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We're heading into a long weekend, but first, let's catch up on what you may have missed this week. On the podcast this week: how the Chicago Sun-Times printed a summer guide that was basically all AI-generated, and documents show that schools were simply not ready for ChatGPT. In the subscribers-only section, Star Wars and weird little guys. Subscribers in the Supporters’ tier get access to that section, so check your email for the Transistor link! Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
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Looking for a Father's Day gift for yourself or just for a daddy in your life? Have you considered ordering a hat so we can send it to you or big papa in time for June 15? We have old-school dad hats AND a sick death-metal corduroy one, plus all the classics.  Image: Reddit REDDITORS CAN'T CATCH A BREAKA student made a tool called PrismX to scan for users writing certain keywords on Reddit and other social media networks, assign those users a so-called “radical score,” and deploy an AI-powered bot to automatically engage with the users in conversation in an attempt to “de-radicalize” them. This is one of several experiments people are running on Reddit involving the concept of running AI against unsuspecting human users of the platform, and comes after a group of researchers from the University of Zurich ran a massive, unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit users.  Image credit: Unsplash CAUGHT IN THE ACTA Kansas mother who left an old laptop in a closet is suing multiple porn sites because her teenage son visited them on that computer. The complaints, filed last week in the U.S. District Court for Kansas, allege that the teen had “unfettered access” to a variety of adult streaming sites, and accuses the sites of providing inadequate age verification as required by Kansas law. According to the complaints, the mother stashed a laptop in a closet at home and forgot about it, and her 14-year-old son found it in working condition and visited Chaturbate 30 times between August and October 2024.  Screenshot via Google Veo SHIH TZU? GET IT?On Tuesday, Google revealed the latest and best version of its AI video generator, Veo 3. It’s impressive not only in the quality of the video it produces, but also because it can generate audio that is supposed to seamlessly sync with the video. We're probably going to test Veo 3 in the coming weeks like we test many new AI tools, but one odd feature we already noticed about it is that it’s obsessed with one particular dad joke, which raises questions about what kind of content Veo 3 is able to produce and how it was trained.  Screenshot of the Chicago Sun-Times online FUN SUMMER AHEADThe Chicago Sun-Times newspaper’s “Best of Summer” section contains a guide to summer reads that features real authors and fake books that they did not write was partially generated by artificial intelligence, the person who generated it told 404 Media. The article, called “Summer Reading list for 2025,” suggests reading Tidewater by Isabel Allende, a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism. Allende’s first climate fiction novel explores how one family confronts rising sea levels while uncovering long-buried secrets.” It also suggests reading The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, “another science-driven thriller” by the author of The Martian. Neither of these books exist, and many of the books on the list either do not exist or were written by other authors than the ones they are attributed to. We also published a follow-up to this article with more details about how this happened.  Photo by Alexander Shatov / Unsplash SOWING DISCORDResearchers published a massive database of more than two billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active. Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called "Searchcord" based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories. READ MOREReplying to the podcast discussion about AI in the Chicago Sun-Times and elsewhere, Jason McIntosh wrote: “Jason's mention of impossible productivity expectations for creative roles like writers resonated with me. Last summer I received a lucrative job offer as a writer for a certain tech startup in NYC, but I turned it down after they revealed during my final interviews with them that they would expect me to publish at least 25 complete articles on technology topics every week. Between the interview and the offer, I rolled this number around in my head, sure that I misheard them or missed some crucial detail—until I put two and two together. After they made the offer, I asked them how they expected the person filling this role to use AI. This is when I learned that they expected this writer to pick a half-dozen tech topics every day, use gen-AI to fluff them up into hundreds of words apiece, lightly season the output, and paste it all into the company CMS. I passed on this job, but presumably someone else picked it up. And I imagine that there's lots of work out there just like this now... as evidenced by the single worker who single-handedly churned out an entire 64-page Sunday-edition insert.”
Yikes!!! And in response to 23andMe Sale Shows Your Genetic Data Is Worth $17, Chloe wrote: “I know this is too much to hope for, but if someone's genetic information is being sold to a company they don't get to approve of, they should at least be given the option to withdraw from the data set. Regeneron 'intending' to ensure compliance with 23andMe’s consumer privacy policies and having 'similar enough' goals as the original owners doesn't mean squat. Shouldn't I own the copyright to my own dna? At least wait for me to be dead.”
BEHIND THE BLOGThis is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the benefits of spending 14 hours a day on the internet, getting cozy for AI slop, and a what a new law in Sweden means for the rest of us. JOSEPH: So I don’t cover generative AI anywhere near as much as Emanuel, Sam, or Jason. Sometimes I think that’s a benefit, especially for the podcast, because I can ask questions more as an outsider or observer than someone deep in the weeds about all these different models and things, then the others can provide their expertise. As a general outsider or just ordinary passive consumer of AI slop now that it’s ubiquitous, I saw videos this week that I’m sure many other people did: those from Google’s Veo 3. Read the rest of Joseph's Behind the Blog, as well as Emanuel and Sam's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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