My main newsletter, Complex Machinery, includes a section called "In Other News..." It's where I list one-liners about interesting articles that didn't fit into any segments.

You can think of this as a weekly version of In Other News. It's still a curated list, but it has a wider remit than Complex Machinery's "risk, AI, and related topics."

What I've been reading

• A study shows that people exhibit greater unethical behavior when delegating work to an AI bot. To me, this says less about AI and more about people. (WSJ)
• With all of this genAI craziness, you may forget that prompt injection is still a problem. Some groups are looking for a fix. (Financial Times)
• OpenAI sheds light on the number of troubling conversations people have with its chatbots (Le Monde 🇫🇷 , Ars Technica)
• Do you want hyper-personalized, generated advertisements? No? It's what you're getting anyway. (404 Media)
• Apple is working on a live-translation feature for its AirPods. It's going about as well as you'd expect. (The Atlantic)
• This article poses the question of why companies are eagerly pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI). My take? Because vague, ill-defined terms make for easier sales, that's why. (Bloomberg)
• Meta admits that some of those "AI" investments may not, in fact, go to AI. (Gizmodo)
• A novel use case for genAI: creating fake receipts for expense reports. (Ars Technica)
• Companies really, really want you to try genAI. Have some. Then have some more. (Washington Post)
• The genAI hype wave hits the medical sector. Practitioners are unmoved. (Business Insider)
• Remember that big European airport snarl from a few weeks back? Collins Aerospace was apparently using very weak (sometimes, default) passwords on key systems. (Die Zeit 🇩🇪)
• An AI-based security system mistook a bag of Doritos for a gun. (The Guardian)
• Destructive storms like hurricanes can cause long-lasting harm to health and social networks. In that sense they are similar to wars, and perhaps even economic bubbles. (Gravity Is Gone)
• This article is about the impact of restaurants outsourcing food delivery to gig-economy tech firms. But it's hard to not see parallels to the way we outsource our marketing to machine-driven (so-called "algorithmic") feeds on social media sites. (The Atlantic)
• Rage-bait still works as a marketing strategy. Though I do question how long it takes for that to come back and bite you. (TechCrunch)

What did I miss?

Have something I should read? Send the link my way.