A local influencer has recently trashed the city folk — or "office plankton," as we call them — an organism that just goes with the flow. He pointed out their obsession with consulting artificial intelligence (AI) on everything, like showing it their clothes and asking if they won't get cold in this weather. At the same time, people who seemingly wouldn't survive natural selection have very strong opinions on politics, immigration, the economy, not to mention ideology and all other big ideas.
Before I knew any better, I used to trust the printed word. Typos or grammatical mistakes in books would simply shock me. My mom used to believe everything they said on national radio.
Why would someone with the privilege to talk to big audiences lie?
🙂
AI tools, used for everyday trivia conversations, can be as persuasive as radio, TV, or the printed word once was.
Having to please social media and search engine algorithms, and audiences that get a thrill from scrolling, media are pushed into promoting "newsfluencers" — journalists who have to be cheeky and convey important news or investigations in under 60 seconds.
At the same time, we are in the zero-click 2.0 era, where publisher traffic is declining steeply because "readers" trust AI summaries.
It's only normal that we are looking for a simple answer, for a shortcut to solving our problem. I think that's why we love Yuval Noah Harari so much — his books explain the world so "well." Just read them and bam — the history of humankind is in the palm of your hand.
Every second out there, an argument silently dies as AI provides a definitive answer summarizing both sides.
This week, I categorized a few of our more interesting topics on AI into two categories – foe and friend. Enjoy!
FOE
2026 is the year for “slopacolypse”
Andrej Karpathy, a prominent scientist and one of the founding members of OpenAI, has shared his thoughts on coding with Claude on X, predicting a “slopacolypse” – a flood of AI-generated poor-quality content.
AI leads to mass layoffs
American fitness and media company Peloton slashed 11% of its staff, mostly engineers working on technology and enterprise efforts, following a sluggish start to its AI-powered equipment.
Layoffs are becoming more common among tech companies. Just in January, Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in its second round of cuts in three months. Pinterest also confirmed layoffs, announcing it was cutting roughly 15% of its workforce.
AI is a privacy nightmare
Moltbot AI became viral overnight, but researchers warn that the “vibe-coded” tool might be leaking your credentials.
Moltbot, formerly Clawdbot, is an open-source local AI agent that, according to its tagline, is the “AI that actually does things.” It is designed to act on a user’s behalf across real services like Gmail, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, calendars, browsers, and local files.
Have thoughts about this topic? Others do, too. Join them in the discussion.
But it gets “better”. Now, there’s a Moltbook, a Reddit-type social media network for Moltbot agents, which has made headlines over the weekend. The agents appeared to autonomously discuss collaboration with humans and even created their own religion, Crustafarianism.
It’s not an AI apocalypse just yet. It’s a privacy disaster bound to happen.
FRIEND
Em…
I’ve got nothing.
No, wait. Maybe this will do?
Scientists developed an app called DinoTracker, where users can upload a shape of a dinosaur footprint to see how similar it is to other footprints, and adjust the footprint using eight features to get new results showing which other prints are similar to the one they uploaded. This is how users can learn how different factors impact footprint identification and classification.
Hurray?
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