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 list as a version of In Other News, but with a wider remit than Complex Machinery's "risk, AI, and related topics."

Above the fold

1. The Silicon Valley tech set has been increasingly building products for itself, but trying to push sell them to the wider public. Crypto was bad enough. Now genAI might be the last straw. (The Verge)
2. The birth, fall, then meteoric rise of Palantir's Project Maven, a tool which expands machines' role in in warfare. (The New Yorker)
3. High-end art theft is a business like any other. Sort of. Sometimes thieves find themselves sitting on stolen artwork, unable to sell it. Now what? (FT)
4. Military-themed video games have long been accused of causing violence. Now they're a training ground for modern, drone-based warfare in which soldiers deliver lethal munitions while looking at a screen and using a Playstation controller. (Le Monde 🇫🇷)
5. French companies are tapping the hit spy series "Le Bureau des légendes" (released as "The Bureau" to English-speaking markets) to create employee cybersecurity training films. (Les Echos 🇫🇷)
6. In a modern retelling of the Blockbuster/Netflix story, TV-based shopping channel QVC has lost its place to legions of social media influencers. Bonus: replace a few nouns and that article also explains how influencers can sell ideas as well as merch. Those direct-to-camera, speak-like-we-have-a-relationship videos are no accident. (Bloomberg)
7. If you were around for the early days of Big Data, you no doubt remember the term "data exhaust" – those by-products of your business operations that can be monetized as data products. The latest flavor involves shuttered businesses selling off their old Slack messages and email archives as genAI training data. (Forbes)
8. Amazon runs a marketplace in which it is also a participant. As if that conflict of interest weren't enough, Amazon also uses bots to set prices in a way that allegedly creates an unfair playing field for other sellers. Oh, and it also raises prices for consumers. (Washington Monthly)

The rest of the best

• Shoe company Allbirds offers the latest sign that we've hit peak genAI – and perhaps a stellar performance art project – by swapping shoes for GPUs. (AP)
• Political campaigns use AI-generated images and profiles as part of social media campaigns. This kind of fakery is hardly new, though genAI has made it faster and cheaper to pull off. In some cases, creating the lifelike avatars costs less than a cup of coffee. (New York Times)
• Mark Zuckerberg isn't the only tech CEO getting an AI clone. (Wired)
• Despite Anthropic's very public rift with the Department of Defense, the genAI company's latest model Mythos has caught the eye of the NSA. (Der Spiegel 🇩🇪)
• Those humanoid robots have their flaws, but newer versions can now outrun you. (WSJ)
• Last year, chat app Discord caught (well-deserved) heat for its AI-based user verification techniques. It rolled back those plans, but now genAI model company Claude is trying the same thing. And using the same backend company, Persona, to run the checks. (The Register)
• Dairy Queen joins the list of fast-food chains using genAI at the drive-through. (WSJ)
• We're seeing increased resistance to datacenter construction. (FT , The Register, Politico)
• Microsoft tried to get the EU to keep its European datacenter plans secret. Since you're reading about it here, it didn't work. (Le Monde 🇫🇷)
• Those "use genAI or else" mandates have increased employee genAI usage, sure. But it hasn't necessarily made those employees more effective or efficient in their work. (ZDNet)
• Attorneys have been caught submitting AI-generated documents that include fabricated citations. In a twist, someone has intentionally generated fake statements in order to support their petition to close a nightclub. (The Guardian)
• Companies' latest genAI adoption tactic: using leaderboards to show who's using as many tokens as possible. Some say this "tokenmaxxing" approach doesn't work as well as proponents claim. (WSJ, TechCrunch)

Did I miss anything?

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