Dave Lee
My WorkBlogupdated 6 hours ago

Interesting links, noteworthy journalism and other miscellanea from around the web.

Pessimism over artificial intelligence exists everywhere but it is particularly acute in the US. The country’s lack of social safety net is to blame, writes venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky in the New York Times:

Job loss in the United States is more threatening than anywhere else in the wealthy world. It turns what should be a setback into a potential cascade — income, insurance, mortgage and child care, all at risk at once. Meanwhile, A.I. chief executives won’t stop telling Americans A.I. is coming for them. The technology is a missile aimed at the most fragile part of the American socioeconomic bargain.

There’s One Clear Reason Why Americans Are Gloomy About A.I.nytimes.comThe key is understanding how our labor market and our social net differs from the rest of the world.

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In the AI age, could curators become king again? Columbia Journalism Review on a fresh crop of print (!!) magazines geared at overwhelmed young people.

This is exactly what Cuqui is trying to bring back. “It’s designed to get young people back into a curated editorial space, away from the algorithm,” Brittney McNamara, the magazine’s features editor, told me, “and back into something that reflects their culture and their universe.”

For teens, a print renaissance might be afoot.cjr.orgFor teens, a print renaissance might be afoot.

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An AI-generated Michael Caine will narrate a 13-hour audiobook version of The Odyssey, Variety reports. The project is the work of leading AI speech start-up ElevenLabs. I’m disappointed that Caine, who knows a thing or two about being a struggling working class actor trying to make it, would put his name to something that stands to limit opportunities for new talent further down the ladder.

Caine’s affiliation with ElevenLabs isn’t new, as the Oscar winner licensed his voice and likeness last year to the firm’s “Iconic Marketplace,” its collection of characters that companies can pay to use for commercial purposes. But this partnership expands the arrangement, one Blank said is rooted in “consent and compensation.” ElevenLabs pays creators every time their voices are used in ElevenReader, and in Caine’s case, he was specifically consulted about the project and approved the marketing materials, Blank said. (Whether he’s heard the final project, however, couldn’t be determined.)

Michael Caine’s AI-Generated Voice to Narrate ‘The Odyssey’ Audiobook Ahead of Christopher Nolan’s Movievariety.comThe AI audio firm is using Caine’s voice to anchor a roughly 13-hour version of “The Odyssey” weeks before Christopher Nolan’s film hits theaters.

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Polymarket set up a fake website for fake bets and then paid influencers to create videos of "huge" "wins" that weren't real. Scandalous behavior and yet more evidence these prediction markets are a growing blight on our society. From the Wall Street Journal:

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.

To get the videos to go viral, Polymarket has recruited a social-media army to copy and re-post creators’ footage. Though the New York-based company has been banned from offering its primary crypto platform in the U.S. since 2022, the social-media creators are paid to specifically target U.S. users, who can still access the site with a virtual private network.

They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Realwsj.comThe prediction market has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators. ‘Is this just free money?’

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We were either too racist or not racist enough.

I saw all Reform’s weaknesses on display in Makerfield – Farage should be worried | John Harristheguardian.comFrom a hopeless candidate to botched strategy, this latest byelection defeat is telling. But for Labour, there is still a long and arduous journey ahead, says Guardian columnist John Harris

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Elon Musk will for sure rant and rave, but he can be ignored: Richard Hermer has become the first UK cabinet minister to order his department — the Attorney General's Office — to leave X. The Observer reports:

Hermer’s decision, communicated to staff via a directive last week, comes off after a surge in mis- and disinformation in relation to the murder of Henry Nowak and the brutal knife attack in Belfast. The attorney general is said to be increasingly concerned about how X in particular is being used by bad actors to attempt to divide communities in the UK. In both cases, the platform was used by far-right activists including Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) to coordinate protests, which in some cases led to riots.

High-profile politicians including Robert Jenrick shared doctored images from bodycam footage in the Nowak case, while Grok wrongly identified two former police officers as being among those attending the scene, resulting in details about the individuals being widely shared online.

First government department quits X over racism and viole...observer.co.ukConcern about the spread of misinformation from right-wing figures prompts Richard Hermer to pull Attorney General’s Office off platform

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Mikel John Obi

In case, like me, you were wondering why the player formerly known as John Obi Mikel is now doing punditry on Fox as Mikel John Obi — this is an interesting article about identity (and some sloppy admin on the part of the Nigerian football association).

John Obi Mikel officially changes his name - world now even more confusedmirror.co.ukIn attempting to clarify his ACTUAL name, the Nigeria veteran just made everyone very, very confused

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Tim Cook warms up Wall Street for price hikes

Wall Street Journal:

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” [Apple CEO Tim Cook] said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products would be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone.

Few points here:

  1. Apple has already raised some prices, sort of: It has eliminated some of the lower-spec'd versions of its Macs, nudging buyers to higher margined configurations.

  2. A price increase on the iPhone is long overdue, and the 20th anniversary year for the device seems a good opportunity to do that. The last time the iPhone saw a price increase was with 2017's iPhone X — the 10th anniversary model.

  3. The WSJ did the math on a $1,299 iPhone. Maybe Apple steered them here, maybe it did not. Either way, the reporting primes Wall Street for such a move. And Cook saying it out loud now saves his successor, John Ternus, from beginning his tenure with some bad news.

  4. My own reporting suggests consumers might be willing to go much higher, especially if Apple offers longer-term installment plans that keep monthly payments at the same level they are now. Longer plans are more feasible these days, when the largest cohort of upgraders each year have had their current handset for at least three years, largely thanks to improved battery tech.

  5. Apple could disguise a price increase for the regular iPhone by hiding it within the anticipated folding iPhone, expected to be priced in the realm of $2,000. For the Apple superfan prepared to pay that, why not make it $2,299 and help a more cost-conscious consumer out?

Exclusive | Apple to Raise Prices Due to Memory Chip Crunch, Tim Cook Sayswsj.comThe CEO tells the Journal that Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of both memory and storage.

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On the day SpaceX overtook Amazon's market cap, this (funny) post on everyday tech gripes winds its way to a serious conclusion that helps frame this next phase of even bigger Big Tech:

Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Techtheringer.comThe bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can't escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI

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I don't know about you, but if I was in a profession — consulting — that seemed particularly ripe to be disrupted by AI, I might be extra cautious when using the technology myself. KPMG didn't get the memo, allowing hallucinated case studies to make their way into a special report on the definitely real benefits of AI. As the Financial Times points out, reports from these consultancies will be seen as reliable, thus embedding hallucinations into future AI models.

The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss bank UBS, the UK’s National Health Service and the public transit groups Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London.

The inaccuracies were identified as AI hallucinations by the research group GPTZero and verified by the FT. After being alerted to the issue, UBS said it would ask KPMG to remove the false claims, and the Big Four firm on Thursday pulled the report from some of its websites.

KPMG report contained AI hallucinations on benefits of . . . AIft.com[FREE TO READ] Bogus case studies on UBS and transit systems exaggerated adoption of the technology

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