatens their livelihoods

Published

1 hour ago

March 18, 2025

John

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…The news media grapples with AI; Trump orders U.S. AI Safety efforts to refocus on combating ‘ideological bias’; distributed training is gaining increasing traction; increasingly powerful AI could tip the scales toward totalitarianism.

AI is potentially disruptive to many organizations’ business models. In few sectors, however, is the threat as seemingly existential as the news business. That happens to be the business I’m in, so I hope you will forgive a somewhat self-indulgent newsletter. But news ought to matter to all of us since a functioning free press performs an essential role in democracy—informing the public and helping to hold power to account. And, there are some similarities between how news executives are—and critically, are not—addressing the challenges and opportunities AI presents that business leaders in other sectors can learn from, too.

Last week, I spent a day at an Aspen Institute conference entitled “AI & News: Charting the Course,” that was hosted at Reuters’ headquarters in London. The conference was attended by top executives from a number of U.K. and European news organizations. It was held under Chatham House Rules so I can’t tell you who exactly said what, but I can relay what was said.

Tools for journalists and editors

News executives spoke about using AI primarily in internally-facing products to make their teams more efficient. AI is helping write search engine-optimized headlines and translate content—potentially letting organizations reach new audiences in places they haven’t traditionally served, though most emphasized keeping humans in the loop to monitor accuracy.

One editor described using AI to automatically produce short articles from press releases, freeing journalists for more original reporting, while maintaining human editors for quality control. Journalists are also using AI to summarize documents and analyze large datasets—like government document dumps and satellite imagery—enabling investigative journalism that would be difficult without these tools. These are good use cases, but they result in modest impact—mostly around making existing workflows more efficient.

Bottom-up or top-down?

There was active debate among the newsroom leaders and techies present about whether news organizations should take a bottom-up approach—putting generative AI tools in the hands of every journalist and editor, allowing these folks to run their own data analysis or “vibe code” AI-powered widgets to help them in their jobs, or whether efforts should be top-down, with the management prioritizing projects.

The bottom-up approach has merits—it democratizes access to AI, empowers frontline employees who often know the pain points and can often spot good use cases before high-level execs can, and frees limited AI developer talent to be spent only on projects that are bigger, more complex, and potentially more strategically important.

The downside of the bottom-up approach is that it can be chaotic, making it hard for the organization to ensure compliance with ethical and legal policies. It can create technical debt, with tools being built on the fly that can’t be easily maintained or updated. One editor worried about creating a two-tiered newsroom, with some editors embracing the new tech, and others falling behind. Bottom-up also doesn’t ensure that solutions generate the best return on investment—a key consideration as AI models can quickly get expensive. Many called for a balanced approach, though there was no consensus on how to achieve it. From conversations I’ve had with execs in other sectors, this dilemma is familiar across industries.

Caution about jeopardizing trust

News outfits are also being cautious about building audience-facing AI tools. Many have begun using AI to produce bullet-point summaries of articles that can help busy and increasingly impatient readers. Some have built AI chatbots that can answer questions about a particular, narrow subset of their coverage—like stories about the Olympics or climate change—but they have tended to label these as “experiments” in order to help flag to readers that the answers may not always be accurate. Few have gone further in terms of AI-generated content. They worry that gen AI-produced hallucinations will undercut trust in the accuracy of their journalism. Their brands and their businesses ultimately depend on that trust.

Those who hesitate will be lost?

This caution, while understandable, is itself a colossal risk. If news organizations themselves aren’t using AI to summarize the news and make it more interactive, technology companies are. People are increasingly turning to AI search engines and chatbots, including Perplexity, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini and the “AI Overviews” Google now provides in response to many searches, and many others. Several news executives at the conference said “disintermediation”—the loss of a direct connection with their audience—was their biggest fear.

They have cause to be worried. Many news organizations (including Fortune) are at least partly dependent on Google search to bring in audiences. A recent study by Tollbit—which sells software that helps protect websites from web crawlers—found that clickthrough rates for Google AI Overviews were 91% lower than from a traditional Google Search. (Google has not yet used AI overviews for news queries, although many think it is only a matter of time.) Other studies of click through rates from chatbot conversations are equally abysmal. Cloudflare, which is also offering to help protect news publishers from web scraping, found that OpenAI scraped a news site 250 times for every one referral page view it sent that site.

So far, news organizations have responded to this potentially existential threat through a mix of legal pushback—the New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright violations, while Dow Jones and the New York Post have sued Perplexity—and partnerships. Those partnerships have involved multiyear, seven-figure licensing deals for news content. (Fortune has a partnership with both Perplexity and ProRata.) Many of the execs at the conference said the licensing deals were a way to make revenue from content the tech companies had most likely already “stolen” anyway. They also saw the partnerships as a way to build relationships with the tech companies and tap their expertise to help them build AI products or train their staffs. None saw the relationships as particularly stable. They were all aware of the risk of becoming overly reliant on AI licensing revenue, having been burned previously when the media industry let Facebook become a major driver of traffic and ad revenue. Later, that money vanished practically overnight when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided, after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, to de-emphasize news in people’s feeds.

An AI-powered Ferrari yoked to a horse cart

Executives acknowledged needing to build direct audience relationships that can’t be disintermediated by AI companies, but few had clear strategies for doing so. One expert at the conference said bluntly that “the news industry is not taking AI seriously,” focusing on “incremental adaptation rather than structural transformation.” He likened current approaches to a three-step process that had “an AI-powered Ferrari” at both ends, but “a horse and cart in the middle.”

He and another media industry advisor urged news organizations to get away from organizing their approach to news around “articles,” and instead think about ways in which source material (public data, interview transcripts, documents obtained from sources, raw video footage, audio recordings, and archival news stories) could be turned into a variety of outputs—podcasts, short form video, bullet-point summaries, or yes, a traditional news article—to suit audience tastes on the fly by generative AI technology. They also urged news organizations to stop thinking of the production of news as a linear process, and begin thinking about it more as a circular loop, perhaps one in which there was no human in the middle.

One person at the conference said that news organizations needed to become less insular and look more closely at insights and lessons from other industries and how they were adapting to AI. Others said that it might require startups—perhaps incubated by the news organizations themselves—to pioneer new business models for the AI age.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. While AI poses existential challenges to traditional journalism, it also offers unprecedented opportunities to expand reach and potentially reconnect with audiences who have “turned off news”—if leaders are bold enough to reimagine what news can be in the AI era.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

Correction: Last week’s Tuesday edition of Eye on AI misidentified the country where Trustpilot is headquartered. It is Denmark. Also, a news item in that edition misidentified the name of the Chinese startup behind the viral AI model Manus. The name of the startup is Butterfly Effect.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Tech News

How to watch the First Four of the 2025 NCAA Tournament for free—and without cable

Published

1 hour ago

March 18, 2025

John

The First Four games of the NCAA Tournament are being held Tuesday and Wednesday, March 18 and 19. They’re an appetizer, of sorts, for the first round of March Madness, one of the most anticipated basketball tournaments of the year.

Selection Sunday is behind us. Now it’s time for March Madness to get underway. (Sorry, HR directors!)

The NCAA Tournament is one of the highlights of spring and while the Round of 64 will get underway later this week, fans will get an appetizer starting tonight with the First Four games.

This matchup sees the four lowest-seeded automatic qualifiers and the four lowest-seeded at-large teams face off in an attempt to make it to the official tournament. It’s where Cinderella stories are born and where longshot bets can pay off (though rarely do).

Here’s a look at who’s playing in the First Four—and some options to watch them.

What is the schedule for the NCAA Tournament’s First Four games?

Here’s who’s playing in the First Four.

Tuesday, March 19

St. Francis vs. Alabama State, 6:40 p.m. ET on TruTV

UNC vs. San Diego State, 9:10 p.m. ET on TruTV

Wednesday, March 20

Mt. St. Mary’s vs. American, 6:40 p.m. ET on TruTV

Xavier vs. Texas, 9:10 p.m. ET on TruTV

How can I watch the First Four games for free?

Ok, here’s the bad news. None of the First Four games will be broadcast over the air, meaning you’ll need either a cable subscription or a streaming service to watch. Many streaming services have done away with free trials, but a few remain. See below for details.

Can I watch the 2025 First Four games online?

Yep! Here are a few other options.

Max

The one-time HBO Max doesn’t have a free trial, unfortunately. Subscriptions start at $9.99 per month.

Disney+

Disney’s bundle of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ no longer has a free trial, so you’ll have to pay $17 per month for all three combined (or $30 per month for no ads on Hulu).

Including Live TV in the bundle bumps the price to $77 per month ($90 with no ads).

Hulu with Live TV

The free trial on this service lasts three days. Afterward, it will cost you $77 per month.

YouTubeTV

After a free trial, you can expect monthly charges of $73.

Sling TV

Dish Network’s Sling lower-tiered “Orange” plan will run you $40 per month. Adding the more comprehensive “Blue” plan bumps the cost to $55 per month. The seven-day free trial has disappeared, unfortunately.

DirecTV Stream

Formerly known as DirecTV Now, AT&T TVNow and AT&T TV, this oft-renamed streaming service will run you $80 per month and up after the free trial option.

Fubo TV

This sports-focused cord-cutting service carries broadcast networks in most markets. There’s a seven-day free trial, followed by monthly charges of $80 and up, depending on the channels you choose.

Can I watch any March Madness games on Amazon Prime Video?

No. March Madness do not stream on Amazon, unless you purchase a subscription to a streaming service.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Tech News

Cathie Wood says most memecoins will end up ‘worthless’

Published

2 hours ago

March 18, 2025

John

Most of the so-called memecoins that are flooding the $2.6 trillion cryptocurrency space will probably end up “worthless,” according to Cathie Wood.

The combination of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence is creating “millions” of meme cryptocurrencies that “are not going to be worth very much,” the ARK Investment Managment LLC founder and CEO told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday, adding that her private funds are not putting money into these coins.

Memecoins are a type of digital asset often inspired by jokes, current events or trends in popular culture. In February, the US Securities and Exchange Commission said memecoins are not considered securities so they will remain unregulated.

“If I have one message for those listening who are buying memecoins: buyer beware,” said Wood. “There’s nothing like losing money for people to learn, and they’ll learn that the SEC and regulators are not taking responsibility for these memecoins.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com