A quick summary of how tGtB&tAI is produced

Up until last week’s issue, we had been making this newsletter the old fashioned way, researching, writing, editing, and sending it by hand. Each issue took all together about 12 hours to put out.

The July 9th edition took just an hour and a half. How? Well, AI.

I was introduced to the software Cassidy at work. Cassidy is an incredibly powerful tool for businesses to leverage AI, building chatbots that reference an internal database of content, automated content workflows, and more. But I wanted to see if I could use Cassidy for something a little more oddball.

So for the past month I’ve been tweaking an AI in Cassidy we’ve called Hux (named after Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World).

Cassidy has a workflow feature where you tell it in plain language what you want AI to do and it builds a workflow to achieve it. I described our newsletter and inputted sample content from the most recent issues and it spit out a hell of a good option on just its’ third try.

Here’s the AI’s third attempt at a news story with some snarky commentary influenced by our previous issues:

Consulting Firms' AI Boom: The New Snake Oil Salesmen

Just when you thought consulting firms had run out of things to charge exorbitant fees for, AI came strutting along like a gift-wrapped unicorn. The New York Times reports that businesses, jittery about the latest tech trends, have flocked to consulting giants like Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, and KPMG. These firms are now the early winners of the AI boom, peddling generative AI strategies like it’s the newest elixir for corporate success.

Picture this: Your company's IT guy, who still can't find the power button on a Mac, is now leading an AI transformation initiative. Enter the consultants, ready and willing to “guide” you for the low price of your annual budget. Need your employees trained? No problem. The consulting firm can do it. Need to integrate AI into your customer service? Easy, for a few thousand dollars more. And if it all goes south, at least you can say you were on the cutting edge—right before you cut half your staff to pay for it.

But hey, at least these consulting firms are providing a service that keeps everyone’s job interesting. Your Monday morning meeting just went from discussing paperclip budgets to pondering the existential questions about the future of AI in your industry. So, here's to the new age of AI—a time when even the clueless get to feel like tech innovators, guided by the handsomely paid prophets from McKinsey.

The jokes were pretty funny and it had the edge I was looking for, but in a little dystopian twist, Hux had considered this the “Good” story of the week. We’ll go deeper in future paid-subscriber posts about how we built and tweaked Hux, but for now I want to show you what Hux produced this week and how it compared to what ended up in your inbox.

Here’s Hux’s output this week compared to the final newsletter.

THE GOOD

Hux:

Imagine swapping your third soda of the afternoon for water with lemon because your AI health coach told you it would be a good idea. No, we're not talking about your mom's passive-aggressive texts, but rather an AI-driven initiative that's transforming healthcare as we know it. According to TIME, the latest wave in AI technology might just make your Fitbit look like a fossil.

Turns out, these AI health coaches can make really precise recommendations tailored to each individual. Whether it's suggesting you take a 10-minute walk with your child to burn off some steam or swapping that calorie-heavy coffee for a green juice, these smart systems seem to know you better than your Netflix recommendations. They might even put your favorite diet guru out of business. 

But let’s take a step back—this sounds a bit dystopian, right? An AI that knows your every unhealthy habit and nudges you towards better choices? What next, an AI that can detect when you're lying about sticking to your diet? Oh wait, we might be giving them ideas.

The upside is huge, though. With a smirk, we say goodbye to the days of generic health advice and embrace a future where our AI buddies cheer us on towards healthier lives. So, don’t be surprised if your AI health coach becomes your new BFF, minus the judgmental looks you get from actual people.

In a world where AI continuously gets a bad rap for job-stealing and data breaches, it’s refreshing to see a story where AI might quite literally save your life—or at least make it a bit more bearable. 

Here’s to a future of AI-driven health nudges—because if anything can convince you to swap soda for water, it might as well be an algorithm.

Not bad, but Hux was mostly repeating the article, jokes and all, and did not take into context that the article was an editorial penned by the very founders of the company. All in all, he sounded a little like a salesman for Thrive. I decided to take out most of the end that just sounded sales-pitchy and take a slightly longer look at what will worry most people, the data privacy side.

Here’ the Final:

Imagine swapping your afternoon coffee for water with lemon because you got a text to remind you of your health goals. No, we're not talking about your mom's passive-aggressive missives, but rather an AI-driven initiative that's transforming healthcare as we know it. According to Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington writing for TIME, the latest wave in AI technology might just make your Fitbit look like a fossil.

Huffington and Open AI’s new venture, Thrive AI Health looks to use AI health coaches to make really precise recommendations tailored to each individual. Whether it's suggesting you take a 10-minute walk after picking your kid up from school or swapping that calorie-heavy coffee for a green juice, these smart systems are being designed to know you better than your Netflix recommendations. They might even put your favorite diet influencer out of business.

While giving any company a huge amount of personal data as sensitive as your health info is a little scary, the upside is huge. In a world where AI continuously gets a bad rap for job-stealing and training on copyrighted data, it’s refreshing to see AI applied in a way to improve lives and maybe even mental health. A non-judgemental AI assistant might help people get over the shame hump of getting help from a real person.

Now, The Bad section.

THE BAD

Hux’s first pass:

In the latest episode of "What Fresh Hell Is This?", even Google's experts are sounding alarms about the potential for AI to distort reality to unfathomable extents. CNET reports that high-ranking officials within Google are warning that AI-generated content, from deepfakes to photorealistic fabrications, could fundamentally alter our perception of what's real. It seems we're just one algorithm away from mistaking a toaster for the President of the United States.

The commentary from Google’s experts paints a rather grim picture: AI's ability to manipulate visuals and text is reaching a point where fact-checking could become as practical as herding digital cats. This isn't your run-of-the-mill fake news; it's an entire alternate reality constructed with machine-learned sleight of hand. When you can no longer trust your eyes, what do you rely on? Your gut feeling that the moon landing probably didn't involve a green screen?

So, what's the game plan? Google's answer seems to be a combination of improving digital literacy and deploying more sophisticated AI to catch AI-generated lies—a sort of Skynet policing Skynet. However, this feels a bit like handing out fire extinguishers after the building is already engulfed in flames.

In a world where our grasp on reality is as slippery as a greased algorithm, we might just have to face the possibility that our future is one big, elaborate game of digital "Gotcha!"—and the AI always wins.

Again, not bad, but in this scenario the jokes fell a little flat for me so I edited or removed them and added a little more commentary to the end.

Here’s the final:

In the latest episode of "What Fresh Hell Is This?", Google's experts are sounding alarms about the potential for AI to distort reality to unfathomable extents. CNET reports that high-ranking officials within Google are warning that AI-generated content, from deepfakes to photorealistic fabrications, could fundamentally alter our perception of what's real.

The commentary from Google’s experts paints a rather grim picture: AI's ability to manipulate visuals and text is reaching a point where fact-checking could become impractical, gish-galloping us with misinformation on a global scale. When you can no longer trust your eyes, what do you rely on? Your gut feeling that the moon landing probably didn't involve Stanley Kubrick? Honestly the shots would have been framed better.

So, what's the game plan? Google's answer seems to be a combination of improving digital literacy (which can’t possibly move fast enough) and deploying more sophisticated AI to catch AI-generated lies (which I’m not currently optimistic about, given Google wasn’t even able to catch its own AIs recommending glue on pizza).

In the AI roundup section, I borrowed from several of the most recent tests and used about half the jokes straight out of the AI. Hux wrote the jokes about your cat asking for the WiFi password, “Trust me bro,” and the Nigerian Prince. The others I was influenced by his draft but tweaked it to make the joke land (hopefully) a little better.

Interestingly, Hux often linked the same stories he summarized above and several press releases, basically turning himself into a shill for AI companies.

That’s where I’ll leave us today, with these parting thoughts: I have been pretty impressed with Hux’s ability to craft a decent joke. I laughed out loud at several he wrote over the last month of testing. But at the same time, Hux does a terrible job parsing context and nuance. A press release and an op-ed read the same to him as a scholarly article and he’s wont to take them both for truth at face value. Interestingly, that may be his most human trait, but it’s one I hope to eventually train out of him.

If you want to stick around for more of these breakdowns and additional commentary from us, don’t forget to subscribe.

Until next time,

Kyle

Maybe both. Let's get into it.

The Good

AI-DRIVEN HEALTH COACH: A NEW ERA FOR PERSONALIZED HEALTHCARE?

Imagine swapping your afternoon coffee for water with lemon because you got a text to remind you of your health goals. No, we're not talking about your mom's passive-aggressive missives, but rather an AI-driven initiative that's transforming healthcare as we know it. According to Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington writing for TIME, the latest wave in AI technology might just make your Fitbit look like a fossil.

Huffington and Open AI’s new venture, Thrive AI Health looks to use AI health coaches to make really precise recommendations tailored to each individual. Whether it's suggesting you take a 10-minute walk after picking your kid up from school or swapping that calorie-heavy coffee for a green juice, these smart systems are being designed to know you better than your Netflix recommendations. They might even put your favorite diet influencer out of business.

While giving any company a huge amount of personal data as sensitive as your health info is a little scary, the upside is huge. In a world where AI continuously gets a bad rap for job-stealing and training on copyrighted data, it’s refreshing to see AI applied in a way to improve lives and maybe even mental health. A non-judgemental AI assistant might help people get over the shame hump of getting help from a real person.

The Bad

THE DIGITAL SLEIGHT OF HAND: AI'S REALITY DISTORTION FIELD

In the latest episode of "What Fresh Hell Is This?", Google's experts are sounding alarms about the potential for AI to distort reality to unfathomable extents. CNET reports that high-ranking officials within Google are warning that AI-generated content, from deepfakes to photorealistic fabrications, could fundamentally alter our perception of what's real.

The commentary from Google’s experts paints a rather grim picture: AI's ability to manipulate visuals and text is reaching a point where fact-checking could become impractical, gish-galloping us with misinformation on a global scale. When you can no longer trust your eyes, what do you rely on? Your gut feeling that the moon landing probably didn't involve Stanley Kubrick? Honestly the shots would have been framed better.

So, what's the game plan? Google's answer seems to be a combination of improving digital literacy (which can’t possibly move fast enough) and deploying more sophisticated AI to catch AI-generated lies (which I’m not currently optimistic about, given Google wasn’t even able to catch its own AIs recommending glue on pizza).

The AI

• Almost half of people in a recent survey said they would use AI-powered air taxis—a Skynet-driven Tesla made by Boeing, what could go wrong?

• The newest AI goldrush: prizes for AI breakthroughs like animal communication. Turns out your cat was just asking for the Wi-Fi password.

• AI is now being used to identify new species at breakneck pace and scientists are worried about accuracy. Said the AI, “Trust me, bro.”

• Phishing 2.0: When Nigerian princes upgrade to neural networks. AI scams are on the rise, this is actually a helpful article about how to not fall for them.

• ​AI videos are producing alternate histories of memes. Maybe this time Distracted Boyfriend will keep his eyes where they belong.

• ​The NSA has released guidelines for secure AI rollouts. Among their top recommendations: leave a backdoor open for us, pls.

Today’s newsletter was initially compiled and drafted by, you guessed it, AI, and edited by Kyle.

Hey, internet friend, we gave the newsletter a little visual upgrade this week. Reply to this email and let us know if you like it. Let's get into it.

The Good

APPLE'S AI IS PROBABLY GONNA BE DOPE

Apple did something very uncharacteristically Apple last week and released an open-source language model called, appropriately, OpenELM. This is a smaller language model than the LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, but it's designed to run on-device without calling to the cloud.

Apple is still in talks with OpenAI and Google, the former of which apparently has intesified lately, but that may be a stop-gap measure to buy time until Apple can get its on-device AIs up to snuff with the big players in the cloud computing space.

This on-device ELM is big, good news for one reason: privacy. I've always personally been a fan of Apple's privacy protections. No big tech company is perfect, but Apple collects a lot less data than Google, doesn't sell it, and you can opt out of most of it. Plus, their end-to-end encryption makes sure your data isn't intercepted.

If these policies are mashed together with on-device AI, we're talking about personal AI assistants that keep your data and requests as private as they can be. And in any case, Apple releasing their on-device language model open source is good for innovation and for the next generation of AI-powered devices.

Stay tuned because Apple is doing an iPad-related event on May 7, and some rumors suggest we'll see the first Apple AI features there!

The Bad

IS AI WORSE BECAUSE OF CAPITALISM?

Many a Twidiot will gleefully tell you that major AI developments would never be possible without market economics. That's certainly true as most of the funding for AI companies of late has come from speculative investment, which obviously expects some return. But fears are growing over job replacement, with 30% of workers fearing technology will soon replace their jobs. Even as over 80% of office workers think AI makes them more efficient, over 80% of digital marketers think content writers will lose their jobs to AI and 14% of workers already believe they've lost a job to a robot. AI innovation is driving layoffs left and right (and Bloomberg reports it's driving more layoffs than companies want to admit).

Meanwhile, there's a groundshift happening right now on Wall Street, and most of us are missing it. Over the 40 years prior to the COVID recession, corporate profits represented 11% of inflation growth. In the four years since then, corporate profits have represented 53% of inflation growth. So your bills have recently gone up mostly to pad the pockets of the investor class rather than because of skyrocketing material or labor costs.

Put these two situations together, and you see the sad reality: Wall Street is focused on bottom-line growth at any cost. Famously, you may have heard a few years back that Citi analyst Kevin Crissey complained about American Airlines pay increases, saying, “This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers.” Well, Kevin's getting his way and AI is leading the charge in "cost savings exercises," aka layoffs in favor of shareholder profits.

This is a freight train headed toward a collapsed bridge. At some point, we will hit a tipping point where we've laid off too many of the consumers we need to keep the economy running. We're in for some bad times unless we pivot toward job protections, job re-training programs, new skilled labor initiatives, and eventually something resembling a universal basic income for those who cannot find work when the robots are doing most of it. This may be bad news, but there is still an opportunity to create an environment where AI works alongside humans rather than instead of them, we just need to all be part of finding it.

The AI

• I've become obsessed with the Arc Browser and the AI features inside. Try it out and tell me what you think.

• Could speaking out against AI on social media cause the algorithms to bury your content? Jessie Cortes thinks it's possible.​

• Generative music is here. This is a bedroom pop song I made called "Echoes of the Past (Gone, my love)." Serious Olivia Rodrigo/T-Swift vibes. Tell me if it's good.

• Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, sat down for an interview with an AI trained on all of his own writing. It was a little surreal but interesting to watch.

• ​Cassidy is a cool AI tool we've been using at my work that can consume anything you've written and a style guide to then write more content in your voice (not an ad, just cool)

• ​The 30 best AI movies of all time. I could quibble with some exclusions, but this is a good list if you're looking for something to watch this weekend

Until next time,

Kyle

This week, we’ve got an AI homelessness detection system, the feds greenlighting AI in government, a hilarious autocorrect-sounding propaganda video, and Elon being sort of right about something? Let’s get into it. As always, send us your thoughts/tips at ai@goodbad.ai—or you can just reply to this email.​

The Good

Grok Goes Open-Something

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I... agree with... Elin Mosk. No, wait. Elong Mask? I agree with Elon Musk! There, fine, bleh. I’m not referring to his freak views on race, or “free speech”, or just about anything, really, but about his views on transparency in AI. What happened is that Elon’s xAI company announced their Grok chatbot will be open-source, making them one of the few AI outfits pursuing that approach. In this case, what they’ve released are the source code and weights of the data, which I guess makes it open-weight, technically. This goes a lot further than, say, OpenAI is willing to go, but we still don’t have the actual sources of what types of data it was trained on. I’m assuming it’s not -only- tweets, uh posts, but nonetheless, we have more information about Grok than we do for most LLMs.

The move is clearly part of the larger spat between Elon and OpenAI regarding how “open” AI should be and its profit motivation (disregard Elon’s cringe “ClosedAI” joke). Now, Elon hasn’t exactly been perfectly consistent in both those areas as we’ve mentioned before, but one thing Elon is definitely good at is changing the conversation. Who better to make the public think about a thing and drag piles of money along with him than the One, True bored ape, Elon Musk. If he’s gonna tweet a bunch of “great replacement theory” garbage, the least he can do is also get people interested in AI transparency.

If you believe that AI has the potential to upend nearly every facet of life as we know it, then the public has the right to know what goes into these things and how they work (to say nothing of government funding). Having a large, open community of people working in your system helps ensure issues will be uncovered, bugs will be fixed, and the platform should have the trust and resilience to last.

Proponents of closed-source AI say that China/the boogeyman is gonna steal our tech and use it against us if we go open source, to which I say, if China wants to copy our AI so bad they’ll do it regardless of whether we let them. Making AI closed-source isn’t going to stop China from mastering AI, it’s just going to let a handful of companies monopolize it. So it may only be a small step in the right direction, but I’ll give Elon this one point- our future robot overlords should be transparent, even if it takes some time to get there.

The Bad

San Jose Is Doing Robocop Shit

San Jose, California has started a pilot program using AI to have cameras on municipal vehicles take images that will be, per The Guardian, “fed into computer vision software and used to train the companies’ algorithms to detect the unwanted objects.” Unwanted objects? Like what, you ask? You know, potholes, overgrown trees, normal municipal stuff, says San Jose. Oh, and the homeless. Haha, almost forgot!

To collect the data for the AI, they’re sending these Google-Street-View-From-Hell cars into areas known to have homeless people. Another way of saying that is that we already know where the homeless people are in San Jose. Remind me again why we need AI to help detect lived-in cars or tents? In addition to being incredibly dystopian, this is another entry in the long tradition of AI Innovations being a solution in search of a problem.

San Jose says it’s working to maintain people’s privacy and that it should be used for the city to provide services to people (towing the cars people live in), but they also want this to be a scalable (sellable) technology for other cities. It doesn’t take a superintelligence to guess how this is going to get used when most cities don’t have big budgets for homeless services.

This is also happening at the same time as the recently passed CA Proposition One, which supporters say is a necessary overhaul of CA’s homeless programs, and opponents say will create a system of locked-door mental institutions. However Prop 1 affects the homelessness situation in California, I feel confident saying that a system with the potential to create old-timey out-of-sight, out-of-mind lunatic asylums should not be armed with an AI-powered surveillance state.

Guys, we have enough anti-homeless stuff and creepy surveillance tech. Please don’t create the Torment Nexus.

Bonus: Referring to other potential uses for the aforementioned torment nexus, “The target objects could expand to include lost cats and dogs” said one official. “Give me a break” said me.

The AI

The Weird, Wild, and Unnerving Side of AI

• In a story almost dystopian enough to be our “bad” story of the week, a woman has come forward amidst the firestorm of comments about an AI-generated influencer on TikTok to say that she’s the model and she authorized it, getting paid something like a couple hundred bucks to license her entire likeness to talk about whatever the company wants. Can you say AI Gig Economy?

• And so the Amazon AI-race-to-the-bottom-begins. A man took to X/Twitter to share the crockpot recipe book his parents gave him and his wife and it seems to be almost definitely completely AI-generated. AI recipes actually frighten me a little. Call me old fashioned, but I’d like a human to have at least tried the food before I make it for my kids.

• This article about AI images taking over Boomer Facebook Groups is interesting, but really, just click on the story to see the wild image of Shrimp Jesus.

• In another Torment Nexus story, researchers are predicting a future where all the AI’s get together and become basically The Borg from Star Trek.

Quick Hit News to Know

• You could use AI to hunt for homeless people, or you could use it to count hedgehogs. The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme (I love this organization already) is training AI-enabled cameras to count hedgehogs and support conservation efforts. More of this, please.

• ​Amazon drops 2.75 big ones on Anthropic, makers of the Claude AI chatbot. Anthropic was started by two former OpenAI folks, siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei. The Amodeis may not have the same ring as the Winklevoss twins, but then again, Bezos is giving the Amodeis’ 2.75 B while the Winklevoss’ Gemini exchange is shelling out 1.1 B to customers after a settlement, so you be the judge.

• Prez Sez to step up the use of AI, but to vet the crap out of it. The OMB just released the first governmentwide guidance on how government agencies should use AI. This could be a Real Big Space for opportunity as the feds have been somewhat skittish about AI so far.

• One day, perhaps not too far off, AI-generated video is going to be a really cool add to the toolbox of filmmakers. Until then, we’ve got Sora, OpenAI’s generative video model. OpenAI had a bunch of filmmakers use Sora to show off what it can do and the results are... fine. Lots of potential, but still very much in the “mobile game ad with a community note saying it sucks on Twitter” stage right now.

• Speaking of overhyped, mediocre-to-the-point-of-comedy videos, China is making anti-American propaganda using AI video generation. Don’t miss the part where a giant hand crushes a guy.

• Oh look, here’s Elon backtracking on his 2023 worries that AI tech is moving too fast and calling for a pause on Open AI’s development. This surely has nothing to do with Grok being released.

Whatever you do, I beg you, please don’t create the Torment Nexus.

John & Kyle

“Certainly, here is a possible introduction.” Hey, if an AI-written intro is good enough for the editorial team at a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, why not you, dear reader? This week we’re looking at states that are beginning to restrict AI usage in election marketing, as well as the insidious deepfake porn industry. Let's get into it. As always, send us your thoughts/tips at ai@goodbad.ai—or you can just reply to this email.​

The Good

Illegal Meme Squad

As a follow-up to last week’s depressing news about AI Election Misinformation, it looks like some state governments are responding to the issue, and unrelatedly, pigs have been seen flying overhead. Idaho and Georgia’s Senates both pushed laws forward that address AI-created audio, video, and image content in elections. Idaho’s legislation would require a disclaimer but rely on lawsuits in civil courts to enforce the law. Georgia’s proposal, on the other hand, would make the undisclosed deceptive use of AI by political actors a felony. With a penalty of 2–5 years in prison! Anybody know if the person who made the TSwift image below lives in Georgia? I just wanna talk.

The constitutionality of these laws will inevitably be challenged, and their value will ultimately have a LOT to do with the courts’ definitions of “deceptive” and “intentional.” But while it’s possible that the courts will undercut the laws’ efficacy, it’s important to note that both of these bills are bipartisan (what?! really?!), so that’s good news for similar laws that may be developing in other states.

The Bad

There’s probably a Taylor Swift lyric that’s perfect for this section header, someone reply and tell me

You may have seen news swirling around recently about AI-generated images of Taylor Swift. In a truly depraved display of the dark side of AI, the images ran the gamut from election denialism to deepfake pornography. One silver lining to this was that these incidents prompted a rush of interest in laws around the country concerning non-consensual AI-generated images of women and children. The urgency of these bills’ advancement is nice to see, but this is not a new problem, or one that’s going away anytime soon.

With the proliferation of increasingly realistic AI generation (with some notable exceptions—RIP Kate Middleton), making convincing deepfakes on demand is getting cheaper. The danger of this is obvious. Deepfake sex tapes of celebrities or political figures would be bad enough, but it seems like just around the corner is cheap and fast deepfake pornography of exes, crushes, or rejections—and with the spotty legal protections against revenge porn, it’s hard to see legislators responding quickly to this potential deluge of sexual AI generations.

The AI

The Weird, Wild, and Unnerving Side of AI

• If you only click on one link in this email, please click on this one. As a heartfelt tribute to their local burrito chain, somebody used AI to make a psychotic Hot Topic looking-ass video backed with an equally insane song. For some reason, the restaurant has not embraced this, but they do have their own Burrito Video on their website, which, while definitely not made with AI, is still just as uncanny and wonderfully weird.

• If you only click on two links in this email, make this your second: We wanna do the fun stuff.

• One of my favorite AI-related movies, I, Robot, is set in the year 2035. In 2004, when it was released, that seemed way too soon for mobile, articulate, thinking robots. It doesn’t anymore with the demo video of Figure 01, a robot powered by Open AI.

• Donald Trump has taken to calling any legitimate video of himself that he doesn’t like AI. I shouldn’t have expected any different.

• Just because an app tells you something won’t kill you, don’t automatically believe it. People are getting sick by trusting spurious apps that purport to use AI to tell you if a wild mushroom is safe or deadly. Australian scientists tested the top apps and found the very best one was only effective at identifying dangerous mushrooms 44% of the time. 44%!

• Speaking of dangerous mushrooms (perfect segue 😙🤌) the new app Calmara claims to use AI to identify STIs by allowing you to upload a picture of your or a partner’s “mushroom”. Guys, c’mon. Don’t send a picture of your funky fungi to some company on an app. Talk with a doctor for godsakes. Good god.

Quick Hit News to Know

• The Apple rumor mill is abuzz with the news that earlier this year, Apple acquired Darwin AI, an AI startup specializing in using AI to identify manufacturing defects. The rumors are flying that Darwin may underpin new consumer AI experiences at Apple, but I’m not buying it. Apple manufactures a lot of tech to exacting specs. This feels like a QC acquisition, not the new Siri.

• Underscoring that, Apple is apparently in talks with Google to leverage Gemini, Alphabet’s Generative AI, on iOS devices, which I feel like Apple wouldn’t do if they were close to their own generative solution.

• Caveat Emptor! The “AI-powered” service you’re buying may not be AI-powered at all and the SEC is cracking down on financial firms that promise AI in their products but don’t deliver.

Until next time, don’t use AI to identify mushrooms or your STIs! See ya next week.

Kyle, John, & Sven

A hearty welcome to our new AI Junkies from SXSW! It was nice to meet many of you face-to-face in Austin. I’m still catching up on all the AI content (I found myself wanting to be in four sessions simultaneously, all week long) but stick around for some of the biggest news of the year and some SXSpecial updates. Today, we've got new EU AI legislation meant to prevent humanity’s destruction and a warning from the U.S. State Department that it might happen anyway. Let's get into it. As always, if you disagree or have a tip, reply to this email or shoot us a note at ai@goodbad.ai.

The Good (a twofer today!)

EU framework on AI approved

I’ll start with maybe the best AI news in years. Am I overselling it? I don’t think so! The EU has reached a deal on a HUGE piece of AI legislation, which was just approved and now heads to the various nations to ratify. This sweeping legislation sets a framework for evaluating new AI tech on a four-tiered scale from low risk (like AI in spam filters) to unacceptable (like biometric identification in a commercial context). It goes far enough to dictate how law enforcement can use AI-powered surveillance and how AI can be deployed in critical infrastructure. The EU has been ahead of the US in Big Tech legislation for a while now, but this is a giant leap forward. More to come here, certainly.

Midjourney bans Trump & Biden images

I love Midjourney. I’m conflicted because while visual AI generation has a lot of problems around creator credit and compensation, it's also undeniably useful, like when I really, really need an image of a terminator going over my chart in a hospital.

In what I will say is an unequivocal good as we stare down a misinformation barrel this year, Midjourney has officially blocked image generation of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is one of those rare moments where a tech company made an actual change that will be a societal net good at the expense of their own profits. Are there other tools the misinfo peddlers will use? Obvi. But at least they won’t be getting their images from arguably the most photorealistic image generator out there. Bonus note, MJ’s CEO is quoted saying, “this moderation stuff is kind of hard,” which, like, I mean, yeah. Where ya been, dude?

The Bad (another twofer)

U.S. State Department says AI is coming for us all

A report commissioned by the U.S. State Department adds to the growing fear of AI representing an “extinction-level threat” to the human species. These kinds of headlines are meant to rabble-rouse, but there is a growing contingency of people who are afraid of this, and they’re not all dumb people! The report interviewed AI and tech experts and the consensus was that AI poses a meaningful threat, if not a completely existential one. Several of the concerns are, reasonably, about the long-term stability of democracy in a world with very persuasive AIs that have no conscience to guide them (Ed. note: someone should look into whether or not politicians could use this so-called "conscience" to guide them. Sounds useful.).

Look, go read the Action Plan yourself, the exec summary will take you 20 minutes to read, max. It’s worth knowing what the people who stand to gain the most from AI believe its biggest risks are.

Election misinformation: Our take? It’s bad!

Hot off the press from this panel at SXSW (hear my question to the panel at 54:35) and some CNN reporting this week, worries are pretty high about misinformation in the 2024 U.S. elections, and no one really seems to have any good ideas about how to fix it. The most common answer we hear is “AI and media literacy,” which is all well and good, but I don’t think we can reverse the decades-long downward trend in media literacy in America in the next 8 months. There’s some mildly promising legislation crawling through a few states (but not the ones that matter most) so the best hopeful message I can give you is to be vigilant, be outspoken about AI manipulation and misinformation, and don’t let your friends vote uninformed.

The AI

• Fanboi favorite and the nation’s only Cybertruck daily driver, Elon Musk, announced this week that he’s open-sourcing xAI’s Grok (what are words anymore) after licking his wounds from the cat fight he started with Open AI (tl;dr: Elon sued because Open AI has become profit-driven, Open AI showed receipts where Elon was like “we should make Open AI profit-driven”).

• Once you see the Hollywood Mountain AI picture that's fooling thousands, you'll be ready to jump off its totally-real peaks.

• Too busy to name your baby or pet? Who isn't?! That's why you can leave it to the algo and have an AI Name Your Pet or Your Baby! I tried it, and it picked the name “X Æ A-12.” Huh. Must still be working out the kinks.

• Once you’ve already relied on AI for your dog’s name, why not its diet? This AI dog feeder/collar combo tracks your dog’s activity and tells you how much food he deserves.

• The CEO of an AI music company says we shouldn’t jump to the worst conclusions with AI. I mean, if you say so, Bronze.ai CEO Lex Dromgoole. Is it too soon for another AI-named-my-baby joke?

SXSpecial Updates

• Icon, a construction start-up that 3-D printed a house at SXSW 2018, debuted a new AI tool for consumers to use AI to design the home Icon will build for them.

• SXSW edited a sizzle reel all about AI and put it in front of their film screenings. It was notably boo-ed by the premiere-night audience for Fall Guy. Read the room, folks. The Convention Center crowd would have cheered it, but they played it at the Paramount Theatre to the group of people most likely to say AI has already started to steal their jobs.

• FOR EXAMPLE, two of the winners of the SXSW Pitch competition were AI tools to automate video editing. Gee, I wonder why that room of film nerds was upset about AI grandstanding!

• Truveta, a health industry start-up announced their medical language model, focused on electronic health records and diagnostic codes, attempting to help doctors diagnose more quickly and accurately. Dr. T-1000 will see you now!

Phew, big week. Back to your normal, bite-sized updates next week.

Kyle & John